The boy knew his mom. She was probably out of the hospital and searching for him by now. She would never leave him alone for too long. He couldn’t wait to see her as he marched out of the elevator and onto the street.
Black pickup trucks filled with officers from the Egyptian Shorta sped down the street towards the church. The men on the trucks dressed in all black and covered in padding and patched crests, an emblazoned eagle on their left shoulder, all sported a long jet black gun the length of Tino’s body. They rode in silence looking towards the church, their legs spilled through the side windows of the back of the pickup truck. Tino wondered what they were up to. Were they the terrorists that blew up his church and put his mother in the hospital? He spat at the sight of them.
A crowd of teenagers and some older folk marched in front of him in organized chaos. A tall man stood with a giant cross in his hand that hovered a foot above the crowd. A group of others held the same mural of the blood spattered Jesus Tino saw the night before as they marched. They must have peeled it off the church wall. The blood had darkened and dried.
“Mubarak, Mubarak, the heart of the Copts are on fire!” they chanted. Tino spotted a group of protesters in the distance. The rioters stood on one side of the street where the Church of the Two Saints stood, its walls stained red from the night before. Across the street stood Sharq al-Madina mosque. A small patch of black tainted the mosque’s cream white walls facing the streets from the explosion the night before. The riot police stood between the two in a large square of officers nine men deep and nine men wide, their black helmets and batons positioned against their shoulders.
A group of teenagers pelted the riot police and the mosque across the street with small stones. Some within the gates of the mosque hurled stones back. One young man in a black t-shirt and curly hair down to his shoulders approached too close to an officer in line, and whipped a stone at the clear shield of the officer’s helmet that covered his face. The stone bounced off and the officer jutted towards the teen, grabbed a hold of his arm, pulled him towards the police and brought the baton down against his head with a heavy hand. A fellow officer joined as the rest watched the crowds. Some spat at the boy who cowered at their feet and held his hands above his head and screamed for mercy. A few other protesters tried to help the boy. They were beaten off with batons back into their group.
Tino heard the teen scream. The boy ran fast towards his cry. He felt a pressure pull against his neck from his shirt. The boy fell back on his bottom and looked up behind him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” a grizzly voice asked. The boy looked up and saw a bald officer, thick and tall, tower over him. A small group of his comrades stood behind him.
“You’re killing him!” Tino cried.
“Don’t worry about him,” the man said calmly. “Think about yourself. What would happen if you ran up to save him?”
The boy and the officer’s stare broke at the sound of a man in the distance.
“Security, are you with us or them?” he yelled above the crowds at the riot police. “You government are all cowards!”
His cries galvanized the protesters who cheered after all his statements.
“Our youth will not stay silent. Our elders will not stay silent. The blood you spilled calls to us from the grave. Cowards! Fight and in time your weapons will fail. God’s punishment will come.”
Tino noticed another teen in a black t-shirt and black pants a few metres away from the group on one knee. He stood in front of a KFC and faced an empty police truck with a glass bottle in his hand filled with a black liquid. The young man’s sight moved between the bottle in his hand and the police who faced the other way to watch the man with the megaphone hurl insults at them. He took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, dipped it into the black liquid in his bottle, took it out and lit it. He stuffed the kerchief in the bottle, corked it, and whipped it into the open back window of the police truck towards the driver’s seat before he ran back and disappeared between the crowds.
The bottle smashed against the truck and lit its inside. The bald officer that pulled Tino to the ground spotted the burning truck, cursed the black day and ran towards the vehicle with his comrades. The boy watched him call for firefighters on his walkie-talkie as he ran. The bald officer turned back and yelled at one of his men to grab the boy, just in case. A tall lanky officer turned back and held the boy with one hand from the back of his neck, his other hand pulling at the boy’s collar. Tino sat so lost in the flames, he barely noticed.
He examined the fire as it grew, the crowd gathering around the burning truck and jeering, the flame fueled by the fear of the men with shields. It grew and ate at the truck flicker by flicker, flame by flame, until it spilled out of the open windows as the dangling legs of the officers did just minutes before, and consumed the truck whole. He felt it’s heavy heat warm him, breathe life into his small frame. The boy, still terrified his mother might not be well, identified with the fire. It’s rage. It’s relentless destruction of everything evil. He sat between a ruthless fire and the cold bare fingers of the law digging into his neck and wondered the difference.
A firetruck approach the blaze, its siren cutting through the chaos of sound that littered the open air. Firefighters jumped out of the truck and pulled out a thick beige hose from the back. They assembled the hose, connected it to a water line and pointed it towards the burning truck. It’s stream of water slowly subdued the flames. Within a few minutes, the fire was out. But not before it got its way.
The plastic shell that covered the pickup’s back had melted and collapsed in on itself. Patches of black paint congealed and mixed with blotches of grey and a dusty white on the car’s body. The tires flattened, melted and conformed to the shape of the steel they circled. The fire relented against the stream of water that choked its life only after it destroyed what it needed to. And the big dumb face of Colonel Sanders painted on a short building looked on from the other side of the street and smiled. Tino noticed the colonel, how he watched in amusement as the car burned, and he laughed.
The officer that held the boy’s neck was called on his walkie-talkie towards the protesters who grew aggressive in their faceoff with the police blockade.
“You’re lucky,” he said as he let go and ran off towards his comrades.
“Tino!” a frantic voice called behind him. He didn’t have time to run. A small thin hand grabbed him by his arm and turned him around. Dina found him. She marched him hand on wrist back to her apartment and scolded him as she walked.
She cried. Tino knew he scared her by disappearing. But he had not yet found his mom. He tried to wriggle out of her hold but the boy only wasted his energy. Her grip was too tight, his wrist hurt. He stepped away from her towards the church but she pulled at him, picked him up in her arms and marched home as fast as she could.
They got to her home in a few minutes. She forced him into her room, closed the door, and sat inside with the boy, her back against the door. She pulled him down to the floor with her.
“What are you doing?” the boy cried as he tried to push Dina over and reach for the knob. “I need to find mama.”
Dina wrestled the boy down and held his hands still to his sides and told him repeatedly to relax. After much resistance, the boy realized there wasn’t much he could do. He buried his face in his palms.
“I want watermelon,” the boy said.
“Do you think I’m falling for that again?”
“Not you. I want mama to cut me watermelon. I’m so hungry.”
Dina let out a deep breath and wiped her wet eyes.
“I have something to tell you,” she said. She sounded resigned from her words, trying to distance herself from them.
Tino didn’t like the sound of her voice. He didn’t want to hear it.
“I want mama. And I want watermelon.”
“Tino, habibi. I lied. Your mom didn’t make it.”
The boy turned to his cousin and stared.
“Make it where?”
“Like giddu,” Dina said. “She’s with giddu now.”
The boy’s mind went blank. He sat and stared at the old drawer in front of him. An empty lightness grew in the pit of his stomach and travelled throughout his body down to the tips of his toes and up to his head. He tried to process his cousin’s words but they felt flimsy in the mind of an eight year old. It felt as if the words spilled out of her mouth and shattered on the tiled floor around him, their crystal shards digging deeper into his skin the more he moved. So he sat still.
“Tino?”
He barely noticed his cousin calling him.
“Tino you’re not talking.” She put her arm around the boy and held him close. That touch. The warmth. The softness of her cheek against his. Like his mother. But she was not her mother.
The shards had dug too deep.
He stood up, turned to Dina and clenched his fat, tiny fists, and swung. Tino knocked her in the nose. His wild fists came from all angles down on her head and body. She shielded her face with one arm and grabbed at the boy with the other. The girl tried to stand but Tino knocked her over. He felt the heat on his face and the hurt in his fists. He kicked at Dina as she tried to wrestle him back down to the floor. She managed to clench both his arms to his back and push him to the ground face down. The boy screamed as his cheek rested on the ceramic floor in the damp wet heat of his own saliva.
“I’m so sorry,” Dina wept as the weight of her knee pinned the boy to the ground.
A knock came from the front door accompanied by the jangle of keys.
“Tino,” his father called as he entered. He sounded very tired. Dina lifted her knee off the boy’s back and ran out of the room before he could stand. Tino followed close behind. He saw his father in the living room next to his Aunt Sally. The man’s eyelids drooped and darkened by the weight of a long night. A faint stubble speckled his tired face. He wore the same clothes from the night before.
“Time to go home,” he said.
Tino walked away from his cousin and aunt and father and out of the open door into the hall. His father followed him. They made their way to the car and stepped in.
A cloud of silence hovered above them.
“Mama died,” his father said.
Tino said nothing.
~~~
His mother’s funeral was held at night. Tino and his father travelled to the Monastery of St. Mina thirty kilometres west. Thousands of people dressed in black filled the church and spilled through the doors and onto the front steps to attend the funeral. Tino and his father sat three rows from the front as family of the martyrs. He watched the procession of caskets above men’s shoulders weave through the crowds as the people reached their hands to touch the wood and pray for the blessing of their churches newest saints. Tino didn’t look too long at each casket. He didn’t want to read his mother’s name on the side. He didn’t want to know which one she laid in. The thought of her body, mouth closed and dead eyes opened to infinity, knotted the boy’s bowels so tight he wanted to vomit.
Twenty three caskets laid at the front of the altar. The priests prayed a sombre chant and begged God to open up the doors of paradise. The crowds wailed and wept. Tino sat amongst them alone in his thoughts. He wished they would shut up.
A girl his age sat next to him in a black dress. Brown skin. Black eyes and short legs that dangled above the pews. She cried. Her father sat next to her with his face to the red carpet.
“Who died?” he whispered to the girl.
“My mother,” she said wiping her tears.
“Me too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Can you stop crying?”
“My mother died.”
“But you need to stop crying. You look weak and stupid,” the boy whispered.
The girl rubbed her tears and sniffed.
“You’re a horrible person,” she hushed. She slid off the pew and sat at her father’s other side. The man raised his head from the ground, slid towards Tino and lowered his head again.
Tino looked up at his own father. He sat facing the altar where his dead wife laid in a box and stared with hard narrow eyes and a stiff jaw like steel. His father always looked that way. But there was a glint in his eyes that the boy read as fear or rage or both. He couldn’t tell.
Tino and his father took the bus back to the city after the funeral. Neither cared to stay for long for the condolences.
“You know, after they killed St. Mina,” his father said as they sat and stared out the window and watched the night horizon stretch darkness to the ends of the world, “an angel visited the pope and told him to take the saint’s body to the Western Dessert. The pope told St. Mina’s sister, and she put his body on a camel and they rode through the outskirts of Alexandria. Then the camel stopped. And it wouldn’t move anymore.”
“Where did it stop?”
“Right where that church is,” his dad said pointing to the church as it shrunk into itself as they pulled away. “His sister knew the camel wouldn’t move for a reason.”
“Why did God want his body somewhere other than where he died?”
“Well. Sometimes, even in death you have to move. Maybe you have purpose somewhere else.”
“But why did the camel stop right there? What’s so special about this dessert that God wanted St. Mina’s body here?”
The man looked off to the side and turned towards the front. He sat back and reclined his seat and rested his head against its back.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “God does a lot of things I don’t understand.”
The boy didn’t ask any more questions. He rested his head against the window and closed his eyes. He’d be in a new country within a week. Away from his family. Away from his old friends and his community. Away from his mother’s body. The knot in his stomach tightened, and he slept under the blanket of his own fear.
~~~
Tino sat next to the window on the plane, his father to his right on the aisle seat. He’d never been in a plane before though he’d seen them fly above him all the time. Up close, his plane looked like a huge tin bird. The inside was packed with people and hot, much like Egypt herself. The boy rubbed his sweaty palms on his pants and imagined his new life in Canada. His angel would save him from the snow bears. His mother promised him. But then she told him she would sit next to him on the plane to Canada. The boy shook the memory off.
The flight attendants went through the pre-flight cautions and ensured all the people on board had their seatbelts fastened. Within a few minutes the plane rolled off the tarmac and onto the runway.
The plane rushed down the uneven concrete increasing its speed with distance. Tino felt the tires bump and roll like thunder beneath him. He forced his quick breath to slow and clutched his armrest as the plane lifted its nose and moved from earth to sky. The boy felt his insides drop to his seat as the engine’s pitch heightened with the plane. His ears plugged as if filled with water and the sound of the vertical world around him descended. He opened and closed his mouth a few times until his ears popped and the tone of the world around him came back.
He stared outside at the wide barren land of no fruits. Huge patches of dessert swallowed much of the Alexandrian landscape and the streets that cut through and the square patches of grass and the sea green that faded into dark blue of the Mediterranean and the tiny people that shrunk with the plane’s ascension sat low before the boy well below his feet and he smiled. The land of bad men and dark blood and dead bodies that had taken everything away stayed in its place as he flew away. Far away.
The boy spotted a white dove below him as the plane approached its peak. His mother told him to say a prayer every time he’d see a bird in the sky. Birds carried prayers to heaven his mother said. The birds sing your prayers to God at his gates she said.
Tino closed his eyes and clasped his hands and bowed his head. Let me see her one more time.
~~~
Twelve hours
in the sky among the clouds and the boy saw the world like a place he’d never known. The clouds looked different from above. Opaque but fragile as if they could dissolve by touch like cotton candy. The waters below stretched to the ends of the Earth and rippled under the huge sun perched against a blank backdrop of nothing, undefined in its shape and piercing in its gaze. Its reflection shimmered atop the uneasy water where the universe held the Earth stitched to its seams.
The boy wondered how far he’d have to travel if he wanted to get to heaven. How far and how high and for how long would the plane need to fly if he were to reach his mother in time and space. He knew she watched him. There was an implied promise between them that she’d always be with him. Those unspoken words he felt in himself good and true.
~~~
At the end of the infinite waters the boy spotted shore and white cut into squares of land as the plane descended. Within an hour, a voice from the intercom cut through the boy’s dreams and announced the aircraft now hovered over Toronto and would be landing shortly. His body felt weightless with the planes decline. His father pointed to the land below them.
“That’s our new home,” he said.
“Wow.”
“See that tall tower with the needle? I think that’s the CN Tower. One of the biggest in the world.”
“The pointy one?”
“Yes. And those huge white blankets, that’s snow. I’ve never seen it before either. Except on television.”
The streets severed the snow into sections. The boy was eager to run his hands through the snow. He imagined it felt like ice cream. Solid and slippery and possibly delicious. His mother loved ice cream too.
Landing was rougher then takeoff. The airplane rolled onto the tarmac and connected its front door to the jetway that lead into the airport. The captain welcomed the passengers to Canada and wished them safe travels. A flight attendant stood at the front of the plane motioning instructions on how to exit the plane dictated by a recorded message played over the intercom. The front doors beside her opened. Tino felt a cold draft breeze through the cabin. He chattered his teeth and held his arms close to his body. He wished he’d worn a jacket, but none of the jackets he owned could protect him against a cold so dense. And the cold only grew as he walked off the plane with his dad and into the jetway. The boy saw his father shudder.
A face like the moon Page 11