You stand on the Sixth of October bridge; both of you are facing the river. You open her blouse and put your hand inside it. When you try to pull your hand out, she presses to keep it in. You get off the bridge and stop a taxi, shout ‘Ahmed Badawi.’ She disagrees for a moment then gets in, takes off her wedding ring and puts it in her bag. She lets her head rest on your shoulder and remains silent until you reach the apartment.
This is how sex-starved Mohamed Ibrahim describes one of his numerous amorous exploits in Mohamed Al-Azab’s new fiction “Woqouf Motakerer (Recurrent Stops). These purely sexual exploits, which are far from naive affaires de coeur or romances, are his sole drive in life and are what the readers repeatedly encounter in the writer’s short third novel.
Al-Azab tells a story of an all too familiar Egyptian character using colloquial, street language that functions solely as a communication tool. The protagonist lives on the margins of society; a place he comfortably occupies.
Al-Azab’s style is idiosyncratic. He writes in the second person, a rarely used narrative style, referring to the main character as “you and thus, throws readers right into the heart of the story, propelling them to assume the role of this central character.
Al-Azab’s lead character, Mohamed Ibrahim, is an unremarkable, lifeless man. The one thing he does efficiently is manage to survive. There are millions of men like him, populating coffee shops, loitering idly in the streets and endlessly, persistently, looking for sex. For them, sex is no mere diversion; it’s what shapes and controls their lives.
Mohamed is neither employed nor is he looking for work. He used to live in Al-Salam City, but got tired of the long daily microbus commute between Al-Salam, a neighborhood situated on the fringes of the capital, and Ramsis Square in the heart of Cairo.
To the mild resentment of his family, he decides to move to an apartment in Ahmed Badawi near Downtown. Mohamed and his friend Men’em have long been planning to rent a place like that where they can entertain their lady friends without much suspicion or fuss.
The 1969 Fiat 128 car he rides comes in handy during “chicks hunting. When the regular spots – Al-Nozha Street, the Autostrad Road, Abbas Al-Akkad, Makram Ebeid – fail to deliver, the two lads resort to internet rendezvous.
Mohamed and Men’em eventually land the job of marketing executives at a pharmaceutical company. Turns out that the company is a front for selling illegal drugs; a scam soon discovered, putting its owner in jail.
Being in possession of a stash worth LE 16,000, the boys suddenly find themselves rich.
They open a small video games lounge and call it “Friends Games. Despite, their decision to have their business right across the street from a girls’ secondary school, their customer base is boys skipping school, who wait at the lounge for their girlfriends to come out at the end of the day. To their surprise, their place becomes a popular spot. But their success turns out to be short-lived, and soon, neighbors start to complain to the police.
Al-Azab continuously switches between the main plot and the numerous sexual exploits, without giving the reader the space to stop and reflect about what has just happened. In a way, this keeps the action going; it also mirrors Mohamed’s own stream of thinking that doesn’t stop to ponder upon the significance or possible repercussions of these events.
At the same time this approach can render the novel as a collection of fragmented stories poorly stitched together, deeming it easily forgettable. Yet while the details might not be quite memorable, the ultra realistic portrait it paints will remain in the reader’s mind long after the novel is put aside.
If the novel’s goal is to probe the psyche of its characters, then by choosing superficial characters and portraying them as they view themselves, that is, superficially, it clearly spells out its own failure. But a deep analysis isn’t Al-Azab’s primary objective. “Recurrent Stops is a fleeting glance of a wasted life and in capturing the essence of this futility, the novel does work. And it does so in an outstandingly audacious way.
“Recurrent Stops is published by Dar Al-Shorouk and is currently available at local bookstores.
