by Leila Rafei
Carefully, as if just breathing the wrong way would destroy all the papers and thus, all hope, she flipped through. On the cover there was her name, Jamila Abdesalam, and a photocopy of her refugee ID card. The following pages were more difficult, detailing everything that happened from Omdurman to Kilometer 4.5. It was strange seeing the names of Mama and Baba and Yusuf in print, scattered among all the terrible things that she’d never think of telling them. The rebels. The smuggler. The broker in Nasr City and the man he brought her to, Mr. Salem. Her secrets were out now, shrunk down to mere ink and paper. What the testimony didn’t contain, though, were the secrets she’d kept from Sami and Rose—the pregnancy test, the phone calls, the self-imposed eviction. By now they’d probably found out about how she unwittingly exposed them, as well as her disappearance. They’d think it was good riddance.
She reminded herself that with hardship comes ease. Maybe this was all her preparation for some big reward ahead. A reward like resettlement. When she closed her eyes she dreamed of being someplace far away, far removed from all the ghosts that haunted her along the Nile. A blank slate where she could look at the horizon dry-eyed, no bodies to find, no questions unanswered. Where she could finally rest her sore bones that had searched so long for Yusuf’s. Where there would be no past outside the pages of her testimony, which she would tuck away somewhere out of sight to never come out again. Or better yet, burn it. What use would there be, anyway, once the testimony served its purpose and got her out of here? It was a diamond in the sea, as Yusuf said—but if she learned anything in these past weeks, it was the speed and spontaneity of change. A life up in flames, a city falling. Presidents faltered. Nobodies became martyrs. Bodies lost, bodies found. It took seconds for a single canister of tear gas to blind a whole city block. There was no telling what lay ahead of her at any given moment. She only had to try.
*****
As Jamila stepped into Fifi’s apartment, streamers of red, white, and black fell over her face.
“Long live Egypt,” said Fifi in place of hello.
It seemed she’d changed her mind about the revolution. In its spirit, she was decked in patriotic gear, with a flag tied around her waist and an Al Ahly cap perched carefully on her head—so as to maintain the integrity of her month-old hair extension tracks. Jamila approached her with caution. She knew the need when she saw it. She walked forth slowly, not sure which Fifi she’d get today—the actress, the mother, the crier, the binger. It could be any one of those or all of the above.
“I need your opinion, young lady,” she said. “Today I’m posting in honor of Egypt, mother of the world, and I don’t know what to wear—the flag or the hat?”
“Both are nice,” she said, playing it safe. No matter what, Fifi would somehow end up wearing them both anyway.
Throughout the day Jamila kept one eye on the TV. It showed the usual flood of demonstrators in Tahrir, faces shouting through balaclavas, flags waving in the air. And from the outskirts, tanks watching. Would this ever stop? She remembered what the junk collector had said, the revolutionary demands and the wormy guava. She wanted to agree with him. She wished him wormless fruit. But she couldn’t help fearing what all of this would mean for her resettlement case. Now that Yusuf was gone it was all she had to carry with her, quite literally. And what good was a legal case in a city that was stuck in a state of upheaval? Parliament was closed and would remain closed until the fall of the regime. There would be no one to read her testimony and even worse, her testimony wouldn’t mean anything. Of what worth was her story when people were setting themselves on fire in public and not getting more than a passing mention in the news? She tried to imagine what it might take to be heard but could not.
When Fifi called for her again, she tore her eyes away from the TV. She found the woman standing over the remains of Jamila’s torn-open purse, gripping the torn cover of her testimony in her acrylic-clawed hand.
“Coco did it,” said Fifi. “That means she loves you.”
Jamila cried out as she dove to collect her things. A strap here, a cookie wrapper there. A pair of keys, one to her own flat and one to Rose’s, which she’d left behind without thinking. A dried-up tube of lipstick that had sat unseen in the depths of her bag since her wedding day. Frantically she tossed item after forgotten item aside as she gathered all the loose pages of her testimony. She flitted through to make sure she had everything, and she did, elhamdulilah, from her date of birth on the first page to the assortment of signatures on the last. Only the cover was torn, but she could easily tape it together. Her heartbeat slowed to a normal pace and the sweat at her temples abated.
“What is that, anyway?” asked Fifi, pointing at the papers.
“It’s my . . . story.”
“Your story? Oh Jamila, you never told me you had a story.”
She explained that it wasn’t that kind of story—whatever fairytale serial that Fifi had in mind—but rather documents from St. Fatima’s Refugee Aid, a charity she’d most likely never heard of that operated out of an abandoned villa down the street. Refugees? Asked Fifi. Yes, refugees. Like her.
“Why didn’t you come to me if you needed help?”
Jamila almost let out a snort. If Fifi wanted to help her, she could start by paying her the guineas she was owed. Besides, what else could she possibly do? Iron her hair? Donate a couple of sequined gowns? She remembered the time she thought Fifi could help her find Yusuf, as if it would make any difference to his fate. She was glad she never asked. Glad, and yet it dawned on her that there was something that actually could turn things around.
“Well, I’ve been trying to reach Nilofone . . .”
“The one on Abu El Feda Street?”
“Yes. Well, all of them.”
“And?” She tapped her fingernail on the back of a chair, not unlike Yusuf’s ghost on the wall.
“St. Fatima’s needs my phone records for the past year. For my, uh . . . paperwork. But the people at Nilofone won’t help me.”
“Say no more,” said Fifi, grabbing her phone. “I know the boss. A very nice man. Very. He’ll do anything for me,” she winked. “We’ll get you your record, whatever that is. Tonight.”
Surprisingly, Jamila didn’t need to explain why she needed the phone records. She didn’t tell her she had a pending resettlement case that they would somehow help. She explained this was all because of a man who stalked her so relentlessly that she changed her number and hid her face in a veil. She just spelled out her name and listened as Fifi rang up this man who—praise be to God—liked the shape of her ass, or the sway of her hips, or whatever indecent feature Fifi had to offer. It didn’t matter. Fifi requested her records on the tail of a few compulsory pleasantries. Her records—that elusive, faraway concept that would soon materialize like gold in her hands. And to think, all it took was one phone call. From the right person, of course.
“He’s sending his boy to deliver it right now.”
The good deed seemed to put Fifi in an even more manic mood. After hanging up the phone she fell onto the rug, squirming to the beat of a familiar song, the white stripes of her leggings making serpentine lines to match her shapely rump. My beautiful country, my beautiful country. The song was playing on TV, on the radios, on phones. Yet Fifi couldn’t get enough.
“Turn it up,” she said, but the song was already over by the time she got to the remote. She pouted, lips coming together in one glossy mass.
“Oh, no,” said Jamila. “You’ll have to wait two whole minutes until the next time it comes on.”
At once Fifi broke into a fit of laughter, rolling around and clutching her belly as if her glee were painful. Jamila hadn’t meant to make her laugh and was somewhat alarmed by the intensity of it. Should she call for help, perhaps an ambulance? She looked to the kitchen, where Qandil rolled his eyes before returning to his room. Fifi roared even louder as the door slammed shut behind him. At this
Jamila started to laugh too, and Fifi noticed and laughed harder, until they were two women gasping for air on the living room floor.
Something strange had come over Jamila. She felt like a wild animal howling at the moon for no particular reason, like Coco the dog, sniffing each piece of trash on the curb because that’s what she wanted. And today what Jamila wanted was to laugh. Tears spurted from the edges of her eyes and for a moment, she thought she was crying too. Had she gone mad like Fifi? It made no sense, but it felt good to finally succumb to the urge that bubbled up in her gut whenever she was with Fifi—the urge to laugh, to look at all the pain and cookie wrappers and laugh. It had once seemed inappropriate, now merciful. Mercy for Fifi and her mascara-streaked tissues, mercy for herself and that stern face of hers that she’d held taut for too long.
Jamila’s cheeks still hurt from laughter when she left Fifi’s house that day, humming my beautiful country, my beautiful country. If only.
*****
The sun was setting when Jamila reached Kilo 4.5, streets quiet, scent of baking bread wafting from alleys strewn with trash. A faint breeze rippled the clotheslines zigzagging between buildings—as if the seasons were changing, winter to spring, the time of year when winds swept in from the desert to coat the whole city with grains of sand. The bigger the storm, the better the harvest, as her mother used to say. And as she gazed into the distance she found herself smiling at nothing in particular, or everything all at once.
17
God must have willed Ayat al-Kursi to Suad’s lips that morning, because she woke up with the words in her head. She reached for the Quran and flipped to the verse. She read it so often that there was a smooth sheen to the page where she’d traced the text with her finger, time after time, year after year.
In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Say, ‘I seek refuge with the Lord of daybreak against the harm of what he has created, the harm of the night when darkness gathers, the harm of witches when they blow on knots, the harm of the envier when he envies.’
The verse was particularly apt nowadays. She drew back the curtain to see that the garden was wet from an overnight sprinkling of rain, and small puddles had accumulated in the trenches between lemon trees. As she stretched over her bed, limbs cracking and squeaking like Nagwa’s cotton wheel, she estimated how many weeds must have sprouted since dawn prayer—at least one for each tree, which meant a dozen, times two to be realistic. She looked forward to plucking each jinn out of the freshly quenched earth and carved out an extra hour to weed that morning.
Right now, she had other demons to dispose. She looked at her bedside drawer, which stared back today in a particularly harsh manner, knobs like fisheyes. With a huff she yanked it open and watched the letters spill out. This time she didn’t reach to unfold any—there had been enough of that. Instead she grabbed letters in bunches and stuffed them into a shopping bag as if it were her garden sack. There must have been a hundred of them, and they filled the bag like dead leaves, crisp and withered with age and all the calamity that came with it. Through paper folds she caught a glimpse of his name, Gamal, and winced. She couldn’t wait to be rid of them, and rid of him.
Ayah was still sleeping, so Suad walked softly to the kitchen, trying not to wake her for perhaps the first time. There she dug out an iron pan, like the one she used to make date cookies for Gamal long ago. The cookies he refused, just like he refused her. Apparently being delicious was just enough to sample and not take for his own. She envisioned those crumbly, powdered morsels beneath her fingers as she crushed the letters down into the pan to make them fit. Then she slid the pan onto the oven tines and lit a match. She didn’t even flinch when the flame reached her fingertips—she just shook it out and watched the fire lick the letters and then engulf them entirely, turning white to black, paper to ash, words to just—zilch. Just before the last shred of paper blackened, she saw his name once again, Gamal, only this time it shriveled into ash as it should have long ago.
After the letters were sufficiently destroyed, she marveled at how it had only taken seconds to demolish three decades of fruitless longing. The charred scraps were like corpses, soulless and vacant. Nothing was left of them, no letters, no names, no ink. It was a relief and yet she also felt foolish—foolish for giving so much weight to mere paper, foolish for holding onto a man of whom she knew nothing but glimpses. She poured water over the embers and watched them sizzle and hiss and release a pleasing smoke into the kitchen, and with it, she exhaled thirty years of pent-up breath.
She tossed the remains in the trash and then thought for a second with her fingertip in her mouth, as if she’d caught her daughter’s loathsome habit. Deciding that she didn’t even want the ashes in her house, she tied up the garbage bag and took it for disposal. But instead of leaving the sack at the door as she usually did, she took it all the way out to the street and to the next corner, where she dumped it in a stranger’s pile of trash. As she walked away she felt better, but figured that she wouldn’t rest until even that pile was removed from the street. Tomorrow morning, God willing, it all would truly be gone.
*****
That evening, Suad’s kitchen counter resembled a canvas that was a work in progress. Sprinkled across the white tiles were piles of red sumac and paprika, earthen allspice and coriander, yellow wedges of lemon, black pepper, and greens chopped into pieces as small as grains of spice.
Mahmoud was due back by nightfall. She was making molokhiya stew for him as he’d demanded, careful to watch the time so it would be ready just as he walked through the door. At the edge of the counter sat the Al Fakher tobacco he preferred, and cans of strawberry soda. She’d searched downtown to the riverbanks for pomegranate, but it seemed Mahalla was all out—thanks, no doubt, to the so-called revolution. In the end she went with strawberry, hoping that its red color would fool him after a long day of traveling. And it would be a long day indeed—he’d arrive in Alexandria at three and then take the train to Mahalla, and with all the chaos in the country, there was no telling if the trains would run as scheduled. It was so strange, she thought, that he would suddenly go great lengths to reach her. Perhaps the revolution had stirred his heart for his baladi girl, Suad, who despite the dirt under her nails, came from the same sugarcane blood as he did, after all. And she, freshly free of decades-old paper, would be ready to welcome him home, a fresh start between them, both pairs of hands wiped clean of their other lovers, whether real or imagined. Yes, imagined. Imagine that.
As she sank a handful of chopped leaves into a boiling vat, she eyed Ayah across the room. Once again, the girl was bathed in the electric-blue glow of the TV, phone in hand, though she promised she was no longer up to no good. Her hair, uncombed for days, resembled the matted pelt of a wild beast, and Suad could already hear Mahmoud’s complaints. Why do you let her go about like this? How will she ever get married? A head like the ass of a buffalo. Nobody will want her, and if nobody wants her then she’ll be ours forever, and with gas prices going down there’s no more money, and I can’t afford her or you either, and I think I’ll stay in Dammam next time, and the time after that, and in fact I’ll never come back, because who wants to come home to a bunch of women with their heads up their asses, who, on second thought, probably should put their heads up their asses, it would be better that way. Better to stay.
Suad stepped away from the stove and fanned herself, worked up from the spiral of doubt that still resided in her despite all her attempts to heal. Perhaps she could distract herself by fixing Ayah’s hair. She warmed spoonfuls of castor and olive oil over a low flame, then came at her with dripping hands.
“Come here.” She grabbed the girl’s hair in bunches, like leaves of overgrown molokhiya, and parted sections to slather in the hot elixir. All the while Ayah groaned, her eyes never leaving the TV. When her head was slick and black as an oil spill, Suad gave her a pat and instructed her to leave it in for an hour—enough time, God willing, to sufficien
tly tame it before her father arrived.
Ayah didn’t get her hair from Suad, that was for sure. All her mother needed were a few curlers to restore a bit of the body of her youth. She dug them out of a dusty corner of the closet, set her hair, and returned to the kitchen, where the messy part was about to begin.
From the freezer she took out the vacuum-sealed rabbit she bought from El Shoun the other day. She grabbed it by the ears, still covered in fur, and threw it onto the bare countertop as Ayah stuck out her tongue from the corner of the room. As Suad dismembered the rabbit she pondered the cruelty of life, looking into its round black eyes that lay open and afraid, as if it had known its fate in the second before it died. “This was written,” she said under her breath, as if to console the dead animal. Before long, all that remained of the rabbit was a bowl of marinated meat, which she submerged into a frothing green stew.
Mahmoud was due to arrive shortly, so Suad covered the pot and returned to her room, where she scrubbed herself clean of the herbal stench that clung to her skin and clothes. The tips of her fingers smelled of coriander, in particular, and would need to be soaked in vinegar and soap. She’d never spent so much time in front of the mirror—not even when she was young and could still attract men. Every errant hair, scar, and wrinkle appeared stark and glaring on skin more blemished than she’d realized. Had she really been walking around like this—white hairs growing out of her chin, lines fanning out from the corners of each eye like an accordion? And her eyebrows, which she’d thought she could get away with leaving be, were now two rectangular masses above each tired socket, almost joining in a faint bridge at the middle.