by Rajia Hassib
“But what can I do?”
“You can kill two birds with one stone. You can avenge your father and brother and your wrongful imprisonment, and be God’s instrument in bringing justice to the police who brought all of this upon you in the first place, who brought this upon all of us,” Badr whispered, nodding toward the other inmates again. “You’re afraid of the judges, but you don’t realize that you can be the judge. You can decide who lives and who dies. You can gain fame in this life and an eternity in heaven, too.”
“How?” Saaber asked, his eyes widening.
Badr smiled.
* * *
—
“I NEED TO talk to you.” Hisham pulled Saaber by the arm, taking him to the corner of the yard where they were let out to walk for an hour once every couple of days. The yard was enclosed by a tall, concrete wall, its top embedded with shards of glass that glistened under coils of barbed wire.
“What’s Badr been talking to you about all this time?”
“Nothing.” Saaber’s heart raced. Hisham was a broad-shouldered man with a plain, clean-shaven face that would have looked harmless on a shorter man, but that in his case made him look menacing. Saaber remembered what Badr had told him: how deceptive Hisham was; how he would try to make him believe he was protecting him in the prison’s hierarchy when he was only trying to secure his loyalty; how he claimed he got convicted of manslaughter for accidentally killing a man during a street fight when, in reality, he had been a hired assassin. Badr assured Saaber that Hisham’s family rolled in the wealth of his blood-tinted money. Saaber looked at Hisham’s white jogging suit, not the prison-issue one, but a more expensive one his family had bought for him, one that felt soft and downy when his fingers brushed against Hisham’s arm. Saaber hated that suit.
“Don’t ‘nothing’ me, boy. I’ve seen him talk to you, and I’ve heard some of the bullshit he’s been feeding you. I’m this close to reporting both of you to the guards.” He held his pointer and thumb half an inch apart. “I would do it, too, but I know what they’ll do to both of you if they found out. I don’t give a crap about him—would be good riddance, if you ask me—but you’re still young. You’ll probably be out of here in a few weeks. You have your entire life ahead of you. Don’t waste it.”
Saaber swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Hisham sighed. “You know why Badr is in prison? He defrauded old women of their money. He would find some poor old woman with a few pennies saved and would convince her to donate her money to some imaginary orphanage he was building. Carried photos of kids with him all the time. You know what he did with the money he collected?”
Saaber shook his head.
“One of the women had a nephew who cared enough about her to alert the police. They raided Badr’s apartment and found money stuffed in mattresses, in boxes under the bed, in old suitcases stacked in a corner. All small bills, all the life savings of these women. He was just keeping it all there while the poor old women starved. He had been doing this for years. The police are still trying to track them down to give them their money back, but they probably won’t find them. They believed they were giving the money to God. It’s not like they would have reported it missing.”
“He was saving up to build the orphanage. He just didn’t have enough money to get started yet.”
Hisham snorted. “Is that what he told you?”
“I believe him.”
“Of course you do.”
Saaber glanced around and saw Badr standing a few feet away, in the shade of the wall, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his gaze so intently focused on Hisham that he didn’t see Saaber look his way. Hisham followed Saaber’s glance.
“Get lost,” Hisham yelled at Badr, flicking him away with one wave of his hand.
Saaber looked at Badr’s back as he slowly walked away.
“I’m only trying to protect you,” Hisham said. “The man is a known crook. Nothing good can come out of spending that much time with him. He is not being kind to you. He is using you.”
“What would he be using me for? I have nothing to give him.”
“You have more to give him than you realize.”
“He is a man of God.”
Hisham snorted again. “Based on what? His beard? Any idiot can grow a beard.”
“He knows a lot about religion.”
“And how do you know that what he’s telling you is true and not some bullshit he is making up?”
“I just know.”
Hisham shook his head. “Not everyone who talks religion knows religion, Saaber. Nothing is easier than sounding religious. All you need is a beard and some inshaa Allah and mashaa Allah scattered between your words and people will swallow all you say. If you really want to learn about religion, I can get you some books. Or I can hook you up with someone to teach you, once you get out of here. I have a close friend who graduated from Al-Azhar, a real scholar. I’ll have him contact you, if you want.”
“Yeah, sure,” Saaber said, scanning the yard again for Badr. He saw him sitting on the ground, his back against the wall, his legs pulled up to his chest, staring at his feet. “Sure,” Saaber repeated, inching away from Hisham. “I’ll contact your friend once I get out of here.”
* * *
—
“WE NEED TO be more careful,” Saaber whispered to Badr as they stood in line to get back in.
Badr nodded. “I know. The devil is already sending his followers to stop us. I expected that. I told you it would happen.”
Saaber nodded. Badr had, just the day before, warned him of Hisham, who had settled down too close to them as they spoke, obviously eavesdropping.
“You know what that means, don’t you? They are starting to realize how powerful you are. They, too, are recognizing your destiny, your potential for glory.” Here Badr stopped, nodded toward another inmate ahead of them, who had turned around and given him a stern look. Badr slowed his pace, and Saaber followed his lead until the inmate was out of earshot. “We just have to be more careful. Trust me, Saaber: this only proves my point about how important you are. You think Hisham would have spared you a minute of his time if you weren’t?” He looked at Saaber, who shook his head. “Of course not. He is noticing you only because he is afraid you’ll overshadow him. Here, within these walls, he is the big shot, and he worries that you will be even bigger, you will reach more people, you will be more powerful than he ever can be. But guess what?” Here Badr stood in place and turned to look straight at Hisham, who was farther behind in line and who had stepped aside, clearly looking at them. “You will,” Badr said, holding Hisham’s gaze, not budging. “You will.”
* * *
—
LYING DOWN TO sleep that night, Saaber did not mind the concrete floor anymore, nor did he find the walls around him constraining. When he thought of the police orderly, of the prison guards, of the judge stamping his file with the renewed detention, of the injustice done to his brother and his father, of Hisham trying to sway him from his destiny, he felt a hatred harder, more solid, than anything he had ever experienced before, but his hate did not constrain his chest, like it used to when he first came to prison, when he focused only on the injustice and not on how he could fight it and bring balance to a life out of kilter.
He had power, he now realized, smiling. When he closed his eyes, he remembered the look on his face when it once graced the pages of the American newspaper, how even then he had seen something in his own eyes that he had never noticed before: determination, a sense of purpose. He remembered the neighbors huddling around the TV as the news anchor held up the article featuring his photo, remembered the way the kids looked up at him when he passed by, and he knew why Badr had recognized this quality in him, this ability to make things happen, to galvanize people just by being himself. Before drifting away to sleep, Saaber realized that, for th
e first time in his life, he liked the person he was turning out to be.
◆ 19 ◆
When the text messages started, they did not stop for three days. Fouad’s phone pinged once, then again, then multiple times in a row, and then it slowed down to a steady trickle of one ping every hour or so, until he turned it to silent mode.
“What’s up with all the texts?” Gameela asked. Four months into their marriage, she was still unsure about boundaries and did not want to fit the stereotype of a meddling wife, but thought the repeated messages warranted an inquiry, especially since that last one had happened after ten in the evening, when the farm was doused in the deep countryside darkness and she and Fouad were already in bed.
“It’s Saaber. I can’t shake him off.”
“He’s not in trouble again, is he?”
“No. He hasn’t been in trouble since he got released, as far as I know.”
“What does he want?”
Fouad picked his phone up, read the last message, and then put the phone facedown on the nightstand. “He keeps asking me to go to Cairo and meet with him. I told him I can’t travel right now, especially since he won’t tell me what he needs me for. It’s ridiculous of him to expect me to drive all the way there just because he asks me to—it’s not like we’re old friends. I hardly know him. I’m not at his beck and call.”
Gameela turned to face Fouad. The pillows on his bed were the old-fashioned, cotton-stuffed ones, and she had to adjust hers to prevent her neck from hurting. She beat the pillow down with one hand, hoping to create a groove in the stiff filling. “Maybe he needs something but is too embarrassed to ask?”
“I offered to send him money, and he refused.” The phone vibrated on the wooden nightstand. Fouad, puffing, picked the phone up and turned the vibration off. “I don’t know what else I can do. I’ve endured this for days. I’ve even called him to try to understand what he wants, and I got nowhere. All he says is I need to see you. I need to see you. Come to Cairo. I would block him, but I want him to be able to reach me if he truly needs something. If he changes his mind about the money.”
“You’ve helped him out enough already.”
“Hiring that attorney was the least I could do, considering I caused Saaber’s troubles to start with.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I put him in touch with Mark.”
“Only because I asked you to. You only know Mark through me. And you didn’t tell Saaber to push that orderly off the building!”
Fouad turned to face her. He held her hand in his, and she fell silent.
“You’re too kind, Gameela. I could set Cairo on fire and you’d find an excuse for me.”
She could not decide whether she was flattered or offended, suspecting him of being condescending, talking to her as if she were a child and he the old, wise man. Behind him, the phone’s screen lit up, creating a halo of pale light, which lasted for a few seconds before disappearing.
* * *
—
FOUAD HAD A faint scar on his forehead, a silvery line that would have been invisible had it not cut straight across his brow, leaving in its wake a line where hair stopped growing. In the mornings, whenever Gameela woke up before he did, she remained still, staring at the faded scar, sometimes reaching over and gently touching it, making sure she didn’t wake him up. It took her years of sleuthing to get him to explain the scar to her, to take one more step toward trusting her, which he allowed in such slow progression that she was often brought to tears of frustration. He was her greatest unsolved mystery, but she was cracking this case, one step at a time.
Her life before she met him felt so distant now that she barely remembered it. On the day she first saw him five years ago, nothing special had happened to signal that this was the day her life was to change forever: no wedding processions passed by her parents’ apartment building on their way to the Marriott next door; no deafening drumbeats announced the arrival of the bride and groom. Only an older man sitting in Marwa’s living room, a man who looked at her as she walked in and then casually looked away, as if nothing had happened.
Later, she would realize that she missed the biggest sign of all: the Egyptian revolution bursting all around them, changing the country’s destiny and, in the process, changing her own fate as well.
As the streets between Gameela’s parents’ apartment and Marwa’s filled with protesters pushing against the forces of the riot police, as people spread across the Qasr El-Nile Bridge, praying under the downpour of the water police hosed them down with, Gameela, Marwa, her brother, and Fouad watched from the sidelines, sometimes venturing into the midst of the marching masses, shouting slogans requesting social justice, other times stepping into the entryways of random apartment buildings, hiding in stairwells as the riot police shot rubber bullets at protesters around them.
“We barely see you for twenty years,” Marwa told Fouad as they walked back into her parents’ apartment building, Gameela and Mustafa in tow, “and then a revolution happens and we can’t get rid of you. Since when were you interested in activism anyway?”
“Since before you were born,” Fouad replied, stepping aside to let Gameela pass.
Later, after the military cleared the streets, when the revolution was relocated to the TV screens people were glued to, watching power being transferred from the army to the Muslim Brotherhood and back to the army, arguing ceaselessly about who was on the side of justice, Gameela started her gentle inquiry into the life of the man who, to the astonishment of his family, would not go back to his beloved farm. He had stayed in Cairo for a full year before disappearing for that dark, dark month without notice, a move he later confessed was supposed to cure her of any infatuation with him but that, instead, had made her more obsessed with him than ever. Later, after he came back, after he started joining her in her forty-five-minute walk back to her parents’ place, after they started spending hours of each day together, Gameela had basked in his ability to focus solely on her, to sit in a room full of people and stare at her until she caught him doing it and then, rather than look away, to continue staring anyway.
“I still don’t understand what you see in me,” she asked him three years after they first met, when their daily meetings had settled into a routine that neither one questioned. She was sitting across from him on the porch of the Studio Masr restaurant, the gardens of Al-Azhar extended before them, the mosque of Mohammed Ali visible on top of the Mokattam hill in the distance, the mosque’s two tall minarets and multiple white domes jutting into Cairo’s clear blue sky.
“I see myself thirty-five years ago. Does that make me narcissistic?” he asked, smiling.
“Probably. What’s the difference between younger you and current you?”
He looked at the vast gardens ahead, tapped one finger on the white tablecloth. “Thirty-five years.”
It would be another full year before she learned what happened to him: how he had participated in the Bread Riots of 1977, when the government attempted to remove the subsidies on basic foodstuffs and found itself squelching a spontaneous revolt, with thousands of people flooding the streets, fearing they could no longer afford to feed their families. Gameela learned how Fouad’s eighteen-year-old self requested justice for the masses of poor people he was not one of, how he got arrested, how he got that scar: in jail, under interrogation, denying that he was a communist.
“It breaks my heart to think of how unfair life has been to you,” she would later whisper as she sat next to him on the balcony in the evening, weeks after they got married.
“It’s not unfair anymore, is it?” he would ask, kissing her temple, one arm wrapped around her shoulders.
And it would not be, because she would not allow it to be. That was the vow she’d made to herself when she decided to marry him against her parents’ wishes; that was the vow she still lived by. She would bend life to meet her desire
s; as long as she was not doing anything to offend God, she would pursue what she wanted. No one would stop her.
* * *
—
EVERY DAY, she reinvented her life, using the farm as a brand-new, spotless canvas. She was Gameela, mistress of the manor, ordering Maymouna around, making everyday decisions about evening meals, furniture layout, which corners needed dusting. Gameela, lover of nature, who walked around the farm during the day, following her husband as he inspected his vast grounds tree by tree, reaching over and sniffing the sweet orange blossoms, collecting ripe mangoes for the evening’s dessert. Gameela, amateur sleuth, gently probing her husband to discover everything about him: his morning routine; how he liked his tea; how his eyes wrinkled when he laughed; the true tone of his skin, visible beneath the T-shirt’s tan lines; the feel of his biceps, kept strong by the manual labor he still insisted on doing, helping transplant young trees, pushing carts loaded with bags of fertilizer around the farm, getting dirt stuck under his fingernails, brushing them clean each night.
She loved her multiple new identities, the freedom of self-invention.
Gameela the lover, in silk negligees that glistened in the faint evening light of her husband’s bedroom.
“This farm is a piece of heaven,” she whispered one night, lying on her back on their bed, staring at the ceiling fan softly swishing above.
Fouad chuckled. “I wouldn’t take it that far. But it certainly was a haven to me when I first came here.”