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.The café, protected by the thick stone blocks of its walls and aired by a large ceiling fan, had retained some of its coolness despite the stifling heatwave.The cafés in the downtown area still performed some of their old functions.They were spaces where workers and passers-by could have a rest.They were refuges for the unemployed, for retired civil servants and those who wanted to escape their cramped homes for a thousand and one reasons.In them you could hear the clatter of backgammon and people playing cards, you could smell tea and coffee and the aromatic tobacco used in shishas.In the old days famous musicians would perform in them, singing songs with long overtures, many reprises and crooning that came from deep in the belly.Nowadays the television occupies a key corner.There are new singers you don’t know who use their noses instead of their throats.They proliferate like weeds, on countless satellite channels.Alongside them gyrate young women who have been discovered you know not where, women with long legs and narrow hips, in tight trousers or short skirts, women of a kind unseen in streets where nowadays you rarely find a woman even with her head uncovered.The football match against the Asian team ended in a 3–2 victory for the local players.The few customers in the café were watching the last minutes as you went in, and as soon as the match was over the waiter turned the television off, the noise subsided and the customers turned to conversation or playing cards.Some of them left at the end of the match, which was only available by special subscription, while others came in, apparently less enthusiastic about football.The man sitting alone at the table opposite you didn’t move.He had his back to the television and he almost sighed in relief when the match ended.He was in his late sixties.Rather sullen.A narrow wedding ring shone on his veined right hand.His hand lay splayed on top of a book but the title wasn’t visible.He had large sunglasses that covered half his face and was wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers.His hair was dyed.It must have been.The jet black was not convincing.The same for his thin moustache, which looked like a fine thread above his thick upper lip.The neat way he dressed suggested a middle-class man who had fallen on hard times.He definitely wasn’t from the city of Sindbad, although many people from there frequented the cafés in the downtown area, continuing a tradition they had acquired at home.You saw him smile once when a fat boy with Down’s syndrome came along, stopped in front of him and shook his big bottom.Clearly the fat boy was a local landmark and one of the street’s distinguishing features.The assistants from the nearby shops had been harassing him playfully, asking him to shake his big bottom again, and he complied with a pleasure that was saddening.The man looked behind him.He lifted his big sunglasses off his eyes and looked at you, then at Badr.He must have heard some of your conversation, because he said, ‘Sorry to bother you, but where are you from?’‘From here,’ you said.‘You must live abroad,’ he said.‘How did you know?’‘It shows,’ he answered.You didn’t ask him how it showed that you lived abroad.How could he know the contents of your black box with just one glance at the table where you were sitting, in the same streets you walked as a young man? Again, and for a last time, the man turned his face towards you, while his body, which showed a flexibility you hadn’t expected from a man of his age, remained static.‘Might we have met before?’ he asked.‘I don’t think so,’ you replied, curtly and firmly.Perhaps it was your terse responses that made him stop interrogating you.He turned his back to you again.But when the man had raised his sunglasses the first time, and you saw his melancholy eyes, a tangled skein of memories began to roll around in your head.The threads were hard to unravel.You felt that one of the threads was about this man in particular.He was very much like Mr Shakib, who had taught language and literature at the Upright Generation Secondary School and who had noticed the devil of poetry hovering around you.But a strange feeling of indifference towards things suddenly came over you, and you stopped wondering who he was.* * *You told Badr that you used to sit in this café, that you began your poetic life here, amid the clatter of backgammon pieces and the cries of the waiters, that the man who had helped you take the first steps along the path of poetry was a romantic poet called Salman, who used to tell you that real poets don’t live to be forty.You told Badr that at one of the tables inside the café you had read a book that had greatly changed you, and that a poet called Hamed Alwan – who had a sharp tongue that was always critical, and a loud laugh that shook the whole café when he laughed, and who was killed in a mysterious car accident – always used to sit in the centre, and that a stout adolescent with thick glasses used to carry around books that weighed more than he did and used to call out to you at the top of his voice from the other end of the street and that.The names you mentioned sounded strange to him, the incidents unexciting.So you shut up [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]