Spring

by Leila Rafei

  “What’s happening in Tahrir?”

  “What’s happening? More like what isn’t happening.” He looked back at her, and as they locked eyes through the slit of her veil, he guessed, “You don’t get out much, do you, sister?”

  She nodded, not wanting to explain that yes, she got out—every day, in fact, from morning until night and to each end of the city—but she had other things to worry about. A missing husband. A resettlement case. Phone records to determine her fate. You try keeping up with the news.

  “Tell me, uncle.”

  The old man was happy to oblige. “Listen, sister. There are one hundred thousand in Tahrir right now. I would join them if it wasn’t such a good day in the junk business. You should have seen what I found the other day. A pair of leather boots. A policeman’s cap. A computer that someone threw out the window, probably because of the internet,” he laughed, wheezing. “Even a gold tooth.” He held out his hand, where there lay a composite of yellowed enamel and precious metal, traces of blood at the root. She shuddered, thinking of the gap-toothed smile of the sunflower man.

  “Yes, I can imagine it is a good day for junk,” she said, looking away. “But what do the protesters want?”

  “What do we want? I’ll tell you what we want.” He slowed the donkey and turned to face her, counting with his fingers: “One, the pharaoh is no fun. Overthrow the president. Two, by the sole of my shoe. No emergency law. Three, like sugar for tea. Dissolve the People’s Assembly and the Shura Council. Four, there’s room for more. Form a transitional government. Five, no honey in the beehive. Six, enough tricks. A new parliament and a new constitution. Seven, for those in heaven. Justice for the martyrs. And finally . . .” He took a deep breath, as if it were his last. “Eight, it’s never too late. All those who stole from this nation—each and every one—should get a speedy trial and a nice long prison sentence. God-willing.” He clutched his belly, wheezing from laughter. “Oh, I almost forgot. There’s three more.”

  She wished he’d get on with it.

  “We want bread, freedom, and social justice—aha!” He spat a hunk of guava to the asphalt, then pointed to the spotted pulp remaining in his hand. “You see this? Worms in my guava, even in the dead of winter. This is the regime’s doing. They take all the good fruit for themselves and leave this shit for people like us. Anyway, I was going to tell you about the curfew.”

  “What curfew?”

  “Exactly. Nobody cares about the regime’s damned curfew. They say that anyone out on the streets past three p.m. will be arrested, fined, shot.” He held up bare wrist as if to check the time. “Tick tock, soon it will be three o’clock. Will you go home? No? Neither will I. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “We’re not going, he’s going!”

  Jamila recognized the chant, which was one of many booming through the streets nowadays. But here in deserted Boulaq, where the only sound was that of the donkey’s hooves, the cart rolling, it gave her a chill. The words came out of the old man’s mouth like hello or goodbye or yalla, donkey, yalla. Stronger in their matter-of-factness. We’re not going, he’s going. It seemed a good thing, this going on the part of the president, but what would happen next? Would the city crumble? Would Jamila have to flee again? Would St. Fatima’s close down, send her papers fluttering out the window, sink all her dreams of refuge in the waters of the Nile? It was already getting harder each day to find food and get to work and do all the things she needed to do to survive until tomorrow, and now the thought of tomorrow was so nebulous she felt the ground caving in beneath her. Of course, she couldn’t explain all of this to the junk man, so she sat silently as the cart rolled onward, and from his quick glance she could tell he was waiting for a response that would never come.

  When a song came on the radio, the junk man turned up the volume and hummed along. My beautiful country, my beautiful country. It was a decades-old classic that still pulsed through radios, even back in Sudan. Jamila couldn’t help mouthing the words under her veil, thinking of Omdurman and its women swathed in bright yellows and reds, carrying baskets on their heads, and the curve of the Nile where it branched into the Blue and White. The song blurred to static as they rounded the corner by the journalists’ syndicate, then stopped abruptly with the screeching wheels of the cart.

  A group of men were blocking the road, clubs and bats in hand. One had a gun strapped to his hip. The junk collector lowered the radio. The only sound was that of wheels crunching over debris on the asphalt. Broken bottles, burst-open cans of tear gas. Jamila eyed them nervously, feeling guilty—of something—just for being in the same vicinity of all these tools of disobedience. The donkey was scared, too. The animal tossed his head in protest as the junk collector urged him onward, step by step, until the armed men motioned with their hands to stop.

  The man with the gun approached first. Jamila held her breath.

  “Identification cards,” he said, hand on his gun.

  “I don’t have one,” said the junk collector.

  He huffed and looked at Jamila in the back. “And you?”

  She didn’t hesitate to dig out her paperwork from St. Fatima’s—the only ID she had. As he flipped through, not knowing he held her whole life in his hands, there was something in his pained expression that made it seem he didn’t register any of the pages before him – a deep crease between the eyes that indicated far too much thought for an ID check. He stopped at a blurry Xerox of her bare face. That was what he was looking for—a photo. He couldn’t read, could he? It seemed to be to her benefit because he handed back her papers readily. He looked skeptically from the junk man to Jamila and back, and asked where they were going, where they lived, what were their names and their father’s names, and in the junk man’s case, even his father’s father’s name.

  “I’m only a junk collector,” said the old man, holding his hands up in surrender.

  The other men looked on from the intersection, their own weapons in hand. A baseball bat, a crowbar, a rope ready to tie them up and hang them if need be. They looked Egyptian but seemed somehow foreign in this context—nothing like Sami with his sad, sweet eyes or even her other employer Mr. Salem, who could break a sweat reaching for the TV remote. With their street clothes and mismatched weapons slung over their backs, they looked like the rebels back home. And as the man with the gun examined her, eyes to belly, she tried not to betray what she was thinking—that he could kill her and that nobody would ever know. Not Yusuf, if he was even alive. Not Rose and not Sami, who’d think she just quit. Not even St. Fatima’s, which would lose her file and forget her among the sea of identical cases.

  “On the ground,” he said, pointing with his gun.

  They stepped off the cart and watched the armed men search it. She noticed how tiny the junk collector was, standing beside her. He came up to her shoulder. If he was scared, he didn’t show it, arms crossed in defiance, chin in the air as if to say I told you so to this ragtag army before them. He turned out to be right—there was nothing in the cart. Nothing of significance, anyway. The man finished his search and threw the tire and boots back onto the cart. For a second he looked unsure, as if this small act of consideration might compromise his power. To take it back, he reached for his holster. Jamila held her breath. And then with the other hand, he waved them through.

  Once the armed men were out of sight, the junk man looked back at her. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I know they don’t look like it, but they’re the good guys. They’re just protecting their neighborhoods from all the criminals on the loose.”

  “Criminals on the loose?”

  “Yes, haven’t you heard?” He looked back at her with a smirk. “Of course not. Well, let me inform you, sister. There were clashes at the prisons last night, some burned down, some prisoners escaped.”

  “Which prisons,” she yelped. She thought of Tora, where Yusuf had been taken
.

  The junk man shrugged. “Abu Zabaal, mostly. Full of a bunch of bearded types. And some people are saying that two of the escapees were the police officers who killed Khaled Said.”

  She froze. Her throat was too dry to give her the gulp this moment required. She knew about Khaled Said, a young man beaten to death by the police last year. Now he was a martyr, a cause for revolution, both alive and dead in Tahrir. Jamila trembled thinking of his infamous autopsy photo, showing a face so disfigured with violence you couldn’t even tell it was his. The police had bashed out any hint of an identifying feature. There was no mouth to match the modest smile in his government ID. There were no brown eyes glinting with a shade of sadness—as if he somehow knew the fate awaiting him on the other end of a baton. She realized, with terror, that if the police had done that to a middle-class Egyptian boy like Khaled, then her husband was a goner. The difference was that the world knew Khaled was dead. He had become a martyr. Yusuf, on the other hand, seemed to have never existed at all.

  “It’s the price of revolution,” said the junk collector. A smile spread over his face as he pulled up to Nilofone. “God be with you.”

  As Jamila stepped off the cart, it was hard to believe God was with her. It certainly didn’t seem like the case. God wasn’t with Nilofone, either—that much was apparent by its shattered storefront and ransacked shelves. She would have to start over.

  Next, she tried the Nilofone shop in the Arkadia mall. She hoped this one was safe thanks to the massive building enclosing it—no storefront to break open—only to find it in even worse shape, the whole thing burnt and ransacked. She hadn’t realized that the mall itself was a hotbed of loot: cash registers, clothing racks, designer bags and DVD players. Looters had even stolen a faux Christmas tree from the window display of a Swiss fondue restaurant on the ground floor, its lights still blinking like an emergency beacon.

  Who on earth would steal a Christmas tree? Who on earth were these looters in the first place? She tried figuring it out by listening to passersby, but it only made her more confused. Some said the looters were protesters from Tahrir. To others they were just criminals on the loose. They were CIA operatives, jihadists from Afghanistan, maybe even the police. She thought of Khaled Said, the burned prisons, the men in plainclothes doing the job of police who’d all but disappeared since the riots began. What at first seemed crazy became more plausible with each step.

  She walked home exhausted, the day’s fruitless search behind her. This was the price of revolution, as the junk collector said. But whatever the cost, she wouldn’t let it stop her—not as long as there were (by her calculations) seventy-eight other Nilofone shops in this city. No, she would keep searching.

  6

  Suad was having even more trouble sleeping than usual. Who could blame her? Each time she closed her eyes she saw fire and chaos, scenes from the city where her son lived, unreachable. Not even the quiet of night could help her get rest. In fact, it made it worse. When night fell—after Ayah went to bed, the TV shut off, and the cotton wheel next door stood still—Suad heard the voice of the woman who had answered Sami’s phone, again and again.

  Could it be . . . her?

  Months ago, when Sami came home for a blip of a visit, Ayah had found a passport in his backpack. Suad didn’t know why her daughter had been in her brother’s backpack to begin with but didn’t complain—in fact, she was proud of Ayah for caring so much for her brother to take things into her own hands. And that she did. The girl ran to her bedside with the passport, waving it around like a prize. Look, mom! Suad remembered it clearly, the way she pushed her glasses up her nose and said what’s this, the way she cringed at the sight of first, a woman, and even worse, a foreign woman. The passport was blue, with a bird embossed on the front. From the United States, Ayah said. The woman in the photo stared back solemnly. She had eyes like a holograph, dull and flat from one angle, and full of far-away thoughts from another. Likewise, she looked both young and old depending on the feature. Bareheaded and fair-haired, like a young girl. The tired, seen-it-all look of an older woman. Who was she? Suad needed to know, and yet dreaded the answer. She envied days of the past, when she blissfully believed Sami was studying when he didn’t answer her calls. Now she couldn’t help but see that woman’s face each time she listened to the phone ring, ring, ring, and then get snuffed out by his voicemail. You’ve reached Sami Sukkary. Sorry I could not answer your call . . .

  But someone had answered her call the other day. That was the problem. Suad was tempted to think it was that woman—only a foreigner would be so brazen—but in her gut she felt it wasn’t. She could have sworn she detected the faintest hint of Nile water on the breath used to utter that sole hello. It sounded too crisp, too easy, to have come from a foreigner. Did that mean there was another? Oh, Sami. He seemed to be taking after his father more and more each dreaded day. She tried to convince herself that all would be well—that he was a good boy, that she was a dutiful mother—but that woman’s voice had followed her like the buzz of a fruit fly ever since.

  Sami didn’t know it, but Suad had been working in stealth to correct him for many months. It all started with the passport episode. She never brought it up directly, of course—just uttering the words would make her faint—but she hoped he’d get the message with a few hints and nudges. It helped that it was Ramadan. She reminded him that it was a month of reflection and good behavior. Smokers quit smoking. The stingy donated to charity. Fornicators kept their pants on. The wayward caught up with their prayers. Even Nagwa kept her wild stories to herself, vowing to quit gossip each Holy Month. Girlfriends clearly had no place in Ramadan, and she didn’t need to spell it out for him.

  To test Sami, Suad decided to surprise him with a visit. She baked his favorite lemon sponge cake for the occasion. Cake in hand, she took the train down to Cairo and carried it all the way to his dormitory. He wasn’t there, but the concierge let her into his room with the master key. Sami was her son, after all. Normally she would have taken the opportunity to go through his things, but something stopped her this time. Perhaps it was fear. God only knew what she might find. So instead she just made his bed and sat there, waiting, until finally she heard the key in the door. By then the night had come and passed. Sami said he’d slept at campus after studying all day. She didn’t believe him but she didn’t press further. He took her hand and led her to the corniche, where he showed her his favorite spot on the river. The benches were crowded with teenage couples sitting too close, fingers ringless, and the air smelled strange, probably from hashish. The view wasn’t so bad, though. The water was murkier than in the Delta, but the river was wide and the skyscrapers cast reflections onto its rippling surface. Later Sami dropped her off at the train station with the spare key she requested, and with a kiss on the cheek they parted. She couldn’t help being disappointed that she hadn’t caught a trace of that woman.

  The next plan of action consisted of spitting girls’ names at him at rapid fire. Ilham and Doaa and Mariam and Malak. Naima and Nashwa and Lulu. Lulu’s older sister Halima—no, that one was married, but her husband also had good girls in his family. Any female ever born to any relative, neighbor, or friend was fair game, whether or not Suad had even known of the girl’s existence prior. It became quite ridiculous, she had to admit. She had no idea whether any of these girls were indeed suitable, whether they looked like their pictures or prayed regularly or had reputations that checked out. It was only necessary that she be connected to Suad somehow, and—most importantly—that she got to pick her.

  She spent many a daydream designing the type of girl she wanted for her son. Someone young, with many childbearing years ahead of her. Someone modest and loyal, uninterested in silly internet rubbish like Ayah. If the girl had any gardening experience, that was a plus. A major plus. She thought she had found his girl when she met Yosra. Simple, young, uninterested in the world beyond lip gloss and silly cartoons. Problem was, Sam
i wouldn’t agree to meet her. So Suad brought her to him instead.

  She invited Yosra’s family down from Damietta, coincidentally the same time Sami was home for a visit. When they met, she scanned her son eagerly for any sign of attraction. How could he not be attracted? The girl was a genetic anomaly, with skin like fresh cream, eyes a straight azure. A bit plump by modern standards, but back in Suad’s day, no man wanted a woman who couldn’t fill two bus seats with her rear-end, and certainly not a skinny foreigner who, even from that one-by-one-inch passport photo, appeared to have the figure of a dried-up chicken bone. But to her dismay, Sami was alarmingly loyal to the chicken-boned lady. He greeted Yosra no different than he would a great aunt who had come to pinch his cheeks. They talked only of schoolwork and universities and, at the most excruciating moments, the weather up in Damietta. It was particularly hot that year, yes, hot enough to bake bread on the sidewalks. Suad was ready to pry their lips together with her own hands, if she had to.

  After the house emptied, she phoned Sami. She could hear his train departing as he brushed off questions about Yosra. Later, it came out that chubby little Yosra was quite taken with the older boy and had told all her friends about him. Suad told her to give it time. And since then, that was all they had. Time.

  *****

  Playing matchmaker reminded Suad of her own engagement so many years ago. She was the eldest girl in her family and as such, her parents had a particular anxiety over her that dissipated by the time it reached the fifth daughter. Back then, she was just a girl. One day she turned around and had an enormous rack, the bane of her existence and the subject of all the local boys’ whispers and giggles. She hated them all, except for one: Gamal the gas man.