Beer in the Snooker Club (3 page)

‘Wait a minute, Marie, I’m coming back in a moment.’ My aunt went out, followed by Hassan Effendi carrying a thousand sheets worth a million pounds; or perhaps not quite a million pounds, because she was selling cheap and pretending to the government she was giving the land to the poor.

‘Hello, hello, Marie’, I said again.

‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘are you in business now?’

I told her I had discovered a brand-new way of exploiting the fellah. All I needed was capital.

‘You mustn’t joke about such things, dearie,’ she said.

My aunt came back and said the price of bread had increased by half a piastre. This affected them both very much because they buy bread every day. I tried to be as helpful as possible and told them of a baker I know who sells bread wholesale and by weight. Then I told them how to heat stale bread in the oven, but got muddled trying to deduct the price of the gas used to heat the oven from the money they would save by heating the stale bread. I was going to
tell them how to jump off the tram at Abbasieh and not pay for a ticket, but thought better of it. I went outside the room for a moment and stuck my ear to the keyhole.

‘Be careful,’ Marie was telling my aunt, ‘he’s come to borrow money.’

‘I know, my dear. That’s why I telephoned you. He won’t dare ask me in your presence.’

I left and went to Groppi’s. I drank whisky and ate peanuts, watching the sophisticated crowd and feeling happy that my aunt had refused to give me the money. I had asked simply because my conscience was nagging. It was something I vaguely had to do but had kept putting off. Soon Omar and Jameel came in, then Yehia, Fawzi and Ismail. Groppi’s is perhaps one of the most beautiful places to drink whisky in. The bar is under a large tree in the garden and there is a handsome black barman who speaks seven languages. We drank a bottle of whisky between us and I watched them fight to pay for it. Yehia paid, then we all left together. They each possess a car.

I am always a bit bored in the mornings because they are all either at the university or working. Sometimes I go and play snooker with Jameel at the billiards’ club. You can find him there anytime – in fact he owns it. I would go there more often if it weren’t for Font. Whenever I reproach myself for drinking too much, I tell myself it’s Font who is driving me to drink. ‘Font,’ I told him once, ‘just tell me what you want me to do?’

‘Run away, you scum,’ he answered. So I went to Groppi’s and drank more whisky. There you are, although, of course, I still read
The New Statesman and The Guardian
and
mine is perhaps the only copy of
Tribune
which comes to Egypt.

‘Font,’ I said another time, when I was nicely oiled and in a good mood, ‘Font,’ I said, ‘you’re about the only angry young man in Egypt.’ And I laughed. It struck me as very funny.

‘Go,’ he replied. ‘Go and sponge some more on these parasites.’

It was I who made Font work in the snooker club. Jameel thought I was joking when I told him it was the only thing would keep Font off the streets. In fact I had to show him Font with his barrow in Sharia-el-Sakia. Jameel was shocked to see one of his old school-friends on the street. It was all I could do to stop him from offering Font enough money to live on for the rest of his life. Font would have spat on him and probably hit me.

There he was then. Selling cucumbers. Cucumbers of all things. Of course I understood. He was Jimmy Porter. We had seen the play together in London and there he was, a degree in his pocket and selling cucumbers. There were other barrows too; lettuce, onions, sunflower seeds, beans. We stopped the car in front of Font and looked at him.

‘Get going,’ he said.

I said I wanted to buy cucumbers but that I didn’t trust his weights.

‘Scram,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll break your rotten face if you don’t scram.’ (This is typical Font. He’ll be sarcastic to the other boys but when it’s me, he’s infuriated.) Jameel told him he needed someone to look after the snooker place for him.

‘He’s too much of a snob,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t like to
be seen working where his old school-friends might come in.’

‘Do you think I give a damn about you idiots,’ Font screamed. Jameel is a quiet fellow and told him he really needed someone. Font might have accepted if I had not been there, so he looked at me with his ‘you dirty traitor’ expression instead.

‘Font,’ I asked in English, ‘what do the other barrow boys think of Virginia Woolf?’

He fell into the trap and answered in English.

‘You making fun of them? They never had a chance to go to school, you scum. Has that parasite beside you ever read a book in his life? With all his money he’s nothing but a fat, ignorant pig.’

Jameel is so docile he doesn’t mind being called a fat, ignorant pig at all. However, by then the other barrow boys were approaching. Font, dressed in Arab clothes, looking after a barrow and speaking in English, awoke their curiosity. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ they asked.

‘He’s a spy,’ I told them and they immediately became threatening. ‘We’ll deal with that son of a dog,’ they shouted. Font became incoherent with rage. We pulled him into the car and drove away quickly.

I had to leave the car soon afterwards to escape Font’s wrath, but a week later he was brushing the snooker tables with the
Literary Supplement
.

I went from Groppi’s to the snooker club. It is a large place with thick carpets in between the tables, a cosy bar and deep leather armchairs. It impresses with its subdued luxury and, one feels, bad manners would be sacrilege there.
Jameel’s father having accepted defeat in educating his son, gave way to the boy’s passion for snooker and built this place for him; which turned out to be excellent business. He is a strange man, Jameel’s father. Believe it or not, he’s a sincere socialist, a genuine one. Not a rich ‘Liberal’ nor a wealthy
The Nation
reader; no, he is active in his ideas and was once imprisoned by Farouk’s gang. He often comes for a game: a tall, lean, elegant man who had a French education and who writes to
L’Express
of France. I like Dr Hamza; as a matter of fact I’d like to be like him: well-dressed and soberly aristocratic and having been imprisoned for socialist views. I would not like to
go
to prison, but I’d like to have been. Of course Font isn’t going to be patronized and Dr Hamza isn’t going to be patronizing; so there is a layer of sympathy separating them.

As I said, I went to the snooker club. I went behind the bar and watched Font run the vacuum cleaner over the carpets. There is a perpetual look of amazement on Font’s face which makes one want to answer an unasked question. The way he works the vacuum cleaner over the carpets with his eyebrows uplifted and his eyes wide, probing into the difficult turns and corners between tables, gives the impression that if he could only get the machine into
that
particular corner, he’d find the answer to whatever was puzzling him.

‘Draught Bass, Font?’

‘Yes, all right.’

I opened two bottles of Egyptian Stella beer and poured them into a large tumbler, then beat the liquid until all the gas had escaped. I then added a drop of vodka and some whisky. It was the nearest we could get to Draught Bass.

There is a street off the Edgware Road in London, where a gang of Teddy boys, Irish labourers and other odds and ends used to play dice on the pavement. We Egyptians are gamblers. Wherever Egyptians are gathered, you can be sure that sooner or later they’ll start gambling. It’s not that we want to win money or anything, we just like to gamble. We’re lazy and we like to laugh. It’s only when gambling that we are wide awake and working hard. Font and I won a lot of money on that pavement once, and went to a silversmith in Edgware Road and bought the two silver beer mugs we now keep behind the snooker club bar. We had our names engraved on them and vowed to drink nothing but Draught Bass from them. I now poured my concoction into the mugs and waited for Font to switch the sweeper off.

‘It’s not bad,’ Font said. ‘How much did you make?’

‘About two pints each.’

‘I’m going to be nicely boozed all day.’

‘I’ll spend the day here, too,’ I said.

If Font hadn’t been so lonely, he would never have spoken to me. But he is lonely and he wants to discuss something with me; I knew that, or I would have known better than to come and chat with him.

‘The real trouble with us,’ he said (when Font says ‘us’ for him and me, it means he’s exceptionally kindly disposed towards me), ‘is that we’re so English it is nauseating. We have no culture of our own.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ I said. ‘I can crack jokes with the best of Egyptians.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘Perhaps our culture is nothing but jokes.’

‘No, Font, it isn’t. It’s just that we have never learnt Arabic properly.’ That is the way I have to speak to Font. I have to contradict him, at least in the early part of any day we are to spend together, and I have to speak slowly or he’ll accuse me of trying to be eloquent instead of carrying on an ordinary conversation.

‘Then what do you mean by saying that cracking jokes is culture?’

‘What I mean is,’ I replied, ‘that jokes to Egyptians are as much culture as calypso is to West Indians, or as spirituals and jazz to American Negroes. In fact,’ I continued, saying whatever came to my mouth, for that is the way to coax Font into trusting my sincerity, ‘it is no less culture than playing the organ is culture.’

I filled our beer mugs again and started preparing some more Bass. Font pondered over what I had just said. I sometimes say such things and then a moment later they sound less silly than they do when I utter them.

It was past eleven, and the first two customers came in; Arevian and Doromian, two rich Armenians who own the shoe-store downstairs. Two fat and greasy individuals with a sense of humour.

‘Good day, good day, professors,’ they said to Font and me (Font’s degree is a source of great amusement to them). ‘We have come to play marbles for your amusement, Herr Doctor Professor Font. It is the ambition of our humble life to divert your knowledgeable eyes with our childish efforts, thus allowing your brain to dwell upon lofty matters.’ They bowed down to Font and made as though to kiss his hands – an ancient custom in government circles.

‘Look at them,’ Font said, ‘they pay that miserable man
downstairs six pounds a month to work twelve hours a day for them, and then they come here and gamble for thousands as though for peanuts.’

‘Forgive us, forgive us, Herr Doctor,’ Doromian sang. ‘If our Hassan had so much as a minor degree from Heidelberg or the Sorbonne, we would give him … eight pounds.’

When I said they owned the shoe-store downstairs, I wasn’t quite exact. One of them owns it and the other has lost it. They play for fantastic amounts of money, and when money has been exhausted, they play for their share of the shop. They never lend money to one another. I remember Doromian losing everything including his car, and Arevian refusing to lend him the price of the tram home.

Font started laying out the snooker balls for them. I finished two pints of this Bass which makes me comfortable and allows my Oriental brain to wonder over non-Oriental things such as Font, and other Fonts I’ve known, and even the Font that I am myself at times. Fonts who are not Keir Hardies but Jimmy Porters in the Egyptian Victorian age; Fonts who are not revolutionaries or leaders in the class struggle, but polished products of the English ‘Left’, lonely and without lustre in the budding revolution of the Arab world.

These thoughts on the one hand and on the other the pleasure in sitting in Groppi’s and drinking whisky without having to pay for it, or of coming to the snooker club and sitting within reach of the bottles. Thinking of this, I reached out and swung the Martell bottle to my lips. Life was good.

Font came back, the Bass having lowered his eyebrows somewhat. He asked me if I had seen Didi Nackla since London.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I saw Edna and Levy yesterday,’ he began. ‘They are coming to my place tonight. You come too.’

Levy and Edna … and Font. I wish they would all leave the country and leave me alone. Levy and Edna, especially Edna. I turned round and was going to have another swig at the bottle when he stopped me.

‘Don’t be such a bloody coward,’ he said.

I sighed and drank my beer instead.

‘I haven’t seen Edna for such a long time.’

‘You can see her tonight.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Well, don’t come then.’

‘You know very well I’m coming,’ I said.

He smiled.

‘I hope we’re all chucked in jail,’ I said. ‘Somewhere on the Red Sea. The four of us. Then you’ll really have something to be angry about. I can just see your eyebrows raised to the back of your head in amazement.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘Why should we be chucked in jail?’ His eyebrows started rising again. ‘Are you involved in something …?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Ram …’

‘I’ve told you a hundred times, no.’

I longed to see Edna again. Her long, auburn hair and large, brown eyes. We’d both sit on the floor, myself behind her, Arab fashion, combing her hair. One long stroke
after another, then a parting and two long plaits with a bit of string tied to the end of each plait.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I said. ‘Let’s have another Bass.’ I shared the remaining Bass and watched his eyebrows go up before he spoke.

‘Did you read what he did?’

‘Who?’

‘Gaitskell.’

‘Gaitskell. Gaitskell! For God’s sake, Font, do you think I’m going to worry about …’ and then I saw the lonely look on Font’s face. ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘What do you expect? So many years being a politician, you end up by being a politician.’

‘It’s not true,’ he shouted, ‘look at Konni Zilliacus, look at Fenner Brockway …’

‘Stop shouting, Font.’ Three men had just come in and were looking at us. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘Go and fix them some balls.’ He took some keys from behind the bar and went unsteadily towards them. I was getting drunk. I took another mouthful of Martell and lit a cigarette.

The ludicrous position of an Egyptian sitting in Cairo and being furious because of Gaitskell’s stand on the manufacture of nuclear weapons in England doesn’t strike Font. Admittedly he began by being furious about Egyptian internal politics as well, but that too was ludicrous, like a Lucky Jim would have been in England during Dickens’s time. It was like trying to ice a cake while it was still in the oven. Font knows how to trim the cake, and frost it, and garnish it with the latest decorations, but he doesn’t know how to bake the cake. So he has to wait for Nasser to bake it for him before he can add his own refinements – and he’s
not too sure that he will be allowed to do that, even later on. In the meantime he sits and judges all the cooked cakes and hopes that the Egyptian, or Arab, cake, is going to come out the correct
shape
.