“He escaped?”
“I think so.”
Not a word was spoken for the rest of the trip.
Her father dropped her off at the mudbrick house with no glass. Shokry smiled and let her in.
“I have something to show you,” he said, tugging her little hand to one end of the room, his other hand holding the mallet Nijma had used to tenderize his meat the day before. She knew she’d have to cook again.
Aisha sat on the floor smoking a cigarette, this time in a bright blue galabeya. A long multicoloured galabeya hung from a small coat-rack in the corner of the room. The end of the galabeya was cut down the middle and sewn into two parts, turning it into pants. The sewing was shoddy, but strong enough to hold. Long green stripes ran down the length of each sleeve and pant leg. “My creation,” he called it.
“I made it with a few of my wife’s old dresses. What do you think?”
She examined it up and down, held it in her hands, touched its seams. She wondered, if she still had Mahboub, and the galabeya was much smaller, would he wear it? He’d be the only one among his friends and family with a galabeya. He’d look so good.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
He turned to his creation and smiled.
“It is,” he said. “It is beautiful. I made a beautiful thing.”
Nijma heard someone open the door. She turned, and saw the man with the pompadour walk in. He wore jeans and a t-shirt.
“Tariq!” Mr. Shokry said. “Come look at this.”
Tariq walked to where the girl stood, looked down at her confused, and up at the altered galabeya.
“What is this?” he asked. “Where’d you get this? The circus?” Tariq laughed and brushed his hand through his pompadour. Shokry turned to him, amazed. Nijma heard Aisha giggle in the corner, although she tried not to.
“Did your buffalo make this?” He looked down again at Nijma. He patted her head and slid her scarf partially off. He ran his hands through her hair. She tried to push his hands off, but he persisted and grinned. He looked up at Shokry.
“How much for the little girl?”
“I’m not a doctor,” she said. He laughed and stared at Shokry. “Doctor?”
Before Nijma could see him wind up, she saw his mallet hit Tariq’s face. Tariq fell to the ground, eyes open, bleeding from his nose and his mouth, a slight dent on his bloodied skull. He didn’t move. A small yelp squeaked out of Aisha’s mouth.
Nijma breathed heavily but tried to stay quiet. She felt her feet plant to the floor by the fear that if she moved, she’d lie next to Tariq. Shokry turned to Nijma. He stepped towards Aisha, who sat on the floor licking her lips and looking at the wall. He sat on a seat that hovered above her and stared at Nijma.
“Cigarette,” he said. Nijma assumed he was talking to Aisha, but he was looking at Nijma. Aisha kept her sight to the wall as she reached for one from her pack, lit it, and passed it to him. His hand trembled as he reached for the cigarette. He stared at the little girl and blew smoke from his nostrils.
“You liked it?” he said, calmly. He wasn’t smiling.
“Yes!” she yelled in an honest panic. “It’s really pretty! I love it!”
He nodded and ran a hand through his moustache. The fat man crossed his legs and looked at Aisha, crouched against the wall. She looked like a wave in her blue dress. He turned back to Nijma.
“This,” he said pointing to Aisha with his cigarette. “This is a doctor. She’s old. She’s not afraid to risk her life. She’s smart. She’s given her life to her work. Not to any one man. Not to any bird.”
Nijma lowered her head to the ground when he brought up Mahboub.
“Mahboub is gone,” she said. “I loved him and he left me.”
The fat man laughed.
“You lost my bird?” he asked. “I gave you one bird, and you lost it?”
She didn’t answer. It was never his bird. He never loved Mahboub like she loved him. The fat man didn’t even know his name.
“You think you’re smart?” he asked.
She shook her head no.
“Of course you’re not. You’re a peasant girl. You’re the daughter of a farmer, a Nazarene, with no land. What money can I make off you?” he said with sharp eyes.
He leaned forward and looked her in her eyes.
“You will never be a doctor,” he hushed, a forced calm in his stare. “You will never work for me. I never want to see you in this house again. I never want to see you close to Aisha again. You will never end up like her. Understand?”
She nodded her head, her heart pulsing against her flesh.
“Leave. And tell your father he’s gone too.”
Nijma ran out of the house as fast as she could towards the field her father worked. She found him feeding Shokry’s water buffalo in the stable next to Shusho. She told him the bad news in tears. She watched his face turn red and his eyes swell with rage. He stood for a few seconds staring at his daughter. Just as quickly as it had come, his face turned its normal colour. He leaned on the gate and breathed. He laughed.
“Everything’ll be alright,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair and picked up his daughter. She cried on his shoulder. He patted her back. A new feeling began to grow in her. Something like happiness. Maybe not happiness. Maybe comfort. Like how she felt when she was with Mahboub. She sniffed and wondered how he was doing. How his family and friends were. She wondered if he thought about her. He said he’d be with her always. He was watching. She could feel him with her. He built a little nest in her heart.
ALL GOOD THINGS THROWN AWAY
I laid my hands above the cold sink that early morning. My head hovered above the drain. I raised it slowly but I was tired. I looked at myself in the mirror that rested against the grey wall in front of me and stared for a moment trying to wake, my face cut through the middle by a crack that ran through the glass. Concrete walls stood above and all around me. All that’s missing is bars I thought. My eyes were barely open and still red in the dim light. My hair stuck out on one side. I combed it down with my hands.
And there I was. Still fat. A hippo in a shallow lake of garbage.
I showered under a garden hose and brushed my teeth and dressed in a pair of plain grey track pants I brought from Canada and a green Abibas sweater giddu gave me as a welcome gift. Nothing here is legitimate I thought when he stretched it out in front of me, smiling like it was the real thing. I doubt he was able to read English anyway. That was his excuse. Mine? A shirt was a shirt.
I walked out of the bathroom and heard the cock crow. The same cock that woke me twenty minutes earlier. It might’ve been just after two in the morning now.
I dragged myself towards the door and accidentally kicked something furry and small on my way out. I curled my toes against the cold cracked tiles and looked down. I screamed like a girl when I saw that it was a mouse, but it was dead. All I could see of it in the little light in the room was that it was dark grey and hunched towards its legs. It laid still on its side with its mouth open like it had something to say before it died.
This was Moqattam, Egypt’s Garbage City. It smelled a lot worse last night when I’d arrived. Like meat left out in the sun for too long. It was hard to breathe for the first hour and the garbage was everywhere. On the streets and on the roofs and in the shops and at the city gates. None of it seemed real. Walking around this city, I felt like I was floating. Like everything I saw and smelled and touched was another boy’s senses.
I wished I was back home in Canada in my single garage house with AC. But if not that, I wished I could’ve at least stayed with my parents in New Cairo and attended the wedding with them. But my mom told me giddu missed me. He hadn’t seen me since I was three years old. That was almost twelve years ago.
I toed around a pile of Pert Plus bottles in the middle of giddu’s living room and made my way out of his apartment.
He sat on a dirty wooden chair to the side of his redbrick home inhaling sm
oke from a shisha and blowing billows out his nose.
“Give me a second,” he said between breaths and put his mouth back to the pipe.
He looked a lot like mom. Big square head. Dark brown skin. But unlike my mom, he had sharp narrow eyes and a moustache that cut off on each side of his upper lip. He still had most of his hair, except for a little bird’s nest at the back of his head. And he always wore one of his several grey galabeyas.
I walked across from where he sat to his white Chevy pickup, probably early nineties, possibly the only clean thing in Moqattam. It gleamed in the moonlight. I leaned against its door.
“Whoa!” giddu bellowed throwing down the mouth end of the shisha’s hose and brushing his hand in the air as if to say get off. I walked away from his truck wondering what I’d done wrong.
“Everything but the truck,” he said as he got up and walked towards me. He had a spry step too agile for a man well into his sixties. “You don’t lean on a Chevy my friend,” he said. “It’s American, like you.”
“I’m from Canada.”
“What’s the difference? America is America,” he said and took out a cloth from a pocket stitched into the front of his galabeya. He wiped down the place I’d leaned on.
“I just washed her last night and you stick your butt on her like you’re George Bush?”
“I’m not American.”
“Semina doesn’t need that from you Mr. Bush. I’m her president. She takes me where I need to go.”
Semina, his car, or Fat Girl in English.
“Now get in,” he said, unlocking the passenger door and walking towards his shisha to put it out.
Giddu stepped in himself a moment later. He pulled out a small, square piece of paper from the glove compartment in front of me, rolled it up into a thin cone and put it to his mouth. He pretended to smoke it even though it wasn’t lit and put the car in first gear and drove off.
He’d been smoking his paper since the moment he’d seen me just yesterday. His eyes wide as he walked towards me and hugged me, but he didn’t take the paper out until he kissed me, and it went back in as he hovered over me afterwards.
“Me no smoke,” he said in his best English. I assumed he meant he didn’t smoke cigarettes. He just puffed on a piece of unlit paper.
My mother told him I could speak Arabic. He laughed and hugged and kissed his youngest daughter, my mother, and greeted me in Arabic.
Back in his Chevy, we passed row after row of short brown and redbrick buildings. Piles of unsorted bottles and newspapers and banana peels and melon rinds and other garbage were scattered on the ground from days before. The world in front of me was mortar and ash and uneven stonework under a still, concrete skyline.
Two boys in a buggy pulled by a pair of mules rode behind us. A large empty bin covered by a tarp rested at the back of their buggy. I looked back at giddu beside me, still smoking his paper.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?” he spoke through his teeth, not letting the paper fall from his lips.
“Smoke that paper. You don’t even light it. Why don’t you just buy some cigarettes?”
“I used to smoke two packs a day my friend. Two packs. Until a doctor I met at church told me I’d go impotent. You know what that is? Impotence?”
“No.”
“How old are you now?”
“Fourteen.”
“You’re not that young. You should know what it means. It means you can’t have kids.” He took the paper from out his mouth and breathed out. “I said ‘what? Can’t have kids? Who will take care of my business when I’m gone?’ So I decided I was gonna quit.”
“So you just quit?”
“I must’ve failed a million times. I kept buying packs and smoking them. I didn’t think it would be that hard. Remember, this was thirty years ago. What was it like a few pennies for a pack? So one day after I bought another pack, I said to myself, ‘you bought it, you eat it.’ And I ate my cigarette.”
“What?” I said hitting my head against the back of my seat.
“Lord knows,” he shook his head. “I chewed it right up and swallowed. It was like eating fire. I didn’t crave another cigarette for another hour. And I ate the next one too. And the one after that. Every time I wanted a cigarette, I sat down and ate one. I felt like an ashtray. You know how long I did that for? A good month. God knows it was the best thing for me. Look how many kids I had after that. Samir,” he said sticking out his thumb, starting the count.
“Saif, Souheir, Marwan, Sausan.” At five, he moved onto his other hand.
“Salim, Shakira, Sahra, George, your mother Salima, Philo, how much is that now?”
“Eleven,” I said, half-amazed, still tired.
“Eleven,” he smirked and sat back in his seat. “I did it.”
“You smoke shisha though.”
“The doctor said cigarettes. Not shisha.”
“Oh. You still didn’t tell me why you pretend to smoke paper.”
“I need something in my mouth at all times,” he said taking a puff. “I feel naked without it.”
I shrugged my shoulders and watched as we passed the makeshift gates made of garbage at the border of Moqattam. This was my first garbage run with my grandpa. I was not excited.
I sat there listening to giddu tell me stories of past garbage runs where he ran into an old village friend or found a gold ring among the waste or the time he scavenged the street he’d been working for thirty years in just under forty-five minutes, his all time record. I shook my head and tried to care.
We got to Cairo after the longest twenty minute drive I could remember. We stopped in front of a grey building a few stories high. I rolled down the window. It was cold out, lit only by a dim light from a lamp at the end of the short street.
“I used to do half this street,” Giddu said as he climbed out. “But as the boys grew, I got more and more workers in my workforce. And now I own this whole street!”
“Nobody’s here but us,” I said.
“Saif and Marwan will be here in another hour.”
“How much do you do by yourself?” I asked.
“Just this building,” he winked. “See what happens when you stop smoking?”
I nodded and followed him to the back of his pickup. He took an extra wheelbarrow for me that day, a small black one. Smaller than his at least, which was almost the size of my bathtub back home. I followed him into the building. We took the elevator up to the top floor. There were five floors, five apartments per floor. Not all of them had garbage in front of their doors, though most did.
Giddu threw the bags into his barrow like a man who’d never seen a loss. He sometimes stopped to look inside the bag before he threw it in the barrow. The first time he did it, he shook his head as if amazed.
“All good things thrown away,” he said running his hands through the garbage.I cringed, although the bag wasn’t filled with much more than plastics and paper. He tied the bag back up and threw it on the pile and he marched on. I lugged my barrow behind him and waited for him to throw bags in it.
We finished pretty quickly, giddu said because he had me as a helper, and made our way out of the building. Giddu walked with a slight bounce and a tired smile. Giddu opened the back gate of his pickup and pulled out a wide wooden plank. He rested one side of the plank on the edge of the pickup’s gate and the other down to the asphalt. He rolled his barrow up the plank first and let it fall on its side once it was up there, letting the garbage spill. He did the same with my barrow and told me to get back in the truck.
“So are you getting married soon or what?” Giddu asked on our way back to Moqattam.
“I told you, I’m fourteen.”
“So?”
“So, I’m too young.”
“Are you joking or what? You’re joking right? I married your tayta when she was fifteen. She bore me eleven kids, and I was poor as dirt. But you,” he said turning to me and nodding, his eyes smiling. “A boy as fat
as you can get any woman he wants.”
He turned his head back to the road. I felt my face flush and clenched my fist. I looked over at giddu, a new rolled paper in his mouth, narrowed eyes staring at the road. He almost looked like he meant it. I breathed out and relaxed my palm and placed it on my lap.
“She was fifteen,” he said, “I was nineteen. If you start early, you could beat me. You could beat eleven.”
“I don’t want to beat eleven. And I don’t want to get married anytime soon.”
“Yes you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“You’re telling me there’s not one girl back home you’re interested in?”
“No.”
I lied. But the girl I liked didn’t share my giddu’s opinions on fatness.
Cindy Thomas.
Little Miss skinny Cindy and her wide blue eyes. She brought in her tiara one time after she’d won her first pageant. All the girls were jealous and a few of the boys started teasing her to get her attention. She shrugged them off like flies. A fly could never touch her perfect skin.
“What’d you do to win that?” I asked her the day she walked into school with the tiara on her head.
“I tried not to spend the few dollars I had on Big Macs everyday like you fatty,” she smirked. A few of her friends broke out in laughter along with her on cue. I always wondered why they hated her behind her back and sucked up to her in her face.
“Go back to the ghetto,” she chirped and turned around to talk to the girls she owned. They stopped noticing me, and I stopped existing.
I forgot everything in that moment and wished I could destroy her. I reached for my left shoe, nobody paid me any attention. I took it off after a short struggle with my laces and whipped it at her face, hit her in the nose with my tattered Reebok. She fell to the ground holding her nose, her tiara lying on the asphalt by her side on the school courtyard, and cried.
A few minutes later, I sat in the principal’s office waiting for my mother to come pick me up on the first day of my suspension. I remembered how the shoe hit her face and how she fell and I hated her and her tiara and wished I could say sorry in a place we were all alone and she’d accept and reach for my hand.
A face like the moon Page 3