That Other Me

by Maha Gargash

  Come with me! The message in his taut face is clear. Why does it have to be now, in front of this bunch, their eyes twitching to snatch a hint of improper behavior? I’d wanted to find him so desperately, and now I wish he would just vanish. Poof!

  I teeter from one foot to the other, trying to decide what to do. I finally decide to make a break for the car. If Adel gets in my way, I’ll knock him down.

  “Mariam, I need to see you.”

  He says this just as I glide past him, quickly approaching the sakan car. The girl in the backseat is leaning forward, about to spot me, but suddenly I change direction, cutting across the lawn. Every step takes me farther away from the car. Adel follows me. I don’t hear his footsteps, but I know he is behind me.

  He takes me to one of the open-air cafés in Giza, along the banks of the Nile. Its splendid name, Casino La Brincessa, is on a faded board that hangs askew from a hedged trellis. A discreet entry down a narrow path carpeted with artificial green turf leads to the river.

  Adel was quiet in the car, eyes fixed ahead as he maneuvered the vehicle through Cairo’s traffic. I had stared out the window, stroking my bangs, dumbfounded by my offbeat behavior yet, strangely, wallowing in the thrill of it. What was it that made me change course so abruptly without weighing the consequences? I did not turn back when Adel overtook me, just followed him to his car. How long would the sakan driver wait for me before heading back and reporting that I was missing? Yes, missing!

  I did not think twice. Spontaneity led me, just as it used to when I was a girl, confident in the knowledge that no matter what mischief I got up to, my father would be there for me, the iron spine that held me up. That was before his first stroke.

  There’s an atmosphere of neglect at Casino La Brincessa, in the chairs pale with age, the lusterless peach plastic table covers, the stubby lampposts riveted into the earth at a slant, the gaze of ownership that sits in the eyes of lazing cats. I don’t mind, because what is important is that it is a well-chosen place: far from the tourist track and little frequented by Khaleejis. There are no persistent little girls selling necklaces made from ambrosial full flowers, young men armed with cassettes of romantic songs for sale, or photographers insisting on snapping eternal memories.

  I’m not sure why this is called a casino, since there’s no gambling at the riverside cafés. There is, however, the notion of romance; they’re places where a lover can gaze at the Nile and compare his amorous sentiments to its vastness. They are respites from the congested city. The norm is to take your time and not rush things, although there’s always a maître d’ hovering around the tables, weighing conversations’ progress and making sure to cut in with a question or comment at every crucial moment of tender articulation, tormented declaration, or intimate profession of love.

  I guess that this one has been pestering the six couples already sitting at tables, because there is relief on their faces when the maître d’ diverts his attention toward us. He leads us to a table by the river, and the couples focus on each other again. I can tell that they are all in the spring of romance by the way they lean their shoulders forward with heads tilted to the side, their ears perked to catch every whispered word and every rustle of a gesture, their eyes bright and wide, registering every mood and expression.

  The maître d’ delivers our order of black tea in tulip glasses, along with a large bottle of cold water. Settled by the riverbank beneath a tree with a plastic tube of light snaked around it, we blow at the steaming tea. The air feels cold and damp. I loosen my shayla and air my bangs. I don’t know what to say to break up the curdled silence that has settled between us since we left campus.

  I have so many questions to ask Adel. I want to know whether they interrogated him as they did me. First it was the professors, then university security—two men who took down notes—and finally the cultural attaché, who arrived from our embassy to hear my statement and then made a formal complaint, demanding more security at the university. So much to talk about, and then there’s the matter of thanking him, too. I must not forget to thank him.

  We’re halfway through our tea when the maître d’ returns and leans over the table, as if about to divulge a deep secret. “We have cold lemonade, soft drinks, and the best Turkish coffee. Or anything else you might desire. Can I get you anything, bey?”

  Adel shakes his head, and when the maître d’ retreats I say, “It seems many of the students have been complaining about the lack of security at the college. Have you heard anything?”

  Adel shakes his head just as the maître d’ butts in again: “And shisha, too. I forgot to mention the water pipe. There’s honey or any other flavor: apple, mango, licorice.”

  This time Adel gets up and rests a brotherly arm over the maître d’s shoulders, leading him a few steps away. I can’t hear what he says, but I do spot the baksheesh that Adel slips into a handshake. One of the couples sees it, too, and the girl frowns with disapproval. She hisses a comment to her partner—she’s probably saying that Khaleejis think they can buy the world! But what else could Adel do when privacy has turned into a luxury that can only be bought?

  “Apparently he was a madman,” I say once Adel is back.

  “Who was?”

  “The farmer. I heard he was charged and sent to jail. No one knows for how long. Did they call you to ask questions?”

  “Why would they?” The expression on his face is serious. “Are you sure you saw what you think you saw?” There’s the hint of a roguish smile, which he suppresses with a sniff. “I’m sure you were mistaken. That wasn’t me in there.”

  “Well, thank you for not being there,” I say with a nod. I intended it to be light and jovial, but it comes out thick, like the air around me, which has completely stopped moving. I turn to the river and gaze at the fading line of sunset. Even though I feel the awkwardness returning, I mutter, “You must have gotten lost in the chaos.”

  Adel lets out a hearty laugh, and with it comes a sudden breeze. It’s as if the weather was waiting for a signal from him. Undulating gusts spin around us, triggering the leaves to rustle and inspiring the cats to prowl all at once, intent on some cat-and-cat games. Adel calls the waiter over and orders a shisha. Then he grows chatty, which suits me fine.

  He is from mountainous Fujairah, the only emirate of the UAE whose coastline is solely on the Gulf of Oman. He is from a middle-class family; his father is employed as a government accountant. Out of his six siblings, he is the second eldest and the only boy. He leans back in his chair and, between drags from his shisha, tells me that he is the first in his family to study abroad. He tells me they’re proud of him, and I’m overwhelmed with tenderness toward him when he expresses his fear of letting them down. I insist we resume our lessons to make sure that doesn’t happen. But Adel has already moved on, describing his apartment in Mohandessin, which he shares with two other students. “Sometimes we get up to no good,” he says with a wink, and takes a sharp inhale that makes the shisha gurgle furiously.

  I’m not sure what he means, and I don’t ask. Instead I grunt softly, and my mind drifts; I consider how simple and straightforward it really is to establish a comfortable rapport between a man and a woman when there are no expectations. This is the way it ought to be.

  Dusk sets in and the river slaps and sloshes, as if readying for a night of rest. The sun idles low in the sky, ready to pull back its light. I watch as its last vivid ray, a ruby streak wobbling on the Nile, disappears before turning back to the café to see the maître d’ hassling another couple. He takes pleasure in being too available. He calls the waiter to empty the ashtray and wipe their tablecloth; when they don’t pay him to go away, the maître d’ decides he must adjust the table’s wobble. “Right away!” he insists with a flourish, ripping paper out of his notebook and folding it into a thick wad to insert under the table’s leg. When the woman considers out loud whether she wants another lemonade, the maître d’ snaps his fingers to confirm the order before she has a chance to change
her mind. Then he strides victoriously over to another table to bother them.

  “It’s your turn now,” says Adel, leaning forward. “Tell me about yourself.”

  He catches me off guard. “Me? What is there to tell?”

  Adel tilts his head back and blows a long breath of honeyed tobacco. My vision follows the smoke as it eddies to the side and over the low wall that separates us from the river. By the bank, it’s the color of dirty dishwater. I spot twigs and grasses delivered by the current; collected in a recess in the wall, they form a nest on which bobs a gray rag, an empty bottle of soda, a sodden piece of cardboard, and a bright-yellow plastic bag.

  “I mean, why did you choose such a difficult subject? Why didn’t you choose something easier, like art or history? True, you can make a lot of money as a dentist, but it’s not as if you need it. You’re rich already. You don’t need to work. You can just sit back and do nothing.” His tone is gentle. There is no jealousy in it, only curiosity.

  He doesn’t know that my personal wealth is not in the millions, just enough to get by. My father intended to put some properties and land in my name, to secure my future. But by the time he got around to it, it was too late.

  Some strange emotion catches me by the throat. My chest tightens and I start fiddling with my chair, picking at the damaged zipper of the cushion under me, pulling it this way and that, trying to force it to close over the nibbled sponge filling. Adel is conscious of having struck a sensitive chord. He puffs at the shisha and watches me intently. I am touched by his solicitude when he says nothing more.

  Some of the girls at the sakan have asked me these same questions. They had already calculated the amount of money my family has, based on snippets of society’s various estimates of the Naseemy fortune. In response, I would play down the importance of money and launch into a lecture on the significance of serving the community and repaying our generous government by getting educated and bringing home vital skills. It’s a dull explanation, something you’d feed a reporter or a government official. But it served me well, because they’d stopped asking. To Adel I find myself uttering, “I need to feel self-worth.”

  Adel flinches. There’s a break in the steady, rhythmic bubbling of the shisha’s water, and I look for something to focus on. There’s the steel sugar bowl. Picking up the teaspoon, I chip at the hardened sugar crusting its sides. My mind roils with disbelief at what I’ve just said.

  Adel puts the pipe on the table and leans forward. He wants me to open up, but how can I with all this self-blame, this guilt that runs as deep as the river to my side, as thick as the silt at the bottom. I was there. I watched it all. I said nothing. I let it happen.

  The images rush through my head: the hospital bed where my father, propped up on a couple of cushions, was recovering from a fall after his stroke; the worry beads unmoving, as still as the hand that was holding them; the open mouth and teary eyes, so grateful to Allah for sparing his life, to his brother for caring so much; the paper in front of him and the court notary asking him, “Do you understand with your full sense what this means?”

  I know we should leave in the next few minutes if I want to arrive at the sakan before nine, but a heaviness holds me down. My head drops to my chin and I avert my gaze. A mosquito fires its sharp drone somewhere around my forehead as the moody air turns still once more. It bites. I pay no heed to the itch. I dare not meet Adel’s gaze. One word, one look from him might slacken my tongue and cause all that is held back to gush out.

  “So,” he says. “How is your cousin, what’s her name? Dalal . . . yes, that’s it, Dalal. Is she your best friend?”

  I am so grateful for the shift in subject that I answer him immediately. “Yes, she is.”

  “Were you close when you were growing up?”

  “Oh, yes,” I say, and as he returns to his shisha, my mind drifts back in time and I think about how our unlikely friendship came to be. The first thing that struck me about Dalal was her impertinence. I was with Nouf in the school’s playground when Dalal sought her out and told her that there was no escaping the fact that they were sisters. Dalal stood before us with her fists stuck to her hips and bragged about it. We were speechless with disbelief.

  She was an odd-looking little girl who did not look like us at all. Her curls had expanded with the humidity and spilled out of the two pink hair clips on either side of her head. One of her eyes refused to open fully and her nose was so flat that, in the morning’s glare, I could not make out the line; only two dots emerged in the middle of her milky face.

  There was quite a commotion at Ammi Majed’s house when Nouf later reported the incident, and this spiked my curiosity. Was she really my uncle’s secret child? Where did she live? What made her suddenly want to slip into our lives?

  Nouf called her an imposter and demanded that I never talk to her about it. I kept that promise, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t speak to Dalal directly. Our friendship developed slowly (we were so different), but flowered after my father had returned from his recuperation in Germany. It was a turbulent time in my home as my father tried to deal with his brother’s betrayal. He had no time for me—and I ended up seeking out Dalal. We had united in our misery. We vented our anger and frustration on the man responsible for all our woes, my uncle, her father, vowing to get back at him one way or another.

  This is how far back my thoughts have wandered when I become aware of Adel tapping the table with his water pipe, pulling me back to the moment. “I just asked you a question,” he says. “Three times!”

  “Sorry. What is it?”

  “Your cousin, Dalal, what is she doing here in Cairo, anyway?”

  “She wants to be a singer.”

  “A singer, huh?”

  I nod. “She does have a beautiful voice.”

  “Maybe we can get together with her sometime soon. And she can sing for us.”

  “She would love to,” I say. “The problem is that once she starts, you won’t be able to get her to stop.”

  Adel chuckles and puts the pipe back into his mouth. He sucks in a deep breath, making the water explode into mighty bubbles. It is a happy sound that makes me think of a merry group of babbling women. The maître d’ saunters back to our table. It seems the privacy gained from the baksheesh has expired. An order of two more teas satisfies him and he leaves us, while we settle back to chat about Dalal and her antics.

  12

  MAJED

  Through the showroom’s glass walls, a tractor gleams. As I enter Green Acacia Ltd., the office boy picks up a rag and starts wiping its hood with urgent strokes. It is a demo utility tractor with a front loader, bright green with yellow tire hubs. Parked on the glaring white tiles at a slight angle, it faces a tomato-red chisel plow. On the right side of the showroom is a reception area where Mustafa usually sits and where, near closing time, I often join him and watch the passing cars outside on Airport Road. I catch sight of him by the stacks of plastic mulch and rolls of tubes used for drip irrigation; he is busy with a customer.

  It is the same large showroom that Hareb bought soon after registering the company, but it never looked like this when he was alive. It used to be dim and dusty, the paint on the walls in uneven shades of beige, the flooring kept dull in its original cement base, the employees crowded behind metal desks that were fringed with towering masses of truck tires and heaps of spare parts. My brother placed little importance on modernizing or neatening Green Acacia.

  When I took over, I rearranged the company. I separated the offices, installing them in the back for privacy. Now I pass a row of work spaces with glass partitions, filled with accountants—Egyptians and Indians—who straighten up when they become aware of my presence, looking up from their sheets, ledgers, and newly installed computers. Their starchy faces break into humble smiles of respect. I nod back my greeting and turn the other way, passing a large room we use for storage and pausing at the open doorway of the first office. Saif is slouched in his rotating chair with his back to
me. The phone receiver is propped on his shoulder as he murmurs into the mouthpiece. He is talking to a woman, and it’s not his wife. I can tell because his voice sounds amorous.

  Ahmad is in the next office, engrossed in his newspaper, but he spots me and jumps to his feet like a soldier, with an expression that he’s ready to accommodate my every wish, as he recites a list of the latest developments—a few queries from interested companies, a couple of updates on the various contracts we have going—that have taken place since he arrived at eight o’clock sharp. “Hasn’t your brother gotten over his broken heart by now?” I ask, frowning at the other desk in their shared office, which has been vacant since a fortnight ago, when Khaled suddenly packed up and left for Bangkok without telling me. Ahmad shakes his head, sighing to show his empathy. When I grunt, he calls out to Saif, who rushes to our side, clutching a green file to his chest. As always, my sons have an idea they would like me to approve. I’ve already delayed the prospect of hearing out this latest one for too long. So I signal them to follow me, with one thought: to get it out of the way quickly so they will leave me in peace and I can search for that photograph.

  My office, along with my secretary’s, is at the end of the corridor. It has a seating area that looks sunken because it’s so much lower than the imposing desk. Whenever I have visitors, I join them on the soft leather seats so I don’t look down on them; that would be disrespectful. I don’t bother to do this with my sons. No sooner am I settled behind my desk than Saif pulls what looks like a thick contract out of the green folder. He hands it to me. It is typed and bound, and seems a most tiresome twenty-page read. “What’s this?” I say, balancing it like a dead fish on the palm of my hand.