Temple Bar

Bahaa Abdelmegid, Jonathan Wright

Description

A novel of culture shock in Dublin and Cairo by the author of Saint Theresa and Sleeping with Strangers
Dublin is alien territory for young and impoverished Egyptian academic Mutazz, who is preparing a PhD on Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Mutazz has enough problems with his family's high expectations and the unrequited, idealized love that he left behind in Cairo. Now he has to deal with cantankerous landlords, the inscrutable local women, the Irish judiciary, haunted seminaries, and cold winter nights selling flowers on the banks of the Liffey to make ends meet. His own personal demons travel with him, especially the clash between his sexual desires and his reluctance to become emotionally entangled with anyone other than his version of the ideal woman. In his year away from home Mutazz learns how diverse the world is, but returning to Cairo is a shock that tests his physical and mental strength. Only when he passes that test can he make a promising new start.

Sujets

• Arabic
• Foreign Language study
• Lettres et linguistique
• Language

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617976131
• Langue: English

Extrait

TEMPLE BAR
TEMPLE BAR
BAHAA ABDELMEGID
Translated by
Jonathan Wright
The American University in Cairo Press
Cairo New York
This electronic edition published in 2014 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright 2011 by Bahaa Abdelmegid
First published in Arabic in 2011 as Khammarat al-ma bad
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright 2014 by Jonathan Wright
First published in paperback in 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 977 416 660 0
eISBN 978 161 797 613 1
Version 1
To the light that shone in the dark recesses of my soul and cleansed me-to my wife and my son Yassin
With gratitude to Trinity College Dublin, for inviting me to study there, and also to Ain Shams University
We will send down to you something new and weighty Bow down Humbly and devoutly enter the temple Throw the incense on the coals Offer sacrifices and take the bread and holy water Drink the wine and fear not You will not be humiliated or become intoxicated Because celestial love will not harm your mind or your body It is the soul that it seeks
Moon Rising
Chapter 1
Cairo 2003
The rain began to come down in torrents. Moments earlier he had heard it tapping on the windowpanes. He stood up and lifted the blue curtains his mother had chosen when they left Shubra and moved to this house in Maadi. He opened the window and looked out at the water pelting down on the long street. The drops were so big you could see the neon lights reflected in them. A large truck passed by, shaking the whole house. It frightened him and made him feel that the end was near.
The dark woman who lived in the building opposite was also looking, surrounded by her children who never slept. Her daughter Shorouk, who was dark brown, was always doing terrifying acrobatics on the balcony parapet and every time she did so he expected her to fall onto the hard ground with a sharp childish scream that would ring out far and wide. But this never happened. Shorouk s mother was slim and powerfully built. She might have come from noble African stock but she had ended up as a political refugee, or a fugitive from famine or genocide.
All he thought about was the end, because he did not want to continue. This was not voluntary. Inside he had a pressing desire to torture his own body. The rainfall sent an unusual chill through his limbs, as if the water had tempered the fever in his body, like cold water falling on a hot iron bar that the blacksmith has just hammered.
It felt like he was planting hot coals on various parts of his body, putting them on his mouth and pressing on them with his fingers until he could see smoke rising as his body fluids evaporated and he could smell his flesh turning into carbon dioxide. Why the fires now? Why did he want to do that?
Fire wasn t the only way he wanted to end his life. He also wanted to see his blood spilled on the ground. This feeling came over him whenever he went into the bathroom, with its dazzling white floor that made it look like an operating theater. That would come about by means of a sharp razor blade or a whetted knife, and the cut would be right at the lower part of the neck, close to the artery that is always throbbing, or there on the arteries in the wrists. After that bold act the hot blood would gush out and his body would be set free. His tormented soul would escape and go very far away, and he could relax, and everyone could relax.
But how would he dare do that when he was afraid of everything? All he could do now was contemplate the idea of deliberately putting an end to his life, but the deed itself was always postponed. Only now could he say that he had moved on and had changed so much that the idea of putting an end to it made sense to him, so that this torment, this delusion would go away. They had forced him to live and look at his face in the mirror every morning or every evening. They had forced him to convince himself that he was alive and successful and an ordinary person like those around him. Those people had convinced him that suffering was part of existence, that for some reason it had been born with mankind, that it was an honor for him, to give his life meaning, and that it was the way to make his family s dreams come true. His family put him at the center of the circle and made him the focus of their attention. If their dreams for him came true, that would prove to others that they were a family that had succeeded, through bringing this individual into the world.
At times he wondered how his mother would take the news and what her reaction would be. She might be the first person to come across him, unexpectedly, lying on the floor, drowned in his own blood, as cold as a wet towel, lying next to the white bathtub that she had also chosen, because she loved cleanliness. No doubt she would scream, this woman who had recently turned fifty and whose bones were weakened by diabetes. The disease had struck her after she lost her two sisters and her father in less than a year, as if death were testing her capacity to put up with loneliness or as if fate were sending them a sign to prepare for the arrangements of death.
She would be stunned, because he had been the light of her life. She had built him up, watching over him and taking care of him day and night. His life twinned hers and her story was his story-the one he had recorded on the pages of the notebook that he hid away and that she read when he was fast asleep or out with his few friends.
Chapter 2
Shall My Soul Pass through Old Ireland
Irish Ballad
Moataz
27 years old
Bachelor
Acquaintances: Many
Friends: Few
What can I do to escape from these characters that surround me? They accompany me everywhere. Now they are phantoms that pursue me in my waking life and in my sleep. They have become elements in my dreams, the rites of my escape and the content of my words. The characters and the people I met on my journey to this distant land, Ireland: the land of rain. Now they sit with me and talk to me. Their bodies and their spirits are heavy rocks that weigh on my chest. I see them walking down the city streets with me in central Cairo, just as they used to roam the streets and lanes of Dublin and Belfast with me. They sit with me in coffee shops as they used to sit in the pubs and bars of Dublin. In its streets they laugh and chat with me, and sometimes argue. In moments of sadness I summon you all; you come to me with open arms. Your warm smiles pull out the sad weeds entangled with the roots of my soul.
I conjure you up repeatedly and send waves of my soul to you through the air and through the stars in the sky. I say, Always remember me. Don t let your memories of me die. Don t let them drop to the ground amid all the stresses of life.
Here I am now, alone. But in their company I try to create a life parallel to life there, but I always fail and end up disappointed.
I have always tried to forget this journey as if it never happened. It does not matter how long or short the journey is; the time it takes is not important, is not a criterion here, because a moment in the life of man, they say, can contain eons of events and memories.
In the room with the bright white paint and bed sheets the therapist sat me down and said, Describe what you see around you. How many of them are there? What do they look like? What have they done to you and what have you done to them?
When I didn t answer he said, If you can t speak you can write about them. I know you like to write and you re knowledgeable about literature. So why don t you write? Writing isn t therapy, believe me, but I want to get to know you and find out about these characters. You strike me as a nice, gentle person, and definitely the people you know will be the same.
The doctor was gracious and stocky. Sometimes he would smile.
In the evening the room was dark and I was alone with the phantoms. This time I was afraid. I looked at the moon through the window. It was coming closer. It was about to sink down next to my bed and I thought it would have grabbed me if I hadn t been hanging on to the bedposts. I wept a lot. I sat on the floor calling aloud for my brother Nader, for him to come and take me away and keep the moon off me. But he didn t hear my voice and he didn t come. The nurse came in and gave me some milk mixed with a sedative. I wandered off and the phantoms flew away with the moon, far off in the sky.
Chapter 3
Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured hoardings . . . Hello. Leah tonight. Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Like to see her again in that. Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide.
James Joyce, Ulysses
A Love Story
I walk along the downtown streets. Magical, bustling Cairo. The city that never sleeps; the city that the moon watches over to keep her company. Talaat Harb Street with its large square; Ghad Party posters demanding the release of Ayman Nour. Next to Groppi s, a group of security men are sitting within sight of armored police trucks. The exhausted heads of policemen look out from the small window openings. On the other side people from the Kefaya movement are demonstrating, holding placards that call for change and carrying pictures of Gamal Mubarak. I look behind me fearfully and sneak toward Mohamed Mahmoud Street. I g