by Leila Rafei
Teta had said it was Suad’s only option. That turned out to be a lie. As years went on, she realized that at worst, she would have become a spinster like Hagga Ibtisam, who ran the only woman-owned kiosk in town, and who swore that the key to longevity was keeping away from men. Or maybe, just maybe, things could have turned out differently if she ever actually sent one of these letters to Gamal. She would have folded one into a paper plane and sent it flying through the alleys of El Shoun and into his bedside window. Maybe he would remember her as she was back then, waving from the window with her bazaz pressed against the sill. Maybe he would return to her, leave behind that woman and the son who looked just like him.
She’d been jealous that day she saw them in the alley by Hagg Ali’s shop, but there was comfort at the thought that he hadn’t gone anywhere. It had been decades since she saw him, but one never knew—maybe one day she would run into him in that same alley, or on the streets of his old gas route.
And as if the latter hadn’t ever occurred to her, she leapt up from her bed, got dressed, and made her way to the street. It was a Monday afternoon.
*****
Suad walked in the direction of Abu Radhi, watching the buildings become denser, the clotheslines heavier. The shadows under palm trees grew darker as the sun set. She saw Gamal’s shadow on the ground beside her own, his broad shoulders ticking with each step. She quickened her pace and he did as well. She stopped to let a car pass and he did, too. As she hopped over a puddle, she heard a splash and imagined mucky water seeping into his shoe. They scaled the alleys together, passing strangers who knew nothing of what had been between them, all the fools who had no clue of what plagued Suad, the woman with eyes locked ahead.
First came the sesame. She hadn’t even reached the pharmacy door and could already smell the sesame ointment she used to buy for Giddo, who was always coming home from the cotton factory with scratches and burns. He liked it because it was natural, but she couldn’t stand the stench. She hadn’t so much as opened a tube in years, but it didn’t take long to remember. And if there was sesame then that meant her old house was near.
She scanned the building facing the pharmacy but couldn’t yet find it. Abu Radhi had grown older and with time came repeated beatings from sandstorms, leaving it browner than she remembered. She counted windows to the fourth from the ground, which seemed right, and her eyes stuck. That was her window—hers—and yet the new tenants had installed a panel of frosted glass to obscure the view. Now it would only let light in. She would never be able to sit there again and watch the street, waiting for the sound of that dangling keychain, and it filled her with rage. It didn’t matter that the house belonged to someone else now, and that Suad was no longer a girl and that for all she knew, Gamal could have changed his gas route or quit the business altogether. All that mattered was that her youth was gone, and now, there wasn’t even a trace. Soon even the memories would dissipate, like Gamal’s shadow in the dark.
The balcony was still there, though those senseless new tenants had covered it with glass too. They didn’t deserve to live there if they couldn’t even appreciate the view. To think, they had no idea this was the home where Suad was born and each of her four sisters; where she learned how to bake date cookies and stew lentils with turmeric; where Giddo had died on a cot by that same window; where Mahmoud slipped that faux-ruby onto her hand. And she realized what was in her heart no longer mattered—if it ever did.
Under a dying palm tree, she found a doorman’s chair that seemed to have been placed right there for Suad and Suad only. When she sat down, it gave her a perfect view of the intersection leading to El Shoun. Gamal would likely come from that direction. But as she sat there, her eyes never left that fourth-floor apartment. She could picture clearly the day of the engagement, Mahmoud in his brown suit, pastry stuck in his teeth, breath smelling of nicotine and not Halls. And she pitied him—yes, pitied him—because while he was slipping a ring onto her finger, she was thinking only of Gamal. Despite everything that came later, Suad was the one who messed up first.
As she rose from the chair, the evening wind swept in and rustled the tree’s dry leaves, sounding like rain. It was too dark and too late to search for Gamal now. She got up, steadying herself on the hollow tree trunk, and took one last look at the place where she grew up. Then she went home—her new home—the only one, after all.
15
Sami had never seen Abu Ali in this state. As he restocked his medicine cabinets, pills dribbled out of his wobbly grip and hit the countertop like pellets of hail. They scattered across the floor and his eyes followed, bouncing to and fro like atoms, as if he couldn’t focus on a single thought, or pill. Sami supposed he should cut him some slack. Looters had bashed in the pharmacy’s storefront last night and had made off with a good chunk of Abu Ali’s inventory. The only sign of normalcy was his trademark sky-blue galabia, though he normally reserved it for Fridays (joking, on better days, that it would ensure God saw him in the mosque).
Abu Ali greeted them with a terse, “good morning.” The words came out right but his hands jittered behind the counter. If it were up to Sami, he’d just wave and go on with his day and leave Abu Ali to tend to his ransacked store in peace. But Rose insisted.
“Where. Is. Jamila.” She spoke loud and slow, making a strenuous effort to separate her words as neatly as the pharmacy shelves—cough syrups in the corner, antihistamines beside the saline sprays. Sometimes she talked to Sami that way, as if he were one of her eight-year-old students, needing help to understand. “Su-dan. The girl. From Sudan.”
Abu Ali’s eyes returned to the pill-strewn countertop. He picked a stray aspirin tablet from a pile of spilled Tramadol, as if to change the subject. “The looters . . . they took this week’s shipment from Alamein. Fifty crates, gone. Ten thousand guinea, gone. It seems Tramadol is the new gold.”
There was something off about him, Sami had to admit. This wasn’t the face of a man who’d simply lost a few crates of inventory. Had they made him uncomfortable? Had he seen something he shouldn’t have seen? Perhaps a kiss in the stairwell, an embrace through the upstairs window. Rose always kept the damned curtains open and would even get undressed in front of the window if Sami wasn’t there to stop her. That must be it. My God, he’d have a word with her later.
As Sami watched Abu Ali lock the cabinet door, his eyes drifted to the shelves, which had never looked so depleted—half empty, bottles askew. Only the top shelf was in good shape, full of pink boxes. He squinted to read the labels. Pregnancy test, over and over again, pregnancy test. There must have been a hundred, untouched. Of course they were untouched. Who would walk into this place and ask for one of those? He looked at Rose standing beside him. Her. He imagined her facing Abu Ali eye-to-eye and pointing to that shelf as if it held nothing but Band-Aids. It would be a nightmare if it wasn’t so believable.
Impatient, Rose unleashed a huff in response to the pharmacist’s story, as if she knew better than he did about his own store. She knew everything, didn’t she? To her it didn’t matter that eyes watched them from every corner, nor did it matter that now, the man they had to face every day, at the foot of their own door, knew exactly what they’d been doing up in apartment 702. Now Abu Ali couldn’t even look them in the eye.
“I know just as much as you,” said Abu Ali, his eyes never leaving the countertop, which he wiped clean with a rag. “Jamila just disappeared.”
Rose gave one more huff. “How can you not know? Don’t you sit here all day watching the street? Isn’t it your job?”
The pharmacist unfurled his rag onto the counter with a slap, then looked straight at them. “Look, I’m not your doorman. You should go get one if you want those kinds of answers. I can’t help you.” His voice lowered, quivering like spilt tablets. “How could I even think about that woman? My son is gone too.”
Rose backed away from the counter, looking embarrassed for raising her voic
e. So that was what embarrassed her. Not the baby, not the open window, but a harsh tone. Sami was so busy trying to figure her out that he almost didn’t realize what Abu Ali was saying. His son was gone.
“Gone? What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s gone,” he repeated, voice quivering like spilt tablets. “Gone in the way people are gone during revolution. Taken, disappeared, hauled off by the police or whoever it is with the batons and big trucks nowadays.” He asked if they’d heard anything, a withering hope in his underslept eyes, but of course, they had not.
“We’ve been in the Sinai,” said Sami, relieved at what seemed like a good excuse. But as he watched Abu Ali’s eyebrows contort to form rings of skin around the prayer bruise on his forehead, he realized how ridiculous he sounded. Abu Ali must be wondering why his son was the one who was gone and not them, two sinners careening reckless like a loose tire across the desert—sinners hiding the biggest sin of all inside Rose’s womb. Sami looked at the portrait hanging on the wall behind him, which showed three identical boys varying only in size. It was the eldest, Ali.
The pharmacist’s eyes fell to the counter again, and his tone softened as he shook his head. “I knew something was wrong, I knew it. It was too late at night—much too late for a phone call. I was home in Abassiya watching MisrTV when some boys called the house. I’d never even heard of them before—Kimo, Gindo, Bibo, Hashisho, whatever—but when they said they were friends of Ali, I knew something bad had happened. They said he disappeared on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, and the air was so full of smoke that they lost him in the split-second it took to blink. One of them—Mimo, Kiko, whoever—said he thought he saw men in plainclothes drag him off, not a uniform in sight.”
Sami asked him if he’d tried calling, as if it were possible he might have forgotten. The sight of those pregnancy tests must have turned his mind to sludge. But Abu Ali nodded, not minding the silly question. In fact, he seemed glad he’d asked, as if he himself had been asking that same question over and over, as if in each repetition there was a chance he’d discover some news. Ever since the phones came back, he’d called and called, dial tone on loop, then Ali’s phone was switched off, and then there was nothing.
Just then Abu Ali’s phone started to buzz, rattling the countertop, and they all leapt toward it. But it was only his wife. The bitch. He hit ignore, tightening his grip on the phone as if he might chuck it across the counter.
“She’s going crazy, crying nonstop like she’s got two burst pipes for eyes.”
“Can you blame her?” For a moment Rose sounded genuinely sympathetic.
“I can’t,” he shrugged. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why Ali? The boy isn’t political at all. He could name you more Al-Ahly players than members of parliament. So why?” He looked for an answer in their vacant stares, but there wasn’t any. That was the worst part—not knowing if his wife should put on her black mourning clothes and sink into the outstretched arms of wailing women, or if their son would one day show up at their door, messy-haired, sunken-eyed, and in need of a bath.
There was nothing Sami could say to help him. Even his presence was a slap in the face. Sami was there, despite his poor decisions, and his son was not. Just a child, just a boy who played football in the streets. He forgave Abu Ali for not knowing about Jamila. Rose held her tongue as she watched him buy a packet of aspirin to pay his condolences—for his missing son just as much as the pregnancy test.
*****
The streets were buzzing about a bombing the night prior, but Rose’s mind was still stuck on Abu Ali.
“Calling the police all day, isn’t he? It’s almost as if there’s nothing worse than not knowing. I bet Jamila can relate.”
“Alright,” said Sami. Alright. He would let her have this one and keep calling after Yusuf as if it would make any difference—because it wouldn’t. Unlike that baby and her decision to flaunt it for all of Ramses. He lowered his voice as people skittered past, beating them to the square. “Did you use a test to find out about . . . you know . . . that?” He looked down at her deceptively flat belly, not knowing how he’d been able to avoid this question until now. Unconsciously he sped up his pace, trying to escape the conversation he started.
“Yes. I pissed on a bag of wheat.”
He slowed down. “What?”
“I did as the ancient Egyptians did. I took a bag of wheat and a bag of barley, and I pissed.”
“Can you answer the fucking question?”
“Yes, Sami. Of course I used a test. The modern kind.”
“OK. That’s, uh, great. They’re what—ninety-nine percent accurate? Miracles of science. Anyway, where did you get this test?”
“A pharmacy.”
He gulped. “Abu Ali’s?”
“Probably.”
Probably? As if she didn’t remember—as if it didn’t even matter? Sami paid more attention buying cigarettes. He closed his eyes to keep from hurling as the ground seemed to loosen beneath him. He imagined Ramses Street splitting down the middle, the crack growing wider until it reached the doors of the Diesel, sucking them all into the ether—she and him, Abu Ali and his pharmacy, all the cats living in trash heaps and every speck of grime lining the walls like prehistoric sediment.
“Are you OK?”
He opened his eyes to see there was no crack but the one between them. Rose stood tall, hand on her hip as if yet again, she knew better. He wanted to shout, grab her by the shoulders and shake, but couldn’t. There were people around. People everywhere, watching. He bit his tongue and vowed to say something when they returned home later, if he could ever face that place again. The Diesel didn’t even have a backdoor he could use to avoid Abu Ali. There was no way in but the big, open front door—and no way out just the same.
*****
They walked without speaking until a hubbub around the shuttered falafel shop drew them down the alley to Café Tasseo. There, they found a ten-foot stain of soot marking the entrance, where a bomb had exploded last night. It had even taken out the Ramadan garlands that had hung across the alley—those same stars and moons that nobody had bothered taking down the year prior, to Rose’s joy. The café’s sign dangled from its last attached cable, frazzled wires poking out of each broken bulb. Somehow the acacia tree had remained intact except for some leaves that had been singed off, lying blackened on the ashen ground.
Rose gasped. Sami was too shocked to even do that. So, this was the bomb the street had been buzzing about, here at Tasseo, the last place he’d expect. What sense was there in bombing a café? It wasn’t a government building, nor was it Tahrir. In the middle of a revolution, somebody had taken the time to make a bomb—it was homemade, he guessed from all the nails riddling the ground—and set it off at a harmless coffee shop.
The asphalt glittered with broken glass from the café’s windows. Sami could feel them under the flimsy soles of his knock-off Chucks. He peered inside to find an empty space where the cash register once sat, its wires yanked out of the wall, a plaster gash behind. He saw the charred remains of the napkin-covered walls, all the drawings turned to blackened film like fish scales. The ibis was surely a goner. Who knew? They’d outlived that piece of paper after all.
As Rose poked around, Sami stood back, nostrils burning from the stench of soot. The morning drifted away with all its trauma. There was no Abu Ali, no pregnancy test, no baby. He held his breath as he remembered the day he met Rose a hundred years ago, right in that same spot. It was in the spring. He had a feeling something good was about to happen and kept catching himself smiling at strangers who smiled back. He was mid-step across the threshold when he saw her standing there staring at him, as if she’d been waiting for his arrival.
And now, look at this place.
There was no blood, but there must have been. They learned from passersby that the bomb had killed a father of six from Dokki who happened to be zipping by on h
is moped at the precise moment it exploded. It must have been right at that spot where the black cloud engulfed the door, and his life, but had spared the sign that still dangled, beat up but nevertheless, alive. Café Tasseo. It had survived to remind him.
What had happened was absurd and yet made perfect sense. Of all the places in Cairo—enormous, eternal, endless Cairo—that bomb went off there. Of all the street corners, blocks, and neighborhoods on this side of the Nile and the other, of all the slabs of sidewalk and curb, that bomb went off at that one. Of the city’s six thousand square miles, that bomb exploded in the one spot where one of those twenty million Cairenes decided, for once, to do what he wanted and not what he was supposed to do. Of all the thousand years of Egyptian history, it was that year in which that café was bombed. It was one of those moments, like the night he saw the beast on the mountain, that made Sami feel like the only person in the world—as if all the heavens and the earth were created around his own existence and all the forces had conspired to make that bomb go off there.
And someone died. Someone died in the spot where in one moment, ages ago, everything began and everything ended.
*****
Not even Tahrir could lift Sami’s mood, though it tried. The demonstration was dubbed the “Day of Egypt’s Love,” and the square was lit up like a carnival, with popcorn and sing-along songs and bullhorns passed around in open hands over the crowd. Sami took a date cookie from a woman handing out snacks and gave it to Rose. They’d barely spoken since Tasseo, but he could tell by the sour look on her face that she was hungry. She opened it to find the cookie crumbled.