Free Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali Page B

nothing to do with the truth.’
    I was enjoying myself. Not particularly because of what we were talking about, but because I was there in a pub with the ‘intellectuals’ I had read about in books, and because the girls were attractive, and because John was such a likeable person. It was natural to want to fit this environment to the books I had read, and to tell myself: here you are, Ram … ‘life’.
    Barbara told John she wished he’d go back to the Party and put a stop to all this bickering between him and Brenda. But they continued talking about the coming elections and whether the communists should vote Labour. The argument grew heated and even Barbara joined in.
    I was just over seventeen when I voted for the first and only time in my life. With my thumb. What I mean is, I pressed my thumb, voluntarily, on an inky pad and then pressed it again, where I was told, on a space next to a name. A boy called Kamal had said:
‘Tu veux faire la noce ce soir?’
I had nodded. ‘Come over then; best Scotch
et puis on paye un petit poucet
,’ I didn’t know what
‘payer un petit poucet’
meant, but I pretended that I did.
    I was at the university then. At last the monotony of school life had ended. The university: strikes, fighting policemen, shouting slogans, stealing sulphur and nitrates from the lab; life at last. And besides, I was in the best of the best – the faculty of medicine. No matter, of course, that my Arabic was deplorable, and that I was, according to a certain Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board, proficient in literature and mathematics but certainly not in biology. No matter that hundreds of much better qualified people queued to be accepted by the faculty. I was one of the privileged; I had strings to pull. Not that I bothered to pull them; my mother, or one of my aunts, must have pulled one from the dangling assortment within her reach. I became:
‘Il fait la médecine, ma chère.’
    We killed a certain Zaki Bey. I don’t remember who was in power then, I think Nokrashi Pasha, but I know Zaki Bey was head of the police and he came, together with fifty half-starved policemen, to the faculty of medicine. They had a dilapidated tank with them. After a lot of mechanical repairs and consultations, the tank’s gun was pointed at us who were on the roof of the faculty’s building, and an explosion took place. Some of us extended our hands, trying to catch whatever was emitted from the tank; but it neverreached our outstretched hands. It fell, instead, with a thud, on a car belonging to my aunt which I had borrowed that day without permission. This made me very angry indeed. My aunt was bound to know I had taken the car, considering there was now a hole in its roof. I therefore helped catapult a bomb which had just been manufactured on the roof, and Zaki Bey died.
    I don’t remember which party I voted for, but we were given whisky and salted pea-nuts, after which we were taken in Cadillacs to vote with our thumbs. (Apart from Kamal, none of us was of voting age.)
    It was only when I went home that I learnt why Zaki Bey had died. He had ordered the Kasr-el-Nil bridge to be opened while a student demonstration was crossing it, causing death to six. A handsome funeral march, comprising half the police force and thousands of civilians was organized for him next day. Photographs of the procession were mournfully published in all the evening papers. Among the civilians in the photographs I noticed the presence of a few future brilliant scientists, including Kamal. They were the ones who had manufactured the bomb on the roof of the faculty of medicine the day before.
    The usual two-months’ closing of the faculty was ordered and most of us went to the beaches of Alexandria.
    The university reopened and again I had to choose a political party to belong to. Roughly, there were the following: the Wafd, the Ikhwan (Moslem Brotherhood), the Communists, and the anti-Wafd.
    The Wafd paid well provided you