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

throw down in front of them the things that he had brought, and pronounce, in the tones of a strict father, “Eat and drink until a white thread can be distinguished against the black hides of your miserable fathers!”*

Uncle Anwar hated nobody so much as he hated Sugar, the dancer, against whom he directed the greater part of his jokes and calumniations. Sometimes, even, when conversation had dried up and silence reigned, one of those present would ask Anwar for news of his mistress and Anwar would launch into a virtuoso display of sarcasm at the expense of Sugar’s ignorance, arrogance, rich lovers, and general awfulness, and the place would ring with laughter once more. Despite Anwar’s imperious love of music, he would go whole nights without playing, refusing immediately and roughly if anyone asked him to do so, and if anyone insisted, a fight would sometimes break out. Anwar’s friends knew how he was and so didn’t ask him, knowing that, at a given moment, which no one could predict, Anwar would suddenly stretch out his hand, take the zither, put on the plectra, and start to play. If one contemplated his face after a few minutes of playing, it would seem that he could no longer see the audience or make out his surroundings. When Anwar finished, he would receive the shouts of admiration and the applause with a face drawn and pale and he’d remain like that for a while before resuming his unruliness and sarcasm, at which point we’d know that he’d returned.

There are no weddings on Tuesdays. Uncle Anwar would show up early, the first to arrive, his face still bearing the traces of sleep and battered by the din of the previous night’s show. He would greet my mother politely and make his way to the studio. There, he would remove his suit, hang it up carefully, and put on his gallabiya (Uncle Anwar always kept one of his gallabiyas at our house). After a little while my father would come. They would drink tea together and then sit on the floor and busy themselves preparing the equipment for the evening. They began with the goza, or hand-held waterpipe, the cleaning and readying of which were important tasks that kept both Anwar and my father busy and often gave rise to arguments. My father might be of the opinion that it was the pieces of thick paper used to tighten the joints that were impeding the flow of the smoke, while Anwar might claim that it was the reed stem that was blocked. I used to watch them—Anwar in his striped gallabiya, seated cross-legged and tearing up little pieces of paper that he would stuff between the stem of the waterpipe and the tobacco bowl and my father next to him, repeatedly puffing into the mouthpiece of the reed and listening to how the water gurgled. When they came to Cairo thirty years before, two young artists full of determination and ambition, had it ever occurred to them that things would turn out like this? How distant the beginning seemed now and how strange the end! Usually it was Anwar who was the cleverer at diagnosing the goza’s problems and when he’d finished placing the tightening wads, he’d light a bowl of tobacco to test it and draw a long breath, which would be followed by a fierce fit of coughing that turned his eyes red. Then he’d pass the pipe over to my father, saying, “I told you it was the wads. They’re dandy now. Take a drag and ask the Lord to bless me,” and my father would look in my direction and say laughingly, before thrusting the mouthpiece into his mouth, “Your Uncle Anwar, see, before the music, used to work as a goza mechanic on Bein el-Sarayat,” and Anwar would burst out with, “Don’t say such things, you son of a bitch! You want Isam to get funny ideas about me?”* Then he’d turn to me, an injured expression on his face, and say, “Don’t you believe a word your father says, Master Isam! I’ve been an honest man all my life. It was your father who taught me to smoke hashish and at the beginning I thought it was chocolate.”

A hail of jokes and quips would then be released, after which Anwar’s face would suddenly resume its serious expression and he’d stand up and thrust his hand into the pocket of his jacket where it hung on the wall and take out a piece of hashish wrapped in cellophane and hand it to my father who would sniff it, try it with his teeth, squeeze it between his fingers, and proclaim it to be, “Sweet, Anwar! Mustafa’s? What do you say? Should we wait for the rest or start with a solo?”

Anwar would sit down cross-legged again and say in tones of the utmost seriousness, “Let’s start with a solo in the mode Sika.”*

He would bite the hashish into little pieces which he would distribute among the pipe bowls of molasses-soaked tobacco, then light the charcoal, and set to smoking right away. They’d ask me to stay with them and I’d sit and smoke with them, and after a few pipes the drug would go to Anwar’s head, his puffy eyelids would droop, a grave expression would appear in his eyes, and he’d nod his head as though following an inner dialogue that none but he could hear. Then he’d turn to my father, smile, pat him on his thick leg, and say, “Honestly, my dear Mr. Abduh, don’t you think you should have given up all this painting business? You could have learned to be a belly dancer. What’s wrong with belly dancing? By now you’d be something of a different order entirely. Old Woman Sugar does this (here Anwar would twitch his waist, holding his arms up as though dancing) and gets five hundred pounds a night, the bitch.”

My father would be on the verge of responding