by Leila Rafei
“You wouldn’t believe how deserted this city is,” he said, catching his breath. “Well, apart from Tahrir.”
Rose leapt to her feet and threw her arms around him, as if he’d come back from war. Jamila looked away as she gave him a kiss and asked, like a child, if he’d seen anything exciting.
There was a shade of disappointment in his black eyes. “Not really. I tried to stay out of all the dangerous areas. El-Galaa, Mohamed Mahmoud. Only hopped on Ramses when I was close enough to make a run for it.”
Jamila both smiled and rolled her eyes as she took the grocery bags and set them on the counter. That Sami. Other men would have embellished the danger, some might outright lie. Especially those like Sami, with something to prove. Yet he was too honest for his own good. That was probably why he screened his mother’s calls—he might let slip that he was not in the dorms, but in Ramses, with his girlfriend, who was pregnant. Then everything would come crashing down. That foolish honesty reminded her of one of her brothers, Malik, whose rear end met the sole of a slipper all too often because of it. To Jamila it was both endearing and worrisome, knowing what she knew now.
Sami opened a carton of mango juice and drank straight from it. Jamila dove for a glass. “It took forever,” he continued, “but I finally found a man selling looted goods outside a church in Shubra. Everything was two, three times the price, but at that point I didn’t care. Would you?”
Jamila shook her head, though she wasn’t sure if he was talking to her. She was too distracted thinking of what she’d cook for today as she unloaded the grocery bags. Neither Sami nor Rose could cook, so they usually left meals up to her. They were content with anything she whipped up, so long as it would last for repeated reheating throughout the week, with enough left over for Jamila to take home for herself. What would they eat if it weren’t for her? Chips and cookies from the kiosk at the corner, no doubt. Greasy takeout every night of the week. Several times Jamila had offered to teach Rose to cook, but she never was interested.
It turned out there was plenty to work with. Bread, tomatoes, basmati rice, even a bushel of okra. Wouldn’t you know it—almost all the ingredients to make bamiya, an okra stew that Jamila would rather avoid. Hesitantly, she opened the cabinet looking for an excuse not to make it, only to find just enough salt and cinnamon. She set the spice jars on the counter with a huff. There was no question. Tonight she would make bamiya, a dish she at once cherished and loathed, a dish that would bubble in the pot before her, nevertheless. She hummed as she scooped tomato pulp out of a can, a song she couldn’t place stuck in her head.
There was a time when she couldn’t even stand the smell of it. Bamiya stirred too many memories to bear. It was an old favorite, synonymous with her childhood in Omdurman, and thus when she fled she left behind any urge to make it, taste it, smell it, or even hear its name ever again. At one point Miss Fifi had made it for a ladies’ lunch (the one time she cooked, it had to be bamiya) and Jamila had to hold her nose as she mopped the apartment, over soaping the bucket in hopes the scent of suds would fill the air instead.
The smell of the stew, with its minced garlic and cumin, conjured more than just memories, but ghosts. That of Jamila’s mother. The house she grew up in. She could practically hear the metal latticework on its windows creak in the wind. They no longer existed, but bamiya would trick her, if only for a second. And in that foolish second it was hard for her to separate then and now, and she swore she could hear her mother calling her name, and the warm little fingers of her youngest brother, Idris, tugging at her leg. Sometimes the feeling was so strong that her skin would turn into the plucked hide of a chicken, covered in goosebumps, hairs standing on end. Then she would remember everything she wanted to forget—that it had been three years since she lost everything and came to Cairo, where she lived in a sunflower-seed-strewn slum with no name instead of her family home, which had been turned by fire into dust along with the bones of everyone she loved. It was too much for Jamila to bear. Not then, not when she was all alone, not after everything that had happened and before anything good came along to strengthen her heart—because surely, good always accompanied the bad, as the Prophet said. For years, she’d waited for that something good with her nose held.
Eventually she confronted the reality of not having options. If there was okra on the table, then it must be eaten. Besides, there was no better way to cook okra than stewed with tomatoes and poured over rice. And she made it and smelled it and ate it and made it again. Now she didn’t need to hold her nose anymore, and she looked straight into the bubbling pot and saw nothing but hot stew.
Bamiya wasn’t just any dish, like sheep’s offal or hoof stew. It was more complex, more to it than money for the butcher, and as such it was one of the recipes her mother taught her as Jamila neared the age of marriage. Before then, she only knew how to make foul and eggs for her siblings, simple breakfasts that would keep their bellies full until nighttime. But to be the best bride on the Nile—as her mother wanted—would require a full repertoire of household services. Bread baking, cattle feeding, rising at dawn. It turned out that preparing for marriage was good training for being a maid, as she would later become, unforeseen by anyone.
Looks were not enough, though they all praised God that she had them. Literally. Jamila was often greeted with a mashallah. It wasn’t always the case. When Jamila was young she was too skinny, with long limbs that could never fill out no matter how much clotted cream her mother rammed down her throat. Her hair would never grow, so she gave up on smothering it with oil each night and instead kept it braided. She was taller than most of the boys in school, and she was always outdoors, letting the sun tint her skin to a rich chocolate. Even now, standing in that kitchen in Ramses, Jamila could feel her mother’s iron grip around her wrist, the way she would hold her arm up to the wall and yell this and that about genes and geography and the treacherous sun, and how they all had conspired to doom any chance of her finding a husband. You can go outside when there’s a ring on your finger! No whitening cream worked—not even the elixir of milk and sandalwood that her mother swore had turned an aunt’s skin to honey. Jamila remembered that aunt and the fishlike pallor that had become of her face, and was thankful no such remedy had worked for her.
Cruelest of all was her name, Jamila, which meant beautiful. Naturally, it became a joke in the classrooms of Al-Safwa primary school. There couldn’t be a worse name. She wished her mother had chosen something more serious, like Khadija for the wife of the Prophet, or Iman, simple and true. Anything but Jamila, a name that reminded her that she was not beautiful, a name that was too comically ironic for any grade-school boy to resist. Until it was not.
One day everything fell into place, as if all that clotted cream had caught up to her overnight to fill out her thighs and hips, turn her from gangly to goddess. Her face matured to match her features, no longer goofy but now something like her mother, who seemed to love her even more because of it. Suddenly her name wasn’t so ironic anymore, and she learned to like it, even in the harsh, gummy Egyptian accent.
Her mother acted fast to marry Jamila off, calling up all her friends in search of eligible men. It was only a matter of weeks until she got her first suitor, and in a few months’ time, four men asked for her hand. But none succeeded.
The first was Ali, who sold peanuts from a cart in the vegetable market at Al-Masalma. One day he saw her, made seven-feet-tall by the crate of sweet potatoes she carried on her head, and he proposed the same night. It was an instant no. Not from her, but from Baba, who saw no need to rush and accept the first offer, especially from a peanut man from the wrong clan. He sent Ali off with a friendly I’ll think about it as Jamila watched from behind the door, relieved. Her first suitor had caught her unready.
Then there was Bilal, who would have been a good choice if he were only half a foot taller. He would gaze up at her in admiration, dreams in his eyes—not so much of her in a weddi
ng dress, but of sons who could see over the back of a horse. Then came Hatim, who ruled himself out with his unsightly henna-dyed beard. Baba wasn’t impressed either. Next.
The last suitor was the best. To her, anyway. Mohsen was a young doctor, a good match by measures of height and profession and intellect and looks. But there was one problem—her father hated his. Baba warned Jamila not to marry the descendant of a long line of swindlers and usurers—a bloodline which, according to him, would make itself apparent no matter his education or wealth. One day she would awake to find all her jewelry gone, sold for new tires, for instance. He would suck the whole family dry, pawn off every penny.
Just wait, said Baba, and another would come.
But he never got to greet another suitor. Not long after that, the rebels came and destroyed everything. The house, razed. The bones of her family, sunk into the Nile. And Jamila, a missing appendage flailing alone in the wind. She left Omdurman in the trunk of a Toyota, a single woman in her fast-waning prime, wondering what would have happened if she hadn’t succumbed to her father’s distaste for Mohsen, as if it would have changed the whole family’s fate altogether. Maybe her father would have mellowed by age or bearing grandchildren would have softened his grudges. She and Mohsen could have moved away to Khartoum, far away from their families. Perhaps if she’d resisted, if she’d said the right thing, added one more lump of sugar to his tea, awoken on her left side and not her right—then none of this would have happened at all.
Time and time again, she reminded herself there was no hiding from fate. It wasn’t easy to swallow but she supposed it made her feel better when she found herself in Egypt, all alone. In Cairo, she was stunned by the crowds, the cars, the sea of unfamiliar faces who stared but didn’t see her. It seemed certain that she would never marry. She resigned herself to a life alone, thinking it was better that way considering her situation, until one afternoon in Khan El Khalili.
It was her first job when she arrived in Cairo. She would walk the alleys of the old bazaar and paint henna onto the hands of foreigners for a few guineas.
One area in particular was a hot spot for peddlers—a café called El Fishawy, where tables lined the alleys and were always full of customers puffing from water pipes and sipping tea. To show off her skills, Jamila would paint swirling flowers onto her own hand and walk past with tubes of black and red ink in her palm. She learned quickly to ignore the Egyptians and go for the white people (some of the whitest she’d ever seen), tourists who accepted the first price she gave them and said thank you in funny accents as they parted. One afternoon, she was painting the freckled forearm of a middle-aged Swede when a man tripped over her foot and caught himself just in time. When she looked up, he was trying to balance a crate full of bread on his head. Her face grew hot just looking at him. She could sense the Swede watching her from her chair, but she didn’t interrupt, hand held out, wet ink drying in the heat.
After the Swede paid and left, the man came back around and introduced himself as Yusuf. As he came closer she noticed a thick fringe of lashes that lined his eyes like kohl. Later, when Yusuf was hers, she found out those eyes came from a distant ancestor, Ibn-so-and-so, who traveled from the Red Sea on horseback carrying a sword and a satchel full of pearls. He made it all the way down the Nile to a village not far from her own, where he spawned a man she had somehow missed all her life, only to find years later in Egypt, at the mouth of that same river.
8
The million-man march had yet to begin, but the bridges and corniche were clogged to a standstill as the brave few who ventured out—Sami included—raced to get where they needed. That morning, what he needed was coffee. They’d run out at home and much of the city was still frozen in a post-apocalyptic state. It was rumored that Café Tasseo was not only open but stocked with enough coffee to fuel the revolution for another month—reason enough to brave the crush of traffic.
Sami sat in the vinyl back seat of a microbus, counting the minutes that passed without movement. Five, ten, fifteen. The bus hadn’t moved an inch for the duration of an entire Umm Kalthoum song.
“That’s how you measure time here,” said Rose, beside him.
“We measure time here?”
“Only with Umm Kalthoum,” she smiled, looking more cheerful than she had in days. The sun beamed into the dark little bus and cast a golden glow to her hair, and she’d never looked as pretty as she did right then, framed by soot and disarray. “It takes one listen of ‘Enta Omry’ to get to Heliopolis on a good day. But if there’s an accident, ooof,” she shook her head, smile remaining. “Then it’ll take a whole performance of ‘Alf Leila wa Leila’—one of the later recordings from the 70s. You know, when she was a real diva, and nobody minded an hour-long instrumental while she caught her breath.”
And if it was a day that promised the biggest demonstration yet, then it took a whole play of ‘Fakarouni’ just to make it to Tasseo—a trip that should have taken no more time than an ‘Aini ya Aini’ B-side, on the worst day.
“Let’s just walk,” said Sami.
They jumped out of the microbus at a defunct falafel shop, which marked the location of a nameless alley that led to the café. As they walked Rose pointed toward the sky. Up above, multicolored cutouts of stars and crescent moons hung from wires zigzagging across the alley. It wasn’t anything they’d never seen before, but there was an enchanted look in her eyes.
“Someone didn’t bother taking down their Ramadan decorations.” He couldn’t help taking her down a notch. It was a little disturbing that she could feel that way—gleeful, glowing—despite, well, everything.
Sami softened when they reached Tasseo. It was a happy place—one full of good memories, where he first met Rose and where they spent hours studying on more normal weekends. The door stood under a massive acacia tree that had grown against the side of the building, which was twice the size it was when they first met a year ago. Rose claimed she loved Tasseo first—before him, before they even met—because it was the only place she could get any work done. Most cafés in this part of town were full of old men, smoking waterpipes and playing backgammon on crowded tin tables. Tasseo was one of the few where you could actually get any work done.
Today was no different. Inside they found the usual crowd—expats and diaspora kids who spoke Arabic with an accent and couldn’t roll their r’s. They typed maniacally at laptops through clouds of nicotine, taking full advantage of their canceled classes—the third day in a row now. At this point school was out for the foreseeable future. Sami nestled comfortably into a booth by the window, savoring this break from the textbooks he hated, the classes he slept through when he wasn’t skipping. The petrochemical morass that would consume him on any other Tuesday. He ordered coffees and toast for the two of them, then turned to Rose.
“Can you believe this place is open?”
“Of course it’s open,” said a young man in thick-framed glasses from the bar. “Tasseo is where this revolution started.” He held out his hand and introduced himself as Ahmed, “a.k.a. RadicalAhmed82.”
“Sami . . . just Sami.”
“Nice to meet you Sami, Rose.” He nodded in her direction. “Feel free to stay all day and talk, chat, mingle, read the news, whatever. We still don’t have internet but Bassem over there is trying to figure out how to set up a VPN.”
All around, hipsters yammered in their rolled-up jeans, pencils sticking out of their frizzy mounds of hair. Sami lit a cigarette and held it in the open window, listening as they debated all things Tahrir—the president, the army, the Brotherhood, the martyrs. He perked up at the latter. For all the men who’d set themselves on fire as of late, there was only one martyr people were still talking about. Khaled Said. A twenty-eight-year-old who the police had beaten to death last year in Alexandria. Apparently he was dealing drugs, or loitering at an internet café, or doing nothing at all depending on who you asked. One thing everybody could a
gree on—at least, everybody in the café—was that he shouldn’t be dead.
The sound of cheering threw Sami off as a chiming rang through the café—one, two, three, four, five—a row of repeated dings that indicated SMS service was back. The whole place rejoiced. At first Sami jolted for his pockets, thinking it was Suad—he’d been conditioned by the sound—but the pockets were empty. On Rose’s phone, he saw not the name of his mother (thank God) but the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, better known as the army.
We implore all loyal Egyptians to confront traitors and criminals.
Protect our people.
The nation is forever.
Watch over her.
Protect our precious Egypt.
The messages were less interesting than he’d expect, given their absurdity. He’d never gotten a message from the army. Who even thought of a thing like that? The army, texting? Anxiety gripped him as he realized that the restoration of service meant more texts would follow. There had been peace in disconnection, like being suspended in air and watching the world turn in silence down below. It was also the perfect excuse to avoid his mother. In a way he was disappointed that service was back—in many ways. Rose felt differently.