by Leila Rafei
Rose called out to him from up the trail. He jogged to catch up and found her bent over the ground, hands on her hips. “Look,” she told him, and he looked but could see nothing but dimples in the sand where drops of sweat had fallen. “It’s snakeskin.”
Sami peered closer and cringed. He hated snakes and even just the skin made him flinch. It was long and coiled, as if the snake was about to strike when the time came to shed. He touched it lightly with the toe of his shoe, resisting the urge to step on it and hear it crunch into pieces.
“Snakes are bad luck.”
“No, no. Don’t fall for that Adam and Eve nonsense. In the ancient world, snakes were good. They protected you. That’s why the Pharaohs had snakes all over their tombs.”
Adam and Eve nonsense? Rose was usually a little uncomfortable talking about religion, but this time she looked straight at him, eyes aflame in the golden light. When they first met she had told him she was Christian. Well, it was more like Christian, I guess. With time he learned that she never went to church and didn’t even know if she believed in God. He questioned whether he would have even started dating her if he’d known she wasn’t a believer. Not because he disagreed, necessarily, but because it was one more thing—one major thing—that made their relationship impossible. Rose as a non-Muslim was bad enough. But Rose as an unbeliever? That would knock his mother dead just at the thought. And Rose could never hold her tongue about it. Just like she could never refrain from questioning everything Sami thought he knew. She was probably right, but he couldn’t help throwing out a counterargument, if only to shake the confidence with which she explained his own country to him. All he could think of, though, was something straight out of Suad’s mouth.
“That was the age of ignorance. Later, the Prophet said: If you see a snake, kill it.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“In the Hadith, the Prophet’s companions come across a snake while traveling through caves. They wanted to kill it, but it got away. And the Prophet said . . . What was it?” He squinted in the sun, feeling sweat form in the lines on his forehead as he dug deep into memories of being a boy with the Quran in his hands, his mother quoting verses for every childhood calamity he encountered—scraped knees and cat scratches and the ilk. He’d never really forgotten. “Ah, yes. ‘It has escaped your evil and you too have escaped its evil.’ So I guess it’s complicated.”
“I like that. The snake is neither good nor bad. Like all of us.” The faint lines around her eyes deepened with shadows, turning her into an old woman for a moment. “Sort of like the ouroboros.”
“Aurora-whattus?”
“I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s an ancient symbol, a snake eating its own tail to form a circle. The beginning and the end. The circle of life, that sort of thing. You know, poetic.”
He looked back at the snakeskin and pictured it consuming itself from front to end. It seemed more demonic than poetic. Rose may be right, but he wouldn’t want any such thing on his tomb.
*****
The sun had fully set by the time they reached the camp. Nothing was visible in the dark—not the mountains, not the sea, not any huts. Only a few lanterns glowed in the distance like fireflies. They followed the firefly lights to the main hut, where a tethered goat bleated as they passed. A lantern approached them, and behind it, the silhouette of a man beckoned hello.
“Ahlan wa sahlan, y’all. Welcome.”
The accent gave him away. It was the camp owner, Zane, who spoke muddled Arabic with an inextinguishable American twang, product of an upbringing by assimilationist immigrants. Now he’d come back to the motherland after his koshari restaurant went under. It seemed to Sami that Egypt was the natural choice for disgruntled Westerners, Rose included. She and Zane got along, but to Sami he was a strange creature, one who was neither American nor Egyptian. Even his appearance confused him, with brown skin and a familiarly Pharaonic face, Crocs on his feet.
“Party’s about to start,” he said, speaking loudly as if it was important that each mundane word be heard. He whistled and a dog ran to his side, tongue flopping out of her mouth. “Come with me.”
A wedding was about to begin. They followed him to a roped-off area on the beach, where a handful of campers sat under gas-and-wick lights. They pushed their way to the front, clapping and trilling, as a man in his best galabia walked around with a tray of tea and date cookies.
Sami was surprised by how young the bride and groom looked—even younger than him. But he wasn’t so young anymore, after all. His eyes stuck to the bride, in pink-and-gold sequins. She must be about eighteen, a little younger than Ayah and older than his mother when she got married. She was still in that razor-thin stage between childhood and adulthood, when life branched off into two paths, one for a continued adolescence and one for a fast-track to motherhood and old age and tired eyes. Rose had taken the former route. Maybe they could be together if she hadn’t—if she were more like the girl in pink-and-gold sequins.
Both bride and groom appeared to sulk before their guests, who seemed to be having a better time. There was no hand holding, no entwined fingers. Their eyes glinted with uncertainty and not joy. It was the first time Sami was even looking for that sort of thing. He suspected he wouldn’t have noticed at all if he’d stayed away from Rose like he was supposed to. If he had followed the rules, he would have gone on with life unaware, not quite blissful but content to pass his nights alone in the dorms. He’d go home on weekends and wile away his youth until the time came to arrange a meeting with a girl and her family, where they would drink tea and eat honeyed sweets and decide, in the course of an hour or so, whether they should spend the next half century together, to create other human beings together, to die and be buried together.
Now things would be harder for him.
After the wedding, Zane brought a birthday cake to their hut. The cook and his son, the busboy, trailed behind, clapping and singing to a bashful Rose, who closed her eyes and blew out each sparkling candle. When Sami asked what she wished for, she squeezed his hand and said she was too old to have wishes, even though she was only a year older than him and he still had plenty. Like his wish, for instance, that she hadn’t squeezed his hand when he asked. He spent some time deciphering the meaning of that squeeze as he waited for Zane and his sidekicks to leave.
Once they were alone, Sami gave Rose the journal. She seemed to love it—from what he could see of her candlelit face, at least. She lay on her belly in the sand beside him, doodling patterns like snakeskin onto its yellowed, unused pages. As she drew, he ran his fingers through her hair and felt strands snap away like thin bands of elastic.
“I fried it as a teenager,” she said, not looking up from the page. “Dyed it every color you could think of.”
“I saw the blue,” said Sami, coughing through smoke. She’d shown him her yearbook picture from tenth grade, unrecognizable with glasses and short blue hair. Are you sure that’s you? It was, she’d nodded. Obviously.
“Oh, there were so many more colors. First I tried red, which seemed less extreme, like I was just dipping a toe in. Red is a real hair color, right? Just not the fire-engine kind. Then it was purple, which was just pretty. Complemented my eyes or something. I wanted to look nice for my first boyfriend, Louie Ramirez. Ah, I remember him.”
In the shadows he made out a wistful smile. Louie? That was the first he’d heard of him. Sami already knew she had a past, which he tried not to hold against her despite the fact that he, decidedly, did not. Well, in grade school there was a girl named Sondos who picked jasmine (and got in trouble for it) just to leave petals on his desk. But Rose was his first actual girlfriend. It wasn’t uncommon for guys his age, but he still got embarrassed about it when Rose reminded him that he was not hers. Who was this Louie from tenth grade? It seemed so strange to share something so personal—Rose—with someone he’d never even heard of. Were they anything alike
? Sami in Louie, Louie in Sami? He tried to act cool, uncaring, not jealous at all, as he blew smoke into the breeze and asked her what happened.
“Oh. He drove off a cliff.”
Sami gulped.
“I’m kidding,” she said, nudging his knee. “I don’t know what happened to Louie. After he dumped me, I was so upset I dyed my hair blue. That was my way of screaming. I guess for his attention. Never got it. Never heard from him again.”
“He just . . . poof?”
“Yup. Anyway, after that it was green for a little bit. Then it was blonde or black, when I was feeling modest.” She picked up the ends of her hair, now a dull brown. “All the colors of the rainbow, and now this.”
“Didn’t you get into trouble with your parents?”
“At first, sure. My dad even shaved it off once. But later on they were too distracted by the divorce and all. So, they gave up. Now my dad even thinks it’s cool.”
“No way,” said Sami, though he might have had the same reaction. At first, absolutely not. More reasonable in hindsight. As for Sami, his hair had always been the same, short and practical, just long enough to show its curl. He’d never even thought about it before. It was an unconscious choice to remain that way, the same, all the way to his twenties, and probably to eighty if need be. She said it was what she liked about him. He was so pure—and she wouldn’t say it, but he knew—so simple.
They laid in the sand until eight p.m. sharp, when the electricity was cut according to schedule. Most campers retreated to their huts, but he and Rose pulled their mattresses outside so they could sleep under the open sky. She fell asleep quickly, as usual, leaving him all alone in the pitch-black night.
From his pocket, he took out the shell he stole from the canyon and fiddled with it in his hands, running his fingers over its roughness to visualize what he couldn’t see in the dark. A million years ago, it must have been a full scallop shell—white and fanned out in ridges, with a conjoined twin that had since been lost. It reminded him of a seashell he once stole from a souvenir shop in Alexandria when he was a kid. He must have been six or seven, and had never felt an urge to take what wasn’t his until he saw that pretty shell sitting on a shelf. He slipped it into his pocket as his mother bargained with the shopkeeper over teacups. The whole day he walked stiff with the shell in his pocket, avoiding Suad. She gave him a few looks, but he was able to keep the shell undetected until later that night, when he sat before Giddo and wanted to show it off. But when Sami took it out of his pocket, there was only a pile of broken pieces in his open palm. Giddo picked out a shard and as he looked back, Sami burst into tears and confessed.
Sami turned over, smiling in the dark. Stealing was wrong, of course, but that day in the shop he had felt a sudden impulse of so what as he reached for the shell. Almost like stealing was something he ought to try sooner or later, anyway, as if he’d have to learn his lesson firsthand. And he did, because the seashell didn’t last long in his pocket. That Giddo kept his secret only bonded them more.
The memory swelled his heart until his chest felt like an overblown balloon that could pop with one breath. Why did Giddo have to go? There were so many things he wanted to talk to him about—Cairo and classes and all the new people he’d met, maybe even Rose. Giddo was only in Sami’s life when he was too young to know better.
But death was inevitable. That was Sami’s only solace—that it was going to happen sooner or later. All the people he loved would one day leave him, just like Giddo and before him, his grandmother Teta, who died of some parasite from the tap that feasted on her insides until all her organs were hollowed out. Giddo changed after she died. He no longer erupted into bouts of laughter when he watched Adel Imam movies, and when he scooped Sami and Ayah into his arms, he smiled in a sad way, as if there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t. Day by day he became more silent. He no longer liked to eat, and not even stuffed pigeon would entice him. He stopped watching his films. Newspapers lay stacked, unread at his bedside. Whenever Umm Kalthoum came on the radio he switched it off. Eventually he didn’t listen to anything at all.
Sami didn’t understand it back then and, in fact, probably complained that Giddo was boring, but now he knew—it was because everything reminded him of Teta. Happy songs, sad songs. Good news, bad news. Stuffed pigeon, baladi bread. Tea with three scoops of sugar and mint, tea with nothing at all. There was only one picture of Teta—on her wedding day in 1965—but Giddo gave it to Suad to tuck away, and never asked for it again.
Like everything else, Sami’s relationship with Rose was doomed to die. But it could have lasted a bit longer—could have, if it weren’t for their big mistake. Now there was no way to continue, to what—bring a baby born out of wedlock to a formerly blue-haired foreigner home to meet his mother? Suad, queen of lemons, slayer of weeds, keeper of the Quran. Archenemy of everything Rose was about.
Sami turned back toward Rose, who lay facedown on her pillow. The moon lit the edges of her hair so that it looked silver. He imagined wiping out her shape with the pink tip of an eraser, starting with her moonlit hair, moving down her shoulders and to her toes sticking out of the blanket. What would it be like when she was no longer there? Would it hurt? Would it grip him by the neck, turn the scent of jasmine to a noose? Would he grit his teeth whenever a particular song came on the radio? He probably wouldn’t be able to listen to any song or hell, even look at any couple ever again. He was screwed. The best he could hope for was to get hit in the head with a shovel and go back to Mahalla dumb enough to be happy.
He sat up and faced the sea, which sparkled with phytoplankton. Like diamonds strewn across the shoreline. What appeared to be magic was nothing more than a horde of microorganisms which, by some chemical reaction, happened to glow a particular way that night. He envied the way he once was, a child who could be enchanted by the sea and take it as a sign that what was written was written and his mother’s word was truth. But Sami was no longer a child, and his mistakes couldn’t be cleaned up with a Band-Aid and a slap.
11
It probably wasn’t smart to use her last guineas to get to Tora prison, but Jamila had no choice. She hadn’t heard an update from Rose and was too shy to ask before she left for Ras Shaitan. Now Jamila was days away from contact, and waiting was not an option. She reminded herself that what kept her up at night was only a sidenote for others—especially others like Rose, with life-changing secrets in her trash.
What made Jamila’s trip even more reckless was that she half-expected to find Tora in the same state as Nilofone—closed, empty, ransacked perhaps. Whatever the equivalent for a prison and not a store. But she had to try. She ended up finding the prison very much in service, and wrapped around its concrete perimeter was a line full of family members of the arrested and disappeared. Many carried portraits of those they were seeking, which made it seem as if they were already dead. Jamila was well aware that she was probably wasting her time. There were a thousand others dealing with the same or even worse right before her, and she of all people would never get what she needed from a building whose entrance was marked with a tank. They’d roll right over her, squash her to dust. Not even St. Fatima’s would find out. Nevertheless, she had come all this way, so she took a spot on the wall and stayed until the sun began to set. At that point she gave up and left. She had a house to clean in Zamalek that evening, and a wallet to replenish.
She squeezed into a river-bound microbus with all the others who’d given up for the day—there were many, too many to fit—and found herself pinned against the window like an Eid sheep on an overloaded truck. Glass to cheek, her mind wandered back to Tora. Dealing with the guards required a strong character, a loud voice and a long stride. Like Rose, for example. Her nationality would work in her favor, but that was about it. And Sami? Forget about it. He couldn’t face his mother, let alone a prison guard. No, there was one person who could help her, and that person was none other than
Miss Fifi Shafik. Rich and well-known, she had the necessary wasta to march into Tora and get answers from guards who’d shrink in her shadow. One look at the glamorous woman—jewels dangling from overstretched earlobes, voice thickened not from smoke, but screaming—would send the officers into a servile panic. Yes, madam, please, madam, as you wish, madam. Jamila caught herself smiling, lips curling upward against the glass.
Then again, Fifi could just as well smash Jamila’s mission to pieces. Her fame wasn’t enough to absolve her of a certain reputation. The retired actress, who’d made a fortune in soap operas broadcast from Rabat to Baghdad, was a touch too brazen both on-screen and off with her many marriages and risqué gowns. Her bosom quite literally hung over the 6 October bridge, cleavage bared atop sweetheart necklines on the sort of billboards that made mothers cover their sons’ eyes. Not even age could quell her lascivious name—in fact, it only worsened it. She resented getting older and the dimming stardom that came with it, and the vigor with which she compensated made her look even more shameless. Nobody wanted to see all that. She was teetering into menopause, on the brink of old-womanhood, at the age too many twenty- and thirtysomethings associated with their mothers. And yet Fifi was the kind of woman that men thanked God bore no blood relation. One Ramadan, after she was photographed drinking on a cruise ship, a pair of thugs on a motorcycle chucked red paint at the front steps of her villa. Jamila remembered it well—she was the one who had to clean it up. As she mopped the steps, spilling red paint like the blood of slaughter onto the street, she listened to neighbors who came out to watch and whisper. They all knew the target—brazen, shameless, irrepressible Fifi Shafik.