A Pure Heart

by Rajia Hassib

  “I have some news. Rose is getting another paper published. The second one this year!” Nora’s voice was jubilant. She smacked a palm on the table to emphasize Rose’s achievement.

  “Oh,” Gameela said, stabbing her fork into three pieces of penne.

  “It’s very important for her to get as many publications as possible. She thinks the Met is going to have an opening for an assistant curator next year, and she is building up her résumé and hoping they will hire her, once she is done with her fellowship. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, if she got a permanent job there? I can just imagine her business card: Dr. Rose, Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “You mean Dr. Hatfield, Assistant Curator?” Gameela corrected her mother. The pasta, drenched in sauce and cheese, was delicious—soft, warm, and comforting. Maybe she was hungry after all.

  “Same thing,” her mother said.

  “I never really liked this Western tradition of having a wife change her last name to match her husband’s,” Ahmed chimed in. “What has the husband’s family ever done to deserve such recognition? She should have been Dr. Gubran, not Dr. Hatfield.”

  Gameela pushed her food around the plate, picked up a few pieces of pasta, and dipped them in gravy before chewing on them, closing her eyes to focus on the added layer of taste.

  “Mark did help her a lot. You have to give him some credit.”

  Ahmed shrugged. “And she lived under my roof for twenty-seven years. She should have kept her maiden name.”

  “That’s not how it’s done in the U.S.,” Nora said.

  Gameela got up, carrying her plate to the kitchen.

  “You haven’t eaten anything!” her mother protested.

  “I ate enough, Mama. Thank you.”

  “But what did you want to talk about?” Nora asked.

  “Nothing important.”

  * * *

  —

  IN HER ROOM, Gameela pulled her laundry out of the duffel bag, placed it in the laundry bin, and noticed one of Fouad’s T-shirts among her things—an item grabbed in error. She folded the T-shirt and tucked it into the inside pocket of her duffel bag. Suddenly exhausted, she wished she were back in Rasheed, where it was certainly cooler than Cairo, where she would have been sitting on the balcony again, the crickets’ hypnotizing chirps replacing the current cacophony of cars, Cairo’s incessant sound track. Where she would have been with her husband, the man she chose to spend the rest of her life with, as was her God-given right. At the bottom of the bag, she found a package—a cardboard box, a cube barely the size of her palm. Opening it, she found one of Fouad’s teacups inside, the yellow butterflies dancing on its edge, a folded note sitting in the cup: Come home.

  She imagined him all alone on the farm, reading in bed, silent and morose. Outside, she could hear her parents chatting, and she considered walking up to them, blurting it all out, and then heading back to Rasheed, reaching the town by dawn, surprising Fouad in bed, waking him up with a kiss. She glanced at the clock—9:00 P.M.

  She tucked his note in her wallet, deciding that this will be her reminder of where she truly belonged until she could stay there and need no further reminding. She imagined the day she finally moved into the farmhouse, pictured pulling the note out and showing it to him, telling him that she was home and tearing the note in pieces to seal the permanency of her arrival. One day, she would do that. Soon. For now, she wrapped the cup back in its packaging, hid it in the corner of the upper shelf of her armoire, took her pants off, and huddled in bed in her T-shirt.

  Lying still in bed, she tried to tune out her parents’ chatter but could not help catching scattered words that repeatedly included her sister’s name. She pulled a pillow from under her head, placed it on top of her face, and pressed the sides to her ears. The frustration and anger that, four months earlier, led her to suggest that she and Fouad elope, content themselves with the orfi marriage certificate with all its stigma, was back now, and she took a deep breath in through the pillow’s feathers.

  The words her parents spit at her back then played again in her ears, stinging with renewed vehemence.

  “You’re out of your mind if you think we’ll allow you to marry a man twice your age!” her mother had yelled.

  “And with an arrest record. And no college education. A farmer, for God’s sake, Gameela. What are you thinking?” her father had pleaded.

  Gameela had stood in the middle of the living room, furious with Marwa’s mother for calling her parents and professing that she suspected her crazy nephew, old enough to be Gameela’s father, was infatuated with her, toying with her mind and heart, dragging her with him all around Cairo until people saw them together and reported the news back to her. Ameera had listed every single reason she thought Fouad was not a good enough match for Gameela. No wonder Ahmed and Nora were having a meltdown. Gameela suspected that her friend’s mother had sniffed a scandal about to break out and rushed to exonerate herself of complicity, eager to assure Nora that she had not betrayed her trust and that she had been watching over her daughter all those times she visited with her family, as she was expected to do. Still, Gameela had allowed hope to creep in, had told herself that maybe it was all for the best, that she could now plead her case and bring the relationship out in the open.

  “He was imprisoned for participating in protests at eighteen! For political charges, not for some lowly felony. He was merely idealistic—trying to defend the rights of the poor. We can’t blame him for that. It’s not his fault that he got dismissed from college. And what’s wrong with being a farmer anyway? It’s a peaceful, productive life. It saved his sanity.”

  Everything she said fell on deaf ears. She knew very well what her parents feared: the censure of their friends and family, the scandal that would ensue as people whispered how the doctor and his wife allowed their daughter to marry an old peasant with an arrest record. On the side table in the living room stood a framed photo of Rose with her American husband, the Christian who converted on paper only to marry her, the one who, apparently, was a better match than Fouad. Gameela thought their logic was so flawed, their objections so unfounded, that there was no point in arguing with them any longer. She remained in place, motionless, letting their words fall flat around her. She allowed them to finish all they had to say, nodded in implied resignation, then locked herself up in her room and called Fouad.

  “We wouldn’t be doing anything wrong,” she told him over the phone, talking him into getting married anyway.

  “But why not a real marriage certificate? Why orfi? We don’t have to hide!”

  “I can’t get my father to sign off on a real certificate, which, as you well know, is legally required. A marriage is valid in front of God as long as we both intend for it to be. The orfi certificate is religiously legitimate, and that’s all I care about. I’ll do anything I want to do as long as it doesn’t go against God’s laws.”

  “I’m too old to be hiding and marrying you in secret. I’m not afraid of your parents. I’ll come talk to them. I can convince them.”

  “I don’t want or need their approval. We are both adults, and we’ll do what we want.”

  He argued for weeks, but she would not budge. She refused to allow him to humiliate himself and face her parents’ inevitable rejection, and she refused to allow them to dictate her life. She persisted. Eventually, he stopped arguing.

  Now, lying in bed in her room, alone again, Gameela thought of her husband and her sister and her parents and how unfair life could be and screamed into the pillow that was still smothering her face.

  She resented her parents for their constant preoccupation with Rose, her American husband, and her American job, when all Gameela wanted to do was talk to them and get them to listen.

  She resented Rose for her unfailing ability to garner her parents’ pride and approval.

  And she was mad at herself for aga
in failing to be the best person she could be, again allowing petty jealousy to fill and paralyze her. For again being too cowardly to tell her parents about her marriage and make them accept her choices, the way Rose had done, and again being—she had to admit it—too judgmental of her parents.

  She needed to forgive them their weaknesses. They, like many upper- and middle-class Egyptians, were conditioned to see all things Western as superior, a version of Stockholm syndrome often manifested en masse in postcolonial societies. They were also conditioned to crave the approval of their peers, to mold their lives to fit into what other well-to-do Egyptians deemed suitable for people of their rank. No wonder they preferred the American son-in-law to Fouad with his farm, his arrest record, his lack of a formal education, and his relatively advanced age. They may have forgiven him one or two of these failings, but four was too much for them to swallow. Gameela knew that. She tried to summon the compassion that, in the previous months, she kept reminding herself to feel toward them. But she could not get over the bitterness of knowing that they could never understand her, never see that those classist, self-loathing attitudes were among the main forces that drove her toward embracing a religion that promised equality, that did not rank people based on such superficial attributes, but that instead embraced all who embraced God.

  How exhausting, to try to reinvent herself. To build a set of values so different from her parents’. How lonely.

  She tossed and turned, unable to sleep, not even after their voices faded away. An hour later, fatigued to the verge of tears, she got up, pulled Fouad’s T-shirt out of her duffel bag, and put it on. Back in bed, she wrapped herself in the oversized garment, pulling her knees to her chest and stretching the T-shirt until it covered her toes. Only then did she fall asleep.

  ◆ 18 ◆

  By the time Saaber was released from jail, eighteen months after his arrest, he had learned to see his imprisonment as a blessing, to believe that, just like the prophet Yusuf, his time in detention was a necessary step toward the glory he was meant to achieve.

  That was the first thing Badr taught him: to recognize his fate; to embrace his destiny.

  Badr was one of the twenty-two inmates sharing a cell with Saaber after he got transferred to prison. They took turns sleeping on the bare concrete floor, lying on their sides to make room for others. For the first two nights Saaber slept only in interrupted fits. On his third night, he found himself facing Badr.

  “You are the boy who was in the American newspaper,” Badr whispered, his voice tinged with awe.

  Saaber nodded.

  “I can always tell when someone is destined for glory. I see it in your brow,” Badr said, pointing above Saaber’s left eye.

  For the first time in weeks, the fist clutching Saaber’s lungs loosened its grip.

  * * *

  —

  EVERY FIFTEEN DAYS, Saaber would face a judge who would flip through his file, declare there was no progress made yet, and renew his temporary detention. The first couple of times, Saaber went to the hearing with high hopes despite his fellow detainees’ reassurances that no one was ever released that quickly and that some of them had been going through this process for over two years. Yet each time Saaber faced the judge, he tried to explain how the orderly had fallen, how he had not pushed him, how he certainly had no contact with foreigners with an intention to harm national security, how he was unfairly imprisoned. The judge, facing a dozen other cases after Saaber’s, would nod, scribble a note, and declare that Saaber’s detention was to be renewed.

  His mother came to visit him.

  “Feed the pigeons,” he ordered her.

  “After I figure out how to feed your four siblings,” she retorted.

  “I need a good lawyer.”

  “And what am I supposed to pay him with? Your pigeons?”

  “Call someone,” Saaber said vaguely, unsure who the someone could be. “Call Fouad,” he remembered, scribbling his name and number on a piece of paper.

  His mother looked at the paper and sucked at her lips.

  * * *

  —

  WEEKS PASSED.

  “It’s not fair,” Saaber would tell Badr.

  “It’s all part of your trials. Great men have to be forged by fire.”

  “Don’t listen to this lunatic,” an inmate sitting close by told Saaber. “He’s been here for years. Isolation has rotted his brain.”

  “I, too, am here for a reason, Hisham,” Badr replied. “I’m here to guide him.” He nodded toward Saaber.

  Hisham snorted. “The blind leading the blind. Since when did you become a teacher?”

  “Since I understood my destiny.”

  “Your destiny is to die in jail,” Hisham said, laughing.

  “And yours?” Badr asked, smiling calmly.

  “Is to make fun of you.” Hisham reached over and slapped Badr, his palm making a popping sound when it met Badr’s cheek and neck.

  Badr’s smile did not fade away. “Trials,” he whispered to Saaber once Hisham’s attention drifted away from them.

  “But he humiliated you!” Saaber protested.

  Badr shook his head. “Everything happens for a reason. Humiliation is nothing but a path toward glory.” Badr turned to face Saaber, looking him straight in the eyes. “Shall I explain?” he asked.

  Saaber nodded.

  * * *

  —

  “TO UNDERSTAND ANYTHING about how life works, one must see it as a short prelude to the afterlife,” Badr said. “If you think of life as fleeting, a period as short as one day and one night when compared to the eternity of the afterlife, then you will see that nothing that happens to you here truly matters. What matters is how this life prepares you for eternity.”

  Saaber nodded.

  “Sometimes, in rare cases, people get special treatment, a life designed to prepare them for an eternity of glory. Prophets all had such lives. Ayyub is a perfect example,” Badr said, scratching his chin as he remembered the prophet Job. “God took everything away from him just so that he could find his faith instead of focusing on earthly possessions. And the prophet Yunus was swallowed by a whale so that he, too, could find God. God tests those whom he loves best. Trials are there to remind us that life is fleeting, and to show us the way to an eternity in heaven.”

  “Stop filling the boy’s head with your bullshit, Badr,” Hisham chimed in.

  Badr smiled at him. He waited until Hisham returned to speaking to two other inmates before he continued in a whisper.

  “Take your own life, for example. You are clearly chosen for a different life than most. Your father is imprisoned wrongfully. He dies in jail. That’s injustice. Then your brother gets killed by the police, the same group of people who caused your father’s death—another injustice. Then the American journalist finds you and writes a story about you, recognizing your uniqueness.” Badr stressed this last word, his voice getting momentarily louder with excitement, which made Hisham turn their way again. Badr paused.

  “And for that you get turned in to the police by the same people who caused your father’s arrest. More injustice. Then the police come to your home, assault you and your family, and then imprison you when you defend yourself.”

  “I wasn’t even defending myself,” Saaber said. “The orderly’s fall was an accident.”

  “You should have defended yourself!” Badr exclaimed. “What’s wrong with self-defense? Are you supposed to let people walk all over you? To allow them to take your life, your freedom, and do nothing?”

  Saaber looked down at his feet, examining his toes in the prison-issue sandals. For the first time, he wished he truly had pushed the orderly. If he had, Badr would have seen him as a hero. He would have taken this as confirmation of Saaber’s glorious destiny.

  * * *

  —

  THE ATTORNEY FOUAD hired ex
plained to Saaber that he was facing two accusations: communicating with foreign elements with the intent of compromising national security, and attempted murder. He thought he could get both charges dropped, since there was no evidence to support either one and since there was no way to prove intent in the case of the orderly who, after all, hadn’t died, which, luckily, rules out manslaughter. The attorney said he just needed time.

  “I’m going to be here for years,” Saaber complained to Badr once he was back in the cell.

  Badr shrugged. “So what? Everything happens in God’s good time.”

  “I don’t want to die in jail.”

  “You will not.” Badr emphasized his words with a gentle squeeze of Saaber’s wrist. “This is one step in your path, one hurdle you have to cross. Have patience, and try to see what God is preparing you for.”

  According to Badr, God was preparing Saaber to be one of His soldiers on earth, and as such, He needed to toughen him up. This explained everything, from the various injustices Saaber endured outside of jail to the multiple injustices he endured within, including the occasional beating by the jail guards who branded Saaber as a cop killer, even though the orderly had not died, as Saaber repeatedly told them. When they refused to believe him, saying that Saaber had tried to kill the orderly in cold blood, Saaber remembered how Badr had stressed self-defense as a legitimate cause for fighting, and instead of trying to convince them of his innocence, Saaber proclaimed that he had pushed the man in self-defense, which produced more beatings by the prison guards.

  “Trials, my friend,” Badr repeatedly whispered as Saaber put pressure on his swollen eyelid. “Trials.”

  * * *

  —

  “YOU KNOW WHY you are different from these people?” Badr asked Saaber one day, nodding toward the inmates sharing the crowded cell with them. “Because you have the power to be heard. Because you have already taken the first steps toward fame, and if you play your cards right, you can revisit this path. You can do glorious things and let the world know about them, not just people here in Egypt, but the entire world, even America! You can remind people that God has soldiers on earth that make sure His justice is served. You can be God’s ambassador to the world—as close as anyone can get to being a prophet.”