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NASSER IRAQ made after Mansour pointed out that, thanks to its delicious and varied offerings, all the nationalities in the world ate lunch and supper at the restaurant. Mansour’s mobile rang and as he answered I scrutinised his face. Nearly four years had passed since the Nile waters had snatched Safaa alSharnoubi, his heart’s beloved, from him, and he looked unchanged: his dark, captivating eyes still harboured the grief that had hovered over them ever since that fateful trip to the Nile Barriers; his soft, cascading hair remained the same. But what caught my attention was how dapper he looked, sporting a dark blue suit over a pale blue shirt and a red tie; the very opposite of my brother, who appeared just as he had when he left us four years earlier, though older and more careworn. Quick as a flash, Hassan piled his plate high with every kind of food, not forgetting his share of soup and salad, and began wolfing it down as though someone might snatch it away at any moment. He showed not the slightest interest in waiting for us to get our food so we could all eat together. Mansour took my hand and guided me along, describing the different kinds of food, which he knew so well. “This is sabzi, or spinach, and this is zereshk, rice with pomegranate seeds.” “How do you know their names?” I asked in astonishment. He laughed and put a chunk of Iranian kebab on his plate. “Have you forgotten?” he replied. “Curiosity made me ask them the names of everything here.” He pointed at a little piece of paper. “Look, they write the name of each dish in English next to it.” I couldn’t prevent myself from loading my plate with as much as it could bear, my selections demonstrating an overwhelming preponderance of meat and chicken, but I found that Mansour had placed on his a small and varied quantity of food. I was hungry. I gulped it down quickly and stood up to get a second plateful. Hassan, meanwhile, had polished off two large helpings, plus a third plate full of pudding and fruit. Mansour was eating delicately, with perfect command of his cutlery, while I messed up more than once, trying to use my knife and fork before deciding not to bother and making do with just my spoon. I was unable to finish the second plate and Mansour smiled: “So sad . . . All the Egyptians who come here heap their plates with much more than they can manage.” His comment irritated me. “And you?” I snapped. “I was the same, until Salah Ghandour taught me to treat my food with humanity!” 124 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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2012 INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION For a moment, it occurred to me that this Salah Ghandour, whom he had mentioned twice that night, had taken the place of Badr al-Minyawi, but the thought disappeared as Hassan, getting to his feet and oblivious of our conversation, asked: “Isn’t it time for a shisha?” Not wishing to embarrass my brother with the fact that we had not finished our sweets and fruit Mansour, who was peeling himself an orange, summoned the Filipino waitress and asked for the bill. But, as we left the restaurant, he gestured at Hassan who was walking a few steps ahead of us, and whispered: “That brother of yours will always be a yob!” At the Zikrayat Café, I was surprised to see Mansour receive the same warm welcome he had met with at the restaurant, this time from the Egyptian waiter, who called out as soon as he saw him: “Welcome, Mr Mansour and his friends! Where’s Mr Salah?” “No idea, we weren’t due to meet tonight.” It’s as though the café is right in the heart of Cairo, not Dubai, I thought to myself: the self-same din rising up from all sides; the waiters moving about in the same way, their strident voices shouting orders; even Umm Kulthoum, intoning the words of “They Reminded Me” as feelingly as she sung them in the cafés of Cairo. There were some differences, however. The café was cleaner and shinier than its counterparts back home, and bigger, too. Here, the chairs and tables were elegant and luxurious, more appropriate for a great salon than a coffee shop. I woke from my reverie to the sound of Hassan’s voice issuing orders: “When we’ve finished here, you go home and straight to sleep! You’ve got a lot to do tomorrow. Don’t stay up. Got it?” Without uttering a syllable, I nodded. Mansour switched his gaze back and forth between us, then muttered something I didn’t catch. Because the shisha was far sweeter than what we had in our cafés, and to avoid thinking about my relationship with my brother, I smoked on voraciously. To be perfectly honest, I was berating myself severely for submitting to Hassan’s commands as though I were still a child. When he ordered me to go home and straight to bed I should have answered back, but my tongue and my courage failed me and I was unable to give as good as I got from the brother who had inherited our father’s brutishness. While it was true he had fixed a work contract for me out here, that did not mean I should abase myself before him like a slave he’d bought at market. Had I left Cairo, fleeing my father’s tyranny, only to fall into my brother’s bullying hands? These nagging doubts circled me as I blew out a thick stream of smoke into the café, while Umm Kulthoum listlessly crooned “How can they BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 125

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NASSER IRAQ

made after Mansour pointed out that, thanks to its delicious and varied offerings, all the nationalities in the world ate lunch and supper at the restaurant. Mansour’s mobile rang and as he answered I scrutinised his face. Nearly four years had passed since the Nile waters had snatched Safaa alSharnoubi, his heart’s beloved, from him, and he looked unchanged: his dark, captivating eyes still harboured the grief that had hovered over them ever since that fateful trip to the Nile Barriers; his soft, cascading hair remained the same. But what caught my attention was how dapper he looked, sporting a dark blue suit over a pale blue shirt and a red tie; the very opposite of my brother, who appeared just as he had when he left us four years earlier, though older and more careworn.

Quick as a flash, Hassan piled his plate high with every kind of food, not forgetting his share of soup and salad, and began wolfing it down as though someone might snatch it away at any moment. He showed not the slightest interest in waiting for us to get our food so we could all eat together. Mansour took my hand and guided me along, describing the different kinds of food, which he knew so well. “This is sabzi, or spinach, and this is zereshk, rice with pomegranate seeds.”

“How do you know their names?” I asked in astonishment. He laughed and put a chunk of Iranian kebab on his plate. “Have you forgotten?” he replied. “Curiosity made me ask them the names of everything here.”

He pointed at a little piece of paper. “Look, they write the name of each dish in English next to it.”

I couldn’t prevent myself from loading my plate with as much as it could bear, my selections demonstrating an overwhelming preponderance of meat and chicken, but I found that Mansour had placed on his a small and varied quantity of food. I was hungry. I gulped it down quickly and stood up to get a second plateful. Hassan, meanwhile, had polished off two large helpings, plus a third plate full of pudding and fruit. Mansour was eating delicately, with perfect command of his cutlery, while I messed up more than once, trying to use my knife and fork before deciding not to bother and making do with just my spoon.

I was unable to finish the second plate and Mansour smiled: “So sad . . . All the Egyptians who come here heap their plates with much more than they can manage.”

His comment irritated me. “And you?” I snapped. “I was the same, until Salah Ghandour taught me to treat my food with humanity!”

124 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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