That Other Me

by Maha Gargash

  There he stood, a statue of power, arms crossed, neck stretched, mouth hard; his eyes were cold pebbles sparkling with cruel triumph. Throughout me spread the sobering realization that no matter what I said or how I acted, Ammi Majed would always be an unbeatable force, the formidable master who drew a life plan for every member of the Naseemy family.

  He’d aimed to shake me, to break me. And he did. He crushed me, and I let him.

  Dalal is still talking about the sister with the crochet needles, and Adel seems to be absorbed in every dispensable detail. A runaway gust flings pink feathers into her mouth, and Adel quickly brushes them away. She withdraws, feigning embarrassment, and I try once more to get his attention with a joke that doesn’t come out as one: “Maybe she should have used the needles as a weapon, poked your mother where it hurts.”

  “She can poke wherever she wants to, but she won’t be able to deter my mother.” Dalal nods with imperious haughtiness. “She is determined and devoted—to me, that is. She’d do anything for me.”

  At this point I lose patience, because the one thing I know about Zohra is that she and love don’t mix. I snort. “You don’t think she’s thinking of herself as well?”

  “What do you know about a mother’s love? It’s not as if you ever had any.”

  Heartless! I am stung and mortified that she would say something like that, and in front of Adel, too. I tighten my lips and glower at her, waiting for an immediate apology. When none comes, I stare past her, focusing on our sailor. His galabia flaps along with the sail, which he draws and releases while steering the boat with his foot.

  It started as a blustery day, and Dalal, with her usual impulsiveness, decided it would be fun to sail on a felucca. She dragged us to a boarding point in Maadi, a part of the city where there are no bridges to interrupt the feluccas’ cruising. All the owners gave us a flat refusal, citing the unpredictable weather, except for a ruddy-faced man called El-Rayyes. He pointed to his small boat with its single sail and space for no more than six people and told us that he would take us, on the conditions that it would be a short trip and that we’d pay three times the normal rate.

  “Girls, girls,” Adel says. “We’re here to enjoy ourselves, not bicker like a pair of parakeets.” There are two benches running the width of the boat; I’m seated facing Dalal and Adel, whose backs are to El-Rayyes.

  “Yes, indeed,” Dalal says, and aims a playful jab at his stomach. The boat tips to the side and her knuckles brush the area under his navel. His face colors, a rush of crimson. Why does she have to embarrass him so? I fold my arms and look away, narrowing my eyes at the swaying line between river and land, softened to a blur in a stretch of fog. The wind has quieted, and the small wooden boat bobs over the gray water like a floundering piece of cork.

  Dalal jumps to her feet and rocks the boat. Lifting an arm to the sky, she exclaims, “Ah, the sense of freedom on this rapturous river!”

  “Sit down!”

  She flashes me a grin. Even though her eyes differ in size, they glow equally with daring. I lunge forward. She yaps like a frisky pup and dodges my reach just as the boat tips to one side. She tumbles and would have done a belly flop over the side had Adel not reacted so quickly. He grabs her wrist, and my fantasy of fishing her out of the water—a soggy, trembling pink ball grimy with wilted river grass—is defeated. I’ve moved to their bench. I glare at her wrist, which has turned limp in his grip. Adel flops down on the middle of the bench and plants her on his other side.

  “What are you trying to do?” It’s the first time El-Rayyes has raised his voice. “I won’t have anyone falling off my boat and drowning.”

  “No harm done,” Dalal snaps back at him.

  “Why do you want to play with your life like that?” El-Rayyes hollers. “You fall in, and I’ll be the one blamed.”

  This time Dalal ignores him. She neatens her feathers and declares, “Ah, isn’t this nice, the three of us together side by side.”

  El-Rayyes has not finished. “You think you’re indestructible just because you’re young? Do you want me to tell you how many youngsters this river has swallowed?”

  Adel turns around. “Okay, ammi, we understand. Nothing happened. So let’s just enjoy the rest of the trip.”

  “The rest of the trip?” El-Rayyes says scornfully. “I’ll show you what’s left of the trip.” With that, he steers the felucca around . . . and then pauses. A wily patch of mist has crawled over us and enshrouded the boat. He cannot get his bearings.

  19

  DALAL

  The felucca smells of rust and rotting wood. It—and everything else around us—has long since lost its charm. Everyone is quiet. The fog travels in sheets so thick that when I stretch out my arms, only my fingers are visible, looking like knobs of dough in the mist. My fingers dance: now you see them, now you don’t. I do my best not to think about my father and how he had materialized at the door.

  His voice had the intensity of gunfire, even though he wasn’t making much noise. A numbing fear had spread through me as he bored through my confidence and ridiculed “this absurd amusement, this game of becoming a singer.” I could do nothing more than cower in silence, as if my existence depended on it. “You make sure she stops this nonsense,” he told my mother, “and removes all thought of ever becoming a singer. It won’t happen. I won’t allow it!” In the back of my mind I hoped that once he left I could still figure out a way to get what I wanted. But that vanished when I spotted my mother nodding her agreement. How would I be able to manage without her? With every bob of her head, I felt my dream of walking into that bright spotlight of fame shrinking. Even now it baffles me that she’d hid her intentions so well.

  “You let them think what they want,” Mama said to me once my father had left, “let them feel good about the conviction that they’ve won. Then you do your own thing.”

  My father’s visit is not yet a distant memory. I would have liked to talk to Mariam about it, but nothing about her encourages me to do so. Even the fog can’t soften her hardened face. The ghostly quietude remains, and to fill the void I start humming the catchy tune of a commercial about falafel. It’s one of Sherif bey’s most successful jingles, and I wonder whether, along with his youth, he has lost the ability to compose real songs.

  “Wah!” Adel growls, finally deciding to spin some humor over our sodden little group. His face bursts out of a pocket of fog that envelops us, like a decapitated head, so close I smell the river’s damp on him. Even though he hasn’t startled me, I delight him by springing to the side with a whoop of alarm. I push his face away and then yip when he aims a peck of a kiss on the flat of my palm. He bursts out laughing. Then, noticing Mariam’s unchanged surly expression, he kills it abruptly. And then there is only the sound of the gurgling water and El-Rayyes, grumbling and cursing into his chest.

  He is lost; I know he is. We are rolling in a capsule of moist air. “It’s either this way or that,” I complain to Adel. “Why is he making it so complicated, turning the boat here and there? If he sticks to a straight line, we’re bound to hit land.” Beneath us the water sloshes and slaps the sides of the boat, and above us the sail flaps like wet laundry on a line. I look around once more, eager to catch sight of the horizon, a familiar rim that’s gray with the city’s pollution. Failing, I close my eyes and strain to pick up the hum of distant traffic. There is no sound, and I consider how impossible it is—how eerie!—that Cairo can suddenly turn noiseless like this. As the boat continues to rock over a river that has become more like an open sea, I feel betrayed by the city.

  Adel growls again in an attempt to cheer me up. But my humor has dried up. From the moment we boarded, he has been flitting between Mariam and me like a merry bee unable to decide which flower is plumper with nectar. I order him to find out what’s happening with El-Rayyes. As he slips away to the back of the boat, I casually slide closer to Mariam, confident that it’s just her nervousness at being stuck in the middle of the river that has made her so gr
uff with me. She is stroking her bangs. “Stop it,” she hisses when I tickle her under the nose.

  “Come on, cousin, what’s wrong with you? Just relax. We’ll get back safe and sound.”

  “I’m not worried about that!”

  “Well, what is it, then?” Not for the first time, I wonder whether she might be attracted to Adel. “Do you like him?” I whisper.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffs, and turns away. “We’re just good friends.”

  Do I detect some hint of embarrassment, a little smile, perhaps? I scrutinize her face. “Come on, Mariam. You know you can tell me anything,” I purr, shifting closer and nudging her with my shoulder.

  “Sometimes you are unbearable,” she snaps. “You had to get us into this predicament, didn’t you. You had to pull us onto this boat in such weather. And now we are lost. Everything is about you. You are so selfish.” She pushes me. “Go back to your side and leave me alone.”

  I slide away and lean over, running my fingers through the water. The mast breaks the wearisome drift with heart-joggling rumblings, as if the wood is about to crack and come tumbling down on us. Suddenly, thwack!

  We shriek. Victim of the fog, the ibis did not expect to encounter a looming piece of lumber as it skimmed over the water. It drops between us like one of those garbage bombs in Imbaba. Shocked and shivering, it kicks its reed-thin legs as if they might pump some air through its dangling windpipe.

  I yelp and blow on it, as if that might give it enough life to flop over and fly away. Mariam reaches out for it, and I do the same. We grab the bird at the same time. “Leave it,” she says, but I hold on tighter. It’s a fishy-smelling creature. The kicking stops and is replaced by an ominous shiver, as if the ibis’s soul were rising in objection. I imagine it pecking us with that scythe-shaped beak. When it dies in our hands, we stare at it as if it double-crossed us.

  Mariam pulls, and the skin ruptures. I yank at it, and a joint cracks. It’s only when tiny insects start crawling out from between its sticky plumes that we throw it overboard. The bird vanishes in a glob of fog. Under the smack of the sails, I don’t hear the splash.

  It has been a month since I last saw Mariam on that foggy, soggy afternoon. We had ended the day with stiff nods and insincere promises to get together again soon. There were smiles just like the one that stretches my face at every party I attend. We couldn’t very well part in a sulk, at least not in front of Adel.

  He seemed to have been entertained by the quibbles and the bird drama. It’s as if he’d looked forward to our taking it a step further, perhaps reaching the point of pulling each other’s hair. But really, if I had to tell the truth, at the end of the day Mariam and I had reached an unspoken understanding: we would avoid seeing each other anytime in the near future.

  I blow my frustration into the air, making sure not to disturb my smile, which shows just the faintest glimmer of teeth (Mama says you can never tell who might be watching). One glance at this medium-sized party is enough to convince me that the guests are interested in nothing more than the food and political blah-blah-blah. Tucked away in the corner is the unfortunate musician, ignored as he plucks at the strings of his oud.

  Whatever harm had been done between Mariam and me can be fixed at a later stage, I suppose. Better to be cool for a while. That’s an American expression Adel likes to use whenever I get restless or irritated. “Be cool.” I whisper it under my breath, puckering my mouth the way Adel does as he stretches the word, always letting his hand glide in a straight line in front of him; it’s a gesture that’s meant to seem offhand, but it fails to obscure the intensity that sits in his eyes as he scrutinizes my every twitch.

  That look! There is rawness, a dollop of the animal in it. It’s not as if I’ve never seen it before. The first time I spotted it was in the eyes of a youth in Dubai. It was a few years back, soon after the straight lines of my girl’s body filled and curved. The boy was nowhere near as handsome as Adel. He was a puny creature, the stubble of his beard covering too little of his hollow-cheeked face. He’d show up at the end of every school day as I made my way out through the gate. He always had the window of his Ford Mustang rolled down, even in the searing heat. The car was a mousy gray, with red seats and a powerful vroom to it. Two stickers bearing the logo of Al-Ahli football club were positioned on either side of the license plate.

  With his sunglasses clinging to the tip of his nose, the boy would hook his elbow to the door so that he was half leaning out as he neared me. For a long time, I ignored him as he tried to lure me with those predatory glances. Then one day he changed his tactics and held up a cassette, twirling it between his fingers. When he threw it at me, it was a direct invitation for me to take the initiative: he’d jotted down his telephone number on the cassette. To his dismal luck, the supervisor caught him in the act, frowning at his effrontery. He blew me a kiss and zoomed off; she reported him.

  There was the usual injunction, and the more humiliating punishment of having his name printed in the accident-and-legal page of Al-Bayan newspaper along with a head shot in which he looked like a convict. I never saw him again, but I’m sure he kept his car window rolled up for good after that.

  We see each other, Adel and I, every so often, and even though I’m not sure what it will lead to, I do enjoy flirting with him. There’s something liberating in it, a distraction I look forward to. But I couldn’t resist asking whether he had seen Mariam. He dismissed my query with a wave of the hand. “She’s a zameela,” he said, and his nostrils flared as if the scent of rot had touched them. “Just a fellow student, that’s all.”

  This party is so dull that I find my thoughts drifting to Mariam again. I miss her. Perhaps it’s because we went through so much together as girls, trying to understand the pain of losing our fathers—whether in life or through death—and dreaming of the futures that were stolen from us. In the past, whatever quarrels took place between us could be ticked off as trivial, necessary to cement a lifelong bond. I could tell what her exact thoughts were while they were running through her mind. I could anticipate what she would say and how she would react to every situation. But she surprised me on the felucca; it was the first time she had been unpredictable.

  The mood had soured so quickly that I hadn’t gotten a chance to tell her about the songs I’ve been singing at some of these parties (all with the wrong crowd, it seems, since they have not led to anything), or about my first acting role, soon to be filmed. My mother met the director at one of these parties and somehow convinced him to include me. Who would believe it? But who would believe that Mariam and I would fight over a dead bird?

  Whenever I remember those insects crawling out of the feathers, my hands feel dirty and I’m overwhelmed by the urge to soap them. That nasty lump of feathers and flesh, warm on my palms: the bird’s death separated us like a barbed-wire fence. What were we trying to prove, tugging at it like that? I resist the temptation to rush to the bathroom and wipe my hands on my skirt. I shake the thoughts out of my head, because everyone knows that too much thinking doesn’t benefit a soul.

  “Ah!” There’s my mother, ushering the director toward me. Sherif bey trails a couple of steps behind, wagging his head at the ground like a goat sniffing dry grass. He doesn’t approve of my debut film role and warned us that it would do more harm than good in the long run. Mama didn’t give him a chance to elaborate. She shut him up with an acid stare.

  I rise. My smile broadens, and excitement propels me toward the director. Although it is not my aim to be an actress, Mama said it’s a stepping-stone that might bring us closer to big fame. It’s a tiny part: the hero, distraught by a misunderstanding he has had with his fiancée, goes to the beach at Maamoura. Heartbroken, he roams along the shore—when a beach ball accidentally hits him. And that’s when I make my entrance. I’m playing the role of a beautiful young foreigner who runs into the scene to retrieve the ball. She is so grateful that when the hero hands it to her, she rewards him with a kiss on the cheek. Of
course, the hero’s fiancée sees all this, and that causes more problems for him.

  “Ready for the big day?” asks the director.

  “Of course she is,” Mama replies. “This week she’ll be on boiled chicken and vegetables. And only water, the day of.”

  “Absolutely,” says the director. “Her tummy must be flat in the swimsuit. She has to look convincing as a European tourist.”

  Mama and the director laugh. “How should I enter the scene?” I ask, determined to get it right. It may be a minor film role, but this undertaking might just catapult my career. “Maybe a flirty jog?”

  “On set, my dear, all will be revealed on set,” says the director, and Sherif bey groans, obviously not happy at being left out. The director looks at him, amused. He cups Sherif bey’s neck and says to my mother, “It seems like your fiancé is the one with nerves. Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha.”

  A middle-aged woman appears, insisting that she must introduce the director to her son instantly. As she leads him away, I cock my head at Mama. Fiancé?

  “So why is that man always with you wherever you go?” the woman sitting next to me asks. “What is he to you?”

  I know what I am supposed to say. I have memorized the line and can recite it in a single uninterrupted breath: Sherif bey, the esteemed composer, is a close family friend who has put his work to the side in order to accompany me and my mother and make sure we are not taken advantage of. Instead, I answer honestly: “I don’t know.”