by Leila Rafei
He sat on the steps of the Banque Misr, where he watched stragglers rush to wash their hands and feet. It didn’t take long to realize this was no normal Friday prayer. The first sign was the sheikh himself, who delivered his sermon outside rather than remaining at the minbar. In his hand was a bullhorn instead of a modest microphone. Prayer rugs spilled out onto the street, no room for them all inside. And the police had now assembled across the intersection of Ramses and El Taawon, their shields raised.
“God is great,” said the sheikh.
In response, there was nothing but the sound of foreheads touching mats.
Sami never felt comfortable watching prayer and not taking part, but this time he had company—up above, neighbors gathered on rooftops to do the same, hands on their hips instead of kneeling. He thought of his family back in Mahalla and how they must be praying at that same moment, Ayah in her jeans and Minnie Mouse socks, Suad draped in the floral sheath she used at home. If he were there, he’d be praying too, nudged gently by Suad, perhaps more so today for forgetting the anniversary of Giddo’s death. But this was one day he wouldn’t complain. There was something hypnotic about the way the men bent in unison across Ramses Street, not a cough or sneeze or twitch among them, their backs forming a blanket of rainbow patchwork. It was beautiful in the literal sense and none of that spiritual gibberish. But if he closed his eyes and listened to each rhythmic thump and whoosh, he was sure he’d eventually feel that too.
When at last it was time for the final prostration, he picked up his bags, preparing to beat the crowd to the Diesel’s door. But something knocked him down. He heard it first—like a wave rising to a crest before breaking—then saw it.
At once, the men sprang up from their mats and turned away from the mosque to storm the police. There seemed to be thousands of them, thousands more than before. They poured out of the mosque and from the alleys as smoke filled the air. They were chanting, but Sami couldn’t make out the words. Their voices battled one another for predominance until they found a rhythm, and then the words came out like bullets in the breeze:
“The people!”
“Demand!”
“The fall of the regime!”
It sounded melodic. Musical, even. Like the hook of an Umm Kalthoum song. Sami caught himself mouthing the words, then promptly stopped. The police were right there, and he was sure at least one of them was from Mahalla, too, and would recognize that unmistakable Sukkary gleam that said he was supposed to be shoulder deep in a field of sugarcane and not there, fighting them in the street. They would haul him off to Tora prison in the back of a truck, like an Eid sheep, and then deliver some nameless corpse to his mother like they did with Jamila’s husband. Only Suad, unlike Jamila, would hear only one thing – that Sami broke the law. That’s what they were doing, wasn’t it? The people weren’t allowed to say things like the people demand the fall of the regime. The people weren’t allowed to flood the streets like this, let alone raise their fists to the police. To Sami, the thought of getting arrested—and worse yet, Suad finding out—was enough to plant him in place for the entire week, if need be. But the people on the street didn’t seem to be afraid. The chant rang out again and again.
The people demand the fall of the regime.
Sami gripped the railing of the staircase, as if he might blow away. He fixed his eyes on the Diesel’s front door. It wasn’t so far. It would take only a few minutes to reach it if he could somehow forge a path through the crowd. As the masses swirled around him, threatening to suck him in like the tide, he decided he had no choice but to try. He looped the bags around each wrist, took a deep breath as if about to dive underwater, and stepped down into the throngs. It felt like the sea.
The people demand the fall of the regime.
He didn’t realize he was moving against the flow of the crowd until he was in the thick of it, bumping into shoulders, running into fists. By then it was too late to turn back. He was in it. And when the police fired back at the protesters, they were aiming for him too. And they got him.
At first he didn’t know what was happening. His eyes began to water, and then his nostrils tingled, and then his whole face burned. If it wasn’t for the crowd shouting tear gas, tear gas, he would have thought his skin was peeling itself off. He scratched at his face but it only worsened the sting. He coughed, but the poisoned air blazed down his throat with each desperate gasp that followed.
Then there was a bang.
It came again, bang bang, like the blunt hit of a baton.
He cracked his eyes open a sliver and saw the silhouettes of kitchen tools punching through the smoke. Had the smoke gotten to him? Had the gas seeped up his nose and into his brain? It seemed absurd and yet, the longer he strained to keep his eyes open, the more apparent it became that it was true—that the protesters had armed themselves with saucepans and spatulas and whatever they could find, and were hitting the iron railings of the street as they came at the police.
The people demand the fall of the regime.
A crowbar flew out of the smoke toward Sami, and to his shock, he caught it. He was tempted to say something came over him, but nothing did. It was just that—nothing, an involuntary movement occurring in the absence of any forethought. He took the crowbar and hit the railings too, and before he knew it, he was walking with the crowd and not against it, and when they reached that intersection where just moments before, a boy soldier had told him not even the president could pass, he saw that the barricade had fallen and the police were gone, and people were indeed passing, jumping over discarded shields as they ran southward to Tahrir Square.
This time, Sami stayed back.
When he turned around the street was empty, left ravaged from curb to curb. Storefronts bashed. Cars overturned. Asphalt littered with broken glass and pots and pans. In the distance, burning cars turned the sky a deep purple. The tear gas had dissipated, leaving just a faint hint in the air that gave him a tolerable tingle. He hadn’t realized he’d lost his grocery bags until he saw their contents splattered on the sidewalk. The carton of breadcrumbs had burst open, its insides scattered like ash on the ground. The catfish lay at his feet, unwrapped, staring at him with its vacant, unblinking eyes. With a jolt he grabbed at his backpack behind him. It was still there, the journal and the Meikorlens tucked safely inside.
He dropped the crowbar, letting it make one final clink. For some reason he took out the camera and proceeded to aim and click. It was an odd first picture but he felt like it was a moment to keep—all of it—the fish and the breadcrumbs and the charcoal sky. Who would believe him when he explained what happened? Not even Rose would believe that he’d brought groceries to her doorstep only to have them ripped apart by sudden, spontaneous war. Now he’d have a picture to prove it, and at the very least, she’d know he tried.
And Sami realized, just then, that he he’d forgotten all about her in the middle of the march. There was no Rose and certainly no baby inside her. There was no Giddo and no death to relive. There were no bills, no schoolwork, no phone calls to return. He felt something like joy but deeper, seeping down into the marrow of his bones. And for the first time in his twenty-three years, Sami thanked God and meant it.
5
Jamila hadn’t always covered her face in the street. It was only months ago that she got the idea to tear panels of fabric from an old dress, rip out the threads, and reuse them to sew the folds into an envelope for her eyes. When she first saw her reflection, reduced to a sliver of eyelid and brow, she felt powerful in her anonymity—like she could shove people out of her way without recourse, like she could wear one of Fifi Shafik’s glittering negligees underneath, feel sequins dig into her overflowing breasts, and all the while look publicly like a wife of the Prophet, too holy to touch.
The decision to veil was not one of piety or even modesty. It was a decision borne of fear—and not any kind of fear she had experienced before. It was
n’t like the fear of thunder, nor wild dogs. It wasn’t the fear that came with the rebels, that of crunching gravel and swinging machetes. Those fears were loud and common. Those fears had company. This fear was silent and unseen, yet it was always there. It clung to the air. It followed her into bathrooms where she bathed with a bucket as fast as she could, just to go back to watching the lock on the door. It followed her to bus stops and into the backseats of microbuses, rearing its head each time a stranger’s thigh brushed against her own. It hung from clotheslines crisscrossing through alleyways, casting shadows to conjure up flashes of grabbing hands, fingers curled like claws.
This was a fear unlike any other—it was the fear of a particular man. She didn’t even know his name. She knew only that he was a neighbor in her nameless slum, and that he spent his days eating sunflower seeds on the street, pestering passersby with his hyena-like smile, his missing front tooth. He quickly took a liking to Jamila, and naturally, started making her life a living hell. Especially after Yusuf disappeared.
At first it was only the sunflower seeds. She could have sworn there were none anywhere when she first moved into that windowless apartment, which was nothing more than a black hole as gaping as the space in between his teeth. Then the first seeds appeared at her doorstep. With each day there were more and more, lying in the corridor and in the stairwell, from the ground floor and up to the top of the roof. Soon they were everywhere, in the dark corners and under the bright light, in the trash heaps and strewn across the tiles, some blackened and some an underripe white, some with naked kernels and some with hulls intact, having missed the jagged edges of the sunflower man’s remaining teeth.
Jamila reminded herself that they were only seeds. So tiny she could crack them under her bare heels. They grew on cheerful flowers stuffed into decorative vases. They were gobbled up by little birds and by millions of normal people who had nothing to do with her stalker.
They were seeds, just seeds, and yet she was terrified.
She tried convincing herself that she was exaggerating, that it was nothing but litter. Could she be imagining this all, seeing double and triple? But when she blinked her eyes to correct her vision, the sunflower seeds remained. They were real and they were insane, more frightening than even the touch of his grubby hand.
In the beginning, she did what anybody else would do and simply discarded any seeds that fell close to her door. But they kept coming back, multiplied, and the more they grew in number, the more afraid she became to even touch them. And so she let them pile up outside the door until the cats got to them. They pawed and nibbled and fought over the remaining seeds until finally they started to dwindle. Now that she ignored them, the sunflower man had gotten bored—either that or it just wasn’t the season. Eventually there was only one seed in the hall, a lone reminder that he hadn’t gone anywhere.
Then came the knocking. The man would call for her at all hours of the night, Jamila, Jamila, through the crack in the door. Somehow he’d found out her name, which had likely been passed around on the smoky breath of all the idle men in the street. She became such a fixation that she couldn’t imagine what on earth they talked about before she moved in. But none were as keen as the sunflower man. He waited for her in the stairwell each morning, and when she passed he would lunge toward her, tug at her headscarf and shout sweet nothings, tossing in a few obscenities for good measure. Hey honey, my darling, give me a kiss. Come here you bitch! Hey slave. You’re black! One day he came for her on the back of a motorcycle, black seed stuck in the gap of his teeth, laughing and blowing kisses. Habibti!
But for all the knocking, the taunting, the hallway-stalking, she thought she was safe as long as she was inside the apartment with the door bolted shut. Her flatmates knew not to answer when the sunflower man came calling, and one, Sayyid Hassan from Sennar, threatened to beat him up if he saw him. Of course, that didn’t work, because the sunflower man was no refugee, but a native. He belonged there and they did not. It was an unwritten law that everybody understood—cross the line as a Sudani and get tossed out like yesterday’s trash. Or worse.
It all ended one day when Jamila answered her phone to hear his voice. Enough was enough. Within a matter of hours, she changed her number, covered her face with a veil, and moved into another apartment on the far side of the Ring Road—all so he wouldn’t find her.
*****
Jamila awoke Saturday morning to the sound of pellets hitting the ground, like rain, like sunflower seeds. She leapt out from under her blanket, hitting her head on the low ceiling above her. But as she rubbed her eyes open, there were no shells on the floor, and when she opened the door a crack, there were none in the halls, nor in the alleys of that sandy shantytown. It was only a dream. Sleep was the only place the sunflower man still stalked her.
She never expected those seeds to end up helping her in any way, but they turned out to be key to her resettlement case. She wouldn’t have brought up the story at all—thinking it seemed silly—if it weren’t for Dolores pressing her. It’s those piece-of-shit harassers who should be ashamed. She said the sunflower seeds built Jamila’s case as a woman at risk, and that there was no real asylum in Egypt, where her situation was untenable. All Jamila needed to do was track down some proof. It never occurred to her that the proof could be something as mundane as a telephone record.
That’s why Jamila was on a mission to track down those records today. It had only been hours since yesterday’s street battles, and now she was out on those same streets, tripping over the remains of Molotov cocktails, burnt-out cars, tin tear gas cannisters, bullet casings that rolled like marbles under her feet. Not even the citywide service blackout could stop her. She imagined a line of twenty million people stretching out the telephone company’s door. She would try anyway.
The neighbors had warned Jamila to avoid Tahrir and take a detour through Boulaq, and she did as they said, veering off the main avenue and into the sleepy side-streets that would take her to the corniche with less chance of catching a bullet. She probably should have been afraid, but for some reason she wasn’t. Why would a veiled woman like her draw any attention, anyway? She wasn’t the army. She wasn’t the police. She wasn’t one of the iron-fisted youth screaming for the downfall of the regime. She wasn’t anyone of consequence in this city—she was just a woman with a belly swelling through swathes of abaya, all alone.
When Jamila reached Boulaq, she found that the neighbors were right. It was free of demonstrators, so ghostly it caught her off guard. Walking its streets felt like trespassing, like she should tiptoe to prevent being caught. The only sign of life was in overhead windows, where she caught the round little faces of children locked up by their mothers, dying to get outside. It filled Jamila with sadness. She thought of the kids she and Yusuf could have if he was only there—and the one that existed, no doubt unwanted, in Rose’s still-flat belly.
An odd sound tore through the breeze, guttural, like the call of an ibis.
“J-junk, junk, junk. Old junk, new junk, rich junk, poor junk, my junk, your junk. J-junk, junk, junk.”
Jamila turned to see not a bird, but a junk collector, at work with his donkey cart as if it was a regular day and not one of revolt and barren streets. It gave her hope that at Nilofone, somebody else might be working too.
The man must have sensed the change in her mood. He nodded in her direction and said salam as he passed.
“Need a ride, sister?”
Jamila looked at the junk collector. He was old, harmless with his frail hands. The bed of his cart was empty but for a tire and a pair of mismatched shoes. She thought of the long way to Nilofone and the unlikelihood of finding a microbus when all of the city seemed to be in Tahrir. Hesitantly, she asked how much a ride would cost.
“For you, madam—nothing.”
He couldn’t see it, but she was smiling under her veil as she gathered her skirt and stepped onto the cart. He pulled a peele
d guava out of his pocket and offered it to her before they set off.
“Please,” he said.
She shook her head. “Take me to the Nilofone shop in Munira.”
His eyes widened into caves under his eyebrows, overgrown like gray hoods. “Nilofone? Why would you go to a place like that? A phone is about as useful as a three-legged donkey nowadays—or rather, a car with no gas. No service, no phone. I wouldn’t even take one if it fell in my path. And I’m a junk collector. I’d toss that thing into the river, plop. It’s how they control you, you know.”
“Who?”
“The government, sweetie! That’s why I can’t imagine why you’d want to go to Nilofone of all places. Today of all days.”
Jamila had a million reasons—one for every sunflower seed. But he didn’t need to know that. She reiterated her need to get the phone shop—before noon, please—and sank into her spare tire for a seat as the junk man crowed on.
“You sound like my kids. All this technological stuff can do no wrong.”
The main streets were blocked to all vehicles, even a rickety donkey cart, so they had to take a detour past the El Wekala fabric market, which had never looked so sparse and colorless. As they rolled onward, a deep voice bellowed from the radio at the junk man’s side: The armed forces will not resort to the use of force against our great people. Jamila hadn’t felt a shred of caution until now—she was too determined to get to Nilofone to be afraid—but the airwaves gave her a pang with each word. Who said anything about the army? Why the declaration of peace? If you could even call it that. She leaned forward, veil billowing in the wind kicked up by the donkey’s feet, and shouted so he could hear.