Beer in the Snooker Club

by Waguih Ghali

To be loved by, and to possess the person we love is why we were born.

All he knew was that he had spent three years in America, had picked up their pet phrases and had been given a degree. He was all set to be given high office, and what sickened me was the knowledge that he would get it.

The only important thing which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution. We took to it wholeheartedly and naturally, without any fanaticism or object in view.

Gradually, we began to see ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians.

It was Edna who introduced me to Egyptian people. It is rare, in the milieu in which I was born, to know Egyptians. She explained to me that the Sporting Club and the race meetings and the villa-owners and the European-dressed and – travelled people I met, were not Egyptians. Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land.

This stupid thing of expecting ‘fair play’ from the English, alongside their far from ‘fair play’ behaviour, was a Strange phenomenon in us.

The mental sophistication of Europe has killed something good and natural in us, killed it for good … for ever.

Gradually, I have lost my natural self. I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of the imagination; my own actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play.

Women sometimes confuse curiosity with love.

The “correct” tactics and propaganda had nothing to do with the truth.’

But every Englishman is born with a certain power. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself he wants it. He waits until there comes to his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants … and then he grabs it.

It is all right for people to pretend that love breeds love, but it is not so. The seed of love is indifference.

‘You are so well informed you know all about the Egyptian fellah, do you? Do you know anything of the natives in Kenya? in Rhodesia? in Aden? And worst of all, perhaps, in South Africa? Or are you going to tell me South Africa doesn’t belong to your rich relatives? It does.

I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I knew I wanted to lose my temper and expose something or other, but what exactly, I didn’t know.

There is only one perfect ending to everything, and that is death, but there are other good endings as well.

‘I’ve told you before, Egyptians are not found in Cairo or in Alexandria,’ she said. ‘You’ve never really known Egyptians. I hate Egyptians of your class as much as I do my parents.’

Se sacrifier à ses passions, passe; Mais à des passions qu’ on a pas? GIRODET

Our bodies, our beings, seem to be filled with venoms and poisons wriggling inside us like snakes wanting to escape. Serpents of sex and love and emotion and longing and frustration coil and uncoil and show their heads now and then. We drown them in alcohol and passion and subdue them at times at the gambling table or even on the football field, but their turgidity returns again and we are faced once more with their torturing pressures. Now and then, they all seem to escape, giving us a respite which we call happiness or contentment or even serenity. I felt

light and peaceful as though all my serpents had shrivelled or shrunk or completely escaped for a while. Even my flesh seemed to cling tighter and neater around my bones. Like those Indian ascetics who search for the secret of a serpentless life.

And if, at such moments, you let your thoughts wander, they transcend every-day pettiness and smallness and seem to hover high up, gazing at the world detachedly and even benignly. And a perception, an awareness of the complete scene below is registered with a lucidity and a clarity which you some...

I felt like having a cold beer and eating salted peanuts by the pool; then a cigarette and another beer and more peanuts. I could do it, of course, even though I had no money. But I knew the pattern too well; the depression afterwards and the self-disgust.

Now and then one of the millions reads a book, or starts thinking, or something shakes him, and then he sees tragedy all over the place. Wherever he looks, he finds tragedy. He finds it tragic that other people don’t see this tragedy around them and then he becomes like Font or Edna, or joins some party or other, or marches behind banners until his own life, seen detachedly, becomes a little tragic.

but happiness, to me, is the freedom of two people who love each other to share their lives in circumstances permitting this love to live.

‘If,’ I told Edna, ‘someone has read an enormous amount of literature, and has a thorough knowledge of contemporary history, from the beginning of this century to the present day, and he has an imagination, and he is intelligent, and he is just, and he is kind, and he cares about other people of all races, and he has enough time to think, and he is honest and sincere, there are two things can happen to him; he can join the Communist Party and then leave it, wallowing in its short-comings, or he can become mad. Or,’ I said, ‘if he is unconsciously insincere, he may join one of the many left-wing societies in Europe, and enjoy himself.’

‘I am insincere,’ I said, ‘but honest.’

‘And Israel too. Imagine a third of our income being pumped into an army to fight a miserable two million Jews who were massacred something terrible in the last war. So what if he becomes unpopular? He is strong enough to take unpopular steps. Besides, you know, we Egyptians don’t care one way or another about Israel. No, Didi Nackla,’ I said, ‘it’s stupid living under a police state without the benefits of the control.’