That Other Me

by Maha Gargash

  “I’m just wondering whether this . . . all this . . . is going anywhere.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Sitt Zohra,” he says carefully.

  I march to the couch. “She means it has been a month now and we still haven’t gotten anywhere,” I say, plunking myself down next to her.

  “Dalal! Stop it! All I’m saying is that I am deeply distressed that I feel we are not taken seriously.” She utters the words to me with unhurried precision in a whisper designed to be heard by Sherif bey.

  He reacts immediately. He jumps up from behind his desk and hops over to face us. “Sitt Zohra, your words hurt me. How can you say such a thing?”

  “You see, Dalal,” Mama continues without so much as a glance at him, her voice even, “the sight of us in this hopeless situation—me a divorced woman, you with no father to protect you—makes people disrespect us.”

  “I don’t disrespect you,” Sherif bey says.

  “Well, what do you call this?” I interject with a wave of the arm. “All this time and you haven’t thought up some measly tune for me, or opened any doors for us. You must know everyone in this business. Why haven’t you introduced us to them?”

  “Ah-ha-ha.” It’s a deep-throated chuckle, but there is no humor in it.

  “If he introduces us, we can get the right exposure,” I persist, turning back to Mama. “Look at us, meeting like this in the middle of the night, wasting our time—and for what?”

  Sherif bey waves a finger at me. “That’s quite a tongue you have for so young a lady.”

  “He’s right, Dalal. I didn’t bring you up to talk that way,” says Mama.

  “You listen to your mother, little girl,” Sherif bey says.

  “It’s true, Mama,” I moan. “He knows all the right people. They have parties he can get us into, make introductions. But he doesn’t.”

  “We are instructed to come at this awful hour,” says Mama, nodding with resignation, “and expected to stay behind these closed doors. After all, there’s no one out there asking after us.”

  “That’s exactly my point, Mama. He doesn’t care about us.”

  “One thing you must understand, Dalal, is that this is a business full of insincerity. Wherever you turn, there are people who you might think are looking out for you. But no, it’s all an act. They’re all the same, putting your noble interests to the side and taking advantage of you.”

  “Don’t talk like that, please,” he shouts. “You make me sound like a brute.”

  She looks up at him, and their eyes lock. All is still. All is tense. I get bored waiting for it to pass, and I gaze at the wooden screen standing in the far corner of the room. Behind it is the other entrance, the alternate route that he uses to get to his office without having to pass the secretary. It’s the door we slip through when night sets in.

  Finally Sherif bey looks away in a huff. “Yes, it’s hard to be patient, and I know how hard this life has been for you. In fact, I can’t sleep at night thinking of the cruelty you have endured out there in the Khaleej.”

  “You mustn’t have sleepless nights over us,” Mama says. A quiver of vulnerability—so convincing I want to salute her—rattles her speech.

  He flings his arms in the air. “I can’t help it. An artist is always too sensitive for his own good!”

  She nods. “It’s not fair that we should ask for more. You have been too kind already. But now I think we must part.”

  He sniffs and mutters, “So be it. Everyone has a destiny to follow.”

  She sighs and says to me, “What hurts me, daughter, is the disrespect. But we have our dignity, after all. We should get going now, Dalal.”

  All this time wasted! How much more can I handle? I can’t hide my distress. “No, Mama, we must not be hasty,” I begin, but she has already risen and is sidling through the various bits of furniture; she disappears behind the screen. I expect him to rush over and plead with us to come back. He does not. I expect my mother to turn back with some clever excuse. She does not. She’s already by the elevator, tapping her foot as if her impatience might speed it along.

  “It’s too early to leave,” I protest. “Hassanain won’t be here yet.” Although it is convenient to have the microbus driver pick us up every evening and drop us off at home in the late hours, after yesterday—when he made a vow to protect us if ever need be—the thought of seeing him makes me groan. He’s just like the others, the helpers and facilitators, the people of the street who want to be a part of our lives. How many of them have claimed to know someone in the world of the stars who is that VIP ticket to success?

  Not too long ago there was Abdo the butcher, who set out on a thorough investigation. In between his gifts of flesh and bone, he went out of his way to make sure we understood that he was trying his best to help us. “I called, but the man has left town . . . I met his assistant (you know how it is, they all have assistants) and he says it’s as good as done . . . Soon, soon, I’m this close.” It’s not the charade that I mind. What bothers me is that Mama reveals our life to them, with uncalled-for details, and they feel they have a claim to it.

  Abdo the butcher wanted her. A couple of months back, just before she gave him the brush-off, he called out to me as I passed in front of his shop. Standing between carcasses hooked on railings, he grinned broadly and waved toward another complimentary provision to nourish the dainty divorcée. “See how tender and marbled it is?” he said, holding up the supple piece of meat for me to see. “It comes from the rump!” He slapped it with his other hand, as if it were a woman’s buttock. “It will make you strong, and your mother, too.” Of course, I pretended to be interested, which was difficult with the damp, meaty odor and the pestering flies. “How is she, anyway?” he continued as he wrapped paper around the meat and tied it with string. Then he lowered his voice and scrunched his eyes at me. “Why didn’t your mother remarry? Has she rejected the idea completely?” I shrugged, and he patted his heart with his right hand to illustrate his humility and kindness, following the gesture with a downward gaze to demonstrate his good intentions.

  Later, when I told Mama, she wasted no time getting rid of him. The next day she handed him a five-pound note as gratitude for his efforts to help us. He would have objected with the vulgar outcries typical of someone of his class, but Mama had caught him by surprise. Before he could react, we had strolled out of his shop. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. He stares at us with dagger eyes whenever we walk by. We have learned to enjoy chicken since then.

  We’re out on the street, and a breeze blows the smell of greenery from the neighboring Shooting Club. I have not given up hope. I’m convinced this must be some ruse to send panic into Sherif bey’s heart. Surely she will linger at the building’s entrance to give him a chance to rush down and beg us to come back. I hurry after her as she marches through the treelined streets, bewildered by her bold steps. After all, we are walking away from “the genius of the music world, the artiste among artists,” as she has repeatedly described him. Sherif bey composed the music of her youth, the tunes that turned her head sodden with romantic reveries. Surely she won’t give up on him so quickly.

  I am not the only one who is surprised by her early departure. The spies my father sends to watch us—there are two of them tonight—are caught off guard, too. As Mama breezes past them, one is quick to pretend he is looking for some important item in his pocket, while the other drops to the ground to tie his shoelaces, even though he is wearing sandals. What a clumsy duo!

  We end up on Wezarat Al-Zeraa Street. It’s 9:30 p.m., and dust and fumes ride on gales whipped up by zooming cars and rumbling buses. “What was that all about?” I shout over the noise.

  “We’ll talk about this when we get home,” she says, craning her neck as if anxious for a taxi. A few slow down, but she ignores them.

  I am aghast. All the effort, all the time, all the hope—what was it for? “I want to know now!”

  “This is not the time or place,” Mama says j
ust as a taxi jerks to a stop. She takes a step back, then forward, as if trying to remember what she was about to do. When she opens the door, I refuse to get in.

  “Now, Mama, now,” I insist, stomping my foot on the pavement.

  “You will not talk to me like that in the middle of the road,” she scolds.

  “We can’t keep wandering from place to place, always getting nowhere,” I whine. “I’m tired. I can’t do this for much longer.”

  Her grip tightens around the door’s handle. “You can’t do this for much longer? Have you ever bothered to think about me? Huh?”

  I look away. One of the spies has crossed the road, rendering his position useless since he is too far away to hear us; the other is closer, once more tying his imaginary shoelaces. I reckoned that the taxi driver would wait a little, pick up pieces of our argument through the open windows and add his own spoonful of wisdom. But he is not interested. He yells at Mama to shut the door and zooms off with a screech. What a night of volatile tempers! And then there is a honk.

  It’s a Mercedes, a well-kept old model, ivory-colored with a burgundy interior. The uniformed chauffeur waves his gloved hand at us, and through a curtain of cigarette smoke in the back we see Sherif bey’s anxious face peering through the window. Mama and I refuse his offer of a lift and walk away, ignoring his pleas to talk things over. The car follows us as we backtrack onto a smaller street; the pair of spies trails us.

  It’s a glorious moment when Sherif bey hops out of the car and dashes toward us. Elated by this welcome twist to the evening, I hide my smile as best I can and watch him, plucked out of his cocoon of an apartment and looking disoriented in Cairo’s streets. I suddenly realize that he is besotted with my mother. He begs her to be reasonable, to come back to the office so we may talk like adults.

  Mama looks as cool as the moon as she accuses him of taking us for granted, thinking we’ll always keep coming back. I want to raise my arms in a cheer when she demands: “No more hiding us. Introduce us to all the important people in the music business so they can hear Dalal sing.”

  “Yes, and after that you needn’t bother with us anymore,” I say, glancing over my shoulder at the spies, making sure they hear me well and proper. Finally they’ll have something worth reporting to my father. “We can take it from there.”

  “No, Dalal. You’re wrong,” Mama says. “This is a journey, a long one, which I, for one, would feel privileged to share with Sherif bey.”

  With that, Sherif bey’s lips curl in a lopsided attempt at a smile, and I feel sorry for him—but only for a flash.

  14

  MARIAM

  “Feeling better? What did the doctor say?”

  I prop myself up on the pillow. That’s enough of an invitation for Tammy, a first-year student and one of my two flatmates, to tiptoe into the room and settle at one end of the bed. The curtains are drawn and the room is dim, bathed in the cool blue of morning light. Still, I spot the inquisitiveness in her impish eyes. She senses there’s more to the story I made up after arriving at the sakan just before midnight last night.

  “The doctor says it must be some virus,” I say, and pat my head, which is slightly warm. I suspect that the injection he gave me triggered an allergic reaction. “It might be contagious,” I add, hoping this will make her go away.

  Tammy acts as though she’s immune to germs. “How could it be that you fell asleep in the library? And doesn’t the staff check to make sure no student is left behind before locking up?”

  “I really don’t know, Tammy. But when I woke up, I realized I was in a corner that could easily have been overlooked.”

  “Hmm.” She curls her lip at me with obvious disbelief, and I find myself wishing she had never discarded the veil that used to cover her entire face. But Tammy had sought a transformation as soon as she arrived in Cairo, and she started with her name: she changed a somber-sounding Fatima to the lighter Fatami, and later, with the playfulness of a wink, altered it one more time, to Tammy. Because of the new freedom she’s found being away from her father, brothers, cousins, and every other male relative and neighbor in the tiny oasis village of Nahwa (deep within the mountains of the northern Emirates), she has taken to dressing differently, too. For her morning classes at the college she wears a satin shirt, bloodred and stretched a little too tightly around her chest. Tucked into a long black pencil skirt, it’s belted just under her ribs with an eye-catching rhinestone buckle that draws attention to her slim waist. Her shayla, which she used to loop twice around her neck, has long since loosened and now sits as no more than an embellishment over yellow-streaked hair that’s parted on the side and falls like a horse’s tail down her cheek. “How come all the noise of people leaving the library didn’t wake you up?”

  I feel like I’ve turned into a creature of intrigue under her gaze. I shrug with a helpless sigh. These are the same questions Abla Karima asked me. Amm Eid, the doorman, was pacing up and down when my taxi pulled up in front of the sakan door. His relief at my safe arrival was immediate. I was the missing resident, and his hands had shaken as he raised them to the sky to thank Allah for my safe return.

  “Where have you been, Sitt Mariam? We were worried sick,” he said. I did not answer him, only shook my head with puzzled exasperation. Slow-thinking in emergencies, I had already prepared a few excuses, but I couldn’t decide which to use. He unlocked the sakan’s door, metal with opaque glass for added privacy. “Abla Karima is worried sick, too. Every ten minutes she pops out here and asks me whether you have arrived yet.”

  I was slightly relieved at the mention of this particular matron. She is the most docile of the lot. “Did she telephone anyone?” I asked. One call, that’s all it would take to end my studies in Cairo, my planned career and independence.

  “Not yet. But she wanted to, many times. She threatened to make a call if you didn’t get here by midnight.”

  I blessed her under my breath. Out of the four ablas, she is the only one blighted with indecision when things don’t go according to protocol. If it were Abla Taghrid, she would not have hesitated to report me, and I’m sure the cultural attaché would have been waiting along with her, his arms crossed, his foot tapping the floor with extreme displeasure that this most sacred of rules had been broken. Amm Eid followed me through the entryway and to the next glass door, which has a beautified plastic covering showing swans gliding on a river. No man is allowed through it, and Amm Eid stopped in his tracks and looked around as if lost. On the one hand, he knew he should go back to his post. On the other, his ears were burning to hear my account.

  He was in luck. The swan door burst open and Abla Karima waddled down the steps. Long necked with a beaklike nose, she always makes me think of the storks wading in the Nile’s tributaries. Her hands fluttered with agitation and she rattled off a full list of questions, pausing only when her breath ran out and she had to replenish it with a massive gulp of air. When I told her, “I fell asleep in the library, I don’t know how,” she flapped her hands some more—maybe to cool the heat that was building in her—and launched into another set of queries. “I’ll have to report this, you know,” she warned. And that’s when I staggered to the side, leaned against the wall, and said, “I think I have to see a doctor.”

  Alunood ambles into my room with a pair of sandals dangling from her fingers. She is my other flatmate, a second-year fine-arts student. She has heavy eyelids and large downturned eyes that brim with gloom. “You know you have probably been reported,” she says, and parks herself heavily next to Tammy.

  “No, she hasn’t,” says Tammy. “Otherwise the attaché would have been here already to find out all the details and punish her.”

  “It’s early yet.” As always, Alunood’s voice is flat, with a no-nonsense quality to it. “He’ll be here soon enough.” With that, she bends over and starts strapping the sandals to her feet.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I had no control over what happened. And if he doesn’t believe me, there is
always the doctor’s report.”

  “What exactly did he write?” asks Tammy, as if anxious for the pronouncement of some exotic disease.

  My eyes grow heavy and I close them. Maybe it’s the nagging guilt over making up so many lies. But what else could I do? Tell them about my secret escapade with Adel?

  I suppose Dalal would have been proud of my performance. I acted as best I could, even though all the while I was convinced that everyone could see right through me. The doctor had shined a tiny torch into my open mouth and peered into the back of my throat. Then he pinched my nostrils to check for inflammation. He seemed unconvinced. So I said, “My head feels light.”

  “Dizzy?” he asked.

  “Yes. And there is pressure in my eyes. And I can’t breathe properly, either.” I stammered with the mention of every fabricated ill.

  The stethoscope emerged.

  “My stomach hurts, too.”

  I suppose I had described a few too many aches, each having nothing to do with the other, because the doctor hummed and scratched his head.

  Tammy’s eyes light up. “Maybe you fainted! Maybe that’s what happened in the library.”

  I nod weakly. There is a tingling sensation in my limbs, and this makes me worry once more about that injection. What was in it? Perhaps the doctor was trying to teach me a lesson for pretending I was sick. Maybe he was insulted by what I did next but could not resist accepting what was offered—for the first time in my life, I slipped him a bribe for a forged diagnosis.

  It wasn’t easy with so many people in the room, but it helped that they were in perpetual motion, opening the window for fresh air and closing it when the night air chilled the room too quickly. They rushed to the kitchen to prepare what remedies they could for all the ailments I complained of. There was thyme for my sore throat, mint for my stomach pain, and chamomile to slow my palpitating heart. In the midst of the pandemonium, I slid a hand into my handbag and pulled out a wad of notes I had no time to count. The doctor raised his eyebrows with surprise but quickly slid them from my palm as he took my pulse. I did not need to say anything else; he understood completely.