LITMIR.BIZ

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There are homes you’re at ease in, that bewitch you the moment you enter. Have you heard about thieves who doze off in the homes they enter, only to be surprised by the return of the owners? I used to think this was the stupidest kind of larceny, and the laziest, until I had perfected my trade and experienced the same thing myself—the sense that this is my home, this woman who’s hung her picture on the wall is my wife; her underwear, left lying with typical negligence on the bed or in the bathroom, keeps her body present.

      My companions left me to my own devices, knowing that my presence was a guarantee of our safe departure. It was as though we were guests to whom the generous owners had gifted some of their possessions—poor relatives to rich folk who gave clothes to us and our children, saying that they were unused, and yet they weren’t quite right for us. But we would accept them, convincing ourselves that we were exchanging gifts.

      “Exchange gifts and exchange love.”

      And yet we were recalcitrant paupers, mature enough to admit that we were resentful for our lesser standing, that this resentment would spur us to gift them, too, something to keep us in their hearts—something hurtful and painful that would perhaps upset their code of values and principles. They would stop receiving poor relatives and wouldn’t give them gifts. Not so freely. No call for tenderness.

      I told you that every home I entered brought me a step closer to myself. Everything I stole led me to a part of myself and what I wanted. It was more like therapy than anything else, which is why I became addicted to living within the lives of others.

      I no longer cared what we came away with. My treasure was the details. Unlike that woman, I possess almost no photographs from childhood. Photography was another expense whose cost we couldn’t bear. The camera I inherited from my father he had rarely used himself, and after his passing we kept it only for special occasions, the kind that are carefully prepared for precisely because they will be photographed. Which is why I cannot remember how I looked, except by relying on a memory that shifts about according to the whim of the moment. Among the papers left by my father, reserve officer Ismail al-Sayyid—the majority of which were comprised of official documents, letters addressed to him from military command, and a few photographs of landscapes, there was a single picture—one single solitary picture—from which I know what he looked like. Standing on the seashore in Alexandria (so he’d written on it) with a group of colleagues, all aping the pose of bodybuilding champs: one arm bowed out from their sides, the other held skyward in a straight line, the face turned with it, out as far as it would go. Little gods who fell and never knew why.

      I lost myself in Sawsan’s life. Compare these hidden pictures with the official portraits on the wall: the bearded husband, the young women in hijabs, the son who looks more like his father than her. And then an exception, a group shot: her with a little girl at the seaside. The little girl is pouring a bucket of water over her mother’s head. Of the three children, she seems to be the closest to Sawsan. Alone among the pictures on the wall, their expressions hold some kind of rebelliousness, while those of the father, son, and other daughter possess a serenity and placidity in keeping with the piety hinted at by numerous small details scattered around the apartment.

      Mustafa reclined on a big, black leather chair in a pose that matched his self-confidence, his hands on the armrests, talking languidly as though seated in his own office with old friends who could discuss without embarrassment the smallest details of their lives. I was sitting on a similar chair, but drowning in it. I tried sitting according to the image I had of myself, but it came off as distinctly forced. What we think of ourselves does not always pan out in reality. He saw greatness in himself, as I did in myself, but the practical application of this thought proved his vision to be the correct one. Was I deceived, then, or was it just a question of practicing to make the idea correspond with reality?

      Practicing greatness!

      An excellent title for a book dealing with the difficulties of a certain class of person looking for solutions to predicaments like mine: in search of that harmony between the idea of oneself and the passage of that self through life. I made do with perching on the edge of the chair, leaning slightly forward: a student in his teacher’s chambers patiently absorbing his lessons until he’d formed sufficient convictions to leave him puffed up and proud.

      When the thieving first began, it was driven by an anger that I could only expend in that particular way. This does not constitute any admission of error—quite the opposite! It’s just that I was not conscious, exactly, of the factors that were making me act this way. But it was in this woman’s home in particular that I realized I was in possession of a message, and one that I must carry out. Call me a devil if you must, but I have the power to expose the fakery in whose prison we pass our lives.

      Nothing is done except at my signal. I am involved from beginning to end. The true leader goes at the head of troops, and this is what ensures that he keeps his position.

      My presence on the ground during operations safeguards my project. No matter how adept and well-trained your foot soldiers, they cannot cope with surprises.

      Leadership means swift reactions, calm in the face of crises, reassuring the men that they will always be protected from things they have no idea how to handle.

      Mustafa Ismail

      The Book of Safety

      4

      “Would you like to know your end, then arrange your life accordingly?”

      I directed the question at Dmitri, owner of the Sappho bookshop, and his friends, still and silent, arrayed in the ancient photograph’s tableau. I had been coming to the bookshop with my father since I was little, and not one detail had altered, every figure in the picture holding position. With this photo, Dmitri had made the most beautiful period of his life immutable. There he stood in his suit, white and cut in the Forties style—were it not for the red handkerchief in his breast pocket, he would have looked like a little puddle of milk. To his right and left respectively, Maria and Helene, and on the opposite side of the picture his friend with the tricky name I couldn’t remember.

      Dmitri’s reticence about personal matters opened the floor to speculation. From time to time, I would dream up different explanations for this picture, for this four-way tie that ended with three off to Greece and Dmitri staying behind. The authentic Shubra kid, passionate about Egypt. That friend of his was bound to leave; the sharply masculine features and athletic body, his simultaneously simple and elegant clothes, spoke of ambitions that no longer belonged in the burgeoning dictatorship. The girl on the other side of the picture had traveled with him, that much seemed certain. Today’s backstory was that she had been his lover. Her casually parted legs went with his liberated air, while her companion’s conservative posture suited Dmitri’s commitment to dapper formality on an occasion that didn’t warrant the effort. But unable to endure his reticence she had chosen to follow her friends.

      In front of the pyramids and the Sphinx: two men and two women mounted on four camels gazing at the horizon, trying to mirror the still-majestic statue. Yet they fell short of the effect they strove for. A pharaonic curse had slipped out from the pyramids and into the four camels, lending them a satirical spirit that spurred them to lampoon their riders: gazing, like them, defiantly into the distance.

      Yes indeed, Mustafa. I would like—would long—to know how it will end for me and to arrange my life accordingly.

      Dmitri heaved his body out of the storeroom I had never been permitted to enter. There was no longer any resemblance between him and his portrait, but beginnings tend to lead to endings, and he had answered a propensity for fatness, doubling the size of every cell in his body. He raised his glasses to his eyes and wiped away beads of sweat. Huge effort was expended in the storeroom, which was why, to obtain a book, lengthy negotiations were unavoidable. The book was a rare edition, he would insist: unobtainable, even from the National Library, which—like every square foot of this country—had succumbed to neglect! I smiled to myself. Then:

      “You were speaking to me?”

      “No, no, Uncle Dmitri, be well.”

      Always suspicious and

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