by Leila Rafei
“What have you done, Ayah?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mama.”
“This is because of you, you and that khara you read all day.”
That’s what she was reading. Shit. Ayah knew it as she looked down at her bare feet, toes painted purple to match some despoiled bottle on her vanity. Her glasses slipped down her nose and almost fell to the floor. Since the men left, she’d taped them together, but they were still slightly askew. Now they had to be tucked into the folds of her hijab just to stay intact. Suad almost felt pity until Ayah looked up from the floor and took in a quick breath, about to say something horrific. “Speak up,” said Suad, before she even got any words out. “Tell me what was in that computer. Go on.”
“Nothing was inside of it, mama. I was just posting things online.”
“What kind of things?”
Her eyes darted back to the floor. “Just some . . . stuff. Nothing important. The news, for example.”
Suad threw up her hands. “Oh OK, it’s just stuff. Thank God! Tell me, what kind of stuff are we talking? Stuff about the weather? Classwork? Football scores? Your own ass?”
“There’s a group called the Youth Movement. About the guy the police killed in Alexandria.”
Suad crossed her arms. She couldn’t recall his name but assumed there was good reason for the police to do what they’d done. Anyway, what did that guy have to do with it? She prodded her daughter to explain, and learned that little Ayah hadn’t been as idle as she seemed. Apparently, she’d been running some kind of online gang called a Facebook group—a circle of troublemakers posting stories so obscene they put Nagwa’s gossip to shame. She thought of the pictures she’d shown her today, the men on horses and camels tearing through Tahrir with machetes. Oh, Ayah. What had she done?
“They must have tracked me through the IP address.”
“The what?”
“It’s like, say, the computer’s fingerprint.”
That didn’t make things any clearer. In fact, it made things worse.
“Enough!” Suad got up and fumbled with the remaining wires but couldn’t make sense of them. Why on earth were there so many? Blue, red, black. Thick ones, thin ones. In her day they didn’t have such things. Children were obedient, men were decent. There was no such thing as BookFace or Tweet-tweet or IP whatevers. None of this would have happened. Suad would still have some dignity, and the drawer would have remained locked. Now the whole world might as well have seen all her letters and the red underwear that Mahmoud had brought into her home to punish her alone.
With a grunt, she yanked the monitor from the wall and carried it to the window facing the lemon grove. Ayah screamed. Suad didn’t look back as she chucked it out the window and watched it crash into a tangle of chips and wires. She still didn’t quite understand why the men had been after its contents, but she knew enough. They should be safe, and as long as that thing was in her home, they weren’t.
As Suad walked back to her bedroom, she heard Ayah sniffling, and the sound of Nagwa’s balcony door swinging open. God forgive her.
10
Sami spent all morning trying to convince Rose not to go to the beach. It was unsafe. Illogical. Unnecessary. Who cared that it was her birthday? It wasn’t even a milestone like her eighteenth or thirtieth. Besides, they were just at the beach only weeks ago, when they spent New Years’ Eve in Alexandria. Granted, it was a terrible trip, wracked with rain and bickering. Rose shot him a look when he brought it up.
“Look, we already bought the bus ticket, booked the room. No refunds,” she said, as if the money at stake weren’t about the cost of a sandwich back home. But she wouldn’t budge. It was her birthday and they would do as she said.
In the end Sami packed his bags halfheartedly, grumbling all the while at Rose’s insistence on going—as if nothing had ever happened in Tahrir or even worse, that none of it mattered.
The streets were particularly deserted at dawn. He’d gotten used to this new Ramses, which had steadily decreased in bustle since that first night of the uprising. There wasn’t a taxi or tuk-tuk in sight. Clear asphalt was visible from curb to curb and from the north and down its southern direction. He counted five lanes he never knew existed beneath the usual tangle of traffic, which paid them no mind anyway. There were no loitering crowds on the sidewalks, and the kiosks and black-market vendors were gone from their curbside posts. Shops that were supposed to be open 24 hours, like Abu Ali’s pharmacy and the shawarma chain across the way, were still shuttered. The overpass in the distance, too, was empty. Not even a single stray cat rummaged through trash. It looked apocalyptic, like some virus had wiped out the millions of inhabitants, like every car, bus, and donkey cart in the entire city had simply vanished in a matter of days.
Even at that early hour, Ramses should have been wracked with car horns, shouting drivers with road rage, random bursts of pop radio, cats screeching and mothers hollering from rooftops. It should have been impossible to pick out any one word or voice over the vast din—and yet today, each breath echoed down the empty boulevard.
“Watch out,” said Rose, grabbing his arm.
But it was too late. Sami tripped over a tin can that clanged like a siren against the asphalt. He reached down to pick it up, if only just to silence it, and found it was no can of beans or Pepsi. It was an empty tear gas cannister. He thought it would sting his fingertips but its power had been spent, the tin bent and punctured, full of nothing but air. On its side was etched made in the USA.
Rose shook her head but said nothing. She seemed embarrassed but he didn’t understand. If anyone should be embarrassed it was him, an Egyptian, victim to imported weapons so meaningless to their financers that they didn’t even know about them. A can worth pennies and not even a passing thought. She hadn’t even known that she was paying to crush Tahrir. That’s how big America was, and how rich. It could change the entire course of Egypt’s history without even the knowledge of its own citizens. He knew it wasn’t her fault but he couldn’t help but feel bitter. It was so easy to be her, to move through life boundless and unaware of the terrible power she held. To make a huge mistake like having a child out of wedlock and not even worry about telling her parents. She was worried about feeding it, bathing it, sending it to school. Gah! He’d be lucky if he even survived telling Suad. It was so easy for her, and so difficult for him.
“Jesus. Propaganda much?”
Rose pointed to a massive billboard in the intersection that seemed to have been erected overnight, reading: the army and the people are one hand. On it was a soldier, two stories tall, with a rifle on his back and a baby in his arms. Sami’s eyes fell to the ground, trying to find another tear gas cannister to divert his attention. Babies would not stop tormenting him, even in the streets, at six a.m. and in the middle of a revolution. Nobody mentioned it—not Rose, not even the billboard itself. It was just a baby, held in the soldier’s brawny arms over the silent boulevard. Unexplained, unremarkable. Unlike their own. He jerked his head up when Rose laughed.
“Why is it funny?”
“Because nobody asked. It’s almost as if the army doth protest too much. Suspicious, no?”
“They say they’re neutral.”
“Neutral is as neutral does.”
“Neutral doesn’t kill people,” said Sami. Though soldiers were now posted all over the city center, they remained on the sidelines of protests, never raising a hand to—well, their other hand. It was good enough for him.
“Well, the show ain’t over until . . . you know.”
“Until what?”
“Until the fall of the regime.”
“Shhhh,” he said, squeezing her arm.
“Oh, come on. As if the streets aren’t screaming the exact same thing.”
The billboard’s tagline replayed in Sami’s head as they approached, trying to make sense of it. I
f the army and the people were one hand, and the people were revolting against the president, did that mean the army was too? It seemed impossible. The president himself had been an officer and in fact, so had every other president since the last fez-wearing prince was ousted in 1953. Damn. Sometimes it seemed like Sami was the only person in the entire country who hadn’t served.
Exemption from military service was the one good thing about being an only son, but Sami wasn’t sure if it was worth the expectation in return. Watching friends leave for conscription had always been a little embarrassing—as if he’d intentionally slipped through the cracks to avoid duty. At least he hadn’t gotten off using an excuse like sweaty hands or flat feet. Overactive bladder, even. Ailments that were only ailments for rich kids who could enclose a wad of cash with the doctor’s note. Those types were never ashamed. But could he really blame them? Who would actually want to serve, other than this twenty-foot-tall soldier standing above him? Sami had heard enough about conscription to know it was even worse than he’d imagined, and nothing like the movies. Grueling months spent alone at far-flung Saharan outposts. Horrible food like cold, congealed foul. No beards, no hair longer than the width of a rolled-up grape leaf. One would think he’d be used to all those rules growing up in Suad’s household, but on the contrary, it made him intolerant of the kind occurring anywhere else. So, he found himself in the uniquely Sami position of feeling guilty for something he was happy to avoid.
He remembered a classmate, Hamza, who did a stint at the Libyan border last year. He’d enlisted as a fat boy with B-cups and pear-shaped hips and returned a reed with cheekbones jutting out of his face. The first thing he did was collapse onto his dormitory bed— a stiff mat covered in scratchy sheets that now felt like a cloud in paradise. Even worse than the army’s bad beds and food was that Hamza hadn’t seen a single female for seven months straight. Not one girl. Not a plain girl, not an ugly girl, and certainly not a pretty girl. Not even a brash, beat-you-over-the-head-with-a-slipper lady like Umm Akbar from the ticket booth at the Mahalla train station. Wallah el azim, said Hamza, I swear to God—even all the bugs in the sand had dicks. And when he closed his eyes at night, all he saw was Captain El Guindy’s unibrow growing thicker and blacker with each drop of sweat borne from the Saharan sun.
Still, service might have helped Sami atone for his misdeeds. It would have made his father proud, and especially Giddo, who must be looking down at Sami two years after his death, watching to see what his role would be in this sea change. And what would he see? Sami in plainclothes, with not a government gun but a camera from Japan found in a junk pile. Hair a touch too long like he liked to wear it, a style unacceptable to those of Giddo’s generation who thought nothing of self-expression and frivolous choices that devalued those of his mother. Like the girl beside him. What would Giddo think? Would he give him a pat on the back for getting a girlfriend in a city full of sexually frustrated youth? And a white girl at that—the kind of girl who, back in his day, would visit the Pyramids in hoopskirts and sunhats and wouldn’t mind sharing a camel’s saddle with a man pressed up against them, one leg on each side, shameless. Showgirls like the singer Dalida, a former Miss Egypt who wasn’t in fact Egyptian, whose photo Giddo had cut out of a magazine and kept hidden in the pages of a book deep in his closet. Sami had found it one day when they were cleaning out his belongings. He didn’t like the thought of his grandfather looking at that whittle-waisted bombshell dressed in a leopard-print bikini. Like he was any other man. Men who were less upright, men who hissed at women in the street. Men who wouldn’t look the same way at Faten Hamama or Hind Rostom, because they had husbands and fathers and brothers just like them and didn’t smile as big and as . . . shameless. Is that how he would see Rose?
Sami didn’t know why Giddo was supposed to be superhuman and why seeing that pinup had disturbed him so much that he took it home and burned it with the end of a cigarette. He supposed Giddo would have wanted that. As would Sami. In time, he would forget about the destroyed photo and restore his grandfather to his rightful status as a national hero, like the soldier on the billboard with the baby and the gun.
The bus station was closed, but somehow still operating. It was full of vehicles for hire, most incoming, carrying protesters from outside the city, dozens at a time. He ignored Rose’s I-told-you-so look as they caught the first ride east, got off at Suez, and paid a Bedouin to take them through the Sinai.
It was a seven-hour trip, hellish at parts—winding up mountains, cutting through the desert as the vehicle palpably overheated. Sami had wanted to catch up on sleep, but the radio distracted him. Dalida. Of all the singers, of all the songs, it had to be Dalida singing my beautiful country, my beautiful country, reminding Sami of the very things he didn’t need to be reminded of—things meant to be buried in a closet, burned with a match. The radio signal cut so frequently that he couldn’t tell if it was replaying over and over or whether it was an uncut version that happened to be seven hours long. Yet the driver refused to change it. NileFM was the only station that got signal in the Sinai—sometimes, here and there—and he needed the sound to stay awake.
“You don’t want to me to drive you into the sea, do you?”
Sami saw his eyes laughing, lines like tobacco spreading across the rearview mirror. Yes, he thought. As a matter of fact, he did.
The driver had to stop several times to ask for directions to their camp at Ras Shaitan, which was so remote it was unfindable on a map. It didn’t help that the place’s name, which translated to devil’s head to match the shape of a huge rock jutting out of its coast, sounded made up—too on the nose given the circumstance. It was favored by people who didn’t want to be found—bohemian types and strange lone travelers who backpacked from camp to camp for months on end. There, for a few American dollars you could rent a hut by the night and watch the sea lap at its doorstep. Sami never quite saw the appeal of those huts. To him they were no different from Bedouin camps on the road—four walls of straw tied together around a gravel floor, holding nothing but mosquito nets and cushions for beds. The kind of place only the poor would live.
“Yeah, but you don’t have to be married to stay together,” said Rose.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we can stay together in a hut and we don’t even have to show a marriage certificate.”
He could see in her eyes that she regretted bringing it up, though she didn’t stop. She never stopped. Sometimes it seemed she was testing him, pushing to see where he would break, where he would throw his hands in the air and give up, hitch a ride back to Cairo and leave her in her little hippie camp in the desert. Still, he knew their trip would be useless if they stayed at a normal hotel, where they’d have to rent separate rooms. For all the sneaking around they did already, climbing through a window in the middle of the night didn’t sound so romantic. It was what usually put him off traveling—that inevitable roadblock when a hotelier would act like the most intrusive of doormen and ask for a marriage document before handing over the room keys. They had found a way around the issue for now, but it was still an issue, an issue for not only hotels but above all, Suad. Uncomfortably, he found himself repeating her words, which were of course rooted in the Quran, uttered in her hushed morning voice. No leaf falls without his knowledge. In the Sinai there were no leaves, but only the open sky.
And there was plenty of sky. They spent the first day of their trip climbing up a stupid mountain, where the sun was brutal even in its waning hours, flinging rays of heat off sides of rock like prisms. For some reason Rose wanted to celebrate her birthday doing this—this thing called hiking—which to Sami seemed like hard labor, something you’d do out of necessity if you were stranded without a car or bike or even donkey. A last resort if you were dying of thirst or running from some bloodthirsty villain on your tail. Certainly not a pastime.
Sami shaded his eyes and stared longingly at the sea way down at the foot of
the mountain. The water appeared to glitter as it lapped the parched shore. Cool and crystalline, with low, languid waves. If he were wearing a watch, he’d be counting the minutes until they could return to the beach. For now, he had only the length of his shadow, which told him it was about midway between afternoon and sunset prayers. He was about to say they should head back soon but bit his tongue. Rose shouldn’t hear complaining on her birthday, no matter how twisted her idea of fun may be. His complaints were nonverbal, instead—smoking cigarettes, keeping a few paces behind her, saying nothing of the harsh, jagged landscape that enthralled her.
“Imagine,” she said, turning to face him. “Millions of years ago, this whole mountain was underwater.” She pointed to the cliffside, which was speckled with holes like tiny caves. “See? There was once seaweed and coral and fish. Now it’s all gone, wiped out. A mini-Armageddon.”
Sami ran his hand along the rocks, feeling grooves for each line of sediment marking layers of prehistory—like wrinkles or fingerprints or, as Rose said, like rings inside the trunks of trees. Today was just another layer of rock, wasn’t it? So insignificant it didn’t even warrant its own line. Untraceable in the grand scheme of things. One day, both he and Rose would be long gone, as gone as the fish that lived there before, and all their worries would prove to be in vain, turned to fossils underneath layers of rock.
He crouched and grabbed a handful of sand. It was full of hard bits that sifted like grains of rice through his fingers. One piece was larger than the others and remained in his hand. He held it up to the light. Smooth, white. Ridged on one side and tucked into a faint coil underneath. It was only a broken shell—not the bone he feared. He tucked it into his pocket just before Rose could see. Defiling nature? Taking what wasn’t his? She wouldn’t understand why he took it, why it reminded him of his childhood and of his grandfather. Giddo would have understood.