by Leila Rafei
Gamal came to their apartment every month to fill up the gas canister in the kitchen. Unlike all the boys at school, he was tall and didn’t have one of those awful pre-pubescent mustaches. He had a smooth face and a dimple on his chin, perfect teeth and a flop of slick hair like Abdel Halim Hafez. He would smile to her from the street each time he came around, and Suad would wait for him in those days. She knew his schedule exactly: the first Monday of the month. Abu Radhi was the last neighborhood on his route, and he’d reach it right after making the rounds in El Nasser and El Sadaat. It would be afternoon by then, the unbearable, humid hours. After finishing her schoolwork she’d wait by the window until she saw him coming—keychain dangling from his finger, sweat casting a sheen on his light brown skin—and she’d perch on the sill and wave, making sure that her breasts were pushed up as high as possible under her dress. It was shameful, but it was only for Gamal. She was sure that nobody else would notice until the day their conversation got personal up in the dark, hot apartment.
It was the first time she baked date cookies all by herself, and she invited Gamal to take some home. He declined politely. A hot flush spread from her temples all the way down to her toes as she imagined that he must be married. She looked at the powdered crumbles in her hands and asked if his wife made them too. He said he didn’t have a wife. And the words made her so happy that she broke into a smile, the kind of smile that’s pulled so hard across the face that it hurts, the kind of smile that gave her away. In the other room, Teta was listening and knew exactly what was happening. She saw the smile. She heard the singsong voice. She noticed the tight dress Suad happened to be wearing that day and come to think of it, every day that Gamal the gas man came around. Later, she cornered Suad.
All the boys in the neighborhood are calling your name.
Oh?
They see what you do with Gamal and they think they can do the same.
Wallahi, I don’t do anything with Gamal.
It doesn’t matter. They think you do. And soon they’ll be lining up at the door calling, ya Suad, ya Suad!
Not long after, Suad found herself sitting in her living room beside her second cousin, Mahmoud. She’d only met him at weddings and funerals, the kind of events her parents had to drag her to. This time he came with a ring and a dish of baklava just for her. He was no Gamal but he seemed OK, so she took the ring on her finger, the pastry into her parched mouth. It wouldn’t go down. She had to spit it out into a napkin when he wasn’t looking. Her mother scolded her with an eye from across the room. She wanted to scream. The time had come for her to marry, apparently, and nobody cared what she thought about it. They didn’t even ask. She went on to wed Mahmoud and moved into the big house on the edge of town. It was outside of Gamal’s gas route. She never saw him again, but his image remained as sharp and vivid in her mind as that day in the kitchen, when she stood close enough to feel his breath.
From time to time Suad wrote Gamal letters, the kind not meant for sending but for hiding away in bedside drawers. Her first letter was sparse—she didn’t know what to say other than I miss you—but by the time her husband left for the Gulf, she had a flurry of news. She wrote of her lemon grove, her children, her regrets over marrying Mahmoud. I should have said no, she wrote on page after page, all covered with broken-hearted scribbles that Gamal would never see.
Later she realized that she didn’t get married as a regular course of action, according to schedule. She got married because Teta thought she was a slut. She figured it out with each successive sister. Nobody pushed plain, big-footed, studious Sara to get married at that age. There was nothing to worry about with her. It was the same with Salma, who wore glasses under a too-tight hijab. Then there was Sabah, who cared only for baking sweets and going to bed as soon as the sun went down. But when Sanaa turned seventeen and started holding hands with a boy in class, she was married off right away. Marriage was for the sluts.
*****
Suad spent the whole morning on her knees, ripping weeds out of the dirt between trees. She kept her phone in her pocket in hopes that at last, Sami would call.
Each time it rang, she’d wipe off her hands with two firm thigh pats and hold her breath, yet each time, it was everybody else: Sana, yelling over a crying baby; Hagg Ali, whose delivery boy wouldn’t come that day; nosy Nagwa, whose presence never ceased; Ayah, putting off her schoolwork; Amo Ahmed, breathless from memories of the riots in 1952. Even Mahmoud called, and they shared a few lines of small talk over the course of a whole minute as she knelt on muddy knees in the weeds.
When Suad hung up, she looked at her forlorn phone and figured she might as well try Sami once more. Her thumb hovered over the speed-dial for the duration of the pre-recorded message that she would inevitably hear.
The number you have dialed is not in service. Please hang up and try again.
The boy you have dialed is busy sinning. Please let go and look away.
The city you have dialed is now revolting. Please shut up and let the kids have their way.
Suad heard that miserable recording so many times that it began to taunt her as the dial log reached triple digits. By that point, there was a faint callus at the tip of her cramped thumb, and it stung from the acid of lemons where the skin parted. She paid it no mind as she continued her work, even more vigorously than before.
Weeding was a regular task, especially after a good rain, but there had never been so many. The nasty little things were the jinn of her garden. They appeared abruptly—one moment, she would be saying goodnight to unblemished, freshly raked soil, and in the next all her lemon trees would be choked by green monsters covering the ground like rabid spiders. They tended to appear when her spirits were low, which was quite often as of late.
Since dawn that day, the weeds had either multiplied or Suad was seeing things. She could have sworn there were only a dozen to begin with, but after hours of weeding there were a dozen more. These demons were relentless. She moved quickly to catch them all, scanning the ground, up and down, until a fresh one caught her eye. And with both annoyance and pleasure, she got down in the dirt and ripped it out of the soil, careful to make sure she got every last one of its damned, dirty roots. I got you, demon. Soon she filled a whole sack with weeds ranging in size from a rosebud to a head of lettuce.
It was Giddo who’d taught her how to weed properly, to grip the plant at its base and shake every tentacle loose. Somehow, he’d learned the ways of the land despite spending his life in factories. He said it was in his blood. Just the memory made her feel like bursting to tears right there in the grove. What a loss. Deep down in the unmentionable recesses of her mind, Suad sometimes grew tired of relying on God. There were so many prayers that had gone unanswered. Gamal never reappeared again. Sami had become even less religious. And not once did Mahmoud suffer divine payback for scorning her. In fact, things seemed swell on his end. She was tired of wishing and waiting for all these men who’d disappointed her, and ironically, it was only another man—the first man, Giddo—who could console her. There were times, like this, when what she needed wasn’t faith but flesh to hold close, words to cool her worries. Worries made worse by the sound of a door swinging open.
Tut, tut, tut, screeeeech.
On a balcony overhead, the neighbor woman Nagwa sat squat on her stool and hitched up her skirt to make room for the spinning wheel between her legs. She reached into a basket of freshly picked cotton puffs and fed each to the wheel, one by one, which spun them into thread with much groaning.
Suad’s heartbeat quickened with the ticking wheel. From the ground she waved to Nagwa, who nodded but didn’t stop spinning. What nerve, to come out and destroy the peace of the grove and not even say hello. Suad often thought of hurling a lemon straight at that contraption of hers—and she wouldn’t feel bad about it, not one bit, because everybody else seemed to indulge Nagwa, starting with her family. They had a farm in Kafr El Sheikh and s
ent her a bushel of cotton each month to sate her useless obsession. Now spools of thread lay stacked at the edge of her balcony to gather dust, untouched.
What was her family thinking? Did they not find it odd she spent all that time spinning and neither sewed nor sold what she produced? They didn’t seem to realize that for Nagwa, spinning cotton was more than a wasteful vice—it was a way to feign preoccupation while she sat on the balcony all day, scanning the neighborhood for gossip. That’s what she was really after: stories to spread from one end of Mahalla to the next, as far as all those spools of thread would take her.
*****
Night fell, but neither woman would relent. Suad tried to block out the sound of the wheel as she moved furiously through the grove with a flashlight. At the edge of the plot, she found a monstrous growth choking her best tree, one with ten lemons for every branch. It was over her dead body that she’d let this demon have its way with that tree.
Suad sucked on her wounded thumb as if to prepare it for battle. Then she started digging around the weed, feeling the wet earth under her nails. She grabbed its base and pulled and pulled until sweat formed at her temples, but its roots clung to the earth as if its life depended on it. But its life did depend on it, she smiled. She would take a break and come for it again in the morning, when she would have more strength and the sun by her side. Perhaps by then Sami will have called.
“Suad,” called a woman’s voice through the trees.
She stood to see Nagwa wading barefoot through the mud, slippers in hand. Suad had been so into the weeds that she hadn’t realized the wheel had stopped, and that this time it didn’t mean Nagwa was minding her own business. How could she be so silly? It had been hours since they last traded words and naturally, she was bursting with some new story to tell her.
“Any news from Cairo?”
“I’ve tried calling everyone.” She shook her head with a flourish, like some kind of soap star. “Everyone. In-laws, cousins, classmates, people I had forgotten all about until now, like the girl from the bodega on Ayyad Street who married and moved away—you know, the one with the bazaz.” With her hands she made two massive mounds over her breasts, snickering, but Suad wouldn’t have it.
“Noha. How is she?”
“Not so good. Not one child yet. Ironic, isn’t it? A girl like that could feed a whole orphanage with those bazaz.” The stench of cigarettes wafted from Nagwa’s clothes as she leaned toward Suad and whispered, as if the trees had ears. “They say her husband goes with men.”
That’s it. Suad chucked her sack to the ground and looked straight at the woman, eyebrow cocked, the way she looked at her children when they brought rubbish to her ears. By instinct, her eyes flitted to her feet where, in different circumstances, she’d reach for a slipper to brandish. But there was no slipper, and Nagwa was not her child, and—for God’s sake—there was a horror afflicting the nation, if she hadn’t heard.
“Anyway, enough about Noha, poor girl. What do you think caused this business with the phones in Cairo? I still can’t reach my boy. I swear, if I get that dial tone one more time, I’m going to march all the way down to Cairo myself and request an appointment with the president at once.”
“And say what?”
“I would say, ‘Mr. President, I wish to speak for all mothers in Egypt.’ ”
“Ambassador Suad from Mahalla.”
“I would say, ‘Our nation is the mother of the world, and mothers are the backbone of our nation, and mothers are the—well, mothers—of our sons. And for the sake of all mothers and the terrible stress we are under, please fix these phones right now, Mr. President. Have mercy on the mothers of this nation. It’s in the Quran.”
“The phones?”
“No, silly.” She shot Nagwa a cross look. It was hard to know whether she was being wicked or just dimwitted. “The Quran says: We have enjoined on man kindness to his parents; in pain did his mother bear him, and in pain did she give him birth. And right now, I could use some kindness.”
“Well, wait till you hear this. Kholoud says they bombed the phone tower. That’s why the phones are down.”
Suad’s eyes widened, but she reminded herself that this was Nagwa, a lady who embellished stories like the tufts of a wedding gown. If the news had come from anyone else, then the horror would have struck her dead right in the middle of the lemon grove—which granted, wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, so long as she managed to remove every weed first. Sighing, Suad returned her attention to her tree. Nagwa was fiddling with a leaf, twisting its stem as she made things up. The leaf wasn’t the best specimen, with yellowing edges—first sign of a coming death—but Suad had to bite her lip to keep from scolding her. There were more important issues at hand and, real or not, she should play along with Nagwa’s story if only not to look careless.
“You’re kidding. Who bombed the phone tower?”
“The Israelis.”
“Of course.”
“And Iran.”
“Ya salam. You don’t say.”
Suad could tell there was a question at the tip of Nagwa’s tongue as she continued fingering the leaf, this time even more vigorously, almost tearing the stem off wholesale. She braced herself.
“I noticed that your husband didn’t come home this winter. Is everything alright?”
Suad reached for the yellowing leaf between Nagwa’s fingers and ripped it off the branch. That was her answer. Nagwa had probably heard her yelp Mahmoud’s name when he called earlier, setting the engines of her silly little mind reeling like that damned wheel of hers. Tales of bombs and war were pretty good, but they were nothing compared to the old-fashioned troubles of a marriage—especially this marriage, which had begun and unraveled and vanished through the tines of her cotton wheel. Obviously, it was the real reason she had come over.
Nagwa must have gotten the hint for once, because she didn’t press further.
“Well, there’s a lot of oil to pump out there in Dammam. So much oil. Really, way too much oil. I’m sure he’s just busy, busy, busy.”
“Yes,” said Suad, “he is.”
When Suad returned inside, she found a hypnotized Ayah hunched over the computer, back curved as a crescent moon. She looked like a thirsty palm bent over the river. About as mindless too, mouth hanging open without her knowledge, phone hanging limp in her hand, notebook draped carelessly over the keyboard, as if using all devices at once. An empty cup of lemon-mint juice sat before her, the drink so long-gone that the pulp had dried stuck to the glass. The girl hadn’t even bothered to take off her hijab after class, nor her ratty old sneakers, which Suad hated—a pair to match her brother’s, straight from some stall in El Muski strewn with bootlegged cassettes and neon lingerie.
“Girl,” called Suad as she washed the dirt off her feet. “Aren’t there better ways to spend your day? Don’t you have studying to do, prayers to catch up on?”
Ayah didn’t answer.
Suad walked toward her and slapped the phone out of her hand. “Sit up straight. What are you, a camel? Keep up like that and you’ll end up hunchbacked like Hagga Warda. And no one will marry you.”
“Egyptian in-soor-jens.”
“What?”
“Egyptian in-soor-jen-t-s.”
Crazy girl. Suad looked over Ayah’s shoulder at her notebook, where in place of homework she’d scribbled unpronounceable English words. Anarchy. Riot. Excessive force.
“In-sur-gent. One who rises in opposition against lawful authority.”
“Ayah,” Suad clapped. “Did you hear what I said?”
The girl finally listened, but not without a childish groan. As she sat up, her back cracked from joints moving for the first time in hours, no doubt. Suad’s eyes never left her as she leapt back into that notebook. She’d never seen Ayah so engrossed, other than say, the season finale of Arab Idol. What kind of nonsense was she
reading about now? The girl’s regular studies were silly enough—digital communication, whatever that was. Her test scores had been too low to enroll in medicine or engineering like her brother, but it didn’t matter anyway. Upon graduation she’d marry and move into her husband’s home just as Suad had. She tensed, as if she just then realized there were only a few more years until she’d be alone completely. All the more reason to rein in that ridiculous girl while she had the chance. And that meant none of this in-soor-jens business.
Suad pointed to the nonsense in her notebook. “Homework, girl. Where is it?”
“I told you a thousand times. I finished my homework. I’m all caught up with prayers, too.”
Ayah looked up at Suad, eyes red and glossy behind cloudy lenses. It was time for new glasses. The poor girl had inherited her father’s vision. Romantically, it didn’t seem to hold him back, but Suad worried about her daughter. Glasses tucked into a headscarf was not a good look. Though she feared the day Ayah would leave her too, she was anxious to find her a suitor—if she missed the brief window between ripeness and rot, she might never find anybody, and the prolonged companionship Suad would get in return would in no way make up for the shame of having an unmarriageable daughter. For now, the best she could do was to arm her with charms of duty.
“Go fix your mother a cup of tea.”
Suad sat down as Ayah scurried off to the kitchen. She returned with an overflowing cup, tea sloshing onto the saucer, and handed it over with a sigh, as if she’d exerted herself. The girl was hopeless. Suad held her tongue as she watched Ayah return to the computer to watch some vile new video from Tahrir Square. This time there was a bald man with a bullhorn. The crowds gathered around him, cheering. He looked strangely dignified despite the setting—almost handsome in his round glasses. Men were so lucky, she thought, picking a lemon slice out of her tea. They could go bald and wear unsightly glasses and still greet masses with arms outstretched. She checked his finger for a ring but couldn’t see through the chaos.