A Pure Heart

by Rajia Hassib

  Rose huffs. “He speaks English with no accent, he is wearing food-handling gloves, and he is new here. What does this tell you, Mark?” She gives him a second to think about it but does not wait for his answer. “It means he learned English as a child, which means he went to a private school, which means he is middle class in Egypt. The food-handling gloves also imply that—no street vendor in Egypt stands on such technicalities; you know that. Which means the man is probably college educated. He could be an engineer or an accountant or a doctor working to support himself while he tries to find a residency position. Definitely not someone used to serving others. Here, among Americans, it doesn’t matter. Any work is honorable work. Once he faces a fellow Egyptian, a woman, too, someone who obviously has a better job than he does, he will definitely be embarrassed to be seen selling food out on the street.” She takes another bite and resumes walking.

  “That’s just a load of crap. The man chatted with me for a good half hour while I was waiting for you and was perfectly friendly. Seemed excited to be talking about Egypt. He was very happy to know I lived there before.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying: He’d be happy to talk to you, an American showing positive interest in his country and thereby stroking his ego. But he wouldn’t want to talk to me. I would only remind him of how he is stuck doing a job he would never be caught dead doing in Egypt.”

  “That makes no sense. You’re just superimposing your own anxieties on a stranger who, for all we know, thinks nothing of all that classist crap.”

  “Everyone in Egypt has that classist crap conditioned into them.” Rose stops walking for emphasis. “How can you not know that, after living there for four years?”

  “Everyone you know, perhaps. All your uppity, private-school-educated, multilingual friends who think they are better than everyone else.” He does a little head shake that always accompanies his sarcastic statements, a side-to-side bobble-head effect that, right now, infuriates Rose.

  “Oh. And you, public-school-educated West Virginia native, do not think you’re better than everyone else?”

  “Of course I don’t!”

  “Have you even read your own articles?”

  “What’s my work have to do with this?”

  “Everything!” She is shouting now. A young woman in a suit and heels passing by glances at her. Rose glares at the woman, who speeds up her pace. Stepping up to a trash can, Rose tosses the last of the hot dog in it with such force it lands with a thud. “You take moral stands with such ease. You write about things like you can clearly see who is right and who is wrong. Don’t you think that’s just a bit of a superior attitude? Passing judgment on people like that all the time?”

  “This is about Gameela, isn’t it?” Mark stands in front of her, arms crossed. They are blocking the sidewalk, and people are streaming around them, diverging before them and converging again after they pass.

  “It’s not about Gameela.” Hearing and then saying her sister’s name makes Rose’s heart race. She clenches her teeth and frowns at Mark.

  “You never used to criticize my work before. Now suddenly my writing implies I think I’m better than everyone else. You bet it’s about your sister.”

  “It’s about how you think you know everything.”

  “I didn’t know the boy would blow himself up.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “And yet you blame me. You act like I’m the one who killed your sister.”

  A man passing by falters, glances at them, and then hurries past.

  “This is not the time or place to discuss this,” Rose says.

  Before Mark answers, she starts walking toward the subway entrance ahead. A train pulls in just as she reaches the platform, and she hops on and walks to the end of the car. Only then does she turn around to check for Mark. He gets in through the same door she used, looks around, sees her, but stays where he is.

  She watches him as the train moves, starting with a jolt, speeding, and stopping at each station with a screech. Mark remains in place, holding on to a pole with his eyes closed. She knows what he is doing: meditating, counting his breaths, listening to the train’s hypnotic rhythm. She tries to do the same, but she is never able to meditate. Every time she closes her eyes, her thoughts race, and she sees images of her sister running under her eyelids in double speed, like a movie on fast-forward.

  At Court Square, they both get out to change to the G train, walking next to each other but not talking. By the time they reach Greenpoint, it’s early evening. They pass by the fresh produce stands, by the Polish deli, by the coffee shop, by the park at the corner of Nassau and Russell. Usually, they would grab two coffees and head to the park, sit there for half an hour to unwind before walking home. Today Rose trots past the coffee shop, and by the time they reach the corner of their street, her step is so hurried that Mark almost sprints to keep up with her.

  At the door of their apartment building, they see Mrs. Kumiega watering her geraniums.

  “Lovely day, right?” the landlady asks.

  “Yes, Mrs. Kumiega,” Rose says, walking up the stairs and past the landlady. “Beautiful day.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE WALKS STRAIGHT TO the kitchen, dropping her backpack on the living-room floor on her way in. Mark follows her, closing the door behind him.

  “We need to talk.”

  She is filling the coffee carafe with tap water to pour into the coffee machine’s reservoir. Either her grip on the carafe is too strong or her hand is shaking—she ends up splashing water all around the machine. She curses under her breath, snags a kitchen towel off its hook, which is nailed to the wall at the end of the counter. The violence of her pull tears the hook clean off the wall. It falls to the floor with a clang, leaving a quarter-size hole in the wall where it used to sit. Rose looks at the wall, the towel still in her hand. Then, slowly, she walks up to the kitchen table and sits down.

  Minutes pass and Rose does not talk or look Mark’s way. When she finally moves, she places the towel on the table in front of her. Mark, who had been standing in the doorway separating the living room from the kitchen, walks in and picks the towel up, dries up the mess around the coffee machine, and brews a pot. In minutes, the kitchen is filled with the smell of coffee. Mark pours two cups, adds cream to both, then sets Rose’s cup in front of her and takes the seat across the table.

  “Thank you,” she whispers, wrapping her fingers around the cup. She lifts it to her nose and inhales the rising aroma.

  “It wasn’t my fault, Rose.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  She does not look up for fear of what his eyes will reveal: that she has said that it was his fault, over and over, and that they both know it. First, when Gameela went missing for two days, Mark had joined Rose in her anguish, and they had tossed theories between them, groping for reassurance that she would be found alive: Maybe she got in an accident and is lying in a hospital somewhere, unconscious; Maybe they couldn’t find her ID—it could have been damaged; Maybe she ran away with someone—it’s not like her, of course, but it happens, right? Not once did they fathom a connection between Gameela and the news they read online and casually dismissed. But the moment they learned how she had died, their status as partners in worry vanished, and Rose turned on Mark, yelling at him with all the vehemence of her grief and anger. She would not have died if not for you and your interviews, your articles, your obsession with meddling. Why did you have to bring her along? Why did you have to drag my sister into your work? Useless, back then, for him to repeat that Gameela was the one who introduced him to the boy he interviewed. Useless to insist that no one could have predicted what happened next.

  “But you’re still acting like it’s my fault,” Mark says. “You’re angry with me. You just fought with me because I wanted to chat with a vendor. Don’t tell me that was all about the po
or guy’s feelings. And since when did my writing reveal a superiority complex?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. You just write with such confidence. Just like you acted with that vendor. Like you know how he feels and what he is thinking.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “No, but it can be simplistic. People’s stories never stand in isolation.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “You know it, yes, but on some level, you have to isolate their stories to make them fit neatly in a two-page article, don’t you?”

  “Please don’t preach to me about my own profession, Rose.”

  “I’m not. I’m sorry if it came through that way.” She takes a sip of coffee and lets the bitterness warm her mouth and throat. When she places the cup on the table, it anchors her hands in place and stops them from shaking. “You need to understand how monumental this whole thing has been for me.”

  “Of course I understand. I never—”

  “Let me finish.” She looks up at him and he falls silent. “I’m not only talking about losing my sister. I’m talking about . . .” She pauses, unsure how to explain. “History. I’m talking about history.”

  He seems puzzled but doesn’t speak. She takes another moment to organize her thoughts. From where she is sitting, she can see the magnolia tree in the backyard, its branches reaching up to her kitchen window. She watches it while she speaks.

  “I’m used to dealing with finished stories. That’s what I do at work: I examine history after it has happened. Not just broad, cultural history, but individual history as well. The stories of Pharaohs, of kings and queens, and so on. I look at the way people lived thousands of years after their death. In a way, it makes it simpler to see things in context, even though so much remains unknown.” She takes a sip of her coffee. Mark does not touch his.

  “This is different,” she goes on. “First, I have the problem of seeing Gameela’s history cut short. It’s extremely painful for me to think of her story as done. Finished.” She pauses to clear her throat. “Then there is the added problem of how my own life may have affected hers. How yours may have affected hers. Because, regardless of how you both came to know that boy, the bottom line is your story intersected with hers at that point, and I keep tracing events back to this, and further back, to our marriage, and wondering how all of this influenced her life.” She looks straight at him, tries to see if he has understood. She is not sure he has, but he is still listening. She pushes her coffee cup aside and puts both palms flat on the table. “This is her life,” she says, pushing her left palm a few inches forward. “But it has stopped here. Now this is mine,” she moves the right palm parallel to the left and lets it pass it, “and mine is still going on. And I can’t stop thinking about how my own choices may have had an impact on hers.”

  She stops moving. Mark looks at her hands. Slowly, he holds each of her hands in his and brings them together at the center of the table. They stay still for a moment, watching their tangled mass of fingers and palms, his skin tone so much lighter than hers.

  “Do you regret marrying me?” he finally asks. He is not looking at her, but his fingers are kneading hers. He brings the tip of his thumb against the tip of hers and holds them both in place, watching them.

  She shakes her head. “No. I don’t.” She pulls her hands free and gets up, taking her coffee cup to the window, and sliding it open. She wants to explain to him that she feels the guiltiest precisely because she does not regret marrying him, but she is choked up and fears that talking will lead to tears.

  It’s close to sunset now. In the distance, a flock of birds takes off and flies away. Rose stays in place, leaning against the wall, looking out on the backyard. The magnolia tree stands perfectly still.

  Mark moves next to her, wraps one arm around her shoulders. She rests her head on his hand but keeps looking out of the window.

  “I wish I could go back in time and change things,” Mark mutters. “Not write that interview, not go to Egypt, or at least refuse when she suggested taking me to that boy. But I keep telling myself that no one could have foreseen this. I certainly never did.”

  “I know. And yet—here we are.”

  Outside, a bird lands on the magnolia tree, shaking a branch and, with it, every single leaf attached to it, the bird’s minuscule feet starting a shock wave that vibrates on and on, leaving hundreds of leaves trembling in its wake.

  Part Two

  ◆ 5 ◆

  Desert sand: dry, blistering hot. At this part of the Giza plateau, where archaeologists once used to dump loads of sand excavated elsewhere, unaware that they were thus burying the queen’s pyramid deeper, the sand settled in layers, fine beige above coarse red, the constitution of clay embedded with white rocks. Rose, sitting on a rock in the narrow shade of one side of the five-foot-tall recently excavated pyramid base, grabbed a handful and let it filter between her fingers. A cluster the size of a dried-up date remained; she crushed it between her forefinger and thumb, watched it crumble.

  “Bachelor of arts in Egyptology, American University in Cairo; followed by an MA in Egyptology and Coptology, also from the AUC, specializing in language, literature, and religion. Correct?”

  Rose, startled, looked up, examining the American reporter more closely. When Tamer, her superior on the excavation team, had told her the reporter wished to interview her, Rose had assumed the American was the journalistic equivalent of small fry. Why else would he be satisfied with interviewing her, a junior archaeologist who, on paper, is supposed to be a linguist, but whose days are spent inputting data that her supervisors collect and interpret, reducing her role to that of an overqualified secretary? She had acquiesced, of course, agreeing with the same willingness she showed when asked to perform various insignificant tasks: run to the nearest stationery store to fax a form; drop off a specimen at the main office for analysis, spending half the day stuck in Cairo’s perpetually congested traffic. Paying her dues in order to advance in the ranks. She had approached the waiting reporter with an apologetic nod, assuming he had asked to speak to one of the site directors and had to settle for her. The newly discovered pyramid behind them, Rose walked over ready to tell him the bare basics about the biggest archaeological discovery of 2008: that they had discovered a 4,300-year-old pyramid of an ancient Egyptian queen called Sesheshet; that her name evoked the goddess of history and writing, Seshat; that she was the mother of King Teti, a Pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty. She had not expected him to know anything about her.

  “How did you know that?”

  He smiled. “Do you think I would come to interview you without knowing the most basic biographical information? I’m not that incompetent.”

  Rose blushed. “I didn’t mean to imply any such thing. I just assumed you had wanted to talk to a member of the expedition regarding the recent discovery of the pyramid. I didn’t expect you to know anything about me personally.”

  “I asked to interview you personally, not just any member of the expedition.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I need to talk to women in professions generally dominated by men.”

  “There are many women on site. Four of the archaeologists in charge of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project are women, for example.”

  “Yes, but they are foreign women. Europeans, mostly. I’m interested in Egyptian women. It’s part of a piece I’m writing on sexism in Egypt.”

  She laughed. “That’s a huge undertaking. You must be very ambitious. Or totally insane.”

  “A bit of both, I guess.”

  He sat across from her, out of the pyramid’s wedge of shade, beads of sweat already forming on his temples, his hair—fine, blond—sticking to his forehead.

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Mark. Mark Hatfield.”

  He was wearing a white shirt and khaki shorts, bot
h already covered with Giza’s fine sand, looking like a character out of an old British movie about a group of aristocrats seeking adventure among Egypt’s lost tombs. He squinted at her, the sun shining straight at his face.

  “Here,” she said, scooting to the side. “Share my rock.”

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT DREW YOU to the field of Egyptology?”

  He had set a recorder on top of his backpack between them, but had still pulled out a notepad where he had written questions and where he was now jotting down notes as she spoke.

  “I fell in love with the Pharaohs at a very young age, during a visit to the Egyptian Museum. I had never been that close to relics before, and I remember looking up at King Tut’s mask and wondering what the writing on the back said. I became quite obsessed with it; had to learn to read hieroglyphs. Nagged my father until he got me a book on the subject. I started then and I never stopped.”

  She did not tell him about The Curse of the Pharaohs, the book she had read weeks before that visit, the nights she spent dreaming of the sordid fates and sudden deaths of many of those present at the opening of King Tut’s tomb (all nonsense, she would learn much later, all medically explicable, much to her disappointment). She had wanted to decipher the hieroglyphs to see if they spelled any curses, if the Pharaohs had engraved words of protection and wrath on the young king’s death mask. For weeks, she lay on the floor in her bedroom, a book opened before her, and copied the old hieroglyphs: the f a snake, the a an arm, two feathers for a y, the r shaped like parted lips, a dangling rope with a tie for a w or ou sound, a knotted rope for an s or a z. She wrote her name in hieroglyphs: Fayrouz. Rose, as she insisted people call her shortly afterward.

  “Did you ever consider whether it was a career suitable for a woman based on Egyptian social norms?”

  “Not really.”

  “Never crossed your mind? Not even when you got older?”