A Pure Heart

by Rajia Hassib

  “Checking in?” the bellman asked in English.

  Mark shook his head and looked back to find Gameela right behind him. “He’s with us,” she said, pulling him by the arm. “Let’s go.”

  They walked down the ramp of the drop-off lane, Fouad in the lead. When they reached the corner at the end of the block, Fouad turned right, away from the Nile, and continued walking around the hotel complex until they reached the wide road behind it. There, Fouad stopped at the corner, pointed toward the neighborhood that was visible behind a meager row of trees: “Ramela Boolak. This is where Saaber lives.”

  Mark had been to similar neighborhoods before. Colloquially, they were referred to as “the Randoms” because of the way they spring up, room by small room, multiplying one next to the other with no building permits, no urban planning, no utilities, no running water or sewer system, the roads between them never wide enough or straight enough to allow for the passage of an ambulance, let alone a fire truck. Mark glanced behind him and made sure Gameela was still in tow before following Fouad down the row of trees and then along a dirt road barely six feet wide, overshadowed by the clay-and-brick rooms built on either side of it. Some of these neighborhoods boasted concrete buildings four or even five stories high, but here the fragile rooms rarely extended higher than three stories, never enough to block the view of the Nile City Towers looming over the neighborhood, drowning it in their shadow. Mark peeked, as inconspicuously as possible, through the single windows here and there, the doors left ajar. In one open doorway, a stout, middle-aged woman in a bright red floral dress, her head tied in a scarf, stood watching them pass, her hands crossed. Mark made eye contact with her and looked away before she did, her curiosity more unapologetic than his. He was a rare sight, he knew, a foreigner who must seem to her to have taken a wrong turn from the set tracks tourists were supposed to walk: the Nile, the Egyptian Museum, the pyramids, El-Moez Street, the heart of Cairo’s historic Islamic district with its street cafés that oblige by conforming to the way Cairo is often still depicted in American movies, offering delicately worn-out wooden chairs and rickety tables, hookahs that fill the air with the smoky smell of apples and tobacco, small, quaint bazaars selling overpriced miniature statues of Tut Ankh Amun and Nefertiti. This was the Cairo that tourists were meant to see. The Cairo he now walked was a sight restricted to the locals, a degree of poverty no one wanted foreigners to witness. The poor, Mark learned early on during his days in Egypt, held on to their pride with fervent tenacity.

  “It’s estimated that over half of Cairo’s fifteen million inhabitants live in neighborhoods like this one,” Fouad said, falling behind to walk next to Mark. Both were keeping their eyes down, watching their step on the treacherously uneven ground. “Many of them were born and raised here, but some immigrate from all over Egypt in search of what they think will be a better life. You’ll find experienced farmers here wasting their talents driving cabs or working construction jobs, building high-rises they will never be allowed to enter once they are finished. I hope you don’t mind me dragging you here; Saaber wanted to meet you elsewhere—he was embarrassed to have a journalist see the extent of poverty he lives in, I know—but I thought you needed to see this. I thought it might help you understand.”

  “I’ve seen similar neighborhoods before, but, yes, I prefer to interview people in their own homes or on their job sites, if possible. Puts everything in context.”

  “I told you he’d appreciate coming here,” Fouad turned to address Gameela. “It’s like a backstage pass,” he laughed. “Should be mandatory viewing for everyone, if you ask me. Just a glimpse into one’s own backyard.”

  Gameela did not reply to Fouad’s remarks but seemed surprisingly comfortable, dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a tunic that extended to her knees, holding on to her messenger bag as she walked, head bent down. Mark wondered if she had ever been in one of these neighborhoods before, or if Rose ever had. The thought of Rose led to other thoughts of home, and he suddenly found himself flooded with nostalgia, not for New York and the apartment he shares with Rose, but for West Virginia, where he grew up and where his parents still lived, and where neighborhoods crammed with five-thousand-square-foot homes were a five-minute drive away from roads edging shallow creeks, where trailers stood, some decaying, some surrounded by wire fences that kept barking dogs in place, and occasionally, some kept immaculately clean, their windows proudly displaying flower boxes bursting with colors. He remembered his school bus passing through one of these roads every morning, remembered the trailer where that one boy lived—what was his name? For a moment, he panicked, thinking he had forgotten, but then it came back to him: Dillon. His name was Dillon. He still felt a kind of survivor’s guilt whenever he thought of Dillon. He felt that same guilt here, walking in his memory-foam-lined Skechers and avoiding the sight of the bare, calloused feet of a man sitting on a plastic chair in front of an open door. Mark looked through another door as he passed by a room at the corner of the narrow alley, and he saw a young boy staring back at him from the corner. For a second, Mark, disoriented, could have sworn the boy looked exactly like Dillon, his face wearing Dillon’s same expression as he stepped into a bus filled with rich, indifferent kids and stared defiantly at them.

  “It’s that room there.” Fouad pointed. “Let me walk in first and make sure he’s home.”

  Mark stopped in the middle of a patio surrounded by two- and three-story buildings on all sides, all constructed in unpainted gray brick, two of them with second stories made from exposed wood paneling. As Fouad walked into one of the buildings, Gameela waited by Mark. He itched to take his camera out and snap some photos, but he didn’t want to do that before interviewing Saaber. The place, he had to admit, was remarkable. Every building they’d passed by looked like it was about to collapse; every corner housed a pile of garbage. The patio they now stood in was an accurate representative of the entire neighborhood. One corner of the patio was covered in rubble that seemed to have come from the fallen wall of one of the rooms above, which now stood gaping. The rubble must have been there for some time, and, on top of it, people had started piling up other discarded items: two broken chairs; a mangle of gray, smashed wood that might once have been a table. Across from all of that, extending from one window on the right-hand side to another on the opposite side, ran a clothesline where two rows of bright red, yellow, and blue garments hung to dry. In one corner of the patio stood a worn-out three-seater, its wood gilded with gold leaf—an out-of-place item that doubtless once belonged to some middle-class family’s living-room set, another piece of the French furniture that never failed to appear in Egypt’s homes. On the sofa sat an old man in gray pants, a light blue shirt, and flip-flops; next to him sat a woman, leaning back in the sofa, wearing a black floral dress and a white head scarf. The man and woman were both watching Mark and Gameela, as was another, younger woman, bareheaded and in a red T-shirt, who looked out of the window of one of the buildings. The sun, blinding, shone all around but seemed absorbed by the prevalent grayness, its rays sucked in but not reflected, emitting instead a suffocating, dull warmth.

  “Assalamu alaikum ya Hajjah,” Gameela said, greeting the seated old woman.

  “Wa-alaikum assalam,” the woman replied in a deep, husky voice. “Ay khedmah?”

  Mark understood the question—Any way we can be of service?—a traditional way to politely ask what they were doing there.

  “Alf shokr,” Gameela thanked her. “We are just waiting for our colleague.”

  The old man was still openly staring at Mark.

  “Ask them if they know the boy we’re here to meet,” Mark whispered to Gameela.

  “I’m sure they do, but if we start talking to them then they’ll want to know who we are and what we’re doing here, and I don’t want to get into that. They may give him a hard time after we leave. They’ll say an American journalist was here talking to him and then he’ll be accused of bein
g a spy or something.”

  Mark rolled his eyes. “What is it with you people and fear of journalists? What exactly would I be interested in learning from him? How to invade Cairo through its poorest neighborhoods?”

  “That’s not funny, Mark. The boy can seriously get in trouble.”

  “Then maybe you should have mentioned that earlier?” Mark didn’t try to hide his irritation. “A bit too late now, don’t you think?”

  “I did mention it earlier. Fouad didn’t listen. I thought it would be a lot safer to talk to Saaber somewhere else, where people didn’t know him. Somewhere where he can maintain his anonymity. Here—this is making me uncomfortable. You haven’t been in Egypt for years. Things are different now. Security is tighter.”

  “I would think you would have discussed that with me, not just with Fouad.”

  “I assumed you’d know that.”

  Mark did know, of course. Every time someone spoke to him, they were at some degree of risk, especially if they were perceived to be criticizing the government. But he didn’t think a simple profile could have any negative repercussions. “I’m not going to talk politics to him. I’m not interested in that. Why would he come to any harm?”

  Fouad emerged before Gameela could reply. “He’s here and waiting for you,” Fouad waved them in.

  Gameela walked into the building, and Mark followed her, glancing back. The old man was still staring at him.

  * * *

  —

  THE BOY HAD a piercing gaze. Mark was almost distracted by the round, dark eyes that stared at him since he had walked into the room. Even when addressing Fouad, Saaber only glanced at him before focusing on Mark again.

  “He says he would rather we sit down somewhere else,” Fouad said. “I told him you wanted to conduct the interview here, at his home, but he seems to have other plans.” Fouad turned to talk to Saaber again, and Mark looked around.

  He could see why the boy would not want them to stay here. The room was cramped and stuffy, with one bench pushed against the wall and no other furniture. It opened up to a hallway that housed a stove in the corner and that Mark suspected functioned as the dwelling’s kitchen. That hallway led to another room where a number of younger kids—four or five, Mark couldn’t tell—hovered around the doorway. Behind them, sitting on a bed, was a slim woman clad in black, a loose scarf draped around her head. She, too, looked straight at Mark. When one of the younger children ventured one bare foot out of the doorway and toward the front room, the woman barked a word at him and he shrank back.

  “Salam ya Hajjah,” Gameela greeted her.

  The woman nodded.

  Saaber and Fouad were still standing in the center of the room, which was lit only through a small window opening to the patio. They were talking rapidly in Arabic, and Mark tried to follow what they were saying, caught some words and missed others.

  “He says it’s too dark in here, and he wants to show you another place anyway,” Fouad said. “I think he is just embarrassed. Doesn’t want an American to see how poor he is. They always feel guilty, these people, as if their poverty is somehow their fault. I tried to explain to him that no one will help them if they don’t see how they live, that exposing such circumstances—”

  “Maybe you should let Mark decide what he wants to do?” Gameela interrupted him. “This is, after all, his article.”

  Fouad took a deep breath in, then exhaled, looking at Gameela.

  “What would you like to do, Mark?” he finally asked, only now turning to face Mark.

  Saaber stood a foot or two away from Mark. Mark stepped toward him, extended his hand to shake the boy’s. Saaber hesitated and then reached out and let Mark grab his hand. He wore a clean, striped shirt and gray slacks, a thin, trimmed beard framing his face. No mustache. From afar, he may have looked older, but this close, he looked barely twenty. The gaze he had focused on Mark for so long now shifted away, looking down.

  “Let him take us wherever he wants to,” Mark told Fouad. “Tell him I’m here to see all he wants to show me.”

  * * *

  —

  “DID YOU REALLY NEED to drag Gameela there with you?” Rose asked Mark on the phone later that evening.

  “Honey, Gameela is the one who did the dragging. She and that friend of hers. I would gladly have gone alone, with one of the interpreters from the office. They wouldn’t let me.”

  He was slouching on the guest room’s bed, too excited to fall asleep. “You should have seen that place, though. And the boy. There is something very sinister about him, I think, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Which friend?”

  “Some older guy. A cousin of that other friend of hers. The one who came to our wedding.”

  “That’s not very specific. Half a dozen of Gameela’s friends came to our wedding.”

  Mark grabbed his camera from the nightstand, started scrolling through the photos he took earlier. “That boy, though. Very interesting perspective. Exactly what I needed. Totally different from the other three profiles I have.”

  “You didn’t tell my parents you took Gameela there with you, did you?”

  Mark put the camera back. “Seriously, Rose. What’s the big deal? She’s not a child. She can go anywhere she wants to.”

  “Except to interview a Muslim Brotherhood guy. Pretty sure my parents wouldn’t appreciate that. Consorting with the enemy and whatnot.”

  Mark laughed. “He’s not officially Muslim Brotherhood, just a sympathizer. But I won’t say anything if you don’t. She might, though.”

  “She won’t. She didn’t even tell me she set that whole thing up for you. Maybe she thinks her American sister won’t approve.”

  “You’re too hard on her, Rose. She’s been very kind to me. Maybe she no longer disapproves of your American husband. People occasionally change their attitudes, you know.”

  “I wish I could change my attitude toward this never-ending thesis. I spent my entire week working on one chapter and I still can’t get it remotely close to where it needs to be.”

  “Less than two more years and you’ll have your PhD and it will all have been worth it.”

  “If I survive, that is.”

  “You will.”

  Mark picked his camera up again, scrolled to one photo of Saaber’s face, round, dark eyes staring straight at the camera, the tall Nile City Towers looming distorted in the background, out of focus.

  “You come from a very interesting country, Rose.”

  “So do you, honey. So do you.”

  ◆ 10 ◆

  Gameela assured herself that, technically speaking, this was not a break-in. Standing with her back against the closed front door, she gave her racing heart a few moments to calm down and allowed her eyes to adjust to the dimly lit room. All the wooden shutters were closed. The resulting effect was one of a place that stubbornly refused to give in to the glaring sun blinding everyone out on the streets, a place that resisted light.

  No wonder Fouad could not remain here for long stretches of time.

  Gradually, Gameela’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. She could clearly make out a sofa and three armchairs ahead, a coffee table, a tall floor lamp. Gameela knew the apartment’s layout by heart; it was a replica of Marwa’s, only one story below. Slowly, she made her way to the lamp, fiddled around for its switch, let its yellow light seep through the surrounding darkness. The entry room she had walked into had only one window overlooking the street below, and this window was hidden behind heavy curtains. She could turn on a dozen search lights here, and no one would notice.

  She placed the key she used to let herself in back into the zippered compartment of her purse, sat down on the nearest armchair, then immediately stood back up. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what to do next. Walk around the rooms? Take a quick glance then rush back out? She took a step towa
rd the nearest room—the one where Marwa’s dining room would be—then stopped, her heart pounding again, looking at her feet. She had not worn shoes appropriate to break-ins. The block heels of her ankle boots clucked on the wooden floor, and she imagined Marwa’s parents looking up, wondering who was in their nephew’s apartment while he was gone, walking up to investigate, or worse, calling the police. The thought of being found in the apartment of a bachelor, even one who was currently four hours away, was so mortifying that Gameela’s face burned, beads of sweat forming on her forehead. She listened. No steps rushed up the stairs outside; no commotion below. Slowly, she slipped her boots off and walked around in her socks.

  She covered the entire apartment in minutes. The dining room mirrored the one below, but, apart from that, the apartment seemed shuffled. Where Marwa’s bedroom stood, she found a formal living room, with access to a balcony identical to the one she and Marwa liked to hang out on and watch passersby. The layout of the kitchen matched the one below, but the cabinets were dark cherry instead of white. The darker colors would have made it look smaller, were it not for its clutter-free countertops, bare save for a canister of sugar and a dish rack still holding an upturned teapot and one cup. Gameela walked in, picked up the teacup: delicate china, cream with yellow butterflies dancing on its rim. Not what she would expect Fouad to be drinking from when home alone; then again, Fouad did not conform to expectations.

  Minutes later, she walked out of the kitchen with that same teacup in hand, filled with steaming black tea. On the saucer, she placed two cookies out of a pack she found in one of the cabinets. She carried the cup to the dining room, sat down at the head of the table, placing the cup in front of her, watching the steam rise. The room was as dark as the rest of the apartment. Despite the street noise seeping in, Gameela felt a sudden discomfort, as if Fouad’s mother were resurrected and sitting across from her at the opposite end of the table, silently questioning why she thought she had the right to be here. Gameela put her hands on the tabletop, spreading her fingers. She waited for her heartbeat to slow down again, then carried the cup out of the room and straight into Fouad’s bedroom.