by Rajia Hassib
Rose nodded, let Ingrid give her a hug, let Ted do the same. She stood at the top of the stairs while Mark walked them down, watched Ted and Mark share a final few whispers in the lobby and then burst into laughter. She walked back into the apartment before they were done talking.
She picked up the dessert bowls, rinsed them, placed them in the dishwasher. She heard Mark return but waited till she dried her hands before she looked up at him. She had found that this little pause helped, whenever she was upset. A soft breath to calm herself.
“I didn’t know you were still upset about Egypt,” she told him. She poured herself a glass of iced tea and walked over to the living room, sat on the sofa, lifted her feet up on the coffee table. Mark followed and sat in the closer armchair.
“I wouldn’t say I was upset.”
“I would. Ted would. Ingrid would, too. I’m sure all three of us would agree you were upset.”
“You’re exaggerating, Rose.”
“I’m not. I’m embarrassed you had to criticize me in front of our guests.”
“I wasn’t criticizing you. And Ted is practically family.”
“I don’t care how close you are or how long you’ve known each other. Even if he’s your best friend, he’s still a guest. I’ve known him only since I married you. And I’m not sure I like him, to be honest.”
“Why not?”
“He’s not right for Ingrid. We introduced them, and I keep fearing she will hate me for it one day. Don’t see how they’ve lasted six months already. He’s too sleazy.”
“No, he’s not. You don’t know him.”
“Exactly. I don’t. Which is why I would rather not discuss private affairs in his presence.”
She took a sip of her tea before placing the glass on the side table.
“Look. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. I don’t know what brought all of this out. I had a bad day at work today, this shitty assignment that I’m not enjoying at all, and I got online to check out Egypt’s news and saw so much I could have been reporting on. And I just regretted not staying.”
“We didn’t stay because I got accepted at Columbia! You know how important that was for me. And it’s not like you had to flip burgers; you got a good job, too. One bad day at work doesn’t mean you don’t have a good job.”
“I know. I know.” He leaned forward, put his hand on her knee, then rested his forehead on his hand. She could feel the weight of his head pushing her leg down. She shifted her other leg, putting her foot on the floor to help steady the leg he was leaning on. Mark looked up but she patted his head, pushed it gently back down, ran her fingers through his hair.
“You don’t really regret moving back to the U.S., do you? Moving away from Egypt?”
Her words were soft, and she imagined them landing on his fine blond hair, tiny birds all symbolizing the w sound.
“No. I don’t. It had to be done. I know.” Mark’s words sounded muffled.
“Would you go back now, if you had the chance? Maybe you could get your post back.”
He lifted his head and sank back in the armchair. “We can’t move now. You know that. My contract doesn’t expire for another two years. And you’re still two years away from finishing your PhD.”
“I could stay here and finish it and then catch up with you. And you could get out of that contract, if you wanted to.”
Mark shook his head. “Wouldn’t want to break a contract prematurely. It wouldn’t look good. Word would get around.” He looked up at her. “And I don’t want to be away from you for two years.”
She got up, squeezed next to him in the armchair, tangled her legs in his. Her ankles rested on his, her skin dark, his pale, and, as usual, she watched the two skin tones with admiration, took in the way each tone brought out the other’s qualities, a mixture of cream and brown as artistic as the elaborate patterns baristas drew on the surface of her lattes. She rubbed her ankle against his, then looked to the side, where their shared bookcase stood, its middle occupied by souvenirs, reminders of every trip they had made, every vacation they had enjoyed. Three years together, and she had never imagined that Mark found their life any less perfect than she did.
“I’m sorry I never realized you were unhappy.”
“Who said I was unhappy? I’m not unhappy. I’m perfectly happy.” He kissed her forehead, clutched her closer to him.
“That won’t do, Mark. You can’t suppress something that you obviously crave. Sacrifices like those are highly overrated. All they do is bury discontentment deeply enough for it to fester with time. I don’t want you to look back and have any regrets. Certainly not on my account.”
“I won’t. Seriously. You’re making too big a deal out of this.”
She shook her head and sat up straight. “There has to be a way out of this.”
“There isn’t any.” Mark’s voice took on a frustrated edge. He got up, stretching. “I told you. I can’t just leave in the middle of my contract.”
“But you don’t really have to abandon your job, do you?” She shot up, her eyes gleaming with excitement. “How about if you just went away for a week or two?”
“What would I do in a week or two? Job hunt?”
“No, no. Write a freelance piece!”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t go roam the streets in Egypt for two weeks and stumble upon a story. It could end up being a total waste of time. And money.”
“Then you start the piece here.” She walked up and down the living room, gesticulating as she spoke. “You decide what you would like to write about, do all the research you can do from here, and then go there for whatever needs to be done on site. You know—interviews and stuff.”
She saw him look at her, his head tilted.
“You know there is merit to this,” she said.
“I don’t know. It could end up coming down to nothing.”
“At least you would have tried.”
“We can’t afford this, Rose.”
“We can certainly afford one plane ticket! We’ll put it on your credit card. We’ll get you the cheapest ticket around. Fly you to Egypt via India, if we have to.”
He laughed, and his laugh made her smile. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard this particular laugh of his—loud, open.
“And you won’t even have to spend any money there. You’ll stay with my parents. So room and board are taken care of.”
She walked up to him and held him by the arms. “It can be done, Mark.”
He nodded, smiling. “Maybe.” He pulled her close to him, hugged her. “Maybe.”
◆ 8 ◆
Insert intelligent-sounding prospectus title here
Introduction
Purpose
Importance of problem
Methodology
Six months after that dinner party, Rose sat at her desk, wedged in the corner of the bedroom of their Brooklyn apartment, her laptop open in front of her. She stared at her computer screen, then picked up her notebook and flipped through the notes she had been scribbling for the previous three months. She was more than three years into her PhD and three months into trying to write a presentable prospectus of her thesis. In her mind, her ideas positively teetered on the edge of brilliance, seeming to need only a nudge to fall into the pool of groundbreaking discoveries and cause a glorious splash, its ripples affecting the entire global community of Egyptologists.
In reality, she felt unable to string two coherent sentences together.
“I am a fraud,” she said out loud.
Academic sources littered the entire room. Books lay in stacks on top of and under her nightstand, overflowing onto the floor and all the way to the corner of the room, where they formed a stepped tower at least four feet tall before falling again in a trail of shorter
stacks tracing the length of the room and reaching the foot of her desk at the opposite corner. A box by her feet held printouts of so many peer-reviewed articles on ancient Egyptian literature of the Middle Kingdom that she was certain she had killed at least two trees and used up four or five cartridges of ink. She didn’t even want to calculate how much she had paid for copies at five cents per page. Now her laptop carried three files of brainstorming for possible directions to take her thesis in; her notebooks oozed scribbles, notes, and arrows connecting ideas across pages; and she was certain that all of this would amount to nothing. Her stomach churned so loudly that she groaned.
In the kitchen, she poured herself another cup of coffee, then brewed a new pot. She stood at the window, watching Mrs. Kumiega sit in the backyard under the shade of the magnolia that, in the spring, exploded with some of the most beautiful pink flowers Rose had ever seen. Mrs. Kumiega was taking full advantage of the warm weather that had popped up in the middle of an otherwise cold, dreary week in January. Rose considered taking her coffee cup and joining the landlady, spending her only weekday off under the shade of the large, welcoming tree, basking in sunshine that might not hit the yard again till March. She contemplated taking the laundry to the corner laundromat, telling herself that she would not be abandoning her work, that she could sit there and let the washing machine’s hypnotic twirl and hum clear her mind and, she hoped, reset it into a semi-intelligent state. She worried about what she and Mark would have for dinner. The thought of dinner made her stomach growl again, so she opened the fridge, pulled out a cup of fruit yogurt, and ate it standing by the window.
She took her coffee cup back to the desk, sat down, let her head fall forward, and banged her forehead on her open notebook a few times.
She was in the fourth year of her PhD studies. She had survived more than three years. She just needed to survive the remaining two.
She lifted her head, moved the mouse to wake up her computer, stared at the few lines glowing in angry black ink on her screen.
Introduction: Explaining where whatever my dissertation will be about falls within the larger field of Egyptology and why it will be brilliant and groundbreaking.
She called her parents.
“Rose, habibti!” her mother’s voice greeted her. “What a nice surprise.”
“Hey, Mama. How’s life?”
“Good, alhamdu lellah. How’s your thesis going?”
Rose grunted. “It’s not going anywhere. It may go to the sewer and take me with it.”
Nora laughed. “No, it won’t. I have full faith in your ability to pull through this.”
“How’s Baba?”
“He’s right here. Let me put you on the speakerphone.”
A moment later, Rose heard her father’s voice, a bit distant, echoing. “Habibti! You’re missing out on my famous marble cake. How come you’re not at school?”
“It’s Friday. No classes on Friday.”
“Working on your thesis?”
Rose eyed the litter of books and papers around her. “Yes,” she lied.
“When is Mark flying over?” her mother asked.
“Next week. His flight arrives in Cairo late Thursday night.”
“Tell him to send us his flight information so that we can meet him at the airport.”
“Has he read about the new constitution being approved? In the referendum, ninety-eight percent voted yes,” her father said.
Rose grimaced. “I’m sure he has.”
“Make sure he writes about that,” her mother added. “Make sure he lets the West know how the people support Al-Sisi and the interim government. How they are restoring order to Egypt. How they saved us all from the extremist Muslim Brotherhood.”
“I can’t control what he writes, Mama.”
“You can guide him.”
Rose sighed. Her parents, like almost all liberal, middle-class Egyptians of their generation, she was finding out, were staunch supporters of Colonel General Al-Sisi, the head of the Egyptian armed forces, who overthrew the elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi. Almost three years to the day since the Egyptian revolution, and everyone in Egypt was still consumed by politics, everyone firmly planted in either the camp of the military rulers or the camp of the ousted Muslim Brotherhood. There seemed to be no middle ground.
Mark, she knew, was a creature of the middle ground. He thrived in between ideologies, in between extremes, in gray areas populated by the skeptics and the tolerant alike.
“How is Gameela?” Rose asked. She was getting sick of talk of politics, which, for a full three years, had permeated every single conversation she had with her parents.
“She’s in her room. I’ll go get her,” her father said.
She heard his steps walking away, then heard her mother pick the receiver up. Her voice came hushed but clear.
“I’ve taken you off the speaker. Your sister has been acting weirdly lately. She’s on that damned phone the entire time, texting someone. And she goes out for hours at a time, comes back home in the middle of the night.”
“She’s a grown woman, Mama.”
“She’s twenty-five!”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t want her roaming the streets till midnight every night. It started with the revolution and now everything is topsy-turvy. No rules anymore.”
“She’s probably just spending time with Marwa. She stayed there all the time during the revolution, right?”
“Yes. But the revolution is over, isn’t it?”
“She’s still friends with Marwa.”
“She’s coming. If you find anything out, tell me, okay? She won’t tell me anything.”
“If she won’t tell you, she won’t tell me, Mama.”
“Your sister is here. She wants to talk to you,” Nora shouted into the receiver. Rose pulled the phone away from her ear.
“Hey, Rosie,” Gameela’s voice came.
“Gigi. Miss you, habibti.”
“Miss you, too. How’s America?”
“Beautiful. Cold, usually, but not today. How’s Egypt?”
“Beautiful, too.”
“I heard you have a working constitution now.”
“Wait. I’m taking the phone to my room. Mama is turning the TV on and I can’t hear a thing.”
Rose got up, walked to the kitchen, and looked out the window. Mrs. Kumiega was still sitting in the sun.
“They’re driving me absolutely bonkers,” came Gameela’s whispered voice.
Rose laughed. “Politics? Or your personal life?”
“Both. But mainly politics. It’s like I’m living with Al-Sisi’s personal propaganda machine. All I hear all day is how great he is, how he’s saved Egypt from the Brotherhood, how he is the hero who responded to the people’s call for help and stopped Egypt from turning into another Iran, run by extremist clerics. How he has to run for president because he is Egypt’s only hope. The police arrested hundreds of protesters across the country just a few weeks ago, and they don’t care!”
“I think it’s a generational thing. Marwa’s parents are the same, aren’t they? They’ve all lived under military rule since the fifties. They are back in their comfort zone. And it was kind of terrifying, the way the Brotherhood was trying to consolidate all power in their hands. You can’t blame them for being relieved that didn’t happen.”
Gameela sighed. “I’m just so disappointed. You should have seen how beautiful it was, during the revolution. People had such high hopes.”
Once, in the midst of a march where hundreds of thousands swarmed Cairo’s streets, Gameela had called Rose to let her hear the chants, even though the noise was so deafening there was no way for the sisters to hear each other above the crowds. But Rose still remembered the chants for Bread, liberty, and social justice, the calls shouted up to spectators look
ing down from the balconies of their apartments: Walk down, Egyptian—your country calls you. She had watched the live coverage on CNN as millions of people flooded Egypt’s various cities on January 25, 2011, and stayed there till Mubarak relinquished his thirty-year rule two weeks later. Gameela had been among those people, and she had given Rose the chance to be there, for a few short minutes, listening to the hope in the people’s voices, participating in the Arab Spring via an international phone call. The hairs on Rose’s arms stood on end now, remembering all this. Back then, she had cried openly as she held on to her phone, watched CNN on mute, getting the sound live courtesy of her sister.
“Mama has high hopes you will get married soon. I think she suspects you’re sneaking out to meet a guy,” Rose said, laughing.
On the other end of the line, Gameela grew silent. Rose’s laugh died down.
“Are you sneaking out to meet a guy?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of Mama’s business.” Gameela’s voice came sharp and cold. “And I don’t see why she can’t ask me personally, rather than have you do it.”
“I’m asking you personally. I’m not asking on her behalf.” Rose would not have told her mother anything her sister wished to withhold, but she wasn’t sure Gameela believed that. “I think she’s probably just worried you’re dating a Muslim Brotherhood guy.” Rose attempted a chuckle, croaked out an awkward, unidentifiable noise instead.
“I’m not. Just because I’m the only woman in this family who wears a hijab doesn’t mean you all should treat me like some sort of religious extremist. I like my hijab. It makes me feel peaceful.”
“I know, Gigi. I didn’t—”
“And just because I’m opposed to the way the interim government is cracking down on activists doesn’t mean I’m pro-Brotherhood either, Rose. You, of all people, should know that.”
“I know that! Who said I didn’t know that?”
“You act like you don’t.”
“I’m just worried about you.”
“Nothing to worry about, thank you very much.”