“So as you all know—right?—Mahfouz was born in Cairo, 1911,” he says. His hand is sweeping over the blackboard, making quick, intense notes. “He’s written over thirty novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988….”
He’s deep in concentration, his hands moving, his head inclined back toward the class, tender and solicitous. Sirine watches the pretty young women—many of whom look Middle Eastern—sitting in the front rows, so alert, all tiny attentive movements, a crossed leg, a hand sliding across hair.
Mireille whispers in her ear. “It’s strange. It’s like I can see he’s attractive, but he’s much too…he’s too Arab for me.”
“Look at all those girls.”
She glances at Sirine, eyebrows raised. “They’re not as pretty as you.”
Sirine picks out one woman in the back of the classroom covered in a black head scarf and dress, so only the pale oval of her face is showing. Her eyes look plush as mink, her lips wide and curving. She is entirely focused on Han.
“I didn’t think girls dressed like that in this country,” Sirine whispers. “I thought that was just back home.”
“I bet their parents make them,” Mireille says. “I think that’s the one that threw her pen at Aziz. He told me. She walked by the café.”
“Her?” Sirine backs away from the doorway and into the hall to face Mireille. “The one that’s all covered up?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“But she said that Islam is a woman-hater religion—something like that.”
Mireille puts her hands on her hips and looks at her as if she were a little crazy. “Sometimes you really don’t understand things.”
Han’s voice rises and Sirine turns back toward the doorway. Han is pacing and scratching things on the blackboard. She remembers that this is some sort of class on contemporary Arab writers; the names Ahdaf Soueif, Emile Habiby, and Naguib Mahfouz are written on the blackboard. “Some critics contend that the Nobel Committee selected Mahfouz because he’s a ‘safe’ writer,” Han is saying. “That his style is very Western, very accessible to American readers, somewhat like Dickens, with his large casts of characters, plain prose style, and broad humor.”
Two of the women in the front row glance at each other. One tucks her hair behind her ear, then the other one does the same; their crossed legs bob up and down.
“But Mahfouz is an intensely Egyptian author, his writing has reflected the social spectrum of his country—he’s been part of creating an exciting new national identity.”
His gestures are broad and circular, electric; the chalk streaks over the blackboard. He walks in and out of the columns of light broadcast from the side windows.
“…Said commented that Mahfouz is ‘a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains’—” He draws arrows across the blackboard. Sirine admires his confidence and his easy authority. “It’s true—Mahfouz encompasses their social conscience, their attention to human suffering and sensuality as well as their devotion to philosophical reflection.”
Han turns to the class, paces back and forth, waving his hand as if he were directing a symphony. “But not everything has to be compared to the West to be impressive.” He smiles wryly at the class and Sirine is startled by a burst of laughter from the students. “Mahfouz descends from ancient Arab traditions of art and poetry. Consider the classical Abbasid period—the Abbasids were brave military leaders but they also appreciated the arts and theater. They built tiled mosques and sweeping courtyards, and they developed and refined approaches to education and literature for the spiritual and psychological well-being of their culture. There’s an old expression in the Arab world that ‘Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.’ The Abbasid writers of Baghdad were also readers and thinkers. They were able to evolve a new kind of poetry that broke with rigid pre-Islamic poetic codes by observing and addressing the changes in the contemporary life. Generations later, Mahfouz did the same by going into the streets and alleyways of Cairo and examining the day-to-day life of the people around him.” He chalks another arrow across the blackboard. “Mahfouz exemplifies the Abbasid Arab ‘Renaissance man,’ if you will—both politically and artistically sophisticated and socially aware….” He pauses and looks at the class.
“You might even contrast him with Hemingway….”
There’s another smattering of laughter. Some of them nod. The woman that Sirine was looking at raises her hand, doesn’t wait to be called on. “I don’t see the connection, Professor,” she says.
“Ah, Rana,” Han says, sighing. He speaks affectionately and familiarly, as if they were old friends. “So impatient—please grant me a minute to make my point.”
Rana pretends to pout and Sirine notices two girls in the front row rolling their eyes at each other. “It seems strange,” Rana says coyly, clearly enjoying the attention.
“Well, look at it this way—it’s all about place and identity,” Han says. His hands slide back into his pockets, he takes a few steps in her direction. “Hemingway slipped easily between national identities, traveling all over the world, meeting everyone, having whatever adventures he could, yet he’s considered the most quintessentially American writer. Mahfouz, on the other hand, has spent almost his entire life in the same streets and neighborhoods, writing about Cairo and its people, yet he’s considered an international author—”
“That’s just because he’s not an American!” Rana says, tossing her head.
“Okay, but consider this—Mahfouz once said, ‘If I had traveled like Hemingway, I’m sure that my work would have been different. My work was shaped by being so Egyptian.’”
Rana allows the barest smile, inclines her head. Sirine is barely breathing as she watches her. Then she feels Mireille’s hand on her shoulder. “Come on,” she whispers. “We better get back.”
Han walks toward the center of the classroom, into a place where the light falls in scalloped waves from a half-turned set of venetian blinds. His hair falls over his forehead and the color in his eyes looks veiled and gold. “The question in the contemporary era is, what does it mean to call oneself an ‘Egyptian writer’ or even a ‘Middle Eastern writer’ anymore?” he says, his voice softer now. “The media is saturated with the imagery of the West. Is it even possible—or desirable—to have an identity apart from this?”
Sirine glances back once at the veiled woman before they go. Rana lifts her eyes and Sirine thinks that she is looking at them—or, actually, someone behind them; but when Sirine turns to look, no one is there.
CHAPTER NINE
“Abdelrahman Salahadin carried himself, you might say, like a handful of water,” her uncle says. “Which is why his mother Camille, my great-great-auntie Camille, loved him the best. Blue, blue water like the blue-dyed skin of the blue-robed Bedu, palmsful of blueness.”
“Blue blue blue!” Um-Nadia mutters. “Where’s the story in all this blue business?”
Her uncle sighs, raises his eyebrows. Sirine and her uncle and Um-Nadia sit together in his library of imagined books, visiting after work.
“After he didn’t come home from work one day, she knew there was one of two possibilities: one, that her son had been bewitched by a houri, a jinn, or a beautiful woman. Two, he’d finally drowned, just as she’d told him would happen. And being a perspicacious woman, she knew it could also be some unlucky combination of the two. My auntie Camille was a freed Nubian slave—she was no dumb-dumb. For a time, she was the third wife of the Sultan of Imr, a sultana!”
“Oof,” Um-Nadia says. “If I had an avocado for every sultan I meet, all of us would have smooth skin.”
Sirine’s uncle sniffs. “Any old way, the story of how she tumbled from royalty to slavery is an interesting one which I may someday tell. Now, then. The knob in the spine of this story has my auntie Camille recovering from an unpleasant stint of slavery. She long suspected that her son wanted revenge for her enslavement, hence his endless hidery and seekery with the notorious Saudi slavers.
“Her hand henna-painting business barely paid the rent, so Auntie Camille decided the only way to gather the necessary resources to find her son was—following family tradition—to sell herself back into slavery. But she would not surrender herself to any run-of-the-mill slavers. No, she offered herself to none other than the British explorer Sir Richard Burton—who had none of the sweetness of my favorite Welsh actor, only the same name.”
Um-Nadia sighs. “So in other words this is some kind of story about some movie star.”
“I just told you, it’s the other Richard Burton,” Sirine’s uncle fumes.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Sahib,” Um-Nadia says quickly, rolling her eyes at Sirine.
“Fine! So! The reason—as I was about to tell you—that Aunt Camille sold herself to Burton was because she’d heard that the Englishman had found the source of the Nile River.”
“Why, was it lost?” Um-Nadia claps her hand over her mouth as soon as she says this.
“May I speak?” Her uncle looks around at both of them. “Or should I just go to bed now?” He stands. Both women protest and he sits back down. “Well. She had a plan to find her son. She thought that if she could convince Richard Burton to take her to the source of the Nile, she could then meet the Mother of All Fish and ask for her help—mother-to-mother-style—in establishing the whereabouts of her son, my cousin, Abdelrahman Salahadin.”
“That’s how they thought back then,” Um-Nadia explains and winks at Sirine. “Me, I prefer to fry my fish.”
“All right, then, clearly you don’t care about the story—” Sirine’s uncle says, standing.
“No, no, please, Uncle,” Sirine says, touching his wrist. “We’re listening.”
He looks for a moment at Um-Nadia, who looks back with a very innocent expression, and then sits down again. “Where was I?”
It takes Sirine a while to fall asleep; her head whirls with bits of stories and advice. She begins to drift, but then there is a sound in her dream like a spattering of rain. She dreams she is floating in a river and particles of rain dust the air around her. She holds out her hands, lifts her face. The rain gets louder.
And then she wakes and it isn’t exactly the sound of rain anymore. There’s a tick and tick against her window. She nudges King Babar, asleep against her ankles, who grumbles and moans, and she gets up and goes to the window. It’s Han, he’s standing by the house with handfuls of stones, looking up and grinning like crazy. She slides open her window, laughing and trying to be quiet at the same time. “You’re going to wake up my uncle!”
“Hi!” he whisper-shouts. “Hey there.”
“What are you doing?”
He smiles, almost demure. “I don’t know exactly. Do you mind?”
“What time is it?”
He puts one hand against the side of the house as if he intends to scale it. “Can I come in? Just for a minute—no more than a minute. I just need to see you again.”
She goes down to the front door in her tattered blue plaid pajamas—a pair she’s worn for years—the cool black air sifting in from the front door, curling around her bare ankles like a sort of magic spell. “Here I am.” She’s a bit shy. “Um. Would you like some hot cocoa?”
His face is hard to see in the dark. He puts one hand to her hair and her knees weaken again with the memory of the previous night’s kiss. “So there you were outside my classroom today,” he says.
“You saw us?”
“How could I not? Why didn’t you come in?”
She stares at him, stricken with embarrassment. Finally he looks around and says, “And this is your uncle’s house?”
She considers that her uncle could be asleep in any of the armchairs downstairs. “Come on,” she whispers. “Let’s go up to my room.”
Sirine has always gone out to meet her boyfriends; she’s never before brought a man upstairs into her bedroom. Standing there with Han, she feels as if she has introduced a wild element into the room, the space lit only by streetlights and the stars. Now the room looks different—clean-swept and bare: blank walls, a barely rumpled comforter on her bed. She thinks spinster and hugs her elbows. Han leans in the doorway looking in. “Aha,” he says. “So, your secret place.”
“Secret?”
“Sure—bedrooms are full of all sorts of interesting hidden things.”
“I don’t have any,” Sirine says. “Not that I know of.”
“We all have hidden things.”
“Then mine must be hidden from me too.” She tows him to her bed and they sit side by side. She feels clumsy and excited as a teenager. “Really, I just sleep here. It’s boring.”
“Did you do all those sorts of American girl things? Have slumber parties and pillow fights and all that stuff on TV?”
“Hardly. I used to stay up half the night watching the news with my uncle or making tea and snacks for his friends. They’d all come over and just talk and talk and talk.”
“That doesn’t sound very American. Didn’t you have, what? A bedtime?”
She laughs and runs her hand over the comforter. “Most of the time I didn’t even sleep in here. I’d fall asleep wherever. I remember I liked to sleep on the carpet under the dining room table with the dog. My uncle didn’t know exactly how to raise a kid. So we pretty much just made it up as we went along.”
“And look how well you turned out,” Han muses.
She looks down and pushes out her lips, trying to hide a smile.
He says, “God, I was happy to see you at school.”
“I know,” she says, not looking up. “Me too.”
“I couldn’t look right at you, though. I couldn’t have finished class.” His hand moves over hers, turning it palm up. “Can I give you something?”
Sirine lifts her hand. She is holding a new silver key.
“It’s to my apartment,” he says. She looks at him, startled. “I would like you to have it. I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“You want to give me your key?”
“I was just thinking about it.” He smiles, holds up his hands helplessly. “Somehow I was thinking it would make me feel better…knowing that you had this.”
She stares at him, wondering what to say, but she feels oddly pleased and flattered; a shiver runs over her. He pulls her in closer against the warmth of his rib cage, then lowers his lips to the top of her head. She tilts her head so he is kissing her forehead, then beside her eye, then the outer corner of her mouth.
And then they kiss again, her mouth softening, and their desire is like a blue flash, their bodies moving up against each other. They lay back on the bed as they kiss, bumping up against King Babar, who groans and complains and stays asleep. Sirine’s skin is flushed and sensitive, her lips raw, lightly abraded from the start of stubble on his face. His hands move flickering through the thin cotton of her pajama top. She pushes them away, grinning. She feels both daring and chaste. Something inside her resisting, a giddy mixture of excitement and fear. She refuses to progress past kissing, but then they kiss so deeply that they knock their teeth together and laugh and then kiss some more. She squeezes the key in her hand.
Sirine wakes at five, her usual time, when the dawn isn’t even silver yet and all the birds are asleep. She realizes slowly that Han is beside her, still dressed and sleeping, and King Babar is snug between them, nestled in like a baby.
“Oh my God.” She’s half-laughing and half-upset, shaking Han. He wakes and looks around, startled. He sits up. His hair has fallen in a glossy sweep over his forehead and his clothes are rumpled, his shirt twisted around on his chest. She covers her mouth with her hand and looks at the door. “My uncle’s already up! You’ve got to go.”
He nods, kisses her twice, and strokes his thumb over her cheekbone. “So this is what it is to date a good Arab girl.”
“Good Arab girls don’t date,” she says and looks behind her at her shut door, thinks she hears her uncle in the bathroom.
He gets up and tries to straighten h
is clothes. He pushes back his hair. “Will I get to see you later?”
“It’s Saturday—it’s a long workday today.”
“I don’t care,” he says and moves toward the window. “I can wait.”
“You can’t go through the window! We’re up high.”
“Just one floor,” he says, grinning a little crazily. “So do I get to see you tonight?”
“I don’t know yet,” she hisses, smiling and annoyed with herself for smiling. “Please don’t—you’ll hurt yourself.”
“Oh, I’m already doomed,” he says cheerfully, slipping his legs out. And before she can stop him, he slides all the way out, hangs by his fingertips five feet from the ground, and then drops. He staggers, turns, waving and blowing kisses as he goes.
During her morning break Sirine goes to the back courtyard, which Um-Nadia calls the garden of birds. She sinks into the string hammock tied between two bending palm trees, partially hidden from view behind a bower of broad, fan-shaped leaves. She drowses, recalling her night with Han, her body soft with desire and heat; there are bits of birdsong that flit through the air like chips of odd colors. The air smells like olives and cypress and roasting herbs—the lavender and sage and thyme and rosemary, onions and garlic shoots that grow half-cared-for by Mireille and Sirine, half-wild, all around the courtyard. She feels weak and watery-kneed, as if perhaps she’s coming down with something, as if she hovers slightly outside of her own body. She only got a few hours of sleep last night and she’s starting to drift off when a low rumble of voices moves through the kitchen and onto the back porch.
Nathan and Aziz walk out the back door in midargument, their bodies and gestures buoyant with the energy of their words. Nathan runs his hands over his stubbly cropped head and Aziz’s hair is ruffed up like blackbird feathers; neither of them sees her. They sit at the wrought-iron table under the spreading bougainvillea branches, scraping the iron chairs back loudly. They lean forward and crook their ankles around the chair legs.
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