by Rajia Hassib
But when he arrived in Egypt this time around, Gameela seemed surprisingly relaxed in his presence. The first time Mark walked into the room and saw her sitting in a corner, barely acknowledging him, nonchalantly raising a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and tucking it behind her ear, he had not recognized her. That evening, he called Rose and told her how her sister, who still wore the head scarf in public, chose not to wear it at home while he was there, and Rose had been as puzzled by this unexpected development as he had.
“Any luck?” Gameela asked him, putting her phone away.
Mark shook his head. “Nothing. At all. Dragged me all the way to Masr El-Gedeeda just to have five members of the Muslim Brotherhood lecture me for three hours on how the Morsi overthrow was an illegitimate coup, even if Al-Sisi had only done so after millions of people demanded it of him in those protests, and even though he is not the president and will not be, unless he decides to run in the elections. Which I’m pretty sure he will do, but that’s not the point. I kept telling them I understand their point of view, I do, but that’s not the subject matter I am interested in. Noah had promised me I’d meet a young member of the Brotherhood with a story to tell, not a group of older leaders who all want me to join their propaganda machine.”
“I told you that you couldn’t trust them.”
“You told me I couldn’t trust the Brotherhood. I don’t. I did, however, trust Noah.”
“Who is a member of the Brotherhood.”
“Whom I’ve known for seven years.”
“Who is a member of the Brotherhood.”
Mark sighed, let his head fall back. “This is looking more like a wild-goose chase each day. And I have only five days left in Egypt.”
“What, exactly, do you hope to find here?”
Except for a short exchange earlier that morning, when she inquired where he was going that day, Gameela had not spoken to him in private since he arrived. In fact, Mark could not remember having had a one-on-one conversation with Gameela at all, prior to this visit to Egypt, something that Rose chalked up to Gameela’s attitude toward their marriage, a resistance through silent treatment. Now, looking at Gameela, Mark was surprised to see that she shared some of Rose’s features, even if both her skin and hair were shades lighter. She had Rose’s eyes and eyebrows. When asked a question that she needed to reflect upon, she crinkled her nose, a fleeting reaction that Rose also shared. Looking at her, Mark remembered, with a jolt, that this woman was his wife’s sister.
“I’m hoping to talk to a couple of people who participated in the revolution and write portraits of their lives,” he said. “Simple, personal portraits. Nothing that directly addresses politics, but something that, through the variety of the people interviewed, can still shed some light on the impact of Egypt’s politics on its society.”
“Then why are you limiting yourself to a Muslim Brotherhood source?”
“I’m not. I’ve already interviewed two people that a colleague of mine set me up with: an older, middle-class lady who is firmly pro Al-Sisi, and a young revolutionary secular man who identifies as a socialist. And I have one more person I’m supposed to talk to tomorrow, a lawyer who wants to discuss the new constitution, though that’s not confirmed yet. But I need someone to represent the Brotherhood, too. I can’t honestly portray Egypt’s society while totally ignoring the Islamists. I’m writing for an American audience, and the profiles should work together to form a story. The whole purpose is to show Egypt’s political diversity. If I write about the seculars only, I would not be presenting an honest portrait. And if I write about the Islamists only, I would be reinforcing the stereotype that all Arabs are religious fanatics. But if I can get people back home to sympathize with multiple, seemingly conflicting members of Egypt’s society—”
“Then you would have presented a complex, honest portrait and challenged the stereotype,” she continued his sentence, nodding.
He leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. She was still looking down at her lap. She picked her phone up, seemed about to look for something, then put it back down. Mark wondered whom she was texting at such a late hour.
“Many people here don’t like American journalists,” she said. “If they do speak to you, they will expect you to defend their political views, whatever they are. Take sides.”
“I won’t.”
“But isn’t writing inherently subjective? You’ll have to take a side, even if you don’t intend to.”
“Then I’ll take the side of decency and humanity.”
Gameela laughed. Mark, only slightly embarrassed, smiled.
“Rose always said you were an idealist.”
“Is this a bad thing?”
She shrugged, smiling. Then she crossed her arms, dug deep into the back of the sofa, her legs folded under her, and looked up at the ceiling. In the evening light, the yellow lamp illuminated her hair, casting tangled shadows on the sofa’s dark brown upholstery.
The colors reminded Mark of Rose. Perhaps because of the late hour, or because of having spent his day roaming crowded streets and interviewing strangers, Mark watched Gameela and realized that her exact current pose seemed to replicate the palette of colors that, in his mind, portrayed Rose: Gameela’s auburn hair had the same golden sheen that emanated from Rose’s skin after a day in the sun; the black of the throw covering Gameela’s legs was the color of Rose’s hair; Gameela’s face and hands, both slightly more tanned than the rest of her, because they were the only parts of her body that experienced direct sunrays, seemed the exact shade of Rose’s palms or of the soles of her feet. Mark could see a tan line at Gameela’s wrists, her hands gloved in darker skin. He had traveled a lot since he married Rose, but never alone to Egypt, to be surrounded by Rose’s family, sleeping next door to her childhood bed. He wished she could have come with him.
Now, watching Gameela rest her head on the back of the sofa, Mark decided he might be able to like her. Perhaps Rose’s anger with her had, in fact, reflected her disappointment in a younger sister who failed to dote on her, just as much as it was the result of Gameela’s opposition to their marriage. But Gameela was not the doting kind. That much Mark could tell.
“You’re not going to bed?” he asked her.
Gameela nodded. “Yes. Soon.”
“How can you all stay up so late all the time?” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost two A.M. I bet you the streets are just as busy now as they were two or three hours ago.”
“It’s a big city,” Gameela said. “Rose says New York is the same.”
“True.”
“And we stay up late because most of us sleep at work. Did you know there was a study that claimed Egyptians work, on average, twenty-eight minutes per day?”
Mark laughed. He had barely ever heard Gameela joke before, and now her smile infused her face with a new, relaxed air.
“How’s Rose doing?” she asked.
“She’s fine.” He glanced at his phone. “I’m about to call her, if you want to talk to her. It’s early evening back home.”
Gameela looked down, hesitated. “It’s okay. I need to go to bed.”
She got up, folded the blanket, carried it on her arm. “I’ll call her tomorrow,” she said, more to herself than to Mark.
A few steps into heading to her room, she paused.
“Listen, Mark.” Gameela turned around, facing him again. “I think I may be able to help you.”
He searched her face and thought that, for a fleeting moment, he may have seen a glimmer in her eyes, a spark resembling the one that lights up Rose’s face whenever she tells him a story of ancient Egypt, a particularly exciting one that she feels everyone should know because it is so relevant, still.
He sat straight up, his grip holding the chair’s arm. He waited for her to elaborate.
* * *
—
&
nbsp; THE MAN’S NAME WAS SAABER. He was twenty-one, Gameela told Mark, and had participated both in the revolution and in several of the subsequent demonstrations. Gameela did not know him personally, but she knew of him through a friend called Fouad, who was now sitting in the front passenger seat of the cab driving all three of them from Zamalek, where Mark’s in-laws lived, to Boolak, just across the Nile.
Fifteen minutes into the three-mile drive, the cab was stuck in traffic on top of the 6th of October Bridge. Mark was used to the old Lada cabs zooming through the cars lined up six rows wide in four-lane highways, to the fact that no one wore seat belts. He didn’t even flinch when he saw the truck right next to them, so close that, had he extended his arm just to the elbow out of his window, he would have been able to hold on to its side railing. The truck was loaded with such a tall stack of boxes of tomatoes that it seemed ready to tilt over at any second and douse them all in fresh tomato sauce. Mark semi-enjoyed all of this, the thrill of riding in a taxicab through Cairo’s busy streets akin to the one he experienced on roller coasters. He looked to the front and noted that the cab’s side-view mirror on the driver’s side was missing, doubtless shorn off after a too-close pass by another vehicle.
“He doesn’t speak English,” Fouad said of Saaber, “but I’ll be happy to interpret. He is a shy kid, but he’s been through a lot. I think we can get him to open up to you.”
Fouad sat with his arm around the back of the cabdriver’s seat. He spoke English with an unmistakable British accent, not the fake imitation of how British royalty are perceived to talk that Mark occasionally came across when dealing with Egypt’s upper classes, but an earthy, worn-out accent, something that Mark could have sworn had traces of the Scottish rolled r in it. Fouad’s left hand held on to the cabdriver’s headrest just inches away from Mark’s face. Mark examined the watch on Fouad’s wrist.
“Nice watch. You think it’s safe to wear a Rolex where we’re going?”
Fouad pulled his arm away, rubbed a thumb around the edge of the silver face of the vintage watch. “This watch is forty years old. Can’t imagine it’s worth much now. I wouldn’t wear it—I hate such signs of elitism—but it belonged to my father.”
“Fouad is a socialist,” Gameela said, smiling at Fouad’s back.
“I hate labels, too,” Fouad replied.
“He is a socialist who hates labels,” Gameela said.
Fouad looked at Gameela through the side-view mirror then smiled and shook his head. Gameela, apparently catching his eye, smiled, too, then looked out the window. They were crossing the Nile, the river wide and calm, running through a city that seems to grow by the minute, the river acting as a natural barrier where the expansions had no choice but to stop. The three and a half years that Mark had spent away seemed to have added a million or so people to Cairo’s population. Mark knew this could not be true, but because they were caught in traffic in the middle of the day with no estimated time of arrival in sight, Mark allowed the city to draw him in, to envelop him in the world he was part of for years and that he was now trying to pretend he was permanently back in, not only visiting for a short trip. Even the dusty, warm, polluted air blowing through the cab’s open window rejuvenated him. He could not think of a reasonable, logical explanation for how much he loved this country. How at home he felt in it. He breathed in, closing his eyes.
“Not carsick, are you?” Gameela asked.
“No. Just enjoying the ride.” Mark opened his eyes.
Fouad chuckled. “Glad you find this congestion enjoyable.”
“I like being in Egypt.”
“How long are you staying?” Fouad asked.
“Just three more days.”
“Pity you’re not here longer. I could have taken you out to the farm.”
“Fouad lives on a farm in Rasheed, on Egypt’s northern coast.”
“Rosetta!” Fouad said, turning to face Mark. “That’s what the British called it.”
“Where they found the Rosetta stone.” Mark nodded. “Did you grow up there?”
“No. My dad did. I grew up in Cairo but moved there to take care of the farm shortly before he died. Was supposed to spend a couple of weeks and then come back. That was over thirty years ago.” Fouad laughed.
“What kind of farm is it?”
“Citrus, mostly. But we also have hundreds of palm trees. We grow some of the best dates in Egypt.”
“Says the farm owner,” Gameela said.
“They’re good dates! You know that!” Fouad said, turning to face Gameela.
“Yes. Just teasing you.”
Now Fouad looked straight at her, and Mark marveled at how much younger he seemed, when smiling. He must have been in his fifties, at least, but now he glowed with youth, despite the gray hair.
“How do you two know each other?” Mark asked.
Gameela, who had been returning Fouad’s smile, looked toward Mark, her smile vanishing, her face adopting its usual serenity again. “Fouad is Marwa’s cousin.”
Mark remembered Marwa, who had attended his wedding years before: short and plump, with long, thick hair and a piercing laugh. Rose had told him how Marwa was Gameela’s best friend since childhood, but she had never mentioned a cousin. That was another thing Mark loved about Egypt: how friends and families merged and intersected, how people never seemed to be lonely. Almost like an exaggerated version of West Virginia, where his mother used to sell cupcakes for his basketball team’s baked-goods sales. On game days, she used to run the concession stand with other mothers, and by the time he’d graduated from high school, she was either a friend of or at least a good acquaintance of half of Charleston, including the mothers of players on competing teams. Over a decade of living in New York, seven years right after college and four now, and he still didn’t feel that sense of community there, not like he felt it in Charleston, where every grocery store run brought him into the path of a childhood acquaintance, and not like he felt it in Egypt, where even people who barely knew each other hugged on first meeting.
“The boy was one of the electricians working on my apartment a couple of months ago,” Fouad said. “When Gameela told me you were looking for someone to interview, I thought he’d be perfect. His brother was apparently some kind of fundamentalist who ended up getting killed during one of the bloody protests last year. The boy witnessed it all but, according to his boss, wants nothing to do with politics, which is quite typical of most common people here. I think the underlying logic is that the country has survived for seven thousand years under the rule of every race and power you can think of—Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, British—you name it. People just adapt and go on with their lives. They’ve seen power change hands so many times that it almost becomes secondary. The rulers will change, but the people will stay, so the people win by default.”
“So the boy is not politically active?”
“Not really, or at least not anymore. Everyone became politically active during the eighteen days of the revolution, but few people still are. Even back then, I doubt he would have participated, were it not for his brother, who seemed to have been deeply involved in politics. I think Saaber was hanging along for the excitement of it.”
“How do you know so much about him?” Gameela asked.
“People will gladly tell you their life stories, if you only listen. They worked on my bathroom and kitchen for two weeks. I had a long time to listen.”
Mark nodded. Fouad’s remark reminded him of an observation an older reporter had made to him years earlier, back when he started writing profiles: that most ordinary people become excellent storytellers, when the story is their own. All he needed to do was learn to ask the right questions and listen to the story being told—and, of course, infer what is being left out. Very few people can see the whole story when they are at its center.
“Almost there,” Fouad said.
Th
ey had finally made it through the bridge’s traffic and were now driving north alongside the Nile toward the Fairmont Hotel, a five-star luxury complex flanked on each side by two identical high-rises, the Nile City Towers, each boasting thirty-four floors of premium office space. Mark bent down to look through the windshield, taking in what he could of the row of high-rises overlooking the Nile. When the cab made it close to the hotel, Fouad signaled to the driver to pull into the drop-off lane.
“We’ll get off here and walk.”
Fouad insisted on paying the fare, and Mark knew better than to argue. He stood at the hotel’s door, peeking through the glass façade into the lobby. The entire place glimmered in shades of gold, the sun hitting the four metallic columns supporting the large awning and mirroring blinding light everywhere. Inside, slabs of marble covered the floors, and a large fountain reflected the dizzying lights of the atrium, decked out in tones of beige, brown, and gold, not earthy tones but glimmering ones, signs of wealth. Mark had attended a wedding at the hotel, years earlier—the daughter of the editor in chief of one of Egypt’s government-owned newspapers. The man was rumored to make close to 20 million pounds a month, but Mark didn’t know if that figure was believable. The bride had walked into the reception hall wearing a trailing gown of white lace embroidered with what must have been thousands of Swarovski crystals threaded with wires of actual gold (if her father was to be believed). Now Mark walked closer to the glass panels, to peer inside the hotel. In the glass, he saw the reflection of the three security guards in their navy suits and earpieces as they turned around, watching him. A bellman in a gray uniform and cap trotted his way.