by Leila Rafei
Copyright © 2020 by Leila Rafei
E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Sean M. Thomas
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982672-59-1
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982672-58-4
Fiction / General
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
For Baba Nasser
1
There was no good reason to live in Ramses. It was a bad part of town by the train tracks, where more people squatted on rooftops than lived inside its decaying buildings. Sami knew that. Rose knew that. It was the source of many arguments before signing the lease. But for Sami, the one selling point was that the apartment building—dubbed the Diesel on account of a defunct mechanic’s sign hanging over its entrance, which conveniently matched the smell in the air—lacked a doorman.
Sami was well aware that was an unpopular take on what was supposed to be an amenity. In Cairo, nearly every residential building came with its own little watchman, usually an Upper Egyptian dressed in a bell-shaped galabia, who lived in the entryway and policed comings and goings far better than any uniformed guard. But that was the thing—doormen knew too much. They knew all about each tenant including their guests and lovers, which was a problem for Sami, who lived with a girlfriend nobody was supposed to know about. That Rose was a foreigner made it even worse. In a place like Ramses, she stuck out like a fluorescent beacon of denim and bare hair. No amount of lying or window climbing would help them hide, and not even a late-night order of koshari would pass the threshold uninspected and unjudged.
Who cares, Rose would say. What’s he going to do, arrest us?
Come to think of it, Sami would rather get tossed into a police truck and hauled off to some dungeon in Tora Prison, never to be seen again, than have word get back to his mother. He could practically hear her gasp, slap her hands against her face in horror. Sami with a girlfriend, a foreigner at that. Living together just the same as they would in say, Paris. What do you think this is, Ba-rees? She always said that whenever he did anything she might call decadent or on the verge of (God forbid) gay. She was right though. This wasn’t Paris. This was Cairo. And if he wasn’t going to live accordingly, then he should at least fake it.
Tonight Sami came ready.
It was the middle of the night on a Tuesday, at the foot of the Diesel. He stood under its namesake sign with half its letters burnt out, looking for Abu Ali, who ran the 24-hour pharmacy next door. But the man wasn’t there for perhaps the first time ever. Go figure. The one time Sami needed him.
They hadn’t realized when they moved in that the lack of a doorman didn’t preclude watchful eyes—specifically those of Abu Ali, who was always there, sipping tea from a stool on the curb between customers. Watching. Like every pair of headlights on the street. Sami was certain Abu Ali knew about him and Rose and yet nevertheless, he would never fess up to being there on her behalf, searching for medicine to soothe the nausea that bent her over the toilet every hour or so. Rose? Who’s that? As if the man hadn’t seen Sami enter the building with her each night only to reappear the next morning. Instead Sami would divert the pharmacist’s attention with a curveball—he would say his mother was in town, that she’d fallen ill on account of say, the smog, and just hope that Abu Ali wouldn’t ask to meet her, perhaps to get a taste of her famous lemon-mint juice, of which Sami had regretfully spoken on many occasions, drumming up conversation in the excruciating window between payment and change. He had it all figured out until he ran smack into its shut door.
When Sami gave up knocking, he peered through the dirty window to confirm the pharmacy’s nonsensical closure. The lights remained off, no flicker of fluorescence reengaging. Abu Ali’s wooden chair sat upside down on the counter, his prayer rug folded beside it. On the latter, two indentations marked the imprint of his knees. They stared back at Sami through the window like his ghost, a taunting jinn standing between him and the medicine he needed, which was painfully plentiful on the shelves overhead. Even through the muck and darkness he could make out boxes and bottles of unpronounceable elixirs, all organized by ailment. Cold and flu. Nausea and diarrhea. Fever and parasites. Bacterial infection. Pediatrics. His eyes darted back to the counter, where at last, he found the anti-nausea tablets he was after, and stared longingly from the other side of the glass.
Abu Ali’s absence wasn’t the only oddity that night. As Sami turned to leave, he froze. He’d been in such a rush to get to the pharmacy and get it over with that he hadn’t even realized the whole boulevard was utterly empty—and that there was a police truck parked across the intersection, the latter cordoned off with a rope.
What was happening?
All he could think of was that it was National Police Day, though it was a pretty meaningless holiday that usually came and went without notice, and certainly didn’t warrant closure of a major thoroughfare like Ramses. He stepped forth slowly, as if some explanation might leap from the curb at the last moment. But nothing did. He was sure Abu Ali would have known, if only he were there tonight.
Sighing, Sami looked back at the pharmacy’s door again. It was still closed. The police truck remained parked in the street, listless, and any officers inside were surely asleep as he should be too. He yawned and made his way back to the Diesel, following that half-burnt sign like a decrepit north star home.
*****
Empty-handed, Sami returned to apartment 702 to find Rose on the couch with her legs draped over the arm, the TV blaring before her. The news was on, talking about some man who’d set himself on fire on the steps of parliament today, the latest in a string of copycat suicides. Only this one had survived. Now he lay in a full body cast in Qasr El Aini hospital, where MisrTV was broadcasting live from room 251B.
“Come watch,” said Rose from the couch, as if Sami had any choice.
He took off his shoes and set them by the door, beside Rose’s beat-up boots and the maid’s paper-thin slippers, then joined her. Up close he noticed the gray cast to her skin, her eyes glowing like venom against it. He’d say she was beautiful but it seemed callous given her state, not to mention the sad display on TV. Like kissing at a gravesite. Distasteful.
“Know why he did it?”
“Another protest?” Sami reached for a cigarette, then stopped himself as he looked back at the TV. Self-immolation had become a sort of trend nowadays, so common it was no longer shocking and in fact, seemed a more reasonable method of protest with each day, each nameless nobody that became a martyr because of it. He assumed that was the intention. “And to become a martyr.”
“Well, duh. But you’ll never guess what he was protesting.”
“Parking ticket? Electric bill? Rotten fruit? Same old?”
“Nope, nope, nope,” she said, trying to maintain her pep despite the increasing pallor of her face. “Bread. The guy couldn’t afford it. Not even fino, the cheap kind with bits of sand baked in.”
“Crunchy.”
“Anyway, the news is saying that his local bakery in Imbaba jacked up the price unfairly. But they’re skirting around the real issue, the elephant in the room.”
“There’s an elephan
t in the room?”
“I mean they’re ignoring the fact that fino is government bread. Bakers can resell it for whatever they want, but when there’s a subsidy cut like there was this year, the price inevitably goes up. That’s why the guy couldn’t afford bread.”
“So he’ll go on a diet, cut carbs.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not funny.”
Sami didn’t get it. He was just trying to make her laugh at a story that was almost comical in its absurdity. He looked at his petrochemistry textbook on the coffee table, regretting choosing a field of study that taught him nothing of how to understand Rose. It wasn’t the first time she confused him. She never had any desire to live in nicer parts of town like Zamalek, for instance, where foreigners like her were supposed to live in grand villas rented cheap with American dollars. There, buildings were named for flowers and French dignitaries rather than say, gasoline. But Rose didn’t care that Ramses was the industrial armpit of downtown. To her that’s what made it real. Just a brush of a shoulder from so-called real Egyptians, the sort who might set themselves on fire over bread.
“I’ve been researching this stuff all day,” she said, reading from her phone. “In the 1960s, self-immolation was a practice among Buddhist monks—do you know what those are?”
Yes, he nodded. Obviously.
“OK, well, Buddhist monks self-immolated to protest persecution by the Diem regime in South Vietnam. The most famous was Thich Quang Duc, who burned himself in the middle of an intersection in Saigon. A bunch of other monks followed, and then eventually the regime fell.” She set down the phone and looked back at him. A hint of amusement counteracted the nausea for a moment. “Isn’t that neat?”
Neat probably wasn’t the way he’d describe it.
“And get this. The only part of that first monk—Mr. Duck or whatever—that didn’t burn was his heart. Even after they tried to cremate him for the funeral, his heart just wouldn’t burn.”
“Yeah right.” He reached for her phone to read for himself. Indeed, the heart remained unburned, and now lived in a glass case in a shrine in Ho Chi Minh City.
Rose gave him an I-told-you-so look as she snatched her phone back. “Now the monk is what they call a bodhisattva. That’s a kind of martyr. The Buddhist Bouazizi, if you will.”
Sami sank into the couch. Its cushions swallowed him like the jaws of some brocade beast. The man in the body cast, like the other self-immolators as of late, had copied a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, who last month had instigated the fall of the Ben Ali regime with his own immolation. But today’s burning was interrupted when tanks rolled in and put out the fire with a water cannon, just in time to save the would-be martyr. Now he was about to meet the president on live TV.
In silence, they watched the president walk into room 251B in his trademark black suit. Rose turned up the volume. Sami leaned forward, mouth slack. The president was stiff and deep-voiced, solemn to match the scene. Sami couldn’t tell whether it was all an affect out of respect for the man in the body cast, perhaps a nod to the funeral that should have been. The guy might as well be dead, anyway. His only sign of life was a straw dangling from the hole for his mouth, and it was unclear whether he was even aware of the camera crew beside him, let alone the president, who proceeded to take his great, white plaster mitt in both hands and kiss it.
Cameras flashed. Sami flinched. Rose leapt from the couch and ran into the bathroom. Not again.
He got up and found her heaving into the toilet bowl, as expected. She’d been getting sick often lately, due to that—that terrible thing inside her—but he still didn’t quite know how to help. What could possibly help? When he got sick as a kid, his mother would squeeze a lemon wedge into a cup of hot water to cleanse the stomach. But their kitchen was empty—no lemons, no medicine, thanks to the closure of Abu Ali’s pharmacy as well as the whole street. All he had were dumb jokes to make her feel better, and to distract from the real reason she was sick.
“Have you been eating tirmis again?”
He always teased her for loving the salted beans, which she bought eagerly off toothless vendors in the street, despite his warnings. You’ll get sick. You don’t know where his hand’s been. The only people who eat that stuff are, you know, the poor. She never cared. Nor did she care now, as she remained face-first in porcelain, ignoring the half-assed attempt for a laugh.
“Ah. So it must be good old tap water.”
Again, no response.
“Well, you know what they say. Once you drink from the Nile, you’re destined to return.”
He thought the line—an old cliché beaten to death by every song, book, and film any lovestruck traveler ever made about Egypt—would elicit at least a half smile, a wink between heaves. But her face was buried so deep inside the toilet bowl that it was impossible to tell.
Finally Rose lifted her head and asked for water. Sami twisted off the cap of a fresh bottle and handed it to her, watching her down the entire contents in a single gulp. She looked terrible, skin a slick gray like the belly of a fish, hair stuck to her face, making involuntary sounds so guttural it was hard to believe they’d come from a human.
“Don’t make me take you to Qasr El Aini. You’re in no shape to meet the president.”
At this she rolled her eyes. There was life. Feeling somehow satisfied, he helped her up and walked her to the bedroom, where he lay her down to sleep.
*****
Before bed Sami checked his phone to see a flurry of missed calls from his mother, even though they’d already talked earlier in the day. Shit. Tomorrow was the anniversary of his grandfather’s death, which meant she would be calling at five a.m. sharp to wake him for prayer.
He tried in vain to scrounge a few hours of sleep before that call, but in the dark, he couldn’t get burning men out of his head. The monks in Asia. The fruit-vendor of Sidi Bouzid. All the flames and flesh that had brought about revolution. And today’s self-immolator, the would-be martyr, who had fallen short.
Apparently he was only a few years older than Sami, also an only son, who supported his family on wages cobbled together from odd jobs laying bricks and washing cars. Sami felt he understood him. As an only son he, too, was his mother’s pride. The honey to her phyllo. The cream skimming the surface of a glass of milk. He, too, had to care for his family. Sami was sure that was why the man had failed to properly off himself. Only sons weren’t allowed to die.
He googled the other self-immolators, those who’d succeeded in becoming martyrs rather than half-dead potatoes encased in plaster. But he didn’t need to do that to know that each one of them had a brother, perhaps several. He shut off his phone and turned to face the wall.
Coincidentally it was when Giddo died, two years ago tomorrow, that Sami learned what a burden he bore. As the only boy in the family, it was his duty to wash the corpse before burial. He remembered it clearly, despite all his efforts to forget, and despite his will to fall asleep tonight instead of watching it play out on the ceiling above him. The shape of Giddo’s bones. The look of his dead body, gray and shriveled. The black bile that spilled out of his mouth when he pressed on his bloated stomach. It was something out of a horror movie, the sick moment before changing channels. He felt guilty for his disgust just as he felt guilty for well, everything else. Smoking hash. Sneaking beer into the dorms. Talking to girls. Her.
He turned to face Rose.
Now her breaths were on the verge of snoring. She never looked so alive, doing nothing at all but breathing, and so dead at the same time, lying beneath a white sheet like Giddo’s funeral shroud. It was fitting, he guessed. There was both life and death inside her. He peeled back the sheet to see her clutching a pillow tightly to her chest. He imagined her womb swelling slowly, growing bigger until it ripped through her shirt, and the pillow turning into a nuzzled child. Stop!
At first he thought she was joking about bei
ng pregnant. A sick prank. But as time set in, and Rose’s body started proving it with these nightly toilet bowl episodes, he realized it was true and even worse, there was no escaping it. He would have preferred dying, perhaps even setting himself on fire, but he couldn’t. He was stuck there. Living with it. An only son, fated for this since the day he was born.
Ironically, his mother would agree with that part. Suad spoke often of his birth – much to his sister Ayah’s annoyance—with a wistful joy in her tired eyes and not a speck of shame for blatantly mythologizing the event. She said the Nile reached the tops of cattails on the day he was born—ignoring the fact that, by all scientific accounts, that stretch of the river hadn’t flooded in five decades. Never mind that. As the story went, it was an uncharacteristically cold day in Mahalla, the ground soaked with a winter’s worth of rain, and she knew, from the moment Hagga Warda pulled him out of her unmentionables, that he’d be her only son.
There was no escape.
2
Each year, Suad made lentil stew on the anniversary of Giddo’s death, in remembrance of his dying meal. Her husband always found it morbid but he just didn’t get it. Typical of Mahmoud to go on with life blithely. Of course it stung to revisit old memories, but that was the point. Tragedies should be remembered, no matter how painful. It was what she’d want of her children too, when she one day passed.
This year was no different, spent cooking and thinking of the day she and her sisters spoon-fed Giddo his last batch. Men of weaker moral fiber might want something decadent for their final meal, like pigeon or lamb, but Giddo had asked simply for lentil stew, the same dish he grew up on in the village that became Abu Radhi. Some thought it was because of his lack of teeth, but Suad knew better. He wanted to relive the past, to go home and be the boy he once was and eat the same stew his mother made in great vats that lasted through the week, every week, the mainstay of their house of sugar farmers. But in the end it made no difference. Giddo died with a barely touched bowl of lentils beside his bed.