Streetwise by Emery Ed Choukri Mohamed

Author:Emery , Ed, Choukri, Mohamed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846591426
Publisher: Saqi

16

It was a fresh, breezy morning as I left Habiba’s house. I felt as light as a feather, as if I was walking on air. She was still asleep. The door clicked shut behind me. My trousers were still slightly damp.

I ordered breakfast in the Café General Yazid. There was an old wind-up His Master’s Voice gramophone in one corner, dating from the 1940s. The records they used to play were mainly Om Kaltoum, Asmahan, Abdel Wahab and Farid el Atrache. They kept the gramophone as a kind of memento of things past, a testimony to their memories and the culture of earlier days.

I decided to wait until my mother went off to sell her secondhand clothes in Bab et Toute and my father went, as usual, to the Feddane, complete with more cock-and-bull stories about his so-called bravery in Franco’s war. His friends in the Feddane, like himself, had been deserters in Franco’s war. His stories were all lies. The only time my father was ever brave was in his war with us, and he began to lose that war once we started growing up.

When he could no longer trash us, he would sometimes beat our mother, to the point of drawing blood or giving her a black eye, or two. One day he’d beaten her so hard that it had exhausted him. At that point he’d lifted the metal pot in which he boiled the sugar needed for making the honey that he sold in Sebta. If it hadn’t been for my mother’s screams alerting the neighbours, he would have tipped the contents over her head. When the neighbours came, I grabbed the pestle from the mortar and threatened to smash his head with it if he started his craziness again. He rushed round to the man next door and burst out crying:

‘The bastard threatened to kill me. He threatened me with the mortar. I should have strangled him when he was little, that would have sorted him out!’

I had a sudden vision of my brother Abdelqader’s blood spurting out when my father had wrung his neck. However, that was the last time he hit my mother. From then on, he confined himself to abusing her and cursing us.

I found Arhimo coughing feverishly. When her coughing stopped, she cooed like a dove. My mother had left her some orange juice, saying it would do her good. I washed my trousers, shaved and then went and bought one of Abdelaziz’s little cakes. When I told him I hoped business would be good that day, he answered jokingly:

‘Well, you’re the first customer I’ve had today, so let’s hope you bring me luck.’

He kissed my small coin and put it in his pocket. We smiled at each other and I left. As I was setting off down the road, I heard Fatima, our hunchbacked neighbour, calling after me. She said good morning and I greeted her in return. Then she disappeared. She had a pretty wretched time with her handicap. She

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