by Leila Rafei
“Please, make yourself comfortable,” said the boy, wiping sweat off his brow. He introduced her to the interpreter, an older Sudanese woman from Khartoum, and the two women nodded across the table as he turned on his laptop. “This piece of junk can take a while to start up.”
Jamila braced herself for the questions that would inevitably follow, ranging from horrific to mundane. At her first appointment at St. Fatima’s, just weeks after she arrived in Cairo, she somehow had to recall the most minute details of her life—the orientation of streets Omdurman, the way to the tomb of the Mahdi, the shape of the river where it parted in two to form an island named Tuti. That was the easy part. Then she had to describe the precise time and date of everything that ever happened, from each of her siblings’ births to the hour of day when she last saw her mother. At the end of the session the case worker had told her to call back in two months’ time. So for two months she waited until finally, she was granted asylum. She went again to the little office off Talaat Harb to pick up her identification card and an envelope of one hundred dollars cash—quite a thick stack in Egyptian bills—which she’d carried back to her apartment with downcast eyes, hands gripping her purse straps.
This appointment, which would determine her eligibility for resettlement, would be more challenging. She couldn’t believe it when she first learned that St. Fatima’s would help a select few refugees—a very select few—to settle permanently in a third country. Most went to places like Canada, Australia, the USA—places that filled her head with daydreams of dancing under falling snow, dressing in denim and maybe even high heels like Fifi Shafik, strolling with her baby-to-be through tree-lined streets.
But on that Thursday afternoon, it was anything but high heels and snowflakes. She should have known better. All around her, she heard stories that couldn’t be obscured by the flimsy cardboard dividers between each intake desk in that narrow room, nor by the buzz of mismatched fans and the hard slap of hands on rustling paperwork, like flies. She heard it all. They came from Juba, they came from the Nuba mountains, they came from Darfur. Some came from Eritrea and wore crosses around their necks. It was the dead of winter, but they swatted flies from their arms and lips as they recounted the various atrocities that had landed them in that office. Jamila’s heart was racing and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. She knew the American boy wouldn’t be asking about her dreams and wishes, what kind of neighborhood she would like to live in and what kind of work she would do. He would be asking about the worst.
“Alright, this is the hard part.”
The boy picked at a red cyst on his forehead as he scanned her paperwork. Did he even realize he was doing that? She grew angry at his lack of manners, or at the very least his lack of basic awareness. This was the moment she’d been awaiting for months, the moment that could change the whole course of her life, and here was this boy popping a pimple in her face.
“Would you like something to drink?” He asked, as if to atone for his rudeness.
She looked at the interpreter, who sat with only her hands folded before her, no drink. Jamila shouldn’t drink either. She feared it would somehow reflect poorly upon her and God forbid, thwart her case. After all, if she succeeded in this resettlement business, then she would be in eternal debt to St. Fatima’s—and this zit-faced boy. She shouldn’t ask for too much. As she shook her head, her foot tapped against the floor like a clock ticking, screaming to get it all over with, until finally, they began.
“Now, I know you’ve already gone over some of this stuff in your last intake. But we’ll need to revisit a few questions to set a clear, you know, backdrop to your present situation.”
She nodded.
“Can you describe what exactly the rebels did when they came to Omdurman?”
She knew very well what the rebels did. In fact, she was trying to forget it. The interpreter shot her a look, as if daring her to tell the truth, but she couldn’t.
“I don’t remember.”
The boy stopped typing and looked her in the eyes. “You don’t remember what they did to you?”
“It’s right there,” she said, pointing to her file on the table. She sensed he wanted more—specifically about the things she didn’t want to talk about. It hadn’t occurred to her until right then, as she sat before the boy with the oily face, that there was no way she could tell him the whole story, no matter how badly she wanted this. There were simply some things a woman had to keep to herself. Especially when there were men around.
“What about your parents, your brothers and sisters?
“No.”
“What about the sheep and the cattle?”
Not even that.
Even though he could barely understand her, the boy paid close attention to each word and gap of silence, frequently looking back at the interpreter to make sure she hadn’t left something out. When he confirmed that she hadn’t, and that Jamila just had nothing to say, he ran a hand through his lank orange hair and continued.
“Look, I want you to think about your old home in Sudan—the mountains, the river. It was a long time ago, but I need you to tell me exactly what happened. Did the rebels hurt you?”
Her gaze fell to the desk, nodding, but she wouldn’t say more. Telling him what happened would leave her feeling as violated as that day the rebels came. She wouldn’t even tell her father what happened if she had the chance. How could she tell this stranger, this boy popping pimples right in front of her face? Somehow it was even worse that the interpreter was there and that she was Sudanese too, which made Jamila even more ashamed to tell the truth. What would she think? Who would she tell?
It didn’t take long for the boy to give up. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, shutting his laptop with a thud. There were a dozen others in line behind her that day, hundreds more this week. Jamila was wasting her time just as much as his. She was relieved to be done with it, but that relief faded to worry as she watched him carry her files away and close the door. Was that really it? She stood and put on her veil slowly, as if waiting for the boy to return with something, anything, to assure her that this uncomfortable experience wasn’t for nothing. But he didn’t come back. On her way out, the interpreter stopped her.
“You’re not helping your case by not talking.”
The interpreter’s look was stern, verging on angry, but she held Jamila’s arm softly.
“But I don’t remember.”
“Of course you do.”
Jamila couldn’t help but notice the pale blue of her hijab—the same color her mother wore, the color of the metal latticework on the windows of her long-gone home. That closeness that had terrified her just moments before now put her at ease, and she felt her arm cave into the interpreter’s grip, her resistance melting away. Perhaps because she was all out of options.
“If you stay tonight, we can redo your intake with someone else. A woman, if you prefer.”
And before Jamila had the chance to answer, the interpreter took her by the arm to the office, where they cut a serpentine line to make another appointment at the front desk. This time with another American, a woman named Dolores.
Jamila could never remember anybody’s name from St. Fatima’s. They were all simply caseworker number 1, caseworker number 2. The American, the German, the one of indeterminate origin like the soap opera stars on TV. Even the interpreter with her sky-blue hijab melded into the mass of sweat and stress and red eyes that overcame her whenever she stepped into that narrow intake room. But she would remember the name of Dolores—the unfamiliar, languid loll of its sound, how it matched the lazy rasp of her voice and the way she blew cigarette smoke slowly into the whirring fan.
Dolores was even older than the interpreter, tiny and shriveled, with wrinkled skin and spindly limbs. The smell of cigarette smoke clung to every pilling on her clothes, to each gray hair on her head. Her kindness was shown not by laying a hand on Jamil
a’s shoulder and telling her it was all going to be alright—such warmth wouldn’t befit her—but by staying late to give her all the time she needed. And about an hour after evening prayer, well after the room had emptied, Jamila’s memory came back like pinpricks, piece by piece.
She started by recounting her basic information. Name. Date of birth. Place of birth. Phone number—scratch that, new phone number. The questions were so routine that Jamila could recite all the answers in her sleep. Until one.
“Marital status,” said Dolores, waving away a cloud of smoke. “Married.”
Jamila fixed her eyes on the tangle of veins covering the woman’s hand. Yes, she was married, but her husband had disappeared was now reported to be dead. Was she still married, then? Was he even really dead if there was no proof? She supposed she could begin with what she knew. She knew it was months ago when the police came around looking for men of a certain description. Poor, black, Sudanese. Between the ages of fifteen and fifty. She knew Yusuf had done nothing wrong and yet they hauled him off as she cried, bare-headed and alone in their cinderblock room. She received a call shortly after. They said Yusuf had died in custody. Died? How could one just . . . die in a prison cell? Lots of ways, they assured her. But when she went to Tora prison to retrieve the body, she knew it wasn’t his. The skin was gray and mottled, the eyes stuck open in the black, vacant manner of a dead fish. Dead, it was. But it wasn’t him. She knew it.
“Dead bodies can look very different from the living.” Dolores looked straight into her eyes with a strange intensity, as if speaking from experience.
“I know it wasn’t him,” she repeated. The nose was all wrong, straight while Yusuf’s was curved, and there was no crooked front tooth like his, though much of the latter here had been knocked out.
“That could all be an effect of, you know, what happened to him.”
Jamila returned her gaze to the veins on Dolores’ hands, fanning out from her wisp of a wrist to each knobby finger tipped with a gray nail. She was sure they themselves reeked of cigarette smoke. The things she thought about at a moment like this. She looked at the interpreter, who again scolded her with her glare. What did they want her to say? Yes, the body was his? Would that make it better?
As a matter of fact, it did.
“We’ll just say he’s dead for now,” said Dolores. “It’ll help your case as a woman at risk—the UN’s words, not mine. It’s a category for women who are particularly susceptible to sexual violence. And you, my dear—a pretty girl all alone—certainly fit the description. Nobody’s told you a thing about how this goes, have they? The worse shit you tell me, the better your case. I’m tempted to say it shouldn’t be that way but really, it’s only fair. You should be rewarded for all the shit you’ve been through. So please, go ahead and tell me about any harassment or assault you’ve experienced. With details, please.”
Jamila took her time, counting the rings on the table left by a thousand cups prior. One, two, three. Big mug, small glass. One from last year, one from this morning. All that was left of terrible moments like this.
“Look, we’ve all been harassed—even me, believe it or not.” Dolores let out a hoarse laugh, unleashing a brief coughing fit, then took another drag to clear her throat. The stench of nicotine wafted forth as she leaned close. “It’s those piece-of-shit harassers who should be ashamed. Not you.”
Jamila looked at the door to make sure it was still shut. It was. She breathed in the smoke, as if taking a puff herself, and began. Each memory unfurled from her tongue in a chain reaction. If she said this, then she might as well say that, and if she said that, then why not spill every ugly detail from the recesses of her mind, where she’d shoved them all this time, onto the sticky table to join the residue of tea and tears and dead flies. Yes, she had been harassed by employers and neighbors and strangers on the street, and it was why she veiled her face in public—not out of piety but of a will for anonymity. It was the harassment that caused her to change phone numbers, too, thanks to man who stalked her in her neighborhood, Kilo 4.5, a slum named for its position on the highway to Suez. And then, the hardest part—she told her everything that had happened in Omdurman, all the events that led her to flee in the back of a pickup truck heading north to Khartoum and then across the border. She remembered it was a Friday afternoon, and that her family was drinking coffee with ginger and cinnamon when the rebels came. She remembered how their approach was announced by the galloping hooves of their horses. She remembered the journey to Cairo and the way the smuggler extracted his payment, and everything that had happened since. With time she spoke louder, her fear dripping away with each memory finally acknowledged out loud.
Dolores ended the interview by stubbing out her cigarette and shaking her hand. It was tiny and frail, but warm against Jamila’s bloodless fingers. She led her back to the office, where she printed a stack of papers too thick to staple. “This is your testimony. It’s a record of everything you told me, everything that we’ll submit in your case to the UN. Oh and Jamila.” She stopped her with one foot out the door. “Any little bit helps. If you could get your hands on even a phone record—just a statement showing you changed numbers because of the harassment—that would support your case too.”
On the bus ride home, Jamila clutched her testimony like a newborn child. Amazing how everything could be condensed into this one stack, and that it didn’t offend her but rather felt like relief. She leaned her head against the window and sighed, making the exasperated sound of someone with the world to tell, for once, and nobody to tell it to. If only she could call Yusuf right then and share everything that had happened—the first meeting that went nowhere, the interpreter who stopped her at the gate, the woman named Dolores who smelled of cigarettes. She dialed his number just to hear the Nilofone recording that had replaced his voice on the other line. It was a sort of nervous tick she’d developed ever since he disappeared, as if to pretend his phone was only out of battery. A way to ease the pain of not being able to tell him all that had happened.
Before Yusuf disappeared, he’d known the resettlement appointment was approaching. He could see it in the jittering edge to her movements, the way her eyes darted across their little cinderblock room as if she was checking off every last detail. He said she was getting her hopes up for nothing, and perhaps owing to his cautious nature, he warned her not to bother. You’re wasting your time. Getting resettled was about as likely as finding a diamond in the sea. He reminded her of Mustafa Mahmoud Square, where five years ago two thousand Sudanese had protested the eternal limbo of their resettlement cases. Two thousand open cases. The police started shooting. And then what happened? They died. They went to jail. They died and went to jail and not one of them got resettled.
But nothing could stop Jamila. What was the point, after all she’d been through, after coming all this way? As long as there was the tiniest fraction of a chance, she would keep searching for her diamond in the sea.
You are the diamond and this, said Yusuf, pointing to Cairo all around them, is the sea.
*****
Upon receiving her asylum status, St. Fatima’s had set Jamila up with jobs cleaning houses in three very different corners of the city. Zamalek, Dokki, and Ramses. A dancer, a dissident, and a foreigner for bosses. Tonight she was at the home of the latter, Rose, a young teacher living with her Egyptian boyfriend. Jamila wasn’t comfortable with the situation but she couldn’t complain. Both Rose and Sami treated her kindly, and at least tried to maintain a facade of decency—pretending, for example, that he was only a friend. A friend who was always there. A friend who spent the night in a place with only one bed.
She was winded by the time she reached apartment 702. As she caught her breath, she noticed that a trash bag by the door had been torn open by stray cats, who’d found the contents unsatisfactory and left them strewn across the hall. The trash collectors must not have come by today, she thought, invoking God’
s name under her breath. It seemed she was the only one still working in this city. She bent to the floor to clean up all the usual water bottles and cigarette cartons that made up the bulk of the garbage. But one item stood out from the rest. It was some kind of tool, white and plastic, like a thermometer or even—could it be? With her shoe she jostled the bag to see more of it. Yes, it was a pregnancy test. She recognized the shape from the one St. Fatima’s had given her weeks ago, yet another bit of proof to build her case as a woman at risk. But this one—did it belong to Rose? She looked at the light beaming out from under the door, the soft sound of chatter behind it. It had to be hers. Nobody else lived there.
At that moment Jamila would have rather run away than face Rose and pretend she had seen no such thing. But of course she couldn’t do that. Not to Rose. For all her faults, this unmarried woman with a pregnancy test had always been good to her and in fact, held a little piece of her fate in her hands. Jamila had told Rose about Yusuf even before St. Fatima’s, and Rose had promised to help find him—or at least, his body—using every ounce of her white, American power to do so. It was help more valuable than guineas, than any discomfort she’d feel tonight. And so with a sigh Jamila tied the garbage bag closed and disposed of it before knocking. She pushed open the door with her hip, too distracted to wait for an answer.
Tonight the couple sat on the couch—Rose with a pile of papers, Sami with his carton of cigarettes, which he drummed against the table. Just the two of them. Owners of that haram thing in the trash. Without a word, Jamila lifted the veil over her head and felt the cool air on her cheeks, unzipped her abaya down to the ground, and stepped out of the swathes belly-first. She gathered her garments in a neat bundle and hung them on the hook by the door, which was always empty and awaiting her many layers, like an obliging hand extended from the wall. The lady of the house wore no scarves or jackets—she was always warm, always at home.