by Leila Rafei
“It was the best of cities, it was the worst of cities.”
“I don’t think you understand this place.”
She jerked her head up, looking straight at the sun. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe it’s a language issue.”
Her mouth formed a vague snarl, as if she would pounce if it weren’t for the heat. “Explain.”
“Well, for one, you keep calling Tora Prison as if it’s going to do anything for Jamila. It’s not. You’re just dragging this out, getting her hopes up that she’s going to find Yusuf’s body or better yet, find him alive. So stop. She’s going to need to make peace with not ever getting an answer, because she never will.”
“How are you so sure he’s dead?”
“Come on, Rose. You saw what they did to Khaled Said—and that was a regular middle class kid from Alexandria. Imagine what they’d do to someone like Yusuf. A refugee from Sudan. A worker. Black. You might think we’re all the same—”
“I don’t.”
“OK,” he said. Sure. “What I’m trying to say is, there are things you don’t see as an outsider. Things that I guess make it easier to say stuff like that. It was the best and worst city. Whatever. It’s just Cairo.”
She looked down at her shadow on the road. “I’m just trying to help.”
Somehow they were both defeated. He was about to sit back down when a red speck approached in the distance, traveling fast on a rough engine. Sami waved his arms frantically. This time the vehicle stopped. He shouted Cairo across the road, the driver nodded, and they were off.
Sami didn’t wake Rose when they reached Cairo’s city limits, where they were greeted with a text message:
To the young people of Egypt: beware of rumors and be reasonable. Egypt is above all else, so watch over her.
13
Kilo 4.5 greeted Jamila with a gap-toothed sneer. Here she was, back again at the edge of Cairo—at the precise point where the city crumbled into slums, where sand took the place of asphalt and only tuk-tuks could pass. With her face covered, she walked through dusty alleys praying she wouldn’t find a single sunflower seed in her path. The place bore little resemblance to the teeming neighborhood she knew—it was still—without so much as a motorbike passing through. The shoddy, lifeless buildings towered over her and seemed to grow, brick after brick without even a window to interrupt the monotony. She shuddered, almost smelling the dank must of those seed-strewn corridors inside.
When Jamila returned there, nights ago, she’d hoped to find some of her flatmates—like Khadija, the old woman from Dongola who’d raised six grandchildren within the four blocks of that slum, or Said, the bricklayer who got Yusuf his first job building a hotel overlooking the Red Sea, or even Abu Mikdad, the grumpy amputee who hobbled up and down stairs without a cane. But there was no one. Had they all gone to Tahrir, to the Nileside villages they came from? She figured it was just her luck—to be in a slum like 4.5, where each room was so packed that the floors sagged, and find herself once again, all alone.
In the morning, she walked to the highway and hitched the first microbus headed for Giza. As the bus sped onward, a text message screamed from her pocket, startling her. She was still jumpy from that last night in Ramses, when Sami’s phone rang for hours. Now she had Rose to ignore—ever since she returned from the Sinai, she’d been trying to reach Jamila with the same feverish persistence of the mother. And Jamila treated each attempt just like Sami did—by ignoring them. She swiftly deleted each message without reading it. There was a high chance Rose had found out what happened the other night, and Jamila didn’t want to hear what she had to say about it.
Jamila could never set foot in Ramses again and didn’t want to explain why. I spilled all your secrets to Sami’s mother. Well—not all of them, but she might as well have brought up the pregnancy too. The shame was so intense and her need to run so urgent that she even thought of changing her number again. If she ever could get ahold of Nilofone.
It was a relief not to find Rose’s name when she reached for her phone. Instead, it was a text from the far more preferable Supreme Council of the Armed Forces:
The army is guarding your safety and will not resort to using force against the great people.
The army again. They’d been texting her for days now. At first Jamila was confused—maybe they had the wrong number—but as the phones of passersby dinged in unison, she realized that the army was texting all of them. That relieved her, somewhat, of her fear of the inbox. It seemed less like a real message than something to fester in her pocket, like used tissues. Almost amusing in its lack of sense. She imagined mortal fingers punching those words into a keypad, pressing once, twice, thrice for each letter, one phone and one pair of hands to represent the entire army. An army so big it had planted tanks on nearly every street corner, full of skinny-boned soldiers so insignificant they fell asleep with guns in their laps. To think—those were the boys who would supposedly protect the people, all of Egypt’s people. The army and the people are one hand, or so it was said. But if that was the case then whose hand would grab her tonight?
A group of boys jumped off the back of the bus when they reached the outskirts of Tahrir, where bottlenecked crowds slowed traffic to a standstill. The rest of the passengers followed. Then it was only Jamila. As the bus rounded the square, she pulled her veil taut across her nose to avoid the smell of burnt rubber pouring in through cracked windows. It was the “Sunday of Martyrs,” she learned, and Tahrir was flooded with faces of the disappeared and deceased, their portraits bobbing solemnly above the crowds. She scanned each face, subconsciously looking for Yusuf’s—once again, she caught herself putting him in the same category. Martyr.
“Hey, honey.”
Jamila froze. Martyrs faded to sunflower seeds and rotten teeth, sweaty palms against her backside. She spun to see a boy blowing her a kiss through his open window the next car over. Maybe he knew the sunflower man. Maybe that’s why he used his nasty words. Maybe they were both in on this scheme to terrorize her from one end of the city to the other. She reminded herself that this was a city of twenty million, probably half harassers in their own right, and the likelihood of those two knowing one another was about the same as finding a diamond in the sea—or more aptly, a flea in a dumpster full of shit.
When she turned back even more boys crowded the window, snickering like rats. What did Dolores call them? Pieces of shit. It was a wonder their tongues weren’t hanging from their mouths as they feasted on what—her browbone? Any morsel of flesh was fair game, it seemed, and it never ceased to amaze her what little the veil did to curb any leering. The boys seemed amazed too—amazed that she looked back instead of cringing like every woman besides maybe their mothers, surely the only living females who’d stomach their piece-of-shit faces.
The thought of Dolores and her cigarette-puckered lips gave Jamila courage for some reason. There was someone she could share this with—someone who’d turn these pieces-of-shit into gold for her resettlement case. She wanted to stick her tongue out and taunt them, boast that she was going to America, and that they’d be stuck in that Tahrir microbus for eternity, sweating between vinyl and a dozen fat men. Instead, she had another idea. She slipped out her phone and held it up to the window. The boys nudged each other, excited. Then she took a picture. Click. A photo of dual purpose—to build her resettlement case and to see the looks of confused horror as she clicked.
Finally the bus broke from the traffic and they left the boys behind. She got off at the corniche, ready. Click.
*****
It was an unpleasant surprise when Jamila answered an unknown number the other night to hear the voice of none other than Mr. Salem, a former employer that she’d thought she was free of. New phone, he clarified. She bit her tongue as she imagined a thousand Nilofones throwing open their doors for him of all people. She would have hung up if she weren’t sleeping on a dir
ty floor in Km 4.5, empty bellied, holding her nose to suppress the stench of festering trash. She needed the money. That it would come from his sweaty, nasty hand was of less importance.
Jamila had been working for Mr. Salem for a year when he was arrested and sent to prison months ago. The wife took out her anger on Jamila and fired her swiftly—her work was no longer needed, aslan. Not one bit. Jamila never thought she’d hear from them again and was quite OK with it. But somehow, amid all the unrest, the riots, the revolution—a judge reopened Mr. Salem’s case and slammed down a gavel in his favor, dropping all charges of money laundering and terrorism. Now Mr. Salem was back, so Jamila was too.
She rationalized her decision to return to the Salem house with one, her desperation for money, and two, its proximity to the Nilofone headquarters in Mohandeseen. Before heading there, she stopped by the store, where she found a harried employee sorting through a three-foot stack of receipts. To her shock he let her in, which gave her a swell of hope that she tried to stifle just as quickly.
She said the usual, “Excuse me, sir, I need help.” Words she was tired of repeating.
“Well, I can’t help you,” said the man, shrugging.
She searched his eyes for the slightest sign of hope, but there wasn’t much to work with. He was an odd-looking man, with two small eyes set deep in the center of his face, like a plastic doll with its head smashed in. As he returned to the receipts, his forehead formed horseshoe-shaped trenches that deepened when he looked back up. Jamila wasn’t budging.
“What’s the matter, lady? Power’s out? Tap’s run dry? Out of cash? Loved one’s missing? Join the rest of us.”
“That’s not it.” She looked directly into those tiny eyes of his, just as she had looked at the boys in the bus, and told him exactly what she wanted. Phone records. Every last one. Now.
“Are you kidding?” Now his face wrinkled up like a sundried date, as if what she needed were so absurd, so outlandish, that it had aged him in a split-second. “There’s a revolution going on and you want your phone records?”
“Well, yes.”
“Look, lady. The computer’s not working. Printer’s out of ink. Network’s down. The whole world’s coming apart. All of our employees have either disappeared or gone on strike, or both. The backlog from the past week has me swimming in paperwork. It’s impossible.”
“But the other Nilofone said headquarters would have what I need.”
“Who told you that?”
“The man in Zamalek.”
“Zamalek? If there’s any store with the capacity to help right now, it’s that one. They’d never inconvenience the rich and the foreigners, and the rich foreigners—you know, all the people that got us in this mess we’re in today. The reason a kilo of tomatoes costs more than a carton of cigarettes. The reason I’m thirty-five and can’t afford to get married. The reason I have a business degree and yet, here I am.”
She stepped away from the glass. Now it was getting political. Maybe she should just agree with him—yes, flatter his woes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He nodded. She bit her lip.
“So, what can I do?”
“Go back to Zamalek and tell them the boss demands they give you your records. The president said everybody should go back to work, after all. It’s an order.”
“Are you the boss?”
“And you’re Nefertiti.”
Sighing, she slipped her phone back into her purse and walked away. Emptyhanded, still. But she was getting closer. One day she’d hold those records in her hands—even if she had to bash her way in and loot the place herself.
*****
Mohamed Salem’s home was unusually chipper that morning, festooned with fresh carnations on every table and console. Both TV news and radio Quran played over the crunching of newspaper pages, forming a static wave that rushed her as she walked through the front door, passing under a brass plaque bearing all ninety-nine names of Allah.
Abeer nodded to acknowledge her arrival. Mr. Salem greeted her with a sick grin. If he weren’t . . . well, him, then she’d almost feel sympathy. Post-prison, he was relishing his newfound freedom so much that he seemed incapable of knocking that smile off his face. He wore a sharp gray suit instead of his usual house galabia, and he glided around on the pads of his feet, as if he were dapper as Omar Sharif. He took every opportunity to catch his reflection—in the hallway mirror and the TV screen, even in the metal handles of the refrigerator door, which distorted his shape to make it thinner. And he was thinner indeed, after months of diarrhea and runny bean soup.
While he was locked up, Abeer had hired an Egyptian girl named Bayan from the slums of Manshayet Nasser who lived in a closet beside the youngest daughter’s bedroom. Today Bayan would work alongside Jamila—it turned out Mr. Salem really did need extra help, and it wasn’t just an excuse to see her. That night they were hosting a party that had set the whole house aflutter. There were guests to entertain, dishes to wash, rugs to beat. A pound of basbusa sat in the kitchen waiting to be served on their best gilded dish, and myriad teacups needed washing. They sent Bayan to the dry cleaners to pick up the rest of Mr. Salem’s suits as well as any spare chairs she could find on the street. Jamila eavesdropped as she cut the pastries into small diamonds, if only to distract from her hunger.
In the other room, Mr. Salem sat on a plastic-covered couch with his wife. He wore a pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose and another perched on his forehead—one for TV and the other for the newspaper—switching between the two as he and Abeer muttered excitedly about the news. Aho, look here. Listen to this. Can you believe it? It seemed the news had been good to Mr. Salem and his comrades—a regime man had agreed to meet with them to negotiate the demands of the revolution. Tonight they would host him along with senior leaders of the party. Jamila almost laughed imagining the vanity of all the chubby, bald men who would soon crowd the room. They would make sure to look their brotherly best—suits pressed, beards trimmed, many newly svelte after freshly cut prison sentences. She lit a stick of incense, waving the scent of oudh all around as if in protection.
Bayan came back with three strong knocks. Jamila opened the door to find her in working stance, crouched on bent knees. She handed over a bundle of warm, folded suits, and then ran down the stairs to return with two chairs stacked on her back, like a donkey. The two of them covered each seat with brocade cushions and arranged them along the walls of the living room, so that Mohamed Mohamed Salem’s guests could sit in a circle with their basbusa and tea and look each beaming, prayer-bruised face in the eye.
“This moment is ours,” said Mr. Salem through coffee-stained teeth. As Jamila collected his cup, she counted rings of residue on its rim. He’d refilled it four or five times that morning. It would be a long day, longer than she knew.
*****
Jamila should have seen the red flags. Mr. Salem had employed her upon recommendation from a broker in Nasr City—one who specialized in maids, and Sudanese ones in particular.
At first she was relieved. Mr. Salem seemed nothing like the bosses she’d been warned about. He wouldn’t even look her in the eye out of so-called piety, and he was jovial and treated her kindly. She found solace in the framed scripture hanging on his walls, the prayer bruise on his forehead, the lack of liquor in his cabinets. He seemed to be a real man of religion—more like an uncle than the frightening preachers on TV, who wagged the holy book in threat. That sentiment lasted a good week or so, until Mr. Salem’s hand made its way to her knee, and then her thigh, and then between her legs and to her breasts and even her swelling belly, which didn’t deter him. This upset her even more than if he was the usual suspect, a typical hair-gelled street specimen with no pretensions of piety. Just as she thought she’d found something she dearly lacked—someone to watch out for her in the way Fifi couldn’t—she lost it, just like that.
Mr.
Salem’s imprisonment brought Jamila a sweet respite, and she wouldn’t let herself feel bad about it. Besides, he’d been jailed and released many times before. She learned it was routine. Every couple of years—whenever there was an itch of unrest in the populace—policemen would come to the Salems’ door bearing badges. They would rifle the duplex for the man himself and all his paperwork, phones, and hard drives. Once, they held him down over the sink and shaved his beard with a dull razor before putting him in handcuffs, slapping him all the while. The most recent arrest happened just before parliamentary elections. This time his location was kept secret.
Jamila had thought he was dead. She assumed his family did too. And yet here he was today—two weeks into the revolution, and the only sign of his imprisonment was the belt pulled tight to keep up his pants.
“A man without a belly isn’t worth a penny,” he said, using the newspaper to muffle his laugh. Everything was a laughing matter now, even the memory of the arrest—and as such, he treated himself to more coffee, basbusa, and Jamila’s rear end.
She was bending over the table with a washcloth when she felt pressure on her backside. Not again. She tried giving him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was the backrest of the chair, for instance, or maybe it was only her imagination. But of course it wasn’t. The same terrible scenario was repeating itself just like the police rounding up bearded men to fill some monthly arrest quota. She was sure the police would be back again. It was only a matter of time. But he wasn’t thinking of that as he grasped her left cheek in his hand.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Abeer talking on the phone across the room. If she looked up at that moment, she would catch him in the act—or rather, catch Jamila and kick her out again. Abeer was jealous, somehow, as if she would rather be a maid groped in broad daylight, and not a relatively well-regarded wife. But Jamila couldn’t get fired—not before she got her money. So, she stood up calmly, broke free from his grip, and shuffled to the kitchen.