The Men Who Swallowed the Sun by Hamdi Abu Golayyel

Author:Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press

Milan

IN THE MORNING, THE MOROCCAN took us to the station and bought the Sarira kids tickets while I stared at the train, looking for a place I could stow away. He gave me a ticket, though, saying, It costs one hundred and sixty euro. If you want to pay me back, do so; if you don’t, God will, and may He forgive you. I almost choked with joy and told him, Don’t worry. I swear to God I’ll pay you back. I hugged him, tears running down my cheeks, and got on the train.

So the three of us set off. We sat there, waiting throughout the journey for the loudspeaker to announce, Milano! We arrived at eleven at night and acted the way we’d been told. We left the station in a perfectly normal way, joking and laughing with one another, like we were natives of the country coming home after a trip. Inside, though, I was terrified and felt like the whole station was staring at us. We found their relatives waiting for them and they took us on the subway to their apartment in Loreto, and I freshened up, washed my clothes, and went to sleep. At seven in the morning, they all went off to work and just the two who’d come with me were left. After we’d had breakfast, they hinted gently that it wouldn’t do for me to stay.

I went down to the street. My first street in a country that wasn’t mine and a world that wasn’t mine, and I felt myself growing larger with the cleanness, the neatness, and the good air. The street was paved with stone, like a wall but built on the ground, and very smooth, and it shone in the sun. I walked till I found a public telephone office with Arabic writing on the outside. I went in and found an Egyptian from el-Menoufiya and I told him, I’m on the run from the RC and I don’t have any money and I want to call my family in Egypt. He said, Go ahead. I called our house in Egypt and got the number of Mahmoud Bu el-Fadl, my friend who’d left for Italy two years before, and I called him. It turned out he was working on the scaffolded apartment building right in front of me across from the telephone office.

Bu el-Fadl put me behind him on his Vespa and we went to his home outside Milan in a place called Baranzate, at the end of the No.12 subway. The apartment was rented by his brother, Hasan, and a friend of his from el-Gharg—a bedroom, living room, corridor, kitchen, and bathroom. There were three bunk beds, one of which was unoccupied because the person who’d been sleeping in it had gone back to Egypt. I slept in it for two days and they made me pay rent. My family paid it to the Egyptian owner of the apartment over there.

I spent a month with Bu el-Fadl and

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