Spring

by Leila Rafei

She felt oddly satisfied as she got to work with the tweezer, as if she were weeding the grove. When she was done, she wiped away all the dislodged hairs and took in her new reflection. The last time she looked this way she was much younger, a different person, and for a second she couldn’t wait for Mahmoud to see.

  In Ayah’s room she found the drawer full of unused makeup that had been of such interest to the two marauding officers the other night. She peeked out the door to make sure Ayah was still preoccupied. The girl was back to tic-tacking at her phone, of course, hair oiled and gathered in waiting. Suad sighed at the sight of her. She would be mortified if her daughter caught her dolling herself up, though soon it would be no secret.

  First she powdered her face, turning toasted wheat to not-unbecoming gray. She didn’t have much of a set of eyelashes, but she brushed on mascara and watched them bloom like her garden after the rain. Finally, she removed the curlers and basked in her new face, and the only reminder that she was still Suad, girl of Abu Radhi, were her drab clothes. Loose and plain, they were clothes for prayer or gardening. They were certainly not for meeting her husband or any man for that matter, and definitely not one like Hagg Ali’s delivery man. But it was not the latter who’d visit that evening, so she straightened her hem, rolled down her sleeves and took a last look in the mirror. Though she felt like an imposter with her face made up, she was determined to greet Mahmoud that way today—a new day and a new beginning, a new wife and a new country.

  When she walked back into the kitchen, it was enough to rip Ayah’s eyes away from the TV.

  “Mama.”

  But there was no time to bask in her new look. Suad dragged the girl into the bathroom where she washed out every last trace of oil from her hair and smoothed the unruly bush into a mass of waves. With a light slap on the bottom, she sent Ayah back to the TV and returned to the kitchen. There, she scooped the molokhiya into a porcelain bowl along with a rabbit leg and a mound of rice. Mahmoud would walk through the door at any moment, so she readied his drink and tossed the can so he wouldn’t see it was the wrong flavor. His shisha pipe, now polished and gleaming, was packed with tobacco and topped with a coal. A booklet of matches sat beside it—the same set she’d used to destroy the letters. She didn’t feel guilty about it—in fact, she felt it was right.

  The clock now struck seven, but Suad didn’t worry because she had learned to give her husband a time window of several hours. She refused to sit, however—Mahmoud shouldn’t find her idle, thigh meat splayed wide on the couch—so instead she stood on her two strong farmer’s legs, hands on hips, watching the door from the kitchen. When the clock ticked past the window of allowance, she decided to show a hint of disapproval by proceeding to serve Ayah her portion of molokhiya. The bowl was still in her hand as a car door slammed shut outside. But through the curtain, she saw that it was only Nagwa’s husband, who had returned from work. At once she ducked, almost dropping the bowl splat on the floor. She’d drop dead just the same if either he or his wife saw her looking like that, a powdered-up hussy awaiting a husband who was late again. Uncomfortably, Suad noted that there was no sound of spinning cotton. Somewhere out there, Nagwa was up to her old games.

  *****

  Night was announced by the barking of street dogs. By then, the molokhiya was cold and stiff. Suad scooped it into containers for refrigeration and emptied out the glass of flattened strawberry soda. She’d done nothing but stare at the door for hours, vaguely listening to the evening news program, which she hadn’t realized had ended, now succeeded by a broadcast of fuzzy yellow chicks running through open fields.

  “Come watch” said Ayah, jumping up from her seat. “The president is about to speak.”

  Suad leapt to join her daughter on the couch, where they both hunched toward the screen, fingernails in their mouths. When the old man appeared, she gave Ayah a preemptive slap to keep her mouth shut. They couldn’t miss a second. Behind the podium the president looked like his usual self, dapper, with hair lacquered in black dye around a face lined with time. He looked good for his age and for all the trouble he was dealing with, and she mouthed a well-deserved mashallah, almost bursting into tears as he began.

  My sons and daughters, I was once young too.

  Indeed, she had also been young at one time. But she didn’t know where he was going with this introduction. It was already too conciliatory for her taste. Maybe this was his way of luring hooligans to his corner, starting with a fiber of relatability. Who couldn’t relate? It was hard to grasp but there was a time when even Suad was ripe as a yellow-green lemon, with clear eyes of black velvet and a heart foolish enough to think anything would last. But nothing did. Not her youth, not her hopes, and certainly not the outright sham of a relationship she had with Gamal. She would have thought that the president’s insistence on this shared experience—youth, and all its idiocy—would bring him down harder on the rioters and looters of Tahrir. But the words that ensued didn’t make any sense.

  Your demands are legitimate, your movement is honest . . .

  Suad reached for the volume, but it was already cranked as high as it would go. She could feel her own forehead crinkle as the president conceded, mistakes can happen in any political system. Mistakes? It was like watching parent tell his child he was right, right for knocking over a dish of molokhiya, right for painting the walls in crayon, right for tossing tissues into the air just for the fun of making a mess. He littered the speech with numbers—76, 77, 88, 93, 179, 189—articles of the constitution that he promised to repeal. Who said anything about repealing? She couldn’t fathom the words she was hearing. Was up down? Was left right? Was yes no, black white?

  If it were up to her, she would waste no chance to tout the accomplishments of her rule. The house was tidy. The molokhiya sweet and smoky. The children were in school, the prayers counted. There were many things that really weren’t that bad, and many things that could fall apart in an instant if the youth had their way. Business was booming in the Delta, cotton wheels spinning, factories puffing black smoke into the air, the smoke of productivity. Sure, there were bombings here and there against the odd church or tour bus, but really, it could be much worse. It could be like Iraq or Afghanistan. Things were not so bad that tourists had stopped coming; in fact, they still flocked to the Pyramids and to the temples of the Said. There was much to boast, but the old man didn’t.

  “He’s very humble,” said Suad, desperate to eke out an air of pride to hide her confusion. She set down her tea, as if it would help her think. The bits of lemon pulp in her teeth felt like boulders. Using her fingernails, she picked them out of every crevice before leaning back toward the man in the dark suit, presentable.

  And then it happened—the very thing she’d dreaded all along, the outcome that inched closer with each word. Transfer, transition, delegation. Peace, transparency, elections.

  “Stop,” said Suad, her voice emerging rough and throaty, like an involuntary grunt or the first words of dawn, unprepared.

  Dear youth of Egypt, dear citizens—

  “Stop,” she said again, her voice picking up strength. But he didn’t stop. She fell to the ground and assaulted the volume on the remote again, pressing the buttons over and over like a crazed child in an elevator. But it didn’t do a thing to aid her aging ears. She almost tore the damned buttons straight off the box, destroying yet another electronic, while all Ayah could do was lay a hand on her arm as if to hold her back. The girl was too distracted, too rapt with the catastrophe her revolutionaries had brought upon the nation.

  I am not going to run in the upcoming presidential elections . . .

  Suad repeated the words in her head and then aloud and then started to weep. How could this be? She pressed her face to the screen, almost kissing it. To her horror she hadn’t misheard because she was getting old, or perhaps misunderstood because she really was just a farm girl. It was true—come elections in September, he would no l
onger be president. He’d be gone like all the men she’d ever known, leaving her alone to answer the door in the night, with nothing to save her but the scripture etched into her mind. Her only solace was that elections were a good six months off. It was ample time to change his mind, despite his promise to adhere to this decision—gah!—the way her dress adhered to her rear end, soaked in a panic-sweat.

  All he wanted was to die in his beloved country.

  Tears fell from her eyes as he went on to praise Egypt, ancient and eternal, the country he’d served for three decades. Three decades! When he came into office, Suad was still tottering around in that too-tight dress, chasing Gamal in Abu Radhi. The thought of ever having another president seemed absurd—such a departure from life as she knew it that she might as well die. Surely it was even more traumatic for her kids, who’d never even known another president. But Ayah sat like steel beside her. Maybe this was yet another trait she’d inherited from her father’s side—a coldness where for Suad, there was nothing but hot tears.

  “Darling, it’ll be OK,” she said, prodding to see if she bit. “Inshallah, he’ll stay.”

  Ayah scrunched up her face, befuddled. “No, inshallah he will leave.”

  “Eh, silly girl, he said he’ll leave in September.”

  “No, there is no September. There’s only now.” She leapt from her seat and ran back to her room, where Suad could hear her type furiously at the keypad of her phone.

  “Back to Tweeter, back to YouToo. Go get lost, crazy girl.”

  *****

  Not even a national tragedy could distract Suad from her regular roster of worries, but around midnight she gave up on watching the door and retreated to her bedroom.

  What was taking Mahmoud so long? Had he even landed or was he still suspended in the sky, nonexistent for a few hours more?

  He once said that flying into Alexandria was a real sight to behold—the Nile Delta opened up like a verdant lotus spilling petals into the sea, and you could find Mahalla as a lone spot of sand within it, surrounded by green. He could even find their house, he said, because it stood on the borderline of the city, where it transitioned abruptly from factories to farms, brown to green, beside channels of the river that flowed black and deep. She had never seen this, of course, and took only his word for it. Suad never cared much for traveling, but her husband never seemed as remote as when he spoke of experiences to which she couldn’t relate, whether it was the look of their hometown from above the wing of a plane or a sip of beer in his uncouth youth.

  Suad lay wide awake in bed, staring at the black ceiling above her, until eventually the sound of her daughter’s typing ceased, and the night settled into silence. She listened, but there was no key in the door, no tires crunching on freshly raked gravel. Not even the sound of Nagwa’s cotton wheel. She waited for headlights to flood through the windows, but they never came. And in the darkness, she rose to pray.

  In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

  18

  In the morning Sami walked the corniche, restless. Here he was again, Zamalek. Where he was supposed to be. With the eastern wing of the river rightly between him and Rose. The island bore no resemblance to Ramses, with streets full of trees rather than the wreckage of protest, grand villas in the place of the exhaust-choked Diesel, and looters warded off by neighborhood watchmen sipping tea at the end of the block. But not even a change of scenery could get Rose’s voice out of his head.

  It was strange how many women suddenly looked like her. By the bus stop, he spotted the same heart-shaped face, but plumper; under the bridge he found the lank curl of her hair; a little girl selling tissues had her poison-green eyes. Yes, it was poison—she poisoned every place he went, appearing between blinds, in air conditioning vents, in every fiber of every rug and curtain drawn in vain. As if she’d never been gone, as if he hadn’t walked out of her apartment with a bag full of his things as she slept. As if the buzz of the ceiling fan hadn’t sounded like a fighter jet as he closed the door. As if each memory took place only seconds ago. She was hours gone but each step he took was in her shadow. At times he even felt her breath casting dew onto his skin, and he shuddered, shaking it off.

  He would have to avoid any place they ever dined or met, anywhere they once walked the streets, any tree from which they’d stopped to pick off buds, any building on which she’d expressed an opinion, any café where she once breathed the coffee-tinged air. Tasseo had been destroyed, at least, but to be safe he probably shouldn’t set foot in that alley again. The ghosts of those blown-out Ramadan garlands were still too near. From now on he would hate the sight of flowers, which would all bring to mind her name regardless of type. He would have to avoid Ramses altogether, which would be a challenge considering it was where the train station was and remained, un-bombed. And Khan El Khalili. The little hole-in-the-wall antique shop. Any taxicab, any time-defining Umm Kalthoum song. All of Cairo was uninhabitable now.

  On his way to the dorms he diverted his path for the corniche, thinking the Nile might bring him some peace. As he walked he gazed with envy at the grand balconies above him, where he wished he could be sitting instead—overlooking the river at a distance that seemed safer, more abstract. He wondered which type he’d prefer at this moment, when nothing seemed to please him. Some were sealed with windows, some open. Some were shaded by the branches of trees, some bright. Some were full of potted plants, some bare and unused. Here and there, Egyptian flags dangled from railings, either as a nod to revolution or the regime—he wasn’t sure. On one such balcony he saw a woman posing for a photo with the river behind her. In the doorway stood a maid who resembled Jamila with her skinny limbs and coffee-bean skin, holding the camera with an uneasy look on her face. Sami stopped and watched the camera flash, once, twice, a dozen times. The posing woman laughed and then the other laughed too, and their laughter fell like petals to the street, a light and joyous mass. It couldn’t be Jamila.

  Still, he made note of the building, an old villa with wind-whipped shutters. Above the door, tiled letters spelled out Pyramide House, the H missing. There was a bench in front of it, facing the Nile. He slung off his backpack and sat on the bench, hoping for a second of rest before someone came and shooed him away.

  The Nile looked so different nowadays without all the usual feluccas, the bridges crowded with cars and idle youth. And yet Sami saw nothing but Rose reflected on its flat, still surface. How could he not? She loved the river more than he did. She was the foreign one but somehow it ran through her veins. He thought of that tired old saying—once you drink from the Nile, you are destined to return—etched onto the first page of her journal as if to define it. No wonder it had come to mind on that first day of the revolution, National Police Day, when he was trying to cheer her up through sickness, to give her a smile between heaves. The memory was almost comical now—the way he pretended she was only sick from water, the way he uttered that line she loved to no response. That must have been the moment it all fell apart. When all the cracked pieces, held together like Abu Ali’s shattered storefront, finally gave out.

  Somehow the fable seemed less absurd now, in the aftermath of the breakup, as the entire course of their relationship—from the moment he opened the door to Tasseo to the moment he left apartment 702—ran through his brain on constant loop, like the film reel that had caught their faces in Tahrir. With each pulse, a pang, another snag in the cellophane. Their first date at Galaxy Cinema, cups of coffee on the balcony overlooking Ramses Street, wading in the warm waves of the north coast last summer and the shallow Red Sea that winter, the venomous glow of her eyes when she was sick. He wondered if Rose would ever come back now that they were over and the baby was gone and she had nothing to bind her to Egypt. It had once seemed obvious. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  You are destined to return.

  That night Jamila read her coffee cup seemed like a different era, one that warranted its ow
n line of sediment in the canyon. What did she say? You keep going in circles. Like drinking from the Nile and coming back. Why would anyone return? All he saw was the traffic and pollution, the beggars and the noise. The heartbreak. Closing his eyes, Sami tried to see Cairo the way Rose did. He tried putting himself in the shoes of an expat like her, someone who ran away from a modern country with basic human rights to find refuge in Egypt. Perhaps once you left, all you remembered was the good stuff—all the incongruities that gave the place its ineffable beauty. If he squinted he could see it too. It was a beauty that some people didn’t get—people like his mother, who needed fresh air and clean streets and the kind of peace you could only find under a canopy of leaves. People with the constant itch for cleaning and pruning and weeding and ablution. No, it was not for them. It was the kind of beauty with flaws like dust and wear and cacophonous sound, flaws that somehow made every speck of prettiness even prettier, like Umm Kalthoum singing over bleating car horns and bougainvillea buds glimmering against walls caked in grime. Those who protested the loudest would be the first to return, Rose included. She knew the place well. She couldn’t live there but she couldn’t live anywhere else.

  He pictured her returning one day, an old woman with strands of gray in her once-blue hair. Like him right now, she would sit on a bench by the river and see the past in each ripple on the water’s surface. She might think of calling Sami, maybe she’d write his number on the back of her hand. Through wrinkles it would be hard to decipher. She’d have to pull her skin taut to make out the numbers which, as she read them, she’d realize she’d never forgotten. She would punch them into her phone—some new, razor-thin gadget from the future—and with each ring think of hanging up. But she wouldn’t because she was Rose. Braver than he, and too curious for her own good.

  He didn’t know whether he would pick up. He supposed time would tell.