by Leila Rafei
Did Khaled have the same dreams? Was he thinking of quitting hash, taking care of his mother, settling down? Of course, it would complicate things if he ever had a girlfriend like Rose, but that was impossible—martyrs didn’t sin, remember? That’s why the sea was sparkling, heavenly on the day Khaled died, while for Sami it frothed like a rabid beast coming to take him. Not a martyr, but simply dead. Gone. Disappeared. Vanished like the body of Yusuf. To be forgotten and not remembered. An accident—a terrible mistake.
No, Sami could never be a martyr.
A what? A martyr, mar-tyr . . .
*****
“Martyr!”
When he opened his eyes, a circle of faces stared at him from above. A man was yelling martyr, martyr. At first Sami thought he was dying, and he submitted. If he was going to die then it might as well be in Tahrir. It smelled of burnt rubber, charred metal. And the soles of a million feet.
“Martyr!”
Yes, thought Sami, call me a martyr. Take me, let me expire, stub me out and forget all my sins. Dying took longer than he expected. As he waited, he noticed that his arm was draped elegantly across his chest, as if pleading. Absolve me. It didn’t get any better than this. And as the man crowed on above him, martyr, a woman’s voice emerged, sounding just like Suad.
“Shut up, you donkey. He’s alive.”
The woman helped him to his feet, and as the earth steadied beneath him, he saw the Meikorlens smashed to bits on the asphalt. He dove toward it and gathered all the pieces—the flash, the lens, the logo he had traced with his finger ages ago in that stall in Khan El Khalili. All that was missing was the film. On hands and knees, he looked frantically for the plastic strip, but it was gone. A goon had come for him like the other night, with eyes on that film, no doubt. Through gritted teeth, Sami imagined the strip crunching under his grubby hands as he stuffed it in his pockets and ran into the night.
When Sami stood up the woman was gone. He felt more lightheaded than before. All the flags and signs and lights blurred around him to create one dizzying mass. The man who yelled martyr hovered about with a dumb expression, a gap between his front teeth giving him the look of a child. He seemed guilty as he made eye contact—guilty that Sami had lived to hear him literally dance on his deathbed. Now he diverted the crowd with arms held wide, shoulders shimmying to the beat of clapping hands.
Sami thought he was dreaming again when he heard a familiar, droning rhythm. The incessant lyrics. My beautiful country, my beautiful country. Somehow, for some reason, that fucking song was still bleating from every phone and driver’s window on the corniche. Turn it off, he wanted to scream, as if anyone would hear him, as if anyone would listen. That song had outlasted everything—Rose and the revolution, the president himself, the Meikorlens, Tasseo and the little bird pinned to the wall. My beautiful country, my beautiful country. Except it wasn’t her country. Like Rose, she was a foreigner. Perhaps she, too, was so thoroughly steeped in Nile water that it somehow transformed her to a native. He never told Rose about her, which hurt to realize—as if it was an important message he needed to relay, as if it would make any difference to their fate. He wondered if she was listening to the same song at that very moment, sitting on the banks of that same river she’d unwittingly drank from, the river that just might bring her back one day, if all the superstitions he’d once scoffed at proved true. But it would make no difference.
As the song played on, the crowd cried out in triumph around him. Ecstatic protesters—though they were protesters no more—leapt and danced and flashed V signs with parted fingers into every microphone and camera lens, we won. Sami mimicked the gesture with shaky fingers. V for victory. Is that what it was? He heard an inshallah, and another, and a third, as if he stood in an echo chamber invoking God’s will. Elections, stability, democracy, inshallah. Bread, dignity, social justice, inshallah. Revolution. Inshallah. Steadily, the roar grew louder and became so massive and infinite that it reminded him of the Alexandrian sea that one day, weeks ago, when the waves swelled and howled as if in warning.
Sami walked to the river and leaned over the edge, watching the technicolor lights of feluccas drift across the water once more. In the distance, he could see the silhouettes of Zamalek’s villas, the tree-lined streets leading to the dorm he’d return to that night, and the billboard of the soldier with the baby, strewn with bouquets and imprinted with the kisses of adoring crowds.
He reached into his pocket and took out his phone for the first time in God only knew how long. It still had just enough battery to power up. And with a tear in his eye—the last tingle of tear gas, of Rose—he called his mother.
The End
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent, Kristy Hunter, who believed in this manuscript before anyone else, back when it probably didn’t deserve it. Thank you to my editor, Jennifer Pooley, for helping me hone the story and language, all the way down to every overused colon and em dash. Thanks to the whole team at Blackstone—Haila Williams for taking a chance on this book, Sean Thomas for designing the beautiful cover, as well as Greg Boguslawski, Ciera Cox, Mandy Earles, Lauren Maturo, Megan Wahrenbrock, Josie Woodbridge, and Jeffrey Yamaguchi. Thanks to my earliest readers and gut-checkers: Kacie Scaccia, Lucia Abramovich, Heba Qutami, and Alice Gissinger. Thanks to my talented and supportive workshoppers: Jennie Egerdie, Stephanie Jimenez, and Katherine Sacco. Thanks to everybody who gave me a platform at Guerilla Lit and Inner Loop. And thank you to Cairo for not so much inspiring me as infecting me—for seeping into my blood and making me a native at heart.
Finally, thanks above all to my grandfather, Nasser Jahanbani, who filled my head with stories of revolution long before the Arab Spring and who didn’t live long enough to see this book in print but will live on through the page as long as I’m writing.