New Shoes
All of a sudden, with no reason or warning, my brother began to hear from friends he had introduced me to or others we still had in common, those few I had somehow retained over the twelve years since leaving home, that I had been seen in Cairo, walking down a street or sitting alone at a café. This even though I had not lived in that city since, at the age of eighteen, I had waved my brother goodbye at the airport, with my small bag and my hopes and worries, seeing a fugitive and tender doubt plant itself deep in his eyes.
He wasn’t convinced that we had made the right decision. Our parents had done all they could, but in the end managed to save enough for only one plane ticket to Europe. Instead of the pair of us leaving together, it was going to be him alone. Then it was me. Then it was him again. I forget all the reasons for and against, but it eventually settled on me, the younger brother.
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A year later, I set off, travelling via a circuitous route that saw me attempt lives in some half a dozen cities across Italy and France, constantly sending messages from new phone numbers. Reassuring messages. And money. They are still there in my head, those obsolete numbers and the addresses where I lived, locations where, I suspect, a part of me remains. Perhaps I am occasionally remembered by the people I dealt with in those places. For isn’t it the case that at times, for no particular reason, we suddenly recall the face of a person with whom we had only a passing encounter? It is not obvious why I remember the things that I remember, or, for that matter, forget the things that I forget.
I continued north till I reached London. All in all, the journey, from bidding my brother farewell in Cairo International Airport to landing here, took four years. I arrived tired, and a little changed. I certainly wasn’t as optimistic, or as fearful. London has been home for the past eight years. Home—what a strange word to use about a city that isn’t your own. And yet, some days a terror rises within me that I may never leave it.
“Four years,” my brother said on my first day, and has said a couple of times since, always in a reassuring and happy tone. “The length of a university degree. You have finally graduated, my boy.”
I hate London. I hate and love it all at once. I haven’t told my brother this, out of fear that he would realize we only hate and love the places we believe we will never leave. I know how he thinks. Nor have I told him that I have always accepted that people like me are unwanted here. Needed, perhaps, but not wanted. It is plain to see. Nor have I told him that I learned to be O.K. with this, that in London, as in life, it is impossible to go on without a degree of indifference. You have to not give a shit.
All this to say that I am fine. I have learned to be away and I am doing well. Discovered a talent for business. I now manage not one but three shops, what here they call newsagents.
“Don’t get yourself into trouble,” my mother said when I first went into this line of work. “Stay well clear of politics. Politics brings only ruin.”
This highly amused my brother. I could hear him laughing in the background.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Hisham Matar read “New Shoes.”
“Mum,” I said, “Newsagents have nothing to do with news. We sell groceries and household goods. You know, milk, eggs, and plungers.”
“And magazines and newspapers,” my brother added. She clearly had me on speaker.
The shops are within a square mile. I spend my days going between them. I employ nine people. The locals know me by now. They greet me when they see me walking. Some call me by my first name. I know many of their names, too, and the names of their children, and even their dogs. You learn things in this job, things that may or may not be important: what people like to drink, what newspapers they read, how parents manage their children’s sweet tooth, how they sometimes weaken and buy themselves tobacco and ask you not to mention it to their spouses, how the lonely pensioners purchase a lottery ticket every week but really only want to chat.
The money I send home every month is more than the amount I keep. During the time I have been away, the exchange rate has climbed sharply and in only one direction. When I first left home, one pound sterling got you eleven Egyptian pounds. Now it’s seventy. If, God forbid, both my father and my brother lost the ability to work, my family would want for nothing.
My brother has been clever, investing nearly half of the money I send. He bought a flat in one of the new developments in the suburbs, “off-plan,” as they call it, before the block was built, which allowed us to pay for it in easy installments. By the time it was finished, it had doubled in value. He rented it to a young family who have been paying on time each month. He is keeping an eye out for similar opportunities, speaks of compiling a “portfolio” of such properties, “so that you can finally return home, and retire in comfortable luxury.”
He, more than anyone else, knew how difficult it was for me to leave, and he, more than anyone else, could sense how frightened I was as he drove me to the airport, how it seemed to me then that time had cracked open, that the past had collapsed, and I could do nothing but go forward, whether I wanted to or not. I remember the grief of it, together with the sharp and manic urge to remake myself entirely. Such passions are with me still, chains tethering me to this fate. And I know that he saw it in my eyes as we said goodbye. He knew how much encouragement I required, and kept on saying that I shouldn’t take it so hard, that before I knew it I would be back home and life would be better, “much, much better.” I didn’t believe him and I needed to believe him. I was angry at him and grateful to him. The opposing emotions battled with each other as I walked away, thinking, He doesn’t fool me. I know he, too, is in pain. But he endured it with a tender deflection, like a man closing his eyes before stepping off a precipice. Even though, of course, it was I, his younger by two years, his best friend, as he liked to call me, who was going into the unknown.
Only after my last visit, some seven months ago now, did my brother start to claim that I had been seen in Cairo. There was something cruel and bizarre about it. I couldn’t understand why he would tell me such a thing. And, every time, it impressed itself upon me in ways I couldn’t fully explain, as though I had been afflicted by a strange fervor. It rendered me consoled and outraged. Whatever the feeling, I had become a passive subject, vulnerable to assault.
The other day, he said that I had been spotted sitting alone in a café in Zamalek, that old and illustrious neighborhood he and I admired as young teen-agers. I remembered us walking through it with romantic dreaminess, looking up at its late-nineteenth-century buildings, picturing ourselves someday living there.
In these dozen years abroad, I have endured some terrible times, and yet I’ve found some comfort in the fact that everyone I truly cared about lived far away, across the sea, and therefore could not possibly know how bad things were. When you live in a foreign land, you can, for example, sleep in parks in summer and in train stations in winter free of the danger of anyone you know ever finding out. What kept me going then was imagining myself one day returning home and buying an apartment in Zamalek, where, at long last, I would be able to set up my own respectable and independent life in the city of my birth, where even with complete strangers I feel as though I share some familial bond.
But in these last few years, since the success God bestowed on me, I haven’t thought of Zamalek much at all. In fact, I can see now, I had managed to almost forget about it altogether, until the first time my brother called to say, with a mischievous smile in his voice, “Apparently, you were seen crossing Brazil Street, in Zamalek.”
We laughed about it.
But then, that night, I couldn’t sleep. I discovered that I had not cured myself of that dream at all but merely suppressed it. I tossed and turned, seeing myself furnishing an apartment on Brazil Street, having tea on the balcony at the hour of twilight, when the Cairo sky and the Nile beneath it appear to momentarily hold their breath.
A week or two later, my brother called again to say that a friend of his swore she had seen me, “prowling through the shelves” of a bookshop downtown.
“And why didn’t you stop to say hello,” my brother had asked her, I imagine with the same smile in his voice.
“Because,” the woman told him, “your brother seemed . . . involved.” She paused before the last word as though to denote that she, too, wasn’t sure what exactly she meant by it. “What I mean,” she went on, “is that he didn’t look as though he was browsing as much as searching for a particular book, one upon which his life depended.”
When my brother called to tell me this, I happened to be standing in front of a bookshelf, with my head tilted to one side in order to read the spines. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had wandered into my local bookshop in the aimless hope of finding something to read. A thriller of some kind, one with blood and wonder, to keep me turning the pages, to make the world recede a little. When I told my brother where I was, hoping that the coincidence would amuse him, but also to confirm that I wasn’t lying, that I was in London, he said, “I see.” He said it languidly, as though he was doubtful.
I could no longer concentrate and walked out of the bookshop empty-handed. Does he really not believe me? Is he truly suspecting that I’m living a double life, that my trips to Cairo are divided between those when I announce my plans to my family and those when I enter the city covertly, perhaps to test what it would be like to live a life there similar to the one I have devised for myself here, a life free of associations, and to do so in tandem? After all, the flight between the two cities is about five hours long, enough time to read a short book. And, if the hesitation I detected in his voice was skepticism, it might also have been an expression of his wish to let me get on with it, in the hope that this would eventually bring me closer, convince me to move back. But, deep within this skepticism or distrust, I sensed a new sadness that had to do with the implied realization that my life abroad had made me in need of convincing, that what was keeping me away now was not only, as he had once called it, “the noble pursuit of one’s fortunes,” but that I had, over these past twelve years, become accustomed to a different life, which had caused the compass of my belonging to ever so gradually shift northward.
I sensed, in my brother’s accounts of these supposed sightings, a tone of wavering disappointment. After his initial amusement, a vague concern lodged itself in his throat, coloring his words. What is even stranger is that I, too, began to sense myself divided, half here and half there. And so, whenever he said that someone had seen me at a particular café or bookshop or walking along one of the streets he and I know so well, I began to feel that I was elsewhere, daydreaming, as though the occasion had birthed in me a violent longing for home and my family. My present self, the self that had left and was getting on with the business of daily life in London, had somehow become divorced from the former and now somewhat hypothetical version of the man I might have become had I remained on my native soil. As the days rolled on, I held on to this superstition that I was cleaving in two. I began to feel lonesome, even more so than before, which made it all the more disturbing that in those alleged accounts of me in Cairo I was either alone or embroiled in some uneasy dispute. My life in London, the life I had cobbled together with the barest of routines, grew thin and unconvincing. It now seldom felt real.
The days passed quietly, with no sense of a precise delineation, as though the division between them had revealed itself to be less definite, and time was not separated into chapters, but appeared as one continuous roll of fabric, monotonously unfolding with few markers. There was peace in this, albeit the peace of falling, together with a numbing evenness, as though I were a fogged landscape, unpunctuated by borders.
My brother, who, for as long as I can remember, was in the habit of calling every second or third day, had gone completely silent. Three whole weeks had passed without my hearing his voice or even receiving a message from him. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a sense of relief at the novelty of it. I continued to get text messages from my mother, of course, focussed on confirming that I was well, healthy, sleeping, eating properly.
Then, one afternoon, when I was sitting on the upper deck of the No. 24 bus going down Charing Cross Road, he called. His voice was off. From the first utterance I thought I detected an agitated or troubled tone. I have long feared the day when he will call with bad news, to tell me that our father or mother has died in their sleep, or slipped and fallen down the stairs, been run over by one of the many careless drivers, or rushed to hospital after a savage stroke that has left them impaired, unable to speak or move or recognize those around them. I kept asking, without giving him a chance to speak, and louder than was necessary—one of the commuters on the bus, a woman sitting three rows ahead, turned around with a disapproving face—“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Is everything all right? Are you sure? Then why do you sound like this? What are you hiding?” Even as I said these things, I was perplexed by the force of the anxious excitement that had overtaken me.
“Sound like what?” he said. “Nothing. It’s you . . .” he said and stopped. “I just got off the phone with Maged, you see. You remember Maged?”
Of course I remember him. For a time, when we were all at school together, Maged and I were very close. Now he was more my brother’s friend. So why ask such a question? But I kept silent, my eyes on the back of that woman’s head. Her soft brown hair swayed with the motion of the bus.
“He called to congratulate me on your safe return,” my brother said, “asking when he could see you, when the three of us could get together.”
He stopped, as though waiting for me to speak.
“I told him that you are in London,” he continued. “Of course I did. What else was I to say? But he wouldn’t leave it, got upset, asking why I was lying and so on. Kept saying, ‘But I saw him with my own two eyes.’ ”
Here he paused again. Was he waiting for me to confirm or deny it?
“Well,” I said, “that’s clearly nonsense.”
“You were sitting outside a café,” he said. “And he was in a taxi, stuck in traffic. Said that if only he weren’t already late for his appointment, he would have run across the road to greet you, ‘To wrap my arms around him’ was how he put it.”
The woman turned around once more. She saw me frozen, listening, and, this time with a neutral expression, she faced forward again, her hair rearranging itself.
“Maged is fond of you,” my brother said defensively.
I could hear my heart in my ears, and felt it tap on the roof of my mouth.
“There was something else,” my brother went on, “that kept Maged from approaching you.” Here my brother tried to give a little laugh. “I had to ask several times, and when he finally agreed to say it, he kept insisting that I promise not to tell you. He feared you might misunderstand, think he was prying. He’s a decent guy. Wishes you well from his heart.”
For some reason, my mind went back to Venice, where I had worked, that first summer after I left home, as a cleaner in a small three-star hotel. The place was in Giudecca, across the water from the historic center of Venice. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t speak any language except my own. During my breaks, I would find a spot in the shade and sit by the water, watching the boats go by.
“In the end,” my brother continued, “when he finally told me what he saw, what he begged me not to tell you, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Hardly extreme. You were in the middle of some argument, that’s all, with the man you were sitting with at the café, who was older, as old as our father, Maged said. He was leaning toward you and looked very angry, waving his hands about and, although Maged could not hear, he was convinced that the man was screaming. You were shouting, too, apparently. Maged said he could see the veins bulging in your neck.”
My brother pretended to yawn. I suspected what he was thinking. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Anyway, I just thought I ought to tell you.”
I held my tongue. Didn’t even give him a brief hum or grunt or any sound to affirm that I was still there.
My brother tried to laugh again. “Strange,” he said, “how the picture corresponds to those times when you were young, the year before you left home, when you and Dad were at loggerheads, arguing over the smallest things, remember?” And then, whether to be kind or else intending to provoke me, he added, “So long ago now.”
The bus was still moving slowly down Charing Cross Road. I tried to return my mind to Venice. Why Venice and why now, I thought, and why that image of the water? Every window of every building the bus crawled past opened a severe yearning in me, as though my life here had become abstract or theoretical. What salvation these rooms, many with blackened windowpanes that looked as if they had not been opened in years, seemed to offer. And yet, the more I looked, the deeper my soul sank. I had to avert my eyes. I kept them pinned to the floor, doing all I could not to remember those arguments. Or not so much the arguments themselves, for whatever they claimed to be about was soon forgotten after I left Cairo. What remained from those disputes, which, had I been allowed to stay home, might have been resolved the way, I suspect, such disagreements between father and teen-age son usually are, is the memory of the acrid vapor they cast over the atmosphere of my early days in Venice, working in silence, where homesickness mingled with bewildered regret. Twelve years later, there I was on the 24 bus detecting that same bitter taste in my mouth.
I got off at the next stop, and walked along the crowded pavement. Isn’t it curious, I suddenly thought, how nearly every piece of clothing I own I had bought in the days before one of my annual visits home, wanting to dress myself up for my family. I realized, very much for the first time, that I have always felt responsible for my absence, guilty for it, and, to console them, in good times and in bad, I brought gifts and turned up looking like a winner. Twelve visits in twelve years. Each lasting no longer than a month. We have, in other words, spent together an accumulated total of about a year since I left the country. One year in twelve. If I’m granted an average life expectancy, I’ll have a total of about four years in my country before I die.
It will now be another four months before I visit again, but I decided to take myself shopping for new shoes at one of the fancy places on Jermyn Street. I was looked after by a man in a suit and tie who, although he was around my age, seemed much younger. He had already mastered that English skill of making you feel accused, obliging you right from the outset to prove yourself worthy. For this reason alone, I decided to try on a battery of models, labelled “Chelsea Boots,” “Oxfords,” “Derbys,” “Loafers,” and so forth. The style I liked most was a lace-up in horse leather. I didn’t even know they made shoes of horse leather. It shone stiffly and was the deep and uneven color of polished antique wood. The shoes were heavy, each one seeming to weigh at least three pounds. I felt steadied by them. They reminded me of when I was twelve and it had rained till the streets of Cairo were flooded. My brother and I had no choice but to walk home from school. The farther we went, the heavier our shoes became, filling up with water. I remembered how much we laughed, how novel and strange and exciting it all was. I kept pacing back and forth across the shop, with the salesman looking bored and detained. I asked him the price.
“Eight hundred pounds,” he said. “As long as you don’t wear them, there is a fourteen-day return.”
“So, if I walk out with them on, that’s it?”
“Indeed,” he said.
I stuffed my old pair in the box and walked to Trafalgar Square. I sat outside the Admiralty pub, lifted my foot up to the sky, and took a photo with Nelson on his column in the background. I sent it to my brother, with the words “New shoes.”
I could see that he had seen it. I watched the screen, expecting him to reply. I looked down at my feet and felt shame and regret. Eight hundred pounds is fifty-six thousand Egyptian pounds, I calculated. That is equivalent to half of my father’s annual salary. All spent on a pair of shoes. And my feet hurt in them. The man in the shop had said that’s because they would need to be broken in. I put the phone in my pocket. The sun was out. It was a nice evening. I decided to walk all the way home. ♦