The Lodging House

Khairy Shalaby, Farouk Abdel Wahab

Description

Winner of the 2003 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature
A young man's dreams for a better future as a student in the Teachers' Institute are shattered after he assaults one of his instructors for discriminating against him. From then on, he begins his descent into the underworld. Penniless, he seeks refuge in Wikalat 'Atiya, a historic but now completely run-down caravanserai that has become the home of the town's marginal and underprivileged characters.
This award-winning novel takes on epic dimensions as the narrator escorts us on a journey to this underworld, portraying as he sinks further into its intricate relationships the many characters that inhabit it.
Through a labyrinth of tales, reminiscent of the popular Arab tradition of storytelling, we are introduced to these denizens, whose lives oscillate between the real and the fantastic, the contemporary and the timeless. And while the narrator starts out as a spectator of these characters' lives, he soon becomes an integral part of the lodging house's community of rogues.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971792
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in 2006 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
English translation copyright © 2006 by Farouk Abdel Wahab
First published in Arabic in 1999 as Wikalat ‘Atiya
Copyright © 1999 by Khairy Shalaby
Protected under the Berne Convention
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.
Dar el Kutub No. 3803/05
eISBN: 978 161 797 179 2
1 2 3 4 5 6 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Designed by Fatiha Bouzidi/AUC Press Design Center
Printed in Egypt
Wikalat Atiya
I never thought I could be brought down so low that I would accept living in Wikalat Atiya. Nor did I imagine that I would become such a rotten bum that I would come to know a place in the city of Damanhour called Wikalat Atiya. It was a place someone like me would not dream of under any circumstances; my feet could not take me to such a far-off place, which the sons of the city themselves might not even know, even those who traveled through it from one end to the other, and who knew every rat hole in it, had I not—as it became clear to me—broken the world’s record for bumming and homelessness.
I am supposed to be a student at the Public Teachers’ Institute; I mean that’s what I was over two years ago. I was on the verge of becoming a teacher after a year, since my talent was obvious in pedagogical studies and in lesson planning, including the modern methodologies, though I was plagued by a math teacher who was despicable and disgusting and a bastard. He was not happy that sons of detestable peasants from villages and hamlets, more like barefoot riffraff than anything else, could excel in education over the true sons of schools, originally from elite backgrounds and good, wealthy folks; and so he would screw with me in every exam, provoking me with dirty looks, writing me up every time I sat up in my seat or coughed or turned around to ask one of my classmates for a ruler or compass or an eraser, things that I don’t think I ever bought once throughout all my school days. This pissed him off, and it made him even more bitter that I never bought a book he required or a quad-lined notebook which, he urged, was necessary. So the son of a bitch saw fit to prevent anyone from helping me one bit; he even kicked out a classmate who snuck me a compass. When he cussed me out, I began to aim looks of suppressed hatred at him, such that I enraged him terribly, and he took away my blank answer sheet, and then, like the swaggering, pompous ass he was, kicked me out. I froze as if nailed in place, shaking with fury; my eyes must have been like flaming arrows, since he bared his teeth and said, “Why are you looking at me like that, boy?”
Still I persisted in my gaze, I don’t know why or what I could have done. He kicked me, his kicks forcing me toward the classroom door, and I was down flat on my face, I who had not so long ago fancied myself a venerable, respectable teacher. I lost it but quickly pulled myself back together. Like a wild, rabid dog I threw myself at the gut of Wael Effendi the math teacher with all my might. I snapped at the flesh of his face with my teeth, and I bashed in his nose and teeth with my forehead, I kneed him in the groin and stomped on his shins, until he fell down to the ground, and I kneeled over him holding his collar and burying my fingers in the flesh of his neck. The whole exam hall sprang to life. I felt like an entire city was raining blows on my body, trying in vain to extract him from me. The clamor grew and cheating flared up and tons of crib notes and cheat sheets began piling up, and the dean came running in panic, and more than one policeman came, and the billy club slammed down on my back, my rear end, and my head. But every blow I received, I returned to Wael Effendi by raising his head then smashing it on the ground as if I wanted to shake out his brain. Then when it appeared to me that he’d given up the ghost and all his limbs had collapsed and he turned yellow and the light in his eyes had gone out completely, I went limp, and I responded to the hands that lifted me from him. When I stood up I started stomping on his stomach, on his groin, on his face, until I left him in a shredded heap, stained with blood, my blood and his.
They took him to the hospital in critical condition; they handed me over to the city police in pitiful condition, accompanied by the dean’s curses and his description of my family and all my kind as despicable hooligans, and he cursed Taha Hussein as the one who destroyed education and polluted it with lowlifes like me. I knew that he would say this, but I didn’t give a damn; for I was certain that I had quenched my thirst for revenge and avenged my wounded pride, and many of my classmates were looking at me with a great deal of sorrow tinged with something like admiration; and besides, I felt that I hadn’t finished the piss that I must yet piss in Wael Effendi’s mouth, but I would still go to jail and my future would be ruined at his hands, and that I would undoubtedly kill him the moment I was free again.
The court took pity on me, giving me a six-month suspended sentence and expelling me from the Institute. A year after that I went to school one day, on the pretext of getting my transcripts, intending to stick a knife in the heart of Wael Effendi, and I was surprised to find that he had been disfigured by the loss of an eye where apparently, in my madness, I had gouged it out, and the marks my teeth had dug in all over his face were still there, and he walked to class a broken man, having given up his arrogance and swagger and lowered his perpetually bellowing voice with his lisping, fancy tongue. As for the distinctive elegance of his dress, it had faded completely. I noticed my grip on the knife handle loosening in my pocket and I was overcome with a kind of pity for the both of us. He had seen me out of the corner of his good eye but he didn’t recognize me since my appearance had changed drastically, for my hair had grown long and was visibly messed up and my beard had grown, and my clothes were wrinkled and dirt had accumulated on my face and my hands and my clothes, so much so that most of my classmates did not recognize me as they passed by me in the schoolyard or the secretary’s office. Actually I liked that, as I hadn’t wanted them to remember me, and I only wanted to get my papers and put them in the pocket of my gallabiya to use as identity papers when necessary.
That incident meant that I would never return to my village at all, and that I would make the city streets my home. I spent all day and all night wandering the streets and alleys and neighborhoods, from Susi Street to Mudiriya Street to Iflaqa Bridge to Shubra to Abu al-Rish to Nadi Street. I spent some time at the public library reading stories and novels and poetry, looking for a better world to shelter me for a few hours, after which I turned back to the asphalt streets of Damanhour, stingy by their very nature, dry in character, and inhospitable to strangers. I cut across Susi Street from al-Sagha Street after I had smelled enough of the ful midammis wafting upward from al-Asi’s restaurant, the most famous ful-maker in all of Egypt, for they say that he presented King Farouk with a pot of his ful, and when the king had a dish of it for breakfast, he gave him the rank of bey via urgent cable, the title by which he was now called by the dozens, no, hundreds of visitors who came to his restaurant every day, from all over the country, for a dish of his famous ful.
When I turned off Susi Street and onto Suq Street, I was greeted by the fruits of Fakharani in a complete garden of awesome and appetizing scents, so it pleased me to plunge into the bazaar, to mix in my nose the smells of apples, dates, guava, and lemon with the smells of fish and meats and gargir and dung from the horses drawing wagons. The crowded street, paved with broad, flat stones and crisscrossed with little canyons of dirty water, spat me out onto the main street which was the height of cleanliness, running from the railroad station to Iflaqa Bridge on Mahmudiya Canal. By that time the smell of frying ta‘miya had intoxicated me and I was convinced that I had eaten my fill, even though my insides were completely empty. When the dark night came all sensations gave way to stifling cold or fear or loss. I knew sleep inside the drain pipes and under the trees on the rural thoroughfares and near the twenty-four-hour bakeries and on the sidewalks close to the low-class coffeeshops, yet I hadn’t fallen so low as to know the place called Wikalat Atiya.
The Square
V agrants stick to each other like sticky fluid on a downward slope. That’s how it was with Mahrous and me; we stuck to each other. The first time I saw him was on the back road leading into town; he was sitting in front of a pile of radishes and gargir spread out on a sack, calling to the customers in mawwals that extolled the virtues of his radishes and gargir with a fervor and vitality surpassing that of Abu Nawas for his wine; the green eyes were in his radishes, and as for the gargir, it was a lover’s eyelashes, it was the tassels on the draperies in her boudoir, and it was the tattoo engraved on his very heart in the name of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. I was enthralled by the sweetness of his vocabulary and how it contained sincere and captivating sentiments; I stood next to him for a long time, and he