by Rajia Hassib
His father had reacted to the view from the pigeon house by stubbornly committing to resist all that society—with its rich people, its religious people, its moral people—told him to do.
“It’s called civil disobedience,” he whispered into Saaber’s ear. “Only I’m doing it on my own. So it’s not really civil disobedience—it’s Mansour disobedience.” His father’s laughter rang so loudly a dozen birds flew off in a single flutter.
After that, Saaber started noticing how everything his father did was, in fact, a refusal to do something else. Mansour refused to work longer than the minimum necessary to procure his daily joints of hashish and his arak, the homemade alcoholic beverage that was rumored to turn people blind. “Not that it would make a huge difference if I did turn blind,” his father had chuckled. He refused to shave, until people started identifying beards with religiousness, at which point he refused to let his beard grow. Years earlier, Mansour had started his uninterrupted run of refusals by refusing to pray and fast, so the beard had seemed hypocritical.
“I don’t do pretend,” he told Saaber. “This,” he said, pounding his chest, “is white. Pure white.”
He refused to use titles when addressing people, scandalizing his family by calling even the elderly by their given names, forgoing the customary “Aunt,” “Uncle,” or “Mother.” Later, he even refused to use people’s names, stamping nearby shopkeepers with nicknames of his invention that he blared at them whenever he passed the open gates of their stores, the stores’ contents as out of his reach as any prospect of a pocket full of money was. So the butcher became “Assassin,” the grocer “Thief,” the dressmaker “Zipper,” and the barber “Baldy,” even though the latter had a full head of hair. “Hey, Thief, how’s business today?” he would yell at the grocer as he passed by, his smile revealing decayed teeth, his wave dismissive of the glare the grocer threw his way, as all the insulted invariably did.
“Yallah ya haramy,” he’d murmur as he passed by. “Haramy we gabaan.” A thief and a coward.
Only two people were exempt from Mansour’s name-calling. The first was Saaber.
“I called you Saaber in the hope that you’d learn to withstand this life better than I did.”
Saaber nodded, letting his name envelop him: The Patient One. The waiting one. The one, like Job, who can withstand life’s trials.
The other exception befell the local preacher and Imam; him Mansour always called “Ya Sheikhna”—our elder, our preacher. Even Mansour never insulted a man of religion, acknowledging the boundary drawn by a turban and a brown galabeyya falling to the ankles. He could refuse to pray, yes—but he would not, publicly, reject a man of God.
Later, Mansour had refused to acknowledge the deed his neighbor showed him, proving that Mansour’s brother had sold his half of the building to the neighbor only weeks before he died. “How could he have sold him something we don’t own? These are the Randoms, Saaber! No one has a deed to these buildings. My brother sold this fool the street tram!” Mansour laughed, repeating the popular saying. The neighbor threatened to sue him if he did not return the money his brother stole, but Mansour refused to pay him back one penny. “I don’t have your money!” he told the neighbor. “Go to the cemetery and ask my brother where he spent it.”
When the neighbor showed up at Mansour’s doorstep, armed with a piece of pipe, and tried to break in to claim the money he was certain Mansour was hiding, Mansour had struck him on the head with a brick. The man fell to the floor, dead. “I was defending myself!” Mansour had yelled at the police, refusing to admit any fault. He had even tried to refuse going to jail, which the police jotted down as “resisted arrest and assaulted an officer while performing his duty,” a note that was later used to prolong his prison sentence by two years.
“It’s not fair!” he had yelled as he was being dragged away.
“Life is not fair,” Saaber’s mother always barked at him whenever he would repeat what his father had said. “Deal with it.”
Sitting in the pigeon house, Saaber remembered his father’s words. He knew there was truth in them: it was not fair that he had to drop out of school after sixth grade to work to help support his family when other kids went on to college, benefiting from the free education; it was not fair that he worked so many hours and earned so little money; it was not fair that people walked into that hotel a stone’s throw away and spent as much on one dinner as he earned during an entire year; it was not fair that his father had to die in prison because they neglected to give him his medication; it was not fair that he had been imprisoned in the first place for defending his family; it was not fair that his father, the rebel, had had to spend the last years of his life in jail, doing what he was told, having his refusal shoved down his throat and his lips held shut until he was forced to swallow; it was not fair that others Saaber’s age were already courting young women when he had no way of procuring a place of his own to live in and therefore no way to marry any woman, not even the poorest one; it was not fair that he was already twenty-one and still stuck taking orders from his mother; it was not fair that his mother expected him to support his siblings, and not fair that his siblings will grow up to a fate no better than his.
It was not fair that his mother begrudged him that article, the one time someone paid attention to him, the one instance of recognition he got, the one chance to talk and have someone listen.
Saaber looked around him at the pigeon house. Was it too much to ask for, to want a bigger one? To dream of making a trade out of this? He wondered what his father would have thought of his plans and of the article the American wrote. He was quite certain Mansour would have rejoiced in the sight of his son’s face gracing the American newspaper.
Dusk was already falling, and Saaber stretched, looking around him. Soon he would wave his pigeons back home. For a few more minutes, he stood in the shade, all the way on top of the neighborhood, and took in the surrounding buildings. He wondered how many people had seen the article or watched the TV anchor mention him. Even if the anchor didn’t understand the story Saaber was trying to tell, it was still exciting to have him give Saaber such attention. Saaber scanned the buildings, looked through the open windows, and wondered if anyone was watching him, too.
He looked down at the yard in front of his mother’s dwelling and saw that someone was watching him.
Am Ismail, his elderly neighbor, the father of the man Mansour had killed, was standing in the middle of the yard, his arms crossed, and looking straight up at Saaber. Even when Saaber locked eyes with him, Am Ismail did not budge.
Saaber stepped back around the pigeon cages and onto the center of the platform, shielded by the cages on all sides. He hated both Am Ismail and his wife, who always sat on that weird sofa in the yard, watching him, his mother, and his siblings come and go, never saying a word. Blaming them for their son’s death, even though their son was the reason Mansour went to jail and died there. Saaber stayed in the center of the platform, occasionally peeking between the cages, until he saw Am Ismail shuffle back to his own dwelling.
Around him, the pigeons flapped their wings, flying in and out of their cages. Saaber grabbed the flag he kept by the cages, stepped out onto the platform, leaned against the parapet, and let the flag unfold in the breeze, waving it from side to side, calling his pigeons home.
◆ 12 ◆
Are you out of your mind?” Ted whispered the moment he and Mark stepped out of the editor’s office.
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“You seriously told her you didn’t want to do that story?”
“I still don’t want to do it.”
“You don’t have a choice, do you?”
They walked together to their adjacent cubicles, Mark entering his, falling on his seat and tossing the sheets of paper he had in his hand on the desk. From his own cubicle, Ted leaned on top of the divider, his head reaching over Mar
k’s desktop screen as he mouthed his judgment again. “You are out of your mind.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“What’s wrong with the assignment she gave you? I’d trade you for it any day.” Ted kept his voice low and leaned closer to make sure those in the neighboring cubicles didn’t hear them. “She did you a favor. She’s letting you cover a national political scandal, not some petty neighborhood dispute on the Upper East Side like me.”
“I was there to pitch a story, not to be assigned one,” Mark huffed, tossing his pencil on the desk. It slid, hitting his metal paperweight with a clank. The paperweight was a souvenir from Egypt, brass and decorated with carvings of the winged Nut, the ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky. Mark reached over and adjusted it so that Nut was facing him but looking to the side still, as all ancient Egyptian engravings did. They never looked one directly in the eyes, Mark thought.
“You got spoiled, that’s what happened. You know you were lucky to get away with what you did. You know Elinor. She let it slide, but she was bound to respond.”
“I know.” Mark looked down at his keyboard, nodding.
Ted was right. Assigning him a story was an obvious power play, but Elinor could have done much worse. She could have assigned him some crappy report that was bound to be condensed to three hundred words and buried deep in the newspaper’s online edition. Instead, she assigned him a piece on the Christie Bridgegate scandal, which was still today’s hot news, even months after the intentional traffic jams took place. The message was clear: I know you’re a good reporter, but you’re still my good reporter, and you will do as I say. Of course she would feel the need to make a statement after the stunt he pulled: going to Egypt on a so-called vacation, then returning with four written profiles and presenting them to her, pitching stories that did not fall under his jurisdiction as a metro-area political reporter. Elinor had read them, nonetheless. She could have refused to pass them on to his old Middle East editor, reminding him that he was no longer a foreign correspondent and that whatever happened in Egypt was not his professional concern anymore. But she had not. She had shared them with her colleague, who loved the profiles and published them. Nothing Elinor did was spontaneous, no word uncalculated. With the yes she had granted his pieces came a however. Now it was time to execute the however. For all he knew, she could be assigning him pieces for the next three months, just to prove a point. He remembered how he used to complain about her refusing every second story he pitched. He would take a 50 percent rate of story approval with open arms now.
“I really don’t want to be second string on Bridgegate.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I know.”
Ted sat back down, shaking his head. “You’re nothing but trouble, man,” Ted said across the cubicle wall.
In front of Mark, Nut’s wings spread wide, keeping guard of the night sky. Mark turned the paperweight around so that the short edge of the oblong weight faced him. On each side, brass feathers flared away from the weight, as if Nut were trying to take off, held back only by the heaviness of the brass.
* * *
—
MARK LEFT EARLY to meet with a source who promised insider information on the Bridge report, but instead of heading straight to Battery Park, where they were to meet, he got off at West Fourth Street, stood in front of the Cage, and watched basketball players shove and tackle each other in the cramped, undersize court. The sounds soothed him: the players’ shuffling feet, the dribbling ball, New Yorkers walking out of the subway station, tourists watching the ongoing game. He associated these familiar sounds both with his life in West Virginia, where he was on his high school basketball team, and with his years in New York when he first moved here, before the various Middle East positions. Sounds, scents, and places could all shift his mood, bringing one of the many versions of him to the forefront and silencing the others: The smell of falafel awakened Mark the foreign correspondent walking Egypt’s streets; the vibration of the subway under his feet summoned Mark the New Yorker; the azhan—the call for prayer—evoked Mark the Muslim, just as the texture of black leather binders joyfully reminded him of his days singing in the choir of the Episcopal church as a teenager. He was all of these people combined, was usually happy to let them all coexist, but in the three weeks since he’d returned from Egypt, he felt his different selves clash, as if they were all suddenly resisting their confinement in one body. He needed to focus on this Mark, the New York Mark who had a New York piece to write, and to silence the Egypt Mark, the one who was (rightfully) still excited about the profiles he had just published, the one whose consciousness still lingered half the world away. For the first time, Mark felt his different selves competing for his attention, and the resulting strain distracted him. He needed to focus.
Leaning against one of the trees by the metal fence bordering the court, Mark watched the players, his arms crossed. A women’s tournament; one team in blue, the other in white, all jumping, passing, wiping away sweat, dribbling, cursing. Any one of those girls would doubtless beat him in a one on one. The thought made him smile. He looked around, imagined the man standing by the far end of the court to be the father of one of the girls, imagined that the man’s beaming face reflected his pride. Already Mark had a backstory forming: the man was poor, a janitor at a local school. For years he had been taking his daughter to basketball courts every afternoon, spending hours honing the skills that he knew would put her through college. She was to become a doctor, maybe, or an accountant, or a teacher at the very school the man worked at. Or maybe it was the other way around: the man might be a doctor or an accountant, toiling at a job he hated day after day just so his daughter could play basketball, just so she could become whatever she wanted to be—an athlete, an artist, a mother. Mark was good at imagining how others felt, a useful talent for a writer. That was the reason those profiles had turned out so well: he knew how to put himself in the shoes of others, and he knew how to make readers see what he saw—how Saaber yearned for a good life raising pigeons; how the elderly mother wished for her kids’ safe future and saw that future in the stability the army rule provided; how ardently the agnostic revolutionary advocated for the separation of religion and state; how the lawyer focused on the new constitution, believing that the country’s future lay in a strong legal foundation. He had poured his soul into those profiles, and draining though they were, they had left him, surprisingly, thirsty for more. More pieces on social justice; more intimate, personal profiles; and, above all, more of Egypt.
He pulled out his phone, sent Rose a text—Your day going ok?—then put the phone back in his pocket, not expecting an immediate reply. He watched a man in a suit scurry past, checking his watch once and then again seconds later as he waited for the light to turn so that he could cross the street. Being in a rush was such a New York state of mind, one that usually affected Mark, who normally would have been rushing to meet his source. Instead, he was tempted to stay here for as long as he possibly could, forcing himself to break his self-imposed rule never to waste time in the middle of a workday. Ever since he came back from Egypt, he had felt the futility of stressing over minutes. Human history spans such a long time, Rose liked to remind him whenever they discussed Egypt’s slow pace compared to New York’s. Egyptians, she explained, are habitually laid back, making appointments not by naming an hour but by referring to an intentionally vague time of day: I’ll see you in the afternoon. We’ll talk in the evening. I’m going there after dinner. She laughed at his incomprehension. What are a few minutes here or there in a country that’s been around for seven thousand years? What difference will half an hour make in the grand scheme of things?
She liked that expression: the grand scheme of things. He liked the way she articulated the English language—with authority but care, as if it were one of the artifacts she handled with white gloves and cleaned with a horsehair brush. People always complimented her on he
r English, and, from the way her face beamed, he knew she was proud of her talent with languages. Still, she didn’t sound American—her expressions too formal, her sentence structure too complex for day-to-day talk. He never revealed that to her. He didn’t want her to feel self-conscious or, worse, try to change in order to fit in.
When they first arrived together in the U.S., he had explained that fitting in was a matter of place, not of people. Trying to ease her transition, he had introduced her not only to his friends but to New York’s various nooks and corners: the spot in Brooklyn Heights where the city’s silhouette looked best at night; the bench overlooking the pond at Central Park where he often sat during his first months in New York; the Polish deli in Greenpoint that sold the best freshly baked bread; the Indian grocery stores that carried her favorite fruit—mangoes. Places, he explained, opened up to newcomers before people did. Places did not care how long you’ve lived here or where you were born; they welcomed you the moment you set foot in them. That, he told her, was the key to fitting in. She had to make New York her own.
He, too, had made Egypt his own, spending four glorious years there, never once considering the disadvantage of having so much fun in a place where he did not belong or dwelling over the inevitable time when he would have to leave it all behind. The effect was similar to splitting one’s soul into pieces and scattering them around the globe. Every new place he loved eventually became a place he was destined to miss. Now, the taste of Egypt so fresh on his lips, he missed it more than ever, even more than he had when he decided to go back for those profiles. Rose’s assumption that going back to write a few pieces would somehow flush the country out of his system was dead wrong. After spending a mere ten days there, he was struggling to fit back into New York’s rhythm, more so than he did upon his initial return after his four-year tenure in Egypt.