The girls took their seats behind the teacher’s desk. Demiana watched Ms. Safiya look through her daily lesson plan. She wondered what Crusader atrocities she’d talk about that day. She convinced herself that nothing could be worse than Ma’arra. Impossible.
Ms. Safiya turned towards the blackboard to erase what was written the day before. The girls heard a loud honk and a dull thud and looked outside.
“Teacher!” Laila yelled. “Teacher, a boy was just hit by a car!”
Ms. Safiya dropped the blackboard eraser and rushed towards the windows along with the rest of the class.
“Oh God, don’t let it be my son!” she cried.
“Don’t say that teacher!” Demiana yelled. “God forbid!”
Ms. Safiya looked out the window and sighed, it was not her son, and looked back at all the girls standing behind her. Demiana knew she recognized her voice. She blushed. She didn’t mean to yell what she yelled. The words came out by themselves.
Ms. Safiya stared at the shy Nazarene for a moment. Demiana noticed her raised eyebrow and open lips. Not angry this time, but confused. Ms. Safiya set off a short shudder in her body, as if trying to shake off a thought, and looked away.
“Let’s go help him,” she said. She sent one of the girls to the office to call the police. The rest walked outside with her towards the boy, who sat up and managed to crawl towards the sidewalk. He looked the same age as her son, but he was much darker and his hair was thick and nappy.
Ms. Safiya asked him what his name was, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t look like he could. The boy bled from a long gash across his left cheek that ran up his scalp. Pockets of blood soaked through his t-shirt and mixed with the mud and dust from Cairo’s sandy streets. The car that hit him disappeared.
The boy couldn’t hold his head in the air for very long before it fell to the ground. Ms. Safiya picked the little boy up and held him in her arms and walked back towards the school. She looked back at the class every so often, but Demiana felt like she looked back to see her. Only her. The dumbfounded stare didn’t leave the teacher’s face all morning.
The girls walked back to class while Ms. Safiya waited in the office for the ambulance to arrive. She came back after the paramedics picked the boy up and taught as if nothing had happened.
The content she presented that day was just as brutal as the day before, but it felt subdued to Demiana. Ms. Safiya didn’t look at her every time she explained a Crusader war crime that day. Her voice had sunk and sounded more matter-of-fact. As if everything she explained belonged to another time.
The hour passed quickly and she ended her class. “Tomorrow, how we took back Jerusalem. Go.”
Demiana stood up and packed her bag. She was the slowest bag-packer in her class, almost always the last to leave. After everyone had gone, she threw her bag over her shoulder and walked towards the door.
“Demiana,” Ms. Safiya called. She turned towards the teacher. “Come here.”
She took a few slow steps towards the front desk where Ms. Safiya sat. Demiana stopped a foot away from her after she spotted the wooden ruler that hung off the side of the front desk. She can’t hit me she thought. Not in high school.
“Yes teacher?”
“You yelled in class today.”
“Yes teacher. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I didn’t ask if you meant to or not. I asked why.”
Demiana stared at the wooden ruler in front of her and breathed in. Breathed out. She considered what answer would let her go the quickest. In her panic, all she could think of was the truth.
“I said why!”
“That could’ve been your son!” she cried with the same urgency as the outburst that got her in trouble.
Ms. Safiya stared at her for a moment. Demiana’s body felt heavy, weighed down by her teacher’s eyes.
“Thank you,” Ms. Safiya said.
“What?”
“For what you said. That’s my only son.”
Demiana stood in a daze. She shook her head to say you’re welcome.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yes teacher.”
Demiana turned towards the door and made her way outside. She sat on the alabaster ledge, as she did everyday between classes, and kicked her feet against its side. Zainab was gone, and Egypt didn’t care. But at least Ms. Safiya’s son wasn’t hit by a car.
Maybe Zainab will have a son someday Demiana thought. Maybe she’d meet Zainab again in the future, and Zainab would have a house and a stove and maybe even a car. And her own son she’d walk to school every day. And Demiana would meet her at a bus stop and they’d kiss on each cheek and she’d take the little palm of Zainab’s little boy.
Demiana stared up at the wide, clear skies and watched a plane fly up higher and higher still until it disappeared above the clouds. Keep going she thought as the plane approached the sun. You’re almost there.
MOSES THE BLACK
I saw the colour of heat on Cairo’s city streets the day the doctor told me I was going blind. The jagged lines that rode between bricks across buildings and the shades of everything bright hot and alive struck me for the first time.
I stared through the thin patches of grass that grew between the broken pieces of cement and brown stalks of palm trees rising from and covering the ground with their massive fronds like owners of the land and the colour of the people that hovered below in all different shapes. Everyone walked like they had somewhere to be. I wondered if they ever recognized each other.
Mama held my hand and walked me through the streets. “Everything’ll be alright” she smiled and tried to mean it. She told me to unbutton my collar because I was sweating. I was too busy watching time move to listen. She stopped, knelt down and pulled me toward her as she reached for my collar. I saw myself in the brown of her eye. My head looked round and glossy, like a balloon on a string held down by a brick.
“Soon you’ll have beautiful blue eyes,” she spoke quietly like a secret. There were words stuck in her throat. If she said what she needed to, we could move. I needed to move. Her eyes were too wide and heavy for me to stare too long.
I looked down at her neck. Her crystal cross beamed purple from where I stood. I tilted my head slightly and watched it turn blue to red to orange to green.
“Maybe the doctor was wrong,” I said for her sake, smiling like a good boy. She pursed her lips and smiled with a hope and a lie. She patted my shoulders and stood up, took my hand, and we walked away. I watched the colours fly through the streets.
At the street corner sat an old man in a moustache and galabeya, his face worn and etched. Dark brown skin like a Southerner. He sat cross-legged on a thin white blanket in front of a basket made of palm leaves full of fish and stabbed at one with scales that shined like steel in the sun. He carved out something pink from its gut and threw it in a plastic bag in front of him, wrapped the fish in a sheet of old newspaper and handed it to a woman that stood to his side.
Mama dragged me to the fish man at the street corner by my sleeve. He aged with each step. Lines dug deep into his skin under his tired eyes. Light patches of stubble grew around his moustache and into his sunken cheeks. His graven face, weak and powerless and angry and alive.
The man watched us approach with his eyes on me. I looked into his basket when we got there. It was full of black fish with long whiskers. Beside him was a tin bucket with the same kind of fish, but these ones were alive and swimming.
“How much for the catfish,” mama asked.
“Which one?”
Mama pointed one out in the basket.
“Why do you want a basket fish? I got live fish right here woman,” he pointed at the bucket. “I don’t always bring live fish with me you know? They haven’t even felt air yet.”
“Those are more expensive.”
“Why do you care about price? You got a growing boy here.” He nodded at me. “Don’t you wanna
see him grow big and healthy? God bless you little boy.”
Mama stared at me for a moment, then back at the man. She pointed to a large fish in the bucket. It swam away from her finger.
The man gave her a price. She bargained him down by a few pounds. He leaned over into the bucket and grabbed the fish out with his hands. It flung its tail and shook its head from side to side open mouthed as it drowned in the open air.
“Head on or off?” the man asked.
“Off,” mama said.
The man slammed the anxious fish onto a slab of wood, picked up a large knife to his side and cut its head off clean. The bent tail slowly fell and rested on the wood. He put the head on an old piece of newspaper and handed it to me.
“There you go guy,” the man said as I took it from his hands.
I stared at it for a moment. It stared back with tiny hollow black eyes, its mouth wide. It didn’t look much different from when it was alive. I examined it from the inside, saw where its pink flesh married bone under its skin.
He gutted the fish body while mama and I hovered above him.
“You’re good,” I told the man. He nodded and smiled at the ground.
“This is my life.”
“You cut it real nice.”
“I’ve been doing this for twenty years guy. Catch, cut, sell.”
The man put the knife down, pulled a cigarette from out of his pocket, lit it and pushed it between his lips.
“You have no idea what these things can do,” the man said wriggling his fingers.
I shook my head and stared at his rough hands. A large gash stitched and pink dug from his wrist and twisted up beneath his tattered sleeve. The man finished gutting the fish, rolled it in some newspaper and handed it to mama.
“Maybe I could work for you?” I said. The man laughed and so did mama.
She said thank you and pushed my head away from the man and told me we needed to go.
“I don’t give money,” the man yelled. I looked back. “But I take volunteers.” He winked. Mama walked faster.
We lived right around the block. It took a few minutes to walk home. Baba was sitting on the couch reading a newspaper waiting for us. He put down the paper and asked mama what the doctor said.
Glaucoma. What a stupid word.
I made my way to my room while they talked and stared at myself in the mirror.
The world had changed just about a month ago. Every so often, I saw halos around streetlights. I woke up with a dull throbbing in my eyes almost every morning. The headaches burned small holes in my sight where all I could see were traces of white hidden between patches of the world.
But my eyes looked the same as I remembered them. White on the outside, round and dark and brown in the middle. They shined under the light. I wondered how things could change but still look the same.
I sat up on my bed and stared at the icon of St. Moses the Black mama bought from a monastery while she was pregnant with me. Another killer reborn and saved. Dark skin. Dark eyes. A halo around his white knotted hair offering his rusted heart in his palm to the sun. And his hands, those ragged hands stained by old blood, some from his worn sodden heart.
I heard mama in the other room whispering to baba. She didn’t want me to hear and I didn’t want to hear her. I closed the door of my room and sat on my bed staring at my palms, clenching and unclenching my fists, small but heavy, and I knew they were real.
~~~
I saw the fish man on the street corner on my way home from school the next day. I walked up to him before he could spot me.
“You said you’d take volunteers.”
The man looked up at me and ran his grime stained fingernails over his thick stubble, a cigarette in his right hand, and winced.
“You can’t take a joke?” he said and rested both arms on his legs.
“I didn’t know that was a joke.”
“You probably don’t know a lot of things.”
“I know you don’t own the street corner.” The man looked up and took a drag.
He looked back at the passing cars. I took a seat a few feet away from him. The many men and women and cars and stray dogs and cats and children and rats felt heavy from where I sat, like I carried the congestion of the streets on my shoulders with all its stench. It was hard to notice another person’s scent in Cairo because the smell of the city’s streets lingered in every corner, but I could smell the man. He smelled like a wet dog.
He turned to me.
“What’s your name boy?”
“Moses. What’s yours?”
“Moses?” the man asked. “The man who split the sea.”
“No not that Moses. Mama named me after Moses the Black.”
“Moses the Black?”
“Yeah. He was a bad man.”
The fish man cocked his head back against the wall and laughed.
“Mama named you after a bad man?”
“Well, he died a good man. Mama loved him because he did some good things. But he did a lot of bad things before he changed.”
“That’s okay. I was a bad man too.”
“How were you bad?” I asked.
He rested one palm on his knee caps and rubbed the other on his thigh. The man nodded and rolled his eyes to a corner and stared for a moment. He cocked the bottom half of his jaw forward and bit his lower lip. I wondered what he was thinking.
“My name is Marwan,” he said.
“Mr. Marwan,” I said. “How were you bad?”
The man smirked to himself and wiped the sweat off his carved brow.
“You don’t see my trail of dead?” he said as he directed my sight to his fish with an open palm to the sky. All of his fish laid lifeless in a basket.
“Why didn’t you get your bucket of fish? The alive ones.”
The man wiped his damp hands on his galabeya.
“You know, yesterday was the only day I ever tried that,” he said shifting his eyes between me and the streets. “I thought it would make me money for being the only guy in Cairo stupid enough to sell live fish. The cab driver made me pay him for the water I spilled on his seats. I lost money that day.”
“Well I thought it was a good idea.”
“That’s why I call you guy.”
“I wanna work for you.”
He laughed and sat back.
“Shouldn’t you be home soon?”
“Mama and baba don’t finish work for another few hours.”
“I don’t have money for you, you know?”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “I want your hands.”
The man stared at me and smiled, measuring my words to my size.
“You grow old, learn to work, cut and be cut. Your hands will be like my hands.”
Mr. Marwan smelled like an old dog in the rain. That’s what baba called street vendors. Dogs.
It was strange seeing the streets from where he sat. The people hovered above me like clouds. I sat so low I saw the dirt under their shoes. They all looked so different, but they felt the same.
“It’s like the ocean,” I said.
The man turned and looked at me.
“What is?”
“The people. They all move the same way.”
The man breathed in and shook his head as the people passed.
“Not the ocean,” he said.
“I think they are.”
“No. They’re ghosts. This city is haunted.” He looked at me and smiled.
“Ghosts?”
“Yeah. You see how they float? You see how they pass each other like nobody else exists? None of them exist. That’s why they can’t see nothing but themselves.”
He rested his shoulders. “Maybe they can’t even see themselves.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you exist?”
The man leaned forward and stared at me.
“Look at me. Look at my eyes. Do I look alive to you?”
The lines
below his narrow dark brown eyes burrowed deep within his gaunt flesh. They cut through deeper creases that carved his barren cheeks. His neck covered in sun spots and rough skin extended from his tired shoulders like an old tree stump that stood on principle, a forced strength.
“Yes,” I said. “You have to be alive to see a ghost.”
“And you see them too,” Mr. Marwan said as he touched the ends of his thumbs together and crossed his fingers. He leaned forward and smiled a half-smile as if he knew something no one else did. He grabbed a fish and started to cut.
“I’ve watched these people float for years you know? How they move. How they bump into each other and curse and move on. You know how many times I’ve seen men cop a feel of a woman they don’t know, and play it off like nothing happened? In broad daylight too. Almost always at bus stops when they think nobody’s watching. A lot of times the woman pretends nothing happened. Can you believe that? A dirty man gropes you from behind and you shrug it off.”
“People are disgusting.”
“I don’t think they think anybody cares enough to notice. But I do,” he said as he scraped out intestines. “I sit. I watch. I wait. Like a lion.”
“A lion.”
“Yes. There’s a time for everything. A time to hurt and a time to heal. A time to break and a time to build. God’s words. And I’ve already been broken,” he said. “I’m just waiting for my time to move in on the kill,” he said and laughed. I think he had to laugh to convince me he was joking.
I shrugged and sat silent and watched the crowd. A spirit slept beneath the man’s words. A horrible truth I didn’t know. I looked down to my palms and twiddled my thumbs and clasped the fingers of both my hands together and looked back up, resting my chin against my knuckles.
“I think a lion lives inside my head.”
“You and me both,” he said.
A man with a trim beard and fine blue suit approached us. His hair nappy and short, black with a patch of white on his right temple. He was a tall man, maybe six foot and bulky like a gorilla.
A face like the moon Page 8