That Smell and Notes From Prison Read Online Free PDF Page B

around,
saying, Where? until the smell went away. Finally I gave up on Sami and got up
and left. The traffic was terrible. I went to the offices of the magazine but no
one was there. A radio was playing loudly in the street — it was a song in
English about children and I realized that Muhammed Fawzi’s new song was the
same song. I got on the metro and the crowds were horrendous and I almost
suffocated. I looked at the faces of tired women with eyeliner running down
their faces. I went to Samia’s house and found them eating. Samia smiled when
she saw me and said she had waited for me for a long time before starting to
eat. Really? I almost said. I asked about her boy and she said he was sleeping.
I felt myself smiling. Her smile was simple and sincere. I hadn’t thought that
she was so simple and so graceful.
    So what? She has her husband and her child and there’s no
place for anyone else in her life and soon I’ll leave and that will be the end
of everything.
    Every now and then she sighed hotly and said, O Lord. I said to her,
If Freud heard you, he would have something to say about that. Lots of things,
she said. We finished eating and she stood up. She was wearing a light shirt
with nothing under it and just beneath her armpit I saw the side of her breast
where it bulged out from her chest. I was surprised it didn’t droop. It was
milky white. I looked away and into her eyes, so frank and so straightforward.
She went in to sleep and I slept too and when I woke up I looked for her in her
room. Her bed was on the far side of the room and she was lying on her back with
her head turned away from me, gazing at the wall opposite, with her son at her
chest, still sleepy and looking around in confusion. Her leg was bare — it was
milky white — and she quickly covered it. She got up and put on an orange skirt
and we sat on the balcony and she said that her little boy liked me. I loved her
easy, honest voice, her simple gestures. I told her that I felt like an old man.
I hardly smiled or laughed. All the people I saw on the street or on the metro
were unhappy, unsmiling. What was there to be happy about? We talked about
books. She said she’d stopped reading a while ago, when her boy was born. I
asked if she had read
The Plague
. I felt as though a lot rode on her
answer but she said, No. I was about to tell her that I envied her simplicity
and her grace. I told myself that I would say so when we said goodbye. I looked
at my watch. I had to go. I stood up and so did she and I said to her in a low
voice, You know, you’re really strange. She looked at me in surprise. Today, I
finally figured you out, I said. She bent over her little boy and busied herself
straightening his clothes and I couldn’t see her eyes very well. Her husband
came home and I said goodbye to both of them. They accompanied me to the stairs.
At the garden gate, I turned around. She was going back into her nice cool home
and I watched her orange skirt disappear behind the door. I walked back to the
apartment and saw a nice-looking girl walking next to the train rails as if she
was having trouble with her shoes. I went into the building. The light was on in
the wood-paneled room by the entrance and the door was open. I peeked in and saw
my sister’s friend Husniyya. I went up to my room and my sister came. I said to
her, Samia’s nice. Then I said, Is she happy with her husband? Of course, she
said. I bet she doesn’t love him, I said. Impossible, she said. Where else will
she find a man like that, as far as personality and position? And she said they
had met before getting married.
    So what if they had met before getting married. . . . She was
twenty-seven, she’d waited for her prince a long time with no luck. . . . She
had no privacy at home, she slept in a room that was like a living room. She
could never close the door and be alone and take off her clothes, for example.
She couldn’t look at her body in a mirror. She couldn’t stand the