A Pure Heart

by Rajia Hassib

  They fell silent. Rose grabbed a fresh mug and walked up to the coffee machine, slammed the mug on the countertop so forcefully she feared she had broken it. She picked it up, turned it around. It was still intact.

  “Why is it that every time I talk to you or to Mama and Baba, we have to either talk politics or religion?” She poured herself a cup of coffee, grabbed the cream from the fridge. “Why can’t we be like normal people and talk about our lives, for a change?”

  “Because now our lives here are about politics. And religion. Every single day. That’s what’s on the news. That’s what people are arguing about. You moved to America just before the revolution, so you haven’t lived through this.” Then, with a sharp, spitting emphasis: “We’re not all American, Rose. Some of us don’t have the luxury of a normal life.”

  Rose pulled her coffee cup away from her mouth, placed it on the countertop, and was on the verge of responding, when she remembered something. Slowly, deliberately, she placed the phone next to the coffee cup, stood straight with her heels together, clasped both hands in front of her chest, then inhaled, deeply, counting to ten. When she was done, she counted one more time. Then she picked the phone up.

  “Rose? Are you still there?” Gameela was asking.

  “Sorry. Lost you there for a moment. What were you saying?”

  “I was asking how your thesis is going.”

  “Great. It’s going great.”

  Rose picked up her coffee, sipped, let the warm liquid twirl in her mouth. Savored the bitterness.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Rose. I’m . . . I’ve been a bit . . .”

  Rose sat down at the breakfast table. The sun, lower now, shone through the window and onto the floor. She extended one socked foot into the path of the sun rays and wiggled her toes.

  “I just haven’t been feeling too well,” Gameela said.

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “Nothing in particular. Work. Life.”

  “I know.”

  Rose leaned back in her chair, looked across the backyard and at the neighboring apartment building.

  “I’m sorry I called you American, Rose.”

  “It’s not an insult, habibti.”

  “I know it’s not. But still.”

  A sparrow landed on the laundry line that ran out of the kitchen window and all the way to a pulley fastened to the electric pole at the end of the backyard. Rose watched it flick its wings, hop in place, and change direction. When she first arrived in the U.S., she was amazed to find the exact same sparrows here that populated the trees in Cairo. She hadn’t expected that. She considered sharing this information with Gameela, but said nothing.

  * * *

  —

  “GAMEELA CALLED ME AN AMERICAN,” Rose told Mark on the phone.

  “I hate to break this to you, but you are almost an American. You will officially be one by next year.”

  “I know that.” Rose copied her husband’s intonation, slow and singsongy. “But she wasn’t stating a fact. She was underscoring a difference. Apparently, as an American, I’m not allowed to have opinions about Egypt anymore. And I’m not qualified to empathize with my parents or with her. American, in this context, meant ‘Other.’ You know that.”

  “And?”

  “I breathed and counted till ten. Twice. It worked, surprisingly. Thanks for the tip.”

  Mark laughed. “If it works with my mom, it should work with your sister.”

  “I was so pissed, though. Why can’t I just talk to her like we used to?”

  “Just give it time.”

  She was back at her desk, trying, again, to work on her thesis. She started doodling in her notebook, drawing spirals that intersected with other spirals, starting at the corner of the page and slowly covering the entire sheet.

  “I still can’t forgive her for how judgmental she got, when we got married.” The spirals grew tighter, closer together. She had to concentrate to spread them apart.

  “You need to get over that. She’s very religious. Of course she didn’t like you marrying an American.”

  “Well, she wasn’t always ‘very religious.’ And you converted, Mark. You’re a Muslim now.” Technically, at least, she thought but did not say out loud. “Even someone ‘very religious’ can’t find fault with that. And what if I had married someone who was Muslim by birth but was not practicing? Half the people in Egypt are Muslim in name only. Would she have submitted them all to a religious test? And why do religious people have to be so judgmental anyway? Shouldn’t religiousness lead people to be more tolerant? Why does it never work that way?” She paused, looked at the doodles.

  “How are your parents?” Mark asked.

  “They’re okay. My mom said to remind you to send her your flight information.”

  “I will. Tonight. Are you sure they’re okay with me staying with them for a full ten days?”

  “Sure they are.”

  “Gameela, too? She’ll have to wear her hijab at home.”

  “Her choice. Not your problem.” She started doodling an oval face wearing a hijab.

  “Maybe I should stay with Tony. He’s still stationed in Cairo. I’d get to see the cats.”

  “You’re not staying with your friend when my parents have a spare bedroom, Mark. And I’m not telling them you’d rather spend time with the stray cats you rescued than with them. Besides, the food will be better at my mom’s. And they’re literally a stone’s throw away from Tahrir Square. Not that anything is happening there now, but at least you can be near where the Arab Spring happened. You can walk over and inhale the same air the revolutionaries breathed.”

  She heard him tap his pencil on the desk. “Seriously, honey. They don’t care,” Rose repeated. Then, after a pause, “Of course, if you end up writing something in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, they may disown me.”

  “Can’t promise you anything.”

  “Just don’t totally take their side, will you?”

  “Never tell a writer what to write, Rose.”

  She sighed, put her own pencil down. Stared at her blank document again.

  “How about you tell this struggling writer what to write? I’ve been working on my prospectus all day. Trying to anyway. So far, I’ve spoken to my parents, resisted hanging out with Mrs. Kumiega, who’s been sitting in the glorious sun all morning, drunk six cups of coffee, and eaten three days worth of calories. At least. Maybe four. And I cleaned the bathroom.” She heard him chuckle. “You think I should do the laundry today? Get it out of the way?”

  “I think you should do some writing. I’ll do the laundry when I get home.”

  “I think I have writer’s block.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re just starting. You’re just overwhelmed because it’s a large project. Just take it one page at a time. One sentence at a time.”

  She stared at the screen, at the vertical line marking the last word she typed. The line blinked. She pushed her chair back, walked to the fridge, pulled out a box of blueberries, and started picking them straight out of the box, lifting the receiver up so that he didn’t hear her munching.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Eating blueberries,” she said, her mouth full.

  “Go write your prospectus.”

  “Eating blueberries is easier.”

  “Go write, Rose.”

  She huffed. “We’re having Chinese tonight.”

  “Sounds good.”

  She hung up and walked back to her desk.

  Introduction: Explaining where whatever my dissertation will be about falls within the larger field of Egyptology and why it will be brilliant and groundbreaking.

  Rose stared at the screen and thought of her sister. She tried to think back to the time before Gameela fell so deeply into religion, the time when, sur
prisingly, Rose, the older sister, used to remind Gameela to pray Ishaa, the evening prayer, only to see her sister roll in bed, pull the covers over her head, and pretend to sleep. Rose remembered exactly when this started to change, when Gameela, during her first year in college, brought home cassettes with religious lectures on them, handed to her by who knows whom, cassettes carrying sweet, syrupy voices of men telling her that she needed to cover her hair, as God required, asking her why she felt it was okay to deny God such a small request, reminding her of all the rewards waiting for those who obeyed His teachings, of the hell waiting for those who won’t.

  Even now, Rose felt guilty remembering those words.

  Ahmed had had a minor fit when Gameela emerged from her room one morning with her hair covered in a pink floral scarf. He had not liked the idea of his daughter wearing the hijab and had not understood why she would want to cover up the abundance of auburn curls that gave him such joy to look at. Nora hadn’t liked it either, had openly told Gameela that she looked like a peasant, that such backward traditions were not for people of their class and education.

  Gameela had assured them both that her mind was made up. Her face had remained calm, but Rose had seen her mouth twitch, had recognized that look on her sister’s face, the one she took on whenever, as a child, she would trip and skin her knee but remain too proud to cry in front of strangers.

  Rose had followed Gameela out of the apartment and joined her as she waited for the elevator.

  “It looks good, Gameela. It does. You look great,” she had said, reaching out and touching her sister’s head scarf, straightening its edge.

  Gameela had looked at her with moist eyes. “It’s not about looking good, Rose. That’s not the point. I’m free to do whatever I want to do.”

  Rose pulled her hand back. “Of course you are, habibti.”

  She had waited with her sister, had not walked back into the apartment until she saw Gameela step into the elevator, the sliding door separating them.

  Now, sitting in her apartment in New York, Rose remembered that day and wondered, for the hundredth time, whether it was all a matter of degrees, whether all people of different faiths fell on exactly the same scale but on different parts of it, and whether there was something about religion that caused everyone to wish all the others were exactly as religious as they were, not more, not less.

  Rose, too, considered herself religious, but she suspected Gameela did not believe that. Rose still prayed five times a day most days. She still fasted the entire month of Ramadan. Her religiousness, though, was a part of her whole, not the center of her being, and she was happy with that. It was precisely because she was religious that she refused to believe that God, the all-merciful, all-knowing God, would hang her by her feet and let every exposed inch of her skin burn in the fires of hell as punishment for her failure to wear the hijab, as the man on her sister’s cassette had claimed.

  In a way, Rose knew she was just like Gameela: she, too, wanted others to be just as religious as she was, not more, not less.

  Mark’s mom was the same. In her home in West Virginia, she had a painting of a white, blond Jesus smiling down on all who entered the house. She had not taken Mark’s conversion well, and Rose still felt the need to apologize to her for that. The poor woman believed she had forever lost her only son, repeatedly reminding Mark that leaving Christianity for Islam would throw him in the same fires of hell that Gameela claimed women forgoing the hijab would roast in.

  Rose imagined a version of hell that was a composite of all the versions painted by various religious people, and realized that this co-op hell would, eventually, have room for every single person on earth. One large hell to encompass them all, with infinite numbers of small, exclusive heavens that included only those who were exactly as religious as each other, who practiced the same religion with the exact same vehemence, no more, no less.

  Even the Pharaohs had similar beliefs, painting the walls of their tombs with scenes where the souls of the dead stood in front of a deity, where the person’s heart was weighed against a feather to see if it contained an iota of malice, to judge whether it was pure enough to be granted entry into heaven.

  Rose wished everyone would study ancient Egyptian religion, then go on to study Judaism, Christianity, Coptic Christianity—as she did during her MA in Egypt—and Islam, and then go on to read about every major religion practiced on earth, like she had done after meeting Mark. If more people did so, perhaps they would finally recognize their similarities and learn to live with their differences, practicing their beliefs their own way and not expecting others to follow suit. She wished people would travel more, too, like she did when she came to the U.S., like Mark did when he worked in Lebanon and Egypt, like Sinuhe did when he left Egypt for Palestine in the ancient Egyptian tale, lamenting his departure and yearning to go back home, yes, but learning, too, because he must have learned something through travel, mustn’t he?

  Rose sat up straight in her desk.

  Travel. Travel and learning. Religion and expatriation. Immigration.

  The words flooded her brain. She could see them, sparks of light shooting colors in all directions at once, a minor show of fireworks exclusively for her.

  Sinuhe’s tale is one of a failed immigration—he returned to Egypt, found a happy ending in his homeland under the grace of a kind Pharaoh.

  Why didn’t his immigration work? Why did ancient Egyptians cling so closely to home? Why did they think that those who were buried in foreign soil would not be resurrected? What is the relationship between all of that and between ancient Egyptian religion? The obvious, of course, was a kind of clinging to the way one practiced one’s religion, to the exact degree of religiousness, not more, not less.

  But was there more to it?

  Rose remained very still. She was chasing a thought that was so delicate, so shy, that she feared even the slightest move would send it scurrying away, forever lost.

  She had come across a paper published just the previous year about an ethnoarchaeological approach to the tale of Sinuhe, about how it can be used to understand Egypt’s relationship to other cultures. She had also read a book that claimed Egypt’s culture was centered around death and salvation, that death, in fact, was the center of all cultures.

  Couldn’t she build on the work of those scholars, compare attitudes toward travel to those toward death, and use that to examine the idea of otherness in ancient Egypt and how this affected ancient Egyptian society? Or something along those lines?

  Where was that article? And the book?

  She dumped the contents of the box filled with scholarly articles on the floor, crouched next to it, sifting through its contents.

  How about communication between the living and the dead? The winged ba, a part of the soul flying between the tomb and the world of the living. What does that say about . . . what, exactly? What was she trying to say?

  She lifted the articles one by one, scanned their titles, tossed them aside.

  So mundane, on the surface, the idea of travel and understanding, of religion and death, so general, what’s new about it. Yet there was something there to connect all of that, something that she just knew she’d be able to find carved on a wall of an Egyptian tomb or inside a sarcophagus, something that has survived four thousand years and that was, somehow, still relevant.

  The thought circled her brain, like the taunting, elusive winged ba, the part of the soul that makes the person unique. Vexing, elusive thought. Out of reach yet right there, she knew. Right there.

  She picked up a handful of articles that she had put aside, took them to her laptop, started typing, chasing those thoughts before they vanished.

  The dissertation is about: Immigration in ancient Egypt. Expatriates. Death as expatriation. Religion as a way to negotiate otherness in life. The relationship between the living and the dead as a metaphor for the relationsh
ip between the Egyptian and the foreigner and how this is represented in tomb engravings. In the Book of the Dead. In catacomb engravings. Religion and otherness and how they were reflected in Egyptian society in the Middle Kingdom.

  She went on and on, filling page after page.

  The dissertation, she knew, would end up being about none of that. But somehow she also knew she had to go through it all, if she were to find that small thought that seemed to be galloping just out of her reach.

  She was not hungry anymore. When, an hour later, her phone rang, she reached over and switched it to silent mode.

  She had glimpsed an idea and, God help her, she was not letting it escape.

  ◆ 9 ◆

  Mark did not realize he had forgotten his keys until he was standing at the door to his in-laws’ apartment. He glanced at his watch—1:15 A.M. Both Ahmed and Nora would be asleep by now, for sure. He checked for the keys again, dug his hands deep into his jacket pockets, even though he clearly remembered seeing his keychain on the nightstand in the guest room, remembered telling himself to get the keys, then walking out without picking them up. He stood staring at the door. He might have to wake them.

  Or . . . could Gameela still be awake?

  He sent her a text message.

  At the door and forgot my keys. Help, please?

  He heard her slide open the security chain, unlock both padlocks before softly swinging the door open.

  “You’re an angel, Gameela.”

  The living room was doused in the soft light of a single floor lamp standing in the corner between the sofa and one of the armchairs. Gameela, in sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, went back to sitting in the corner of the sofa, pulling both feet up and covering her lap with a blanket. It was only sixty degrees outside, quite normal for Cairo in January, but Egyptian apartment buildings lacked central heating. Mark let himself fall on the armchair next to her, rubbed his hands to warm them.

  Gameela was texting someone. Mark watched her, her hair thick and auburn, falling in curly cascades and covering half of her face as she bent her head down to look at her phone. She looked nothing like Rose, and, at home, looked nothing like the girl he used to see during the years he spent in Egypt. Back then, she never took her head cover off in his presence, not even after he married Rose. He had felt quite uncomfortable, knowing that she had to scramble to her room to grab a scarf and drape it around her head whenever he arrived, knowing that, even after he married her sister, he still did not fall into the category of men she could let see her hair, a category limited to her future husband and her father, uncles, grandparents, and her brothers, if she had any. Per religious classification, he was and would always remain a man foreign to her, a man in front of whom she needed to cover up.