Friendly Fire by Alaa Aswany (best e book reader TXT) 📗

that dignified bearing with a cheap flirtatious word? Months passed as I watched her in silence during class; and, as I knew for sure from the slight quiver that would pass over her lovely face whenever our eyes met, she could feel my glances.

One evening, the telephone rang at home and I heard her voice on the line—smooth and drowsy, as though she was asleep or had just woken up. She asked me about some point that was unclear in the last class, then thanked me and hung up. I stayed awake the whole night thinking. Why had she called me specifically? First, I was weak at accounting, as she well knew, and second she had the number of the teacher himself and could have asked him if she’d wanted. Could it be that…?

The idea that she might love me had me soaring like a bird in the sky.

I rang her the next day and her mother enquired coldly, “Who is this?”

“Her classmate Salah, Tante,” I answered quickly.

She said nothing for a moment as though carefully weighing the situation. Then she called her. This time we talked for ages. I discovered that she had two sisters and that her father was a university professor who worked in the Gulf and I told her about my father who had died recently and complained of the complicated inheritance procedures. In the end, I asked her if I could ring her from time to time. She laughed and said, “Why not? That way we can encourage each other to study.”

Our phone conversations became long, daily affairs that strengthened the love in my heart until one day my feelings overflowed and I suddenly said to her, “Listen. I love you. Will you marry me?”

She said nothing for a long time. Then she responded, in a voice that sounded to me low and sad, that this was what she’d been afraid of at the beginning and that, though I was as outstanding a young man as any girl could wish for, she wasn’t thinking of marriage yet. It was a hard blow, and I asked her in a despairing voice if that meant that she was refusing me. She replied that she was neither accepting me nor refusing me; she just wasn’t thinking about marriage. Our calls continued and I didn’t talk to her about marriage after that, but I would express my love every day, telling her, “I love you, I love you.” Sometimes she’d laugh and sometimes she’d say, “If you really love me, study hard.” One day, when the finals were approaching, she told me, “Why don’t we review together? Come to the house tomorrow. I’ve told Mummy and Daddy.”

I spent the night as in a fabulous dream. I didn’t sleep and I didn’t read a word, and when the appointed time came, I was wearing my best clothes with my hair neatly brushed and my face shaved. How happy I felt as I rang their melodious doorbell!

Her house was lovely and her family lovelier still. Her father was a man of great distinction who embraced me in his fatherliness, and her mother, still beautiful despite her age, covered her hair with a somber black bonnet. I really liked it about her parents that they would leave us alone in the study and close the door on us. Didn’t that demonstrate the trust they had in their daughter, and in my own morals too?

How beautiful love is! I started going to see her every day. I’d sit beside her as we went over our lessons and talked, and I’d move close to her and smell the scent of her hair and suddenly surprise her by grasping her soft, plump hand, feeling it melt in my grip. At such moments, she’d color and gasp and whisper fearfully, “Are you mad? If Mummy caught us it’d be a disaster.”

Then one day, when I’d gone to review with her as usual and had sat down at the desk and spread the lecture notes out in front of me, she informed me, casually, that her parents had gone out and that they wouldn’t be back before evening. The moment this sunk in, I felt the blood seethe in my body and a veil fell over my eyes, so that I couldn’t make out what I was seeing. In a strangled voice, I asked her to bring me a glass of water and the moment she got up and turned around I grasped her arm and pulled her toward me, covering her face and neck with hot kisses. She let out a low scream and resisted a little, then surrendered to my embrace, and we dissolved in a long, burning kiss sweeter than any I’d tasted in my life before. When I recovered my senses, I found her face had turned pale and was wet with tears, and it wasn’t long before she broke into a bout of painful weeping. I tried to calm her and said I was sorry I hadn’t been able to control myself. I told her, to make light of the matter, that it was only a kiss after all, but my darling screamed in my face, “It’s nothing to you, but for me it’s a catastrophe. Me, on whom no man but my father has ever laid a hand—how could I have allowed you to kiss me? What am I going to tell my father? What am I going to tell my mother?” My beloved collapsed in a new fit of weeping and wailing and I couldn’t stand it, so I left in a hurry feeling extremely upset.

Then there we were, my mother and I, in their living room with my beloved seated like a shining star between her parents, wearing a bright red dress with a bonnet of the same color. My mother spoke at length about my upbringing and my morals and the wealth my father had left me and how much she wanted to see me happily