A Pure Heart

by Rajia Hassib

  Mark had looked up at the teacher—an older man, who had repeatedly made snide remarks about the dead boy, a poor boy, one who, Mark now saw, was totally out of place in a school of middle-class kids, one who, in the previous year, had started to walk to school rather than take the bus. Sometimes, the bus would pass by him and the boy would not look up. Back then, Mark had not given a thought to the reason behind the boy’s choice to spend half an hour walking rather than ride with all the other kids. Mark saw the boy’s home: a trailer in a decrepit nook of the city. He saw the boy’s hunched-up walk, his downward gaze. Mark saw the boy—Dillon—distinctly, as if he were still alive and standing right in front of him, and then he lunged at the teacher.

  He never told his parents what happened that day, when they got called to the principal’s office to discuss their son’s uncharacteristic behavior. It’s simply a response to shock and grief, the school counselor had insisted, negotiating a more lenient penalty than usual, citing Mark’s spotless record so far, eventually persuading the teacher and principal to turn Mark’s suspension into a detention.

  Throughout all of this, Mark had remained silent, stubbornly refusing to defend himself. He had needed the silence to sort through a new revelation: the idea of a fixed narrative, the lie that is a predetermined destiny, the notion that a person’s fate was merely the result of an accident of birth—such a simplistic view of the complex mess that is life, a view that conveniently relieves everyone of responsibility. If those who made bad choices did so because they were destined to do so, society could sit back at ease, smugly satisfied with its own guiltless success. Dillon could have been helped, Mark told himself. Every person who falls does so with the blessing of a society that chooses not to care about him.

  For days afterward, Mark walked around mulling this new thought. By the end of the school year, he had made a vow never to let society pull him into a cozy corner of compliance. He would make a difference, and he would make his own life different. No one was ever going to dictate a predetermined narrative and expect him to follow it.

  Much later, after the move to New York, the various journalism jobs, and the subsequent posts in the Middle East, after meeting Rose and contemplating pushing his vow to the extreme by changing his religion (why not?), Mark had imagined he was not only challenging the narrative that separated people in different social classes, races, religions, and ethnicities, but building his own narrative, finding a theory akin to Stephen Hawking’s elusive Theory of Everything: a narrative that, in its universality, could be embraced by all, one that did not abide by rules of a certain religion or culture but that rather followed a higher moral code that applied to everyone equally.

  He happily inhabited that narrative for years, letting his moral code guide him, believing that good intentions led to good outcomes—a variation of the Golden Rule of every religion, whether people chose to call it karma or Do unto others. Yes, he let that moral code guide his writing. That was what Rose referred to during that fight about the hot dog vendor when she accused him of judging people. He had been offended then, but now he thinks that maybe she was right. Rose was often right.

  The first time he saw her, he was visiting the excavation site to write about the new pyramid discovery. Standing in the sun, a solitary petite woman with a mass of black hair pulled up in a messy bun, her arms crossed and feet planted firmly apart, she had listened to a male colleague talk to her for minutes before calmly raising one palm and holding it up in front of his face until he stopped talking and looked at her palm with puzzlement, as if she had pulled a salamander out of her pocket and held it up for him to examine. Then she had spoken, a few sentences that Mark stood too far away to hear, and her colleague had turned in place and walked away, his face flushed, muttering as he retreated. Mark had been transfixed by Rose’s unexpected show of authority, had thought up that article on gender relations partly to explore this aspect of Egyptian culture and partly, he had to admit, as a pretext to meet her. The article had been the reason he met her, married her, followed her back to the U.S. when she got accepted to Columbia.

  Ironic, how he writes in the hope of initiating change only to see his articles steer his own life into unforeseen directions. Kind of terrifying, how the outcome of his writing is often so different from what he intended.

  He sits up, taps a pencil on his desk, and stares at the computer screen, the Word document still dutifully pulled up, a paragraph already typed. He reads through his paragraph again, rests his hands on the keyboard, ready to continue his work. He tries to focus on his topic: how the upcoming elections will affect the future of coal in West Virginia.

  Nothing.

  He waits, fingers still poised, and does not move until his phone beeps, signaling a text message.

  Hey, Mark. It’s Ingrid. Is Rose okay? She hasn’t shown up for work and is not picking up her phone.

  Rose answers neither his calls nor his texts. On his phone, he has an app installed that promises to trace her location via GPS, a safety measure she insisted they both obtain after it took her parents two days to find Gameela. Just in case, she had said, not elaborating.

  He clicks on the app that he has never used before, signs in, and hopes it works. It tells him that Rose is at home—or, at least, that her phone is. After one last failed attempt at contacting her, he heads out of the office.

  * * *

  —

  HE FINDS HER sitting on the floor in the middle of their living room, her back against the sofa, the area around her covered with junk, as if she had taken the contents of their desk and scattered them all over the room.

  “For goodness’ sake, Rose. Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  She looks up at him, revealing puffy, bloodshot eyes. “Sorry. Ingrid kept calling so I put the phone on silent.”

  A crumpled piece of paper juts out of her clenched fist, its edge splayed out like a Chinese fan.

  “Rose?” He sits on the floor across from her. “What’s wrong, honey? What’s all this?” On second inspection, he realizes that the items on the floor are not familiar: books, notebooks, letters, even pieces of clothing and jewelry, none he remembers seeing before.

  Rose holds the piece of paper up in the air between them. “I excavated and found treasure,” she says dramatically, giggling and then immediately sniffling. Reaching over to the box on the side table, Mark grabs a tissue and hands it to her. She exchanges papers with him, giving him the crumpled sheet. After she blows her nose, she carefully adds the tissue to a small mound by her side, pushing the tissues together to form a mass resembling a pyramid.

  Mark eases out the creases. It’s a sheet torn out of a notebook and covered with writing, with spaces for four different signatures at the bottom. He labors to read the title—a marriage certificate?—then tries to translate the first line, but his Arabic is rusty and he is too impatient to decipher the mangled handwriting. He looks up at Rose.

  “It’s a marriage contract. Gameela’s marriage contract. Orfi.” A marriage per custom and Islamic tradition: one that is not officially notarized and therefore bears no legal weight. Mark remembers reading about it while he was in Egypt: how, in one year, eighty-eight thousand of Egypt’s youth had written such contracts, which are supposed to fulfill the Islamic requirements for marriage—the intention to stay married; the publicizing of this intention (hence the two witnesses)—without going through government channels. It is what adults do when they want to get married in secret; what college kids do when they want to have religiously sanctioned sex behind their parents’ backs.

  “Gameela was married?” Mark asks.

  Rose nods, an outstretched palm indicating the paper in his hand.

  “Why would Gameela need to keep her marriage a secret?”

  Rose shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe he was already married and didn’t want his first wife to find out. All I know is that he is almost thirty years older th
an she was and that his name is Fouad Salem Sedky.” Rose points to the spot on the paper where the man’s name is scribbled.

  Mark’s heart starts racing. Staring at the paper in his hand, he tries to find the name that Rose just mentioned, hopes, for a second, that she is wrong, that he will not have to tell her that he has met the man, has spent a day with him and Gameela, that his life, again, has crossed paths with Gameela’s in an unforeseen way.

  “What was the man’s name again?”

  Rose looks up at him. “Fouad.” He knows this glance—inquisitive, suspicious.

  He doesn’t want to be tangled up in Gameela’s life any more than he already is. He contemplates staying quiet, not telling Rose that Gameela introduced him to Fouad two years ago. He looks again at the marriage certificate in his hand, takes his time before he speaks, and tries to maintain a calm tone.

  “I may be wrong, Rose, but I think I met him.” He hands her the marriage certificate. “I think that’s the man Gameela brought with her when we went to interview Saaber.”

  Rose knots her brows. “Are you sure?”

  “The age certainly fits. And that’s not a common name in Egypt, is it?”

  Rose shakes her head. “No. It’s not.”

  He waits for this information to sink in before he adds, “I have photos of him on my laptop.”

  * * *

  —

  HE BRINGS HIS laptop over and sits next to her on the floor, their backs against the sofa. Not until he starts searching through his folder does he realize it would have been better if he had pulled a few photos out before sitting so close to her. The folder containing all his photos from that last trip to Egypt is a mangle of snapshots that include many of both Gameela and Saaber. Rose leans in closer, peers at the photos flashing on his screen one after the other.

  “I can find a few photos and just pull those out, if you prefer,” he suggests. “You don’t need to look at all of them.”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  Her voice is calm, and she has stopped crying. Mark scrolls down through the photos, starts clicking on some of the ones he took while he, Saaber, and Fouad were up in the pigeon house. Each photo pops up, one after the other, layers of his recorded history. He finds one that clearly shows Fouad’s face and enlarges it. For a few moments, he and Rose sit quietly looking at the face filling the laptop’s screen: a dark-skinned man, the shade Egyptians refer to as wheat colored, with curly salt-and-pepper hair. He is not smiling in the photo, his clean-shaven face set in concentration, looking somewhere to the left of the photo’s frame. Mark tries to remember what Fouad was looking at, but he cannot.

  “Did she tell you anything about him?”

  Mark shakes his head. “Just whatever I told you back then: that he was the cousin of a friend of hers.” He flips through more photos, finds one of Saaber that shows Fouad in the background, minimizes it. “That short, chubby one that came to our wedding—what was her name?”

  “Marwa?”

  “Yes, Marwa.”

  Rose gets up, walks up to the bookcase, and pulls their wedding album out. She starts flipping through the pages on her way back, finds the photo she is looking for, and sits down, album in lap, pointing to it.

  “This one?”

  Mark looks at the photo of him and Rose surrounded by Gameela and six of her friends.

  “Yes. That’s the one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nods. “Unless I got the name wrong back then, but I don’t think I did. I distinctly remember thinking how little he looked like her. Not that cousins need to look alike, of course.”

  He goes back to scrolling through the photos, looking for another clear snapshot of Fouad, trying to avoid looking at both Saaber and Gameela. “Why would she get married in secret?” he murmurs.

  Rose does not answer. She is flipping through the album in her lap. Mark peeks at the photos documenting his wedding day, most of them populated with Rose’s family, a few showing his own, his parents and sisters by his side, his mother a bit flustered by the elaborate wedding ceremony, the loud, pounding music, Rose’s puffy dress and long train. He had never liked weddings, but seeing photos of his own, he finds himself playing with his wedding band again. Rose has paused at a page showing one of their official wedding portraits—he, facing her, his hands on her waist, while she looks up at him, still a good ten inches shorter even in her high heels. Her face is beaming with a smile he has not seen in a long time. When he looks at her, he sees a faint trace of that smile curling her lips. For a moment, she looks like the Rose he fell in love with, not the Rose currently sitting next to him, the two incarnations of his wife distinctly different.

  He goes back to scrolling through the photos on his laptop. The last few are ones he took after they climbed down from the pigeon house, and he opens one taken in the courtyard in front of Saaber’s dwelling. In the photo, Gameela, on the right, is looking up at Fouad, who is standing in the center, his hands in his pockets as he glances behind him at the dwelling’s door. On the left of the photo stands Saaber, who is looking at Gameela, though neither she nor Fouad seem aware of his presence. Mark studies the three faces: Gameela’s discreet smile, Fouad’s frown as he looks at the dwelling, and Saaber’s intent gaze.

  Next to him, Rose has placed the album on the sofa and has moved closer, holding on to his arm. “I can’t believe she got married without telling anyone,” she whispers. “My poor mom would die if she found out. How could she keep something like this a secret?”

  “She was an adult, Rose. She had the right to do anything she wanted to.”

  “It’s out of character. She took pride in how straightforward she was. She never did anything behind anyone’s back.”

  “Maybe she did but was good at hiding it.”

  Mark glances at the wedding album on the sofa. It’s a visual record of part of his own life, just like the photos on his laptop seem to have captured more of Gameela’s life than he thought possible. All around him are things, artifacts, as Rose would call them, bearing witness to someone’s life, many of them to his own. He starts turning his wedding band around again, rubs it with his thumb, and for a moment he closes his eyes and imagines himself free of all these things, free of any reminders of a past life, living only in the present moment, not encumbered by the weight of memories.

  Rose places her head on his shoulder, and he opens his eyes again. On the laptop’s screen, the three faces are still frozen in time, unaware that two of them will die a mere two years later. He looks at the third face, at the man glancing sideways, his brows knotted. He wonders if he ever wore a wedding band.

  Part Four

  ◆ 17 ◆

  At Fouad’s farm, the peasants called Gameela el-sett—“the woman.” She relished the definitive “the” that implied her uniqueness, like Sherlock Holmes’s one and only woman—the highest of her kind. Secretly, she thought of herself as Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. She rarely asked her sister for anything, but she did request a T-shirt with “I AM SHERLOCKED” printed on it, claiming she was infatuated with Benedict Cumberbatch (not a total lie). Sometimes, while doodling, she practiced signing her name as Irene.

  It took her two months to start leaving some of her things at the farm. A few items at a time, her presence at the farmhouse became visible: a couple of her T-shirts in the dresser drawers Fouad emptied for her; a day dress and some head scarves in his closet; her nightgowns and underwear, the lacey ones she bought and kept wrapped up in tissue paper at home lest her mother find them and become suspicious.

  A spare toothbrush on his sink. An extra pair of slippers under his bed.

  In the mornings, they ate breakfast together on the balcony overlooking the guava trees and hidden from the main road. Today, Gameela was indulging in feteer meshaltet, the freshly baked flaky pastry one of the peasants’ wives had carried to the house this morning, the pastry round a
nd flat, buttery to the touch. Gameela tore a piece, dipped it in the pool of honey covering a small plate set between her and Fouad. The plate was part of Fouad’s mother’s fine china set, pale cream decorated with faded yellow butterflies. The pool of honey reached the edge and made it look as if the butterflies, too, were sampling the sweet syrupy treat. Gameela liked this set of fine china, the intimacy of knowing she is privy to his mother’s things. She chewed on the pastry, licking her honey-covered fingers.

  Fouad ate the same breakfast every day: two hard-boiled eggs and a piece of feteer with some feta cheese on the side. He cut his eggs in quarters before eating them, just like Gameela’s father used to cut them for her when she was young. Ahmed called the egg pieces felookah—fishing boats—and sailed them across the plate for his giggling daughter, and, by association, Gameela now watched her husband eat his cut-up eggs and saw him as the child she once was, not as a man closer to her father in age than he was to her. He looked up at her and smiled, and his face lit up with youth.

  “Let’s go fishing today,” she said.

  He nodded. “Sure. I’ll have Mahmoud fetch us some bait.”