by Leila Rafei
“That reminds me,” she said, grabbing back her phone. “I need to call Tora.”
“For Jamila?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, for fun.”
Sami sighed, stubbing out his cigarette in an ashtray full of burnt filters. “You’re wasting your time. Her husband is dead.”
“So what? We have to try.” Rose punched in the numbers, which she now knew by heart, and listened to the phone ring until the line cut.
“There are no police anymore, remember?”
“Shit.”
*****
The café grew busier as more kids stopped in on their way to Tahrir for the million-man march. Sami watched a girl with tattooed arms use a broomstick to turn on the ceiling fan. It was getting muggy in there with the hot breath of patrons who wouldn’t shut up about the news. He thought the restoration of service would distract them, draw their attention to their phones, but it only seemed to fuel their chatter. The opposition’s latest remarks and those of the vice president, thugs called hatchet men hounding the square. Sami spent the morning eavesdropping while Rose was strangely engrossed, scribbling notes on loose-leaf paper.
“What are you writing?”
“Just some observations.”
“Observations of what?” He cocked his head to see, but all he caught was the word Nadim before she snatched it away.
“Tahrir, Ramses, the whole thing, know what I mean?”
Yes, this was a noteworthy moment, but what did that name have to do with it? He was struck with a flash of jealousy. Who even was this Nadim? It took a while to realize she was referring to a famous oud player they’d seen perform under the 15th of May bridge weeks ago. Nadim Salah. She said she liked the name—so much so that she’d consider it for her child. They had a huge fight after that.
For a second Sami wondered if Jamila had seen the baby in Rose’s coffee cup last week. But that was ridiculous. Coffee cup fortunes weren’t magic. They were just a way for women to pass the time. What they called fate was only a matter of circumstance—the way the grains settled into peaks and valleys had to do with the way they were brewed, or the temperature outside, or the residue left on the lip of the cup from each prior sip. Even if Jamila had seen a baby, which she didn’t, she’d never say so. Instead she said something about diamonds, as if that’s what he and Rose were—diamonds and not two idiots who’d made a terrible mistake.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love Rose. That part was certain. He had tried time and time again to imagine a parallel universe where their relationship could work out. They would do what they could to make it seem legitimate, like get married right now and claim prematurity seven months later. They would live in Cairo, obviously, because Mahalla was no place for a foreign wife and a half-foreign baby, born to an only son who should have done better. Maybe his family would finally accept her and they’d all drink lemon-mint juice together, Rose and Suad and Ayah gathered around the table, feeding rice pudding to little Nadim. Sami smashed the end of his cigarette into the ashtray, burning the tip of his thumb. It was impossible.
His eyes fell on the wall, which was covered in napkin drawings that fluttered under the force of the fan. He knew those drawings. He knew that wall. Leaving Rose to her scribbles, he got up and walked toward it, in search of one napkin in particular. It was a drawing of a bird, an ibis on the Nile. He’d copied it from a postcard Rose had brought back from Aswan last summer. He wanted to show off his dormant artistic skills, which he’d given up years ago when there was no longer any use. That must have been just after primary school, when everything he did started being scrutinized for its bearing on his future, its importance. And art was not important. Petrochemicals were.
Layer after layer, Sami peeled away napkins until he found the ibis. It stared back from its thumbtacked space on the wall, looking happy and rainbow-bright, signed by the two of them, dated too (July 31st, hottest day in a decade). At its feet were the unfortunate words: Sami and Rose forever. It still hung beside the same Fairouz lithograph. The thing hadn’t moved in a year. And he realized, as if it were some revelation and not the natural conclusion of a feeling that had been festering in the back of his mind all along, that the measly napkin ibis would outlive their relationship. Sami and Rose forever, forever on that wall. A love more fleeting than torn paper. He thought about asking the waiters to take it down but couldn’t bring himself to do it. His hand hovered at the napkin’s edge, ready to rip it off, but he couldn’t do that either. It was too final.
*****
Tahrir was so packed they couldn’t even enter. They followed hearsay about a side entrance at the museum and snaked through crowds until they found a checkpoint controlling entry, with separate lines for men and women.
“Even the museum’s been looted,” said Rose, pointing to the enormous building looming above them. “The looters got in through the roof in the night. They smashed a few vases from the Ptolemaic era, ripped the head off a three-thousand-year-old mummy.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The news,” she said, holding up her phone.
“Local or foreign?”
“Local. So you know, take it with a grain of salt.”
Sami looked up at the museum. Its terra-cotta facade looked tangerine against the sky, which had dulled to a smoky white since the morning. There was no sign of the heist, which seemed surprising compared to the singed remains of the nearby Arkadia Mall. The looters, if the story was true, had been merciful to the museum. Thankfully. He’d only ever been there once, on a trip with his family when he was a boy. After years in Cairo, it was only now that he wanted to return.
“Apparently there are a bunch of criminals on the loose,” she said. “I guess that’s why there’s so much security.”
At the checkpoint there were no police officers, but instead citizens in plainclothes who searched the bags and pockets of each and every person trying to get to Tahrir. As Rose walked off for the women’s line, Sami watched the tattered hem of her sweatshirt bounce against her backside. For once she’d followed his advice and wore baggy clothing, but some things were just hopeless.
When it was his turn to be searched, a heavyset man pulled him aside and asked him first to empty his pockets. Luckily, he’d packed light, with only the Meikorlens and a kaffiyeh that stank of vinegar—a remedy against tear gas, he’d learned. The man shook out the scarf, making a face as the stench wafted out. “Smart,” he said, tying it to his neck. “But keep here to be safe.” Then he searched the camera. He flipped open its battery compartment then peered through its lens, taking his time, holding it close to his eye as if he wasn’t sure it was real. Sami had to admit was an odd contraption to carry into the square, clearly an antique. But what choice did he have? Bringing his phone would have been like bringing along his mother, shrunk down in his pocket, where she could scream at his every move.
“Identification?”
He slipped out the plastic card. As the man inspected it, Sami looked at the worn sneakers on his feet, affixed with a knock-off Nike logo. Straight from the factories of Mahalla. The place was inescapable. On his ID card, too.
“Sami Mahmoud Sukkary,” the man read aloud, mumbling through the bristles of his beard. “From Mahalla. Muslim. Army?”
“No, I’m not in the army.”
“Have you served in the army?”
“No, uncle, I’m an only son.”
Sami felt the man’s eyes scan him from his head and down the length of his body. Young and fit, two arms and legs, an inch or two taller than average. Unlike the pear-shaped man before him, Sami would’ve made a perfect soldier. Would’ve, but he wasn’t. The government waived all only sons from conscription on account of their blessedness and all the responsibility that came with it. Perhaps the man would deny him entry for that same reason.
But the man said OK. He opened the gate and hurried Sami through, onto the next.
Rose was waiting for him on the other side. The women’s line had moved quickly. The guards hadn’t even touched them.
In the middle of the crowds, though, all eyes were on Rose. People stopped her left and right on the way to Tahrir. Some thought she was a celebrity and asked to take pictures with her. Sami was always the designated picture-taker. He would roll his eyes behind the camera as they posed beside her, standing self-consciously with hands clasped before them, some waving flags in the air, some with clever signs. Some thought she was either a journalist or, just by virtue of being white, someone who should hear their struggles. As if she could do anything about it.
“Please, America,” a man shouted at her. “Put a good president for us!”
Occasionally she’d turn the camera around on her subjects, who were happy to pose. One wanted to show off his hat made of bread rolls, and they laughed—a hearty, true laughter that was rare nowadays—until a man in a gray jacket swooped in and snuffed it out.
“No photos,” he said, holding his arm out to block the lens. His voice was gruff to match the thick stubble on his face. He spoke as if he were the police, but he wore no badge.
“What do you mean, no photos?” She wrestled her camera over his arm. “Sami,” she called out. “How do you say, get away from me?”
But before Sami could say anything, the man backed away and disappeared, swallowed whole by the crowd.
“What was that?”
“Who knows. Just stay right next to me.”
He grabbed her hand to keep from drifting as they moved toward the epicenter of Tahrir Square. They seemed to move in circles, pushed round and round by the whirlpool force of the masses, which grew stronger by the minute as more and more poured into the square. Eventually the riptide won out, tight as he held her, and he lost her in the dense crowds near the KFC. Sami stood on tiptoes under its brash red banner, the chicken man’s face smiling incongruously on, but he couldn’t see through the signs and flags and funny hats. A stranger offered him a leg up. He stepped into the man’s cradled hands and scanned the crowd. When Sami spotted Rose’s dun-colored bun from afar, he leapt to the ground and hurried to catch up, apologizing for each shoulder brushed on the way.
The throngs dragged them deeper into the square as voices grew louder, unafraid.
“He steps down today,” said one man.
“We need to be careful,” piped in another.
“The Brothers are making a deal.”
“A deal with who?”
“The regime!”
“Whatever happens, the president steps down. It’s just a matter of time.”
“No, no, you’re mistaken. The Americans won’t allow it.”
The words sounded strange out in the open, fuzzy and warped as if he were listening underwater. Sami had never heard such commentary apart from chatty taxi drivers who at best, might complain about the price of tomatoes while stuck in traffic. He could barely recognize the faces around him, and even Tahrir itself looked different gridlocked with crowds and not cars. Though the masses blurred in motion, he tried to pick out threads of the familiar. A man with a prayer bruise on his forehead, like Abu Ali. A sliver of brown skin behind a face veil, like Jamila. There were even a few foreigners like Rose, though they tended to be actual journalists with cameras hanging from their necks. From signs and accents he counted representation from every city: Sohag, Suez, Mahalla, from one end of the Nile to the Delta, from the Sinai to the barren edges of the western desert. There were men and women, toddlers and elders, secularists and Salafists, Saidis from the south and Iskandaranis from the north coast. He even spotted the jerseys of Al-Ahly and Zamalek, two arch-rival national soccer teams whose fans were often in fistfights, but not today. They all shouted one word, leave. Some on the sidelines whimpered the army and the people are one hand.
In Tahrir, it didn’t seem to matter anymore that he came from the farms of the Delta and not the villas of Zamalek, that he lived in the latter off subsidy from the rich, that his mother’s love verged on embarrassing obsession, that his father had almost completely disappeared, that his whole existence was one of apostasy, that he’d fallen for the wrong person, Rose, and was awaiting the disastrous result the same way Giddo had awaited death with a dry mouth, open and wordless. He bumped into Salafists marked with beards and prayer bruises, who smiled and never said a word of the white lady on his arm, though he braced himself each time like a dog awaiting a kick. He saw university kids, the rich ones with houses in the suburbs, who greeted him like he was one of their own and not a bumpkin from Mahalla. He came across round women with tight hijabs and the same tired eyes as his mother, who raised their fists to his face and said nothing but long live Egypt.
In Tahrir of all places—the vast roundabout that he crossed each day, dodging traffic and tissue peddlers—he belonged.
9
Suad hated El Shoun. There, dusty roads crisscrossed to form the sandpit it called a town square, and it stank permanently of hot fuel streaming from cooling towers that watched from above. There was about a twenty-to-one ratio of men to women in the street, and even at her age she could feel gooey eyeballs stuck to her rear end as it shook with each step. It was these moments in El Shoun that reminded her to be grateful for her lemon grove. Imagine, the closest some people would ever get to paradise—which to her, was the feeling of damp earth between her toes—were grains of sand lodged in their sweaty shoes. Poor souls, she thought, and lucky me.
But for all El Shoun’s unpleasantness, it was unavoidable—there were some things you couldn’t find in any old bodega. Suad was in search of molokhiya and basmati rice, pomegranate soda and that nauseating tobacco for Mahmoud’s pipe. The latter sat in a cupboard gathering dust since his last visit ages ago. She made a mental note to clean it when she returned home, just to give him one less reason to complain.
Today the crowds were thicker than usual. She strained to thread together all the disparate voices coming from car windows and market stalls. Camels and Tahrir. Thugs and the Pyramids. There was news and somehow those words were connected to it, and she was so distracted that she walked right past the spice souk and had to turn back. How could she help it? She was going on ten days with no word from Sami, and though he wasn’t the type to get caught up in protests, she could never be sure. She calmed herself with the belief that at the very least, God knew. He knew about every leaf in the trees, from its birth to the day it fell.
Much like God knew the fate of each of the dried rosebuds that lay in an open sack before her. In a spice shop in a dark alley, Suad held a bag of saffron and scanned the shopping list in her head. The roses weren’t needed tonight, though they always drew pause with their sweetness—buds snipped off at the stem, with un-sprouted petals ready to part and sprinkle over rice pudding. Around them, there were piles of sumac and thyme, hibiscus and dried chili, and a slew of powders of yellow and red and green, all the colors of the earth from brown all the way to the neon purple of indigo. The spices cast a complex musk around her, and she stood picking out individual threads of pepper and tartness, thinking of all the stews she could make with a stock like this—the best in town. Hagg Ali’s shop was a secret of hers, operating out of an open garage in an alley that was shaded by clotheslines. He sold Suad the saffron for a special price of twenty guinea, a perk of being the cousin of his brother-in-law.
Suad had just tucked the saffron into her purse when she saw the boy, about six or seven, with gangly limbs and a honey-brown face. There was a dimple in his chin, and his hair lay in soft waves that shone like silk. He chased a ball bouncing from one side of the alley to the other. When he scooped up the ball, he flashed a mischievous grin, and she realized that he must be the son of Gamal, the gas man.
“If you don’t stop it right now, I’ll rip that ball to shreds with my bare hands.”
A woman swooped in like a vulture, swathed i
n black, and yanked the boy off the ground. He smirked, holding the ball under his arm to protect it from those bare hands of hers. The woman still had the boy’s arm in a death grip as she passed Suad, who stared at her with enough intensity to elicit a sideways glance. It had to be Gamal’s wife. She hadn’t any proof, but her instinct told her it must be true, for Suad never got these feelings for no reason. The fact that the woman had felt her gaze and looked back was evidence enough. It was the intuition of romantic rivals, however many decades apart.
And as she walked home to that house on the edge of town—the house that was outside of Gamal’s gas route, where the city began to dissipate into fields of sugar, where she lost him forever—she could think of nothing but the woman’s face. She was young, no more than thirty. And come to think of it, her eyes were long and fringed with thick lashes like his. Suad was sure that she was his cousin, this bitch of a wife.
*****
Today was a day for pickling, and to prepare, Suad had amassed three bushels of lemons and still had a surplus left over. She sliced each with a cross and watched their rinds open up to expose pulp like a blossoming lotus, then sprinkled in a mixture of seeds and saffron flowers. One by one, she dropped each lemon into a bubbling pot, and as she stirred, she watched the contents swirl like loose leaves in a cup of tea, turning the water to the color of rust to match its earthen odor. She realized she had been staring into the pot for minutes now, watching each seed sink to the bottom. It felt a bit like looking into the Nile, which ran red during winter floods.
The last time Sami visited, Suad sent a container of pickled lemons back to Cairo with him, against his will. He said they would stink up the train, that the brine would leak into his luggage and destroy his textbooks and he’d never again be able to crack them open in class because of the unforgiveable stench. Suad pushed aside her annoyance—the stench, really?—and used her iron grip to seal the jar shut. She covered it in foil and plastic several times over, until finally, he accepted the will of his mother.