by Leila Rafei
He followed her and placed a syrupy plate beside the sink.
“Here you go, chocolata.”
She could feel his eyes stuck to her like the damp legs of flies. For a man who wouldn’t make eye contact, he was remarkably comfortable looking at her body. In the end she was saved by Abeer, who shouted for him from the living room.
“Mr. Hegazy is calling. Yalla.”
Mr. Salem took one last look at her swollen, tired body, his gaze as sick as a tongue’s lick.
*****
Jamila survived the day by thinking of freshly baked bread and the clang of guineas. Mr. Salem came through in more ways than one. In the evening he handed her a few American bills, assuring her that the exchange rate worked in her favor.
“Nobody wants Egyptian pounds anymore. We want dollars, dollars, dollars.”
But there was one more thing before she could go. His two hands swam around her veiled body to find her backside, which he squeezed while looking at the wall over her shoulder. She imagined vomiting right in his face, ruining that new suit he’d already stained with crumbs and coffee. While his hands were on her ass, she thought of the crisp bills in her purse, estimating their worth in loaves of bread. Three loaves, four loaves, five loaves, maybe even a dozen if she went for government fino instead of the standard baladi. By the time Mr. Salem was satisfied, she’d settled on a larger quantity of cheaper bread, which she’d buy later from the souk under the 6 October overpass.
Free at last, she flew down the stairs, horrified at her ability to tally off errands under the grip of his grimy hand.
14
When Suad gave the butcher her order, she almost said Jamila instead of the whole rabbit she was really after. Luckily, she caught herself in time. It would have been an odd word to utter over a steel countertop smeared with blood—a name meaning beauty. Jamila, Jamila. She repeated the name in her head as she watched the butcher pound meat with a mallet, one syllable for each beat. It was thanks to that woman that she’d learned what her son was up to.
That night on the phone, she’d been speechless, unsure of what to make of her claim. He’s with her. Rose. One syllable to house the catastrophe unfolding. After that call she couldn’t bring herself to dial Sami again, though she tried many times, punching in the numbers and then hanging up before it would let out even one ring. She’d rehearsed what to say over and over: Look, I was young once too. I know it might be fun to run around town with that woman, but it’s not proper. It’s not correct. Who do you think you are, Omar Sharif? You think we’re in Ba-rees? You think you can lie to your mother, ooh la la, and get away with it? Even her rehearsals devolved into breathless tirades. She thought she might compose herself better if she used the words of the president himself. There is a thin line between freedom and chaos. The latter would come inevitably the longer he strayed. He would turn into some kind of wild animal, like that man swinging a machete from a camel’s back in Tahrir.
But Suad remained tongue-tied when her lips met the receiver. In the end she decided to sit back and wait, see how long it took for him to reach out—the same game she tried playing a hundred years ago when he never called on the anniversary of Giddo’s death. And she thought that was a tragedy. Now look at this mess in her hands—a son turning fast into a Tahrir hooligan.
The butcher finished hacking off a leg of lamb, wrapped it in paper, and handed it to her along with a kilo of rabbit. When he said goodbye, she almost answered with the name again, Jamila. Oh, that woman. She didn’t know whether to curse her or sing her praises for delivering the news.
Suad walked through the dust-choked alleys of the souk until she reached the vegetable stand, where she needed to buy a bushel of molokhiya. There, she found an assortment of leaves gathered in bunches with rubber bands, and she fondled each, one by one, to find the best batch. She knew to look for dark leaves, quenched with a good winter rain. When she picked the winner, she gave it to the vendor to weigh. Her mind wandered to Sami again. What would she do about him? She needed to find him a wife, marry him off before he gave her a heart attack. It wouldn’t be hard to find a more desirable partner than that Da-lee. A girl from the family, or the daughter of a friend. Someone who’d never embark on a premarital romance, let alone take a sordid holiday during revolution. A girl with upright morals and the bloody sheets to prove it. Sami wasn’t thinking of these things now because he was still a foolish boy. One day he would, and she was sure of it, because mothers knew best.
“Here you go, Umm Sami,” said the vendor as he gave her the molokhiya. It was as if he could read her thoughts. Disturbing.
An album of girls flipped through her mind as she dug through her purse. Who had she missed? There was Basant, the daughter of Mona, with thick hair that was rumored to flow down to her plump bottom. Soon she would graduate from university, prime time for engagement these days. And there was Salsabeel, the neighbor girl. She wasn’t quite ideal herself, having recently discovered the garish style of pop stars in billboards and—God forbid—prostitutes in the cabarets. Face smeared with a pallor, eyelids dusted in alien shades of green and blue, inky brows strong as tattoos. Even her hijab was a problem—massive and showy, always in tart hues of candy. She followed the awful trend of pinning her hair with clips and pom-poms and God knows what else—koshari takeout boxes, for all Suad knew—so that it looked like she had endless mounds of air piled under her scarf. Then there was the spandex that clung, wrist to ankle, to every curve of her hourglass figurine. Such fashions didn’t exist in Suad’s day. Back then, the only way to show off the goods was with an open window and an outgrown dress.
Anyway, Suad would consider her. There was nothing like the discovery of that woman to make a girl like Salsabeel look suitable. What man could say no to a girl like her, with her long lashes and curves?
*****
El Shoun was a nightmare, as always. Once again, Suad found herself in that vast dust pit, arm in the loop of a shopping basket and head stuck in a haze of unpleasant news. No, it wasn’t a haze, because a haze could dissipate even in the industrial zone of Mahalla. Rather, she was stuck in a cement mixer jammed to a standstill, and all the news choked her like the grip of hardening concrete. She couldn’t grasp what was happening; it grasped her.
As if this Sami business wasn’t enough to drive her up the wall. Now it seemed that the Cairene disease had sufficiently infected the whole populace—except for her, that is—and the workers were on strike. Mahalla, a city always in motion—looms and sewing machines ticking, wheels and conveyor belts running—had fallen still at the assembly line. Factories empty for days. Lights off, looms disengaged. Not one thread spinning. The cooling towers that should have been oozing black smoke into the sky had no breath today. And the factory workers—who should have been, you know, working—had instead filled El Shoun like multiplying cells, swelling and spilling out onto highway ramps and train tracks. If Suad were a doctor, she’d declare, scalpel in hand, that survival depended solely on a full-on excision. A fatal prognosis. And the tumor, El Shoun.
She held her hand over her chest to feel her heart race. With each beat she heard the butcher’s mallet smash flesh into sludge. It was cruel, all of it. She watched protesters tear down a poster of the president, stamp it with muddy shoeprints, and hoist it like a carcass of victory over the square. Oh, that damned square. The place where order turned to chaos just as the streets spilled onto an intersection of donkeys, tuk-tuks and trucks. Where on days like this, crazed factory workers left their looms to converge with the singular aim of disgracing their president. It filled her with the uncouth urge to throw her body over the front lines, to shield the president from those dirty shoes and the wild, demonic fervor that had swept over the country despite all semblance of logic and morals and manners.
Terrible as it all was, Suad didn’t know why exactly she was surprised. There had been a strike like this one the year her father died. Even in his weak
ened state—the cancer having spread to the lymph nodes by then—he shook his fist at the lazy, spoiled youth filling the streets. Back in his day, workers wouldn’t dream of showing up late, let alone go on strike. A man would give his right arm for a decent job behind a factory loom. When pay was overdue, they’d protest by working. They’d stay in the factories for hours and hours past dismissal, spinning cotton into threads of gold until their bosses were compelled by shame to pay them. Was it any surprise? People had manners back then. Politeness was an actual value. People wouldn’t so much as whisper a complaint of the president, and now—look.
All around her, the citizens of Mahalla huddled around radios, debating aloud and in broad daylight, cursing the president’s name, not one shred of shame in their voices that raised in decibel with the dial, up, up, up. They could crank the volume high as they wanted—it wouldn’t make a difference. Couldn’t they hear? The president promised all would be well if everybody would just go home. If the hoodlums would leave the square and stop rioting, then their demands would be met. Suad was certain. The president was in his eighties now, ancient even by Egyptian standards. He was a full decade over the national life expectancy, though you wouldn’t know it, because he was well preserved by winters on the Red Sea and the formaldehyde lacquer on his head. And now, in his final years, this mess had to go and take hold of the wrongheaded youth. Would they treat their grandfathers like this? Their disrespect was appalling.
There were rumors that the old man was dying, bedridden in a hospital when he wasn’t addressing the masses in a suit. He was so sick that his dear wife had to write all his speeches. Suad imagined the woman perched at the edge of his hospital bed, pen in hand, transcribing his calm wisdom until, with enough morphine, he could buck up the strength to go on TV. He delivered each speech in a low, droning voice, which to her sounded like the call of a muezzin, and ended with a plea. All he wanted was to die in his beloved Egypt. Didn’t they all?
Despite Suad’s qualms with his regime, and there were many, it was wrong to treat an elder this way. Giddo wasn’t even his age when he died. She wished she could march into Tahrir herself and drag the protesters out by the scruffs of their necks, starting with her son.
*****
In the afternoon Suad tried to nap but wasn’t able to sleep. Under the drawn curtains of her window, she turned over for the millionth time on the sway-backed mattress, still thinking of Salsabeel and her obscene body, the tiny waist and hips like a gourd. Suad once had the same figure, but she always hid it—except for that first Monday of each month when she would prepare to greet Gamal at the end of his gas route. Those days she always wore a dress cross-stitched with roses, though it was several sizes too small—so tight she needed to hide the gaping zipper under her hair. The dress had since disappeared, likely at the hands of Teta who had intercepted her laundry basket with the singular goal of destroying it.
In the dark blotted-out light of her bedroom, she raised her bare leg in the air. Now her flesh was as loose as milk pudding and jiggled with even one strong breath. The tops of her thighs were strewn with brown stretch marks from her second pregnancy, when her whole body had blown up to bring Ayah into this world. After all that bodily expansion, the girl was born premature, weighing less than a leg of lamb. Abla had blamed it on all her time spent in the garden, saying that all that bending and squatting had induced labor before it was time. Mahmoud, of course, had no opinion other than his mild disappointment that it was not another son. No doubt, the new wife would bear nothing but sons. No doubt, the new wife was as young and ripe as Salsabeel, as all the fruit hauled off by Hagg Ali’s man the other day.
When Suad remembered the young man, it filled her with a longing for what had been lost. There was a time when she was his age. There was a time when she would have been a good match for the tall man with the nice hair and the dimple on his chin. There was a time when he would have looked at her with shyness and not the same comfort with which he’d greet his mother—a time when he’d find it shameful to follow her into her home alone when her husband wasn’t there. And it was now that she realized, as if the decades had only just been erased, that that time was gone.
Giving up on her nap, she rolled over and opened the drawer at her bedside. Crumpled papers emerged from the compartment like bread rising. She cringed imagining what Ahmed and Nabil had read that night. Letters to my brother. Suad had never been so embarrassed—not even Mahmoud could humiliate her like that. And to think, the whole drawer was his fault to begin with. He was the one who brought the red underwear into their home, and it was because of that red underwear that she started writing letters to Gamal, not ever feeling bad about it. The memory almost made her slam the drawer shut again, but a magnetic nagging drew her hand to it.
Some letters were much older than others, with yellowed paper and red ink from a pen that had long since dried up and disappeared. The newer ones had been written in haste, with letters slanted at an inscrutable tangle. She’d forgotten to dot the appropriate places—the dot for gim, first letter of Gamal’s name, and the dot for the ba at the end of the word for love. If it weren’t for the predictability of her constant ruminations—of men and lemons—she’d never be able to decipher them. She hoped that it had been these new, unintelligible letters that the officers had found. Their jeers would have been much worse if they could read what was actually written.
Suad grabbed her reading glasses from their spot beside the Quran and began with an old letter, one with edges wrinkled stiff from some long-gone glass of water. The folds were stuck together and had to be ripped apart carefully, and inside, red ink had dribbled out at the edge of the paper, leaving a stain like dried blood on the margins. The writing had imprinted itself to the opposite folds of paper, so that each word was marred by the ghost of its neighbor. It was hard to read, but she could make out the message using her instinct and memory, as if she’d written it yesterday, as if she’d never forgotten what she wrote—as if each letter was imprinted to the insides of her skin, in smudged ink that only she could read.
Dear Gamal,
Remember me? You’re probably wondering where I went. They took me away to the other side of Nahr El Bared Street, near the Bassiouny sugar farm. If it’s possible, please change your gas route to include my new place. Our gas man is named Tarek Salah El Din, and he comes from a family of Saidis on Katora Street. Maybe you can switch routes with him. With that kirsh of a belly, he would probably appreciate the shorter distance between houses.
The girl in the flowered dress
The paper crunched as Suad folded the letter back up. From the drawer she dug out another scrawled in the red ink. This one had been folded several times over. It seemed to have never been reopened because the paper was still crisp and smooth, and the lines between the folds were singular and strong. Whatever was inside must be something she hadn’t ever wanted to revisit. She opened it to find she was correct. It contained the story of Ayah’s birth and why she chose the name—from the red underwear to the river to the ring. She even told Gamal about jumping into the Nile, assuring him that she hadn’t been thinking straight, that some jinn had come over her and possessed her pregnant body and pushed her into the river. She wrote of the midnight phone call and asked Gamal if it really was normal for a man to do what Mahmoud did, as Abla had said. Were all men disloyal? No, they couldn’t be. Because Gamal had showed up at their door each week just when she expected him. Until he didn’t anymore.
Had she been wrong all along?
Suad pressed the letter to her chest, thinking back to the last time she saw Gamal. He took no time to even say hello. He rushed toward her, and in his lips there was more haste than tenderness. She would have been alarmed but there was no time to think as he moved, ravenous, the way she raced against weeds in the grove—as if each second behind were a second wasted, as if he’d been staring at her through the window and at once was set loose, and all the fingers and sweat and
heat washed over her like the sand carried on western winds during the khamseen season. He seemed to know it was the last time.
But Suad did not. The only reason she allowed Gamal to even touch her—other than that exceptional resemblance to Abdel Halim Hafez—was because she believed there would be no last time, that this was the start of a big love that would become marriage and children and burial in Mansoura cemetery where their bodies would become one with each other and then with the earth, and then one day a tree would grow from their bones and bear ripe fruit for grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come. She knew nothing back then. She didn’t know that the tip-tap of her heart when he touched her meant nothing at all—that it was no precursor to marriage and not even a courtship. It didn’t even mean he liked her. And it was this prospect that wracked her mind the day a ring appeared on his finger and he melted into the door instead of her arms, and the words exchanged between them shortened to a point of absurdity, as if they had never laid eyes on one another and were nothing more than strangers exchanging glances in El Shoun Square. She was tempted to say she should have known better but how could she? She was only a girl, and she believed it when he said he loved her. She drank every word like a glass of sticky-sweet Qamar El-Din juice.
That day—the final day—their tryst was cut short by a door slamming shut. That stupid, stupid door. If she could get her hands on it now, she’d break it in two over her knee. Funny thing was, back then, it hadn’t even bothered her. She wouldn’t have cared if a pigeon shat on her head. All she could think of were Gamal’s hot lips and the way his breath smelled like menthol Halls. Just the thought made her smile to herself like a neighborhood loon. Teta had noticed, of course, and from that day on she was on a mission to marry Suad off. Within weeks she became the wife of Mahmoud, a man whose touch felt like just that—a touch, no different than a slab of cold meat bashed with a mallet into a butcher’s block. Bang, bang, bang, the two of them were melded together by force, turned from living flesh to ground meat and packed into Styrofoam tubs for refrigeration.