That Other Me

by Maha Gargash

  I nod. Dalal has been singing since she was a little girl, trilling all the famous songs like a bulbul bird when she was happy and dropping her voice into a warble of laments of lost love and country when sad. And in between, there were always the tunes she made up. She never mumbled them into her chest; she always sang to an invisible listener. “Definitely, you don’t need much practice,” I say as she holds the glass of beer to her lips. I don’t show it, but it pleases me when she takes a sip and makes a face, as if she’d swallowed bitter medicine. I hide my worry, too, that if she keeps asking for beer, she might start liking it. And that would most certainly lead to heavier spirits. Then she would need alcohol all the time, just like her father craves it: the forbidden pleasure of his secret night hours.

  Ammi Majed thought his whiskey drinking would always remain as safe as a yolk in a cradled egg. The only ones who knew about it were his few close friends and Dalal’s mother, Zohra, who was his other big secret: the second wife who’d made things more complicated by having a child. But then everything changed.

  That Zohra Mahmoud: pretty and petite, but so very daring. She had marched into his villa in Al-Wuheida, where his “real” family (that was what Ammi Majed called them) lived. There, she simply let the egg fall to the ground.

  “So what did you want to tell me?” Dalal asks.

  She catches me off guard. I look at the ground and frown as I consider the best way to tell her about Adel. What can I say? That I am attracted to him? It sounds so trivial, when I want it to sound special.

  “Well?” She is glancing over her shoulder, slouching, maybe looking for the waiter so she can scold him again—anything to chase the boredom away. Then she sits up, suddenly alert. There are two girls in her line of sight; they are trying to convince their grandmother to go up to her room to rest. I chase her gaze farther. And there is Adel, looking straight at us.

  In a fit of confusion, I turn to Dalal. Her mouth has swollen into a bud; she examines her fingers, as though measuring their length. When she looks up, she catches his gaze and raises her eyebrow in what could only be an invitation.

  I’m not sure how he snakes his way between the tables toward us so quickly. I am still grasping Dalal’s secret signals and the unlikelihood of his being in the same place as we are when I hear him say, “Mariam? I thought that was you.”

  “Bih.” A nonsensical word, delivered with a friendly smile.

  He shifts from one foot to the other. There is nothing I can do. I make the introductions.

  “Ah, your cousin?” he says. “You look nothing like each other.”

  “Cousins, not twins,” Dalal says with a light and airy laugh. He smiles, obviously charmed, and waits. She grins, showing too many teeth, and waits.

  I am expected to invite him to join us. If he sits, we’ll be forced to stay longer. If that happens, he might fall head over heels for Dalal—before I get a chance to win him over. I cannot believe the tumble of such thoughts in my mind. “It’s late!” I say, covering Dalal’s objection with the noise of my chair grating as I push it back. “We have to leave now.” I pull her away from him before she can say anything else, but Adel calls out to me: a reminder of tomorrow’s study session.

  “Yes,” I call back. “Tomorrow.”

  4

  MAJED

  “You’d think there would be a little coolness with all these clouds,” my youngest son, Badr, says as we exit the mosque after the Friday prayer. Heat-dazed into listlessness, Badr squints at the sky: a glaring white sheet holding a furious ball of sun. “It’s still January, and suddenly it gets so hot? I told you we should have taken the car, Baba,” he says, fanning his face with both hands, his arms slack as if there were no bones in them.

  A haze hovers over the tarmac at the end of the small road; the palm trees stand stiff, their fronds dull with desert dust. No birds and no wind. Dots of perspiration collect on my forehead, and I scowl at the humidity. The weather changed so abruptly the people in the mosque couldn’t stop talking about it. “When I was young I walked everywhere, summer and winter, and never complained.” I pause to bid peace to some men leaving the mosque, and then continue. “The sand burned the soles of my feet, the sun singed my face. You listening?”

  Badr nods with a smile and crouches to uncover our sandals, strewn among the pile of all the sandals belonging to the worshippers.

  “With every breath, the heat collected and got trapped up my nose, turned to steam.”

  “I’m just saying, Baba, an air-conditioned car would have been more comfortable.” Badr has a lisp. The tip of his tongue pops out with every word. Right now, it’s an added irritation to the fact that he’s right. It will take us no longer than fifteen minutes to walk to our house, which is three streets away. And yet by the time we get there, we’ll be wet through. And then the blast of air-conditioning will make us shiver and get sick. “The body has gotten so weak with all this modernity,” I say, envying the men getting in their cars and driving away. “And you, you children are the air-conditioned generation; you can’t even handle a little walk under the sun.”

  Badr chuckles. “I’m hardly a child, Baba,” he says. “God willing, I’ll be finishing school this year.” He has located my sandals and kneels to position them in front of me. Despite the glare, he looks straight up at me; his lids are slightly hooded and his lashes are so thick it looks like he’s wearing kohl. Yes, we have the same eyes; the difference is that there is no restless hunger in his.

  “You said that last year,” I grunt and start walking. We are the only people on the road. Under my kandora, I am swathed in soggy, hot air. No matter how many times I pull it loose, my wizar creeps back into the cracks, kneading its way into my bottom and clinging to the back of my knees. Ahead is a municipal garbage bin, silver and gleaming under the sun. We cross the road to avoid the stink.

  “No, really, this time it’s true,” says Badr, and he goes into detail about this or that teacher who has it in for him. I lose the thread of his chatter and think of my other unmarried son, Khaled, who normally joins us for the Friday prayer. But he’s disappeared, went fishing with his friends for the weekend—or so his mother told me. I don’t think he’s catching fish after the incident that took place last Monday. I imagine that Khaled must be moping by the shore, using the excuse of a chipped heart to write more of his useless verses. Aisha did not bring up his recent predicament, even though I could tell she was troubled by it, what with all her shuffling about the house with that taut face. Khaled is her favorite son, after all, and he is in pain.

  He’d set his eyes on the daughter of Diab Al-Mutawa. He called her a beauty and declared that it had been love from the moment he’d spotted her in the mall. I’d had to hold back a snicker as I listened to him, but in the end I’d nodded my approval, all the while thinking that it was about time he settled down. I had lost patience with him, the sensitive poet who could never get enough pampering from his mother. There was no reason to stand in the way of such a match. The Al-Mutawa family has always been prosperous and held in high esteem by society. What could be better? I congratulated him on his choice wholeheartedly. But then the girl’s father refused.

  “You hear what I’m saying, Baba? This time I really will graduate,” Badr says, jolting me out of my thoughts.

  “It’s not studies or age that turns you into a man. It’s how you handle difficulty,” I say in a stern voice aimed at concluding this talk that does nothing more than irk me. “And since you haven’t had any—difficulties, that is—you won’t mature further.” In the silence that follows, my mind drifts off to two nights earlier.

  I’d arrived at the Neely agitated, eager to find out whether my friends had heard anything about Diab Al-Mutawa’s refusal—by that time I regarded it as an insult to my family’s good name. But instead, I’d ended up hinting to them that the drink didn’t seem to leave my body as it used to.

  “Age plays tricks on the body,” my friend Saeed said to me. There were a brown sofa and tw
o beige chairs in the living room of the Neely, but, as always, we were more comfortable settled on the ground around the rectangular coffee table, on which were placed the usual bowls filled with olives, nuts, and chips. Between Mattar, my banker friend, and me sat Saeed, one leg bent underneath him, the other held to his chest by his arm—a Bedouin’s typical position of comfort. “You are wiser with age, and you notice that,” he continued, mischief lighting his sharp eyes. “You feel fine, you feel young. Whiskey still relaxes you, and you enjoy it. But age is busily changing all that.” With that, he clapped my shoulder and guffawed. It felt like being whacked with a plank of wood.

  “What rubbish,” I said, kneading the sting out of my shoulder. We are close in age, but his small frame has remained hard and sinewy, with muscles and veins that bulge like thick ropes under his skin.

  I’d met Saeed nearly thirty years ago, soon after I’d moved to Dubai to work for my brother. Saeed was a regular at the bar of the Saba Hotel, a rowdy place with lots of noisy conversation, smoking, and puking in the bathrooms. Most important, there was no risk of being spotted, because it was not a place anyone I knew went. We’d stay at the bar until midnight, then head out to Mohammad Ali Kebabi, a dim cave of a restaurant deep in the heart of Sharjah’s souk. Bread, kebab, and raw onion: there was nothing better to dilute the alcohol.

  “Let me say my piece,” Saeed said, swaying slightly and rubbing his unkempt beard. He refuses to dye it black as Mattar and I do, and under the bright ceiling light it looked like it’d been sprayed with salt. “I know what I’m talking about. You don’t realize what’s happening to everything in your body, all those parts you can’t see: bones, guts, blood. So maybe you ought to consider giving up whiskey and taking up wine instead.”

  “You suggest that, huh?” I cuffed his neck just as he took a thirsty gulp of his third glass of whiskey, causing it to spatter out of his mouth. “Do I look weak? Do I look like a woman? You really fart from your mouth after a few!” Both men fell back, roaring with laughter.

  I would have liked a simple and straightforward answer for why I feel the way I do; and I thought about bringing up the vile dreams that have been sneaking up on me, leaving me with a numbing sense that some violent death awaits me. But worries like that would be perceived as a sign of personal weakness. Being unable to manage our emotions, whining like women? For men like us, that wouldn’t do. So with cleverly disguised words we try to steer the conversation toward whatever is making us anxious, and hope someone will inadvertently come up with a solution. I got no answers. What I did get was the dreadful sense of growing old.

  Once the mirth abated, I declared, “Khaled decided to propose.”

  “What? Masha’Allah, God willed it!” Mattar exclaimed. “Khaloodi?”

  “You can hardly call him that now,” Saeed said. “He’s a grown man. What is he, nearing thirty-one, thirty-two?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Mabrook! Congratulations,” Mattar said.

  “About time,” added Saeed. “By the time I reached that age, I already had six children. I don’t know why you didn’t arrange a marriage for him early on, like you did with your other children, and like your father did for you.”

  “I tried. But he didn’t want to do it the traditional way—he said he wanted to choose his own wife.”

  “Well, anyway, he’ll put down roots now. Wonderful news, my brother.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” I said, reaching out for the sweating glass in front of me for my first sip of the night. “The problem is that the girl’s family refused.”

  My friends were baffled. “What? Why?” Mattar asked, cupping his whiskey with both hands.

  “Whose daughter is this?” Saeed flung his arms into the air in exasperation. “Don’t they know what a privilege it would be to hook your son?”

  I merely shrugged, but Saeed could tell I was boiling inside at the insult of this refusal. He bowed his head slightly to show me that he was a good friend and a compassionate listener who would like to hear more. I tapped his back and continued, “The womenfolk, my wife and daughters—even my sisters, who came all the way from Ras Al-Khaimah—did their duty and visited the women of the girl’s family to let them know of Khaled’s interest and intentions. My wife said it was an auspicious meeting. She came back with nothing but praise for the girl, who apparently had excellent manners. Aisha couldn’t wait to seal the arrangement. If it had been up to her, she would have called as soon as she got home to set up the next meeting, for my sons and me to visit and make a formal proposal to her father. But I told her, ‘Hold off for a few days. Don’t make it seem like we are desperate.’ ”

  “Wise, wise,” said Mattar.

  “Aisha agreed and waited a few more days before calling them. Do you know what they told her?” I picked up my glass and held it to the light, watching the amber liquid swallow up what slivers of ice remained. “Her father said, ‘The girl wants to continue her studies.’ ”

  My friends groaned at this infamous excuse: a polite yet definitive refusal.

  “But who are these people? What family is this?” Saeed asked, and when I told him, he became thoughtful. This was a gracious and respectable family, after all. Khaled is a good boy; only the most serious of reasons could make them change their minds. I watched Saeed rub his hooked nose, and I guessed that the very same thoughts were filling his head: What could it be? Does the old man consider his family better than mine? I wanted to know. But to go to Diab Al-Mutawa as the father of the proposed groom and ask him outright would have been mortifying. Saeed knew this and announced, “Well, my friend, I will wait a few days and then go see the old man. He won’t tell me right away, of course. But I’ll talk to him in a most clever way.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger, and a spark of shrewdness lit his eyes. “I will suck the information out of him without his realizing it. Leave it to me. I’ll unravel the riddle.”

  Mattar sighed, and I nodded. That’s what the Neely is for: it is a place where we can share common enjoyment and camaraderie, take pleasure in one another’s good-humored nonsense and take a man’s stand whenever it is called for without being asked. We recognize that we are all saddled with pressures—work, family—and this makes the gatherings at the Neely vital for our serenity.

  There’s a light-blue Audi parked outside the house. The engine is on; Mustafa, my right-hand man at the company, dozes behind the wheel. I’m puzzled that he’s here on a Friday. It’s the one day that my whole family assembles for lunch. As Badr and I draw closer, I spot the fifty or so threads of hair on the top of Mustafa’s head standing and quivering from the force of the air blowing out of the air conditioner. Mustafa straightens up in his seat as soon as I knock on the window, flattening the hairs to his scalp before rolling down the window.

  “Why are you sitting out here?” I ask, squinting at him under the dazzle of the whitewashed sky.

  He jumps out of the car and rubs the creases out of his shirt before answering. “Well, bey, I didn’t want to disturb you on a Friday, but I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to give you this news.” I instruct Badr to go on ahead and to notify the family that Mustafa will be having lunch with us. But Mustafa insists he does not want to inconvenience us. “My wife would never forgive me,” he says. “She has cooked molokhia.” In this muggy heat, I can almost smell the slimy green broth these Egyptians can’t get enough of. My instruction to Badr is the expected etiquette, as is Mustafa’s refusal to enter our house, the private sanctuary in which his employer resides with his wife and unmarried children. So we head to the men’s majlis.

  It’s a one-story structure to the right of the main house. There’s a large sitting room that opens onto an even larger dining room. There’s a kitchen and a bathroom, and next to it a row of sinks for the guests. Once a week, I receive visitors who arrive after the evening prayer to socialize and exchange news. Between the house and the majlis there is a lawn with a marble fountain in the middle, dry for the
moment because the water is still turned off. Two weeks on, and the plumber still hasn’t finished his work. My kandora is glued to my back as we walk over the grass. One of the cooks scurries past us, hugging four bottles of water. How many times have I told him to serve limboo, chilled lime juice with lots of sugar, when it’s hot? It’s the best way to get heat out of the body. I want to call him and scold him, but that would mean another minute under the sun. So I quicken my pace, and Mustafa does the same.

  We walk up the three steps to the heavy teak door. The foyer is round, with colored glass fitted into the ceiling. Light shines through them, and Mustafa’s face turns a luminous green. I indicate that he should wait for me in the sitting room while I splash water on my face.

  “They don’t go out in the morning,” Mustafa says as soon as I settle next to him, “only in the afternoon: four, five, six o’clock. Keda, like that. They don’t come back until late: nine, ten, eleven o’clock. Keda. They always dress nicely, with makeup and styled hair. They take the microbus—maybe because they can’t afford taxis.”

  “Of course they can’t afford taxis.”

  “Well, that’s when my man always loses them—until this time, that is. Yes, he took a chance and got on the same microbus, dangerous as that was. I mean, what if, what if?”

  “But they don’t know who this man is.”

  “True, but if they saw him there and remembered his face from another place, and then keep spotting him? They might solve the puzzle and form a picture.”

  “We’re the ones trying to form a picture, not them. Now, Mustafa, will you get to the point and tell me what you found out?”

  “Yes, yes, exactly.” Mustafa clears his throat. “Anyway, my man—and I won’t tell you his name or where he lives, for your protection, of course. The last thing we want is people saying that Majed Al-Naseemy is spying on his daughter and her mother.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “They got off in front of a building near the embassies in El-Dokki. It’s an old building, gray or maybe beige, I’m not sure because of all the dust and diesel fumes. You know, in Cairo buildings are never washed.”