Flickering Light

 

Mansoura Ez Eldin

Translated by: Paul Starkey

I seemed to be walking in another city. The streets were covered in a gentle darkness. Although it was midday, pallid people were hurrying quickly on, without looking back. I wanted to stop one of them but he didn’t take any notice of me, so I wrapped my grey overcoat around my body, listening to a husky sound welling up inside me.

At last I found it . . . an old bar on the ground floor of a building designed in the Belgian style. I stepped inside, to be greeted by a dim light given out by a few candles placed in niches that were spaced at equal intervals along the wall.

The barman with a thick moustache gave me a searching look, then continued a terse conversation with someone sitting in front of him at the bar.

I chose a seat near the enormous gramophone and rested my elbow on the table. It was made, like the other tables in the place, in the shape of an enormous, irregular tree trunk. My attention was gripped by the bar, with its tree trunks and flickering candles, until I became aware of a bulky hand covered in hair putting a bottle of wine and a crystal glass in front of me.

The hand withdrew as quickly as it could. I couldn’t touch it. I pulled out my wallet, counted what was in it and found I had a reasonable amount of money. I put it on the table and pretended to look at my right palm, avoiding the eyes of the enormous waiter who was standing between two of the niches in the wall staring at me.

The bulky hand came back again, poured some wine into the glass and went away. I interpreted the last movement as an order to drink so brought the glass to my mouth and began to sip the contents. For a brief moment I was confused, undecided whether it was wine or something else, but I pressed on mechanically drinking one glass after another until I had finished the whole bottle.

Then I noticed the barman whispering something to the man with his back to me at the bar. He walked over in my direction and sat down opposite me, scrutinising me with narrow eyes whose colour I could not make out. He made a cryptic gesture to the waiter standing between the two niches in the wall facing me, who walked off in a huff.

Faced with a deafening silence from the man at the bar, I didn’t dare to speak. In fact, I thought that I had lost the power of speech entirely. Suddenly, he came up to me, pulled my overcoat from me, followed by my black jacket, undid the buttons on my blouse and stretched out his fingers towards my shoulder. He pressed the scar on it. “I’ve got one exactly like that,” he said.

He took off the jacket he was wearing and I noticed a speck of dark blood sitting there in the middle of his white shirt, whose colour had changed. He pulled up his sleeve and took hold of a sharp knife that had been lying in front of me from the start without my noticing.

He touched the scar on his arm with the edge of the knife and immediately pressed down hard with it. He continued pressing on the knife as he brought it down along his arm. A thread of dark blood appeared. He was so absorbed in his work that I doubted whether he heard the sound of my screams.

I began to grip my arm, writhing from the intensity of the pain. A terrifying mist came over my eyes. My eyelids closed against my will and I tried unsuccessfully to open them . . . my voice turned into the meowing of a cat exposed to some unbearable agony. 

Eventually, I could see the things around me again: tables in the shape of tree trunks revolving around themselves . . . a sharp knife quivering with drops of congealed blood on it and candles flickering anxiously. I got dressed slowly and went out.

(There is a rock in the shape of a strong, masculine face. I was leaning against it with my arms folded in front of me. Behind me was a fence made from sticks of cane that I thought I had planted.

At the top of a gentle incline, the sand was burning. I began to alternately put my weight on one foot and raise the other. After a little, I smelled the aroma of roasting meat. I cursed the hot sand and said: “Perhaps it’s the smell of my flesh.” There was a mirror blocking the horizon between him and me but despite that I noticed him, sprawled out in a heap the other side of it. At the same time, I could see him beside my reflection. There was a sharp nose, narrow, cunning eyes and an untidy beard. Then the hair on his head began to grow faster so that it almost reached his waist, and his eyes turned a blue colour and grew wider in his face. His wooden features and unkempt beard fascinated me.)

A solitary man was making his way from one cheap bar to another, coughing violently, lighting a cigarette from the one before without caring that his lungs had turned into a rusty filter. At first, I had been walking one pace ahead of him, aware of him behind me, driving me senseless as he watched my every move. Then the positions were reversed and he started to walk in front of me, with me watching him, following his blurred image wherever he went. I would wake to find myself suffering from a terrible headache, his hoarse voice ringing in my ears with no respite. I would run to the mirror to see whether he had taken me over or not, then calm down again when I saw my own blue eyes facing me.

The last moments in the old bar were mingled in my consciousness with ghostly things. I was overpowered by evil thoughts that I had to suppress.

I stopped in front of the Belgian-style building, hesitating whether or not to go in. A strange silence had taken hold of the place . . . a young woman in clothes that seemed to date from the fifties hid herself away quickly in the entrance to the building next door. From a window, a young girl of about nine peered out. Her eyes fastened on my face and I felt myself become more and more tense.

Inside, the place was devoid of any sign of life. Dust covered the walls and floors. In the corners, spiders had tirelessly spun their webs. I did not despair. Ten days later, I walked again along the same streets until I arrived, walked into the bar, and was greeted by the dim candlelight. There was a man sitting at the bar. He exchanged a few short phrases with the barman with the thick moustache, then came over to me.

I passed him the knife that was lying on the table and stretched out my bare left arm for him, hiding my face with my other hand.

From the anthology "Unbuttoning the Violin".. Banipal Books 2006.

Headache

Mansoura Ez Eldin

 Translated by Paul Starkey

The sunlight hit you like a truth you were trying unsuccessfully to ignore. You woke to find yourself on the Corniche, sprawled out on a wooden bench that had stood for years fixed to the ground.

It was nearly seven in the morning and the cold air was searing you, while your head felt like a piece of ice shattering under a powerful hammer.

You remembered you’d been walking along drunk with your friend at three in the morning, when suddenly you decided to flop out like that until daybreak. You weren’t ready to face a father who’d curse and scold you before throwing you out of the house, when his nose caught the smell of the vast quantities of whisky your friend had bought from the Free Zone for the two of you to swig. It was a drinking ritual that wasn’t complete for either of you unless the other one was there.

He failed to persuade you that you shouldn’t sleep in the street in this bitter wintry weather and after a heated argument, as always happens when the two of you get drunk, he abandoned you with a laugh. You could find no excuse for this when you sat down later. You were racking your brain to remember the details of what had happened from the moment you took the first swig from the bottle of Red Label until he left you and got into the first taxi he could find. You let out a yawn as you struggled to move from a lying position to a sitting position on the wooden bench and smiled with the contentment of a man who has woken to find himself in his own warm bed. An old beggar was sleeping curled up a few yards away and a large cat crossed the street. Meanwhile, you were busily trying to work out how many people had greeted the light of day sprawled out where you were now, since the time when someone had installed a number of benches – perhaps for passers-by like yourself to sleep on – and he too had passed on to God knows where.

But why should you bother about the number of these idiots with this headache that’s practically splitting your head apart? It’s a good thing you’ve decided to go home on foot. A walk in this foggy morning weather might help you wake up. Why are you rubbing your forehead like that?

You’ve forgotten the way to the tumbledown house with seven storeys. What a mess you’re in now! You’re sticking to the wooden bench more than before. You almost let out a mocking laugh, but it was nipped in the bud by the fear that suddenly swelled up.

You haven’t lost your memory, as happens in those film melodramas with flimsy plots. You’ve just forgotten your way home, though apart from that you’ve been remembering everything in the smallest detail.

A thick fog was settling over a small part of your brain. The paths of memory began to expand for a short time, then quickly contracted in on themselves, leading you nowhere. You sat down cross-legged, ignoring the speeding cars, squatting like some ancient scribe, trying to utilise the smallest details to recall the things that were eluding you. Dark steps, with no precise colour, that you never succeeded in counting despite your unceasing attempts. You used to go up them backwards, with your hand over your eyes, perhaps to avoid looking at Aunt Amal, the daughter of Madame Jean, your neighbour on the upper floor who always walked in a hurry looking intensely serious and who never  paid you any attention.

You often made fun of Amal – of the fact that she wasn’t married and of how she looked at you. The look had slowly turned into a frown, and you had started to feel an obscure sadness whenever her eyes met yours because she had made you realise that the things that are lost to us are not lost like that, all at once and forever. Rather, they seep away slowly until we come up against their loss in a frowning look in place of the old sparkle in eyes we know well.

Her brother Samih had gone out to play in the street when your mother asked you to bring her “two cloves of garlic from Aunt Jean”. You prepared yourself for the shudder that would come over you when you entered their flat, which was in perpetual darkness. Aunt Amal opened the door for you with the mischievous look she used to have, and the young boy that was you turned his eyes from her breast which was visible through her flimsy nightdress. She closed the door and dragged you into the bedroom where another woman was lying on the bed, almost naked. Amal dragged you towards her and gave you a long, greedy kiss while the other girl clapped delightedly. You felt that you could hardly stand up, there was so much pleasure hidden in that magic thing, but you also felt extremely embarrassed. Your intuition told you that what had happened somehow or other concealed a deep mockery of you, and you became quite certain of it when her friend shouted in an insolent voice, ”What’s up, son? Why don’t you grow up a bit?” Before you realised, you were running down the stairs. You continued to avoid Aunt Amal for a long time, though you had meanwhile found your way to other women, while she became more and more of a confirmed spinster. No one was to blame. Suddenly, your friend’s laugh burst out in your head . . . Why do you suppose he laughed at you like that? Try to guess! Have you forgotten the spectre of the woman that flitted before you in that rundown bar? – the “champagne lady” as you called her.

She belonged to your friend originally, until he passed her on to you in a vague fit of boredom . . . and you skilfully picked her up like a player receiving the ball. At first, you didn’t have any strong feelings for her, though you kept up your relationship with her for a whole year before he bet you (again, with no excuse) a bottle of champagne that he could take her back from you. If he failed, he’d pay for it, and if he succeeded you’d buy it. You had to pay a tidy sum from your wages for him to taste his success with champagne, and for some time he had to avoid mentioning anything to do with her in front of you, though later you began to talk about her again in passing if the occasion demanded. To ensure the friendship continued, you both persuaded yourselves that what had happened was just a passing distraction. A woman, no matter how important, would never make one of you lose the other. You pretended you had been wanting to escape from her, while the part he played in this story – often repeated between you, though sometimes with roles reversed – was the part of the noble saviour who had rescued you from her before you were killed by boredom. A relative stability returned to the supposed friendship. But what was it that brought her spectre to dance between you again?

Don’t walk so fast, you hardly know where you’re going, you’ve forgotten the way home.

Are you trying to run away from my nagging? Leave your head on the asphalt in the street, then, for the speeding cars to crush. Stop your evasions and tell me the truth about that woman. Don’t make do with the few meagre lines you’re trying to summarise your relationship with Amal with. Why have you stopped walking? What are these outbursts of raucous laughter from you? Here you are, still walking through the middle of the crowd. Your friend is staggering along beside you, the champagne lady’s walking confidently between the two of you, and behind you Aunt Amal is hurrying along undisturbed, with her ridiculous spectacles. You can see yourself becoming detached from yourself, breaking away over and over again so that hundreds of little selves are formed out of you and disperse in the air. That way you can watch the scene far better . . .  and the variety of viewpoints will certainly assist you.

From the anthology "Unbuttoning the violin".. Banipal Books 2006.