Live from Cairo

by Ian Bassingthwaighte

  “I told you not to come.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Dalia wrapped him up as if she were trying to keep him warm. They remained that way—entwined—until the security officer, the same one as before, approached and commanded, “Yallah.” This time the security officer said the word not with anger so much as sadness. Maybe the officer missed his own wife and wished desperately to go home and kiss her. Omran wanted to kiss Dalia right there, but couldn’t do it; not in front of the officer. Instead he and Dalia heeded the command by leaving the terminal. The hot night air hit their faces when the glass doors slid open. The taxi ride was no less hot, even with the windows rolled down and the air whipping them. Omran and Dalia held hands as the car sped on the raised highway. Their fingers stuck together with sweat. The whole ride, other than the noise of the wind and the driver hitting the car horn, was silent. When they finally arrived in Imbaba, the taxi driver sped off without so much as ensuring his passengers had fully exited the vehicle. The driver left behind an alley that seemed to stretch endlessly toward other alleys, with only a few yellow streetlamps dotting the darkness. Dalia and Omran stood alone on the curb.

  “Today from Baghdad?” asked the voice of a man on the stairs. Omran turned and squinted at him. He saw a man holding a cigarette in one hand and what looked like a warm Coke in the other. The man threw his cigarette on the ground. The orange sparks went dancing.

  “Boston,” said Omran. “Before that, Baghdad.”

  “A long journey,” said the man.

  It occurred to Omran that his journey shouldn’t be measured in distance but in time. And that he should apologize to Dalia for taking so long. For failing to get her to America. For having no virtues left. He even felt like apologizing for having one eye. The scar would never go away. Every day she’d have to look at it.

  The stairs became a stone floor leading to more stairs leading to a red door five stories up. The door led to an apartment Omran had envisioned many times, but had never seen. He stood in the center of the room and looked at pictures of himself on the wall. He wanted to say something. Needed to say something. He needed a bright new way to tell Dalia the same old truth. That he loved her. That he had to come back.

  Dalia didn’t linger in the silence for long. She stood between Omran and a lamp, which she flicked on. Dalia became a black shadow with yellow edges. Her head scarf was a feather floating to the floor, but her dress dropped like a rock. The last thing she removed were her socks. She threw each at Omran, who collapsed onto the couch under the weight of her gaze. Dalia jumped on him. It took her a few seconds to remove his belt because her hands were shaking. Omran’s hands also shook. He didn’t know where to put them. He put them in his pockets, on her thighs, in her hair. They didn’t talk because their mouths were busy kissing. What was there to talk about, anyway? The future? Instead they let their bodies move the way celestial bodies do, toward and around each other with desperate inevitability.

  PART IV

  * * *

  MOTHER OF THE EARTH

  This midnight who has come like moonshine? It is the messenger of love, coming from the mihrab.

  —Rumi

  Dalia and Omran, standing ankle deep in the sand, watched a stiff wind rough up the bay. Six months had passed but only some two hundred kilometers. Alexandria stretched behind them into the green fields of the Nile Delta. They’d come this far on a train and would continue their journey by boat. To Italy, God willing. Should the fisherman show up as promised. Should his vessel be seaworthy. Should the weather not take a turn for the worse.

  Dalia fiddled with the letter in her pocket to avoid obsessing over what she couldn’t control. She felt the torn edge where she’d ripped off the postscript warning against exactly this form of transport. Don’t trust the smugglers, the postscript had read. Please don’t trust them. Whatever you do. It had been a sorry end to what was otherwise a beautiful letter. Dalia had found it one morning shoved under her door. It was from Hana, which had shocked Dalia so badly that she hadn’t been able to open it right away. In fact, she’d almost thrown it in the trash. Dalia was glad now that she hadn’t done that. The letter, endeavoring to make amends for what had passed between them, spiraled through time and across continents. It told Hana’s own tale of woe. Her deceased father and sister figured prominently. There was a bomb and another bomb. There was a bathtub and a bathrobe in a pile on the floor.

  At first, it had seemed odd and perhaps invasive to read such an intimate portrait of Hana’s family. As if the letter weren’t meant for Dalia even though it was addressed to her. As if she were stealing something. Only after reading the letter all the way through, then keeping the letter hidden for a few days before reading it again, did Dalia realize Hana’s intent. Hana was giving her story in return for the one she’d tried to steal that day in the conference room. “Was the threat of rape just a threat, or . . . ? Please, I need to know. Ahem. Dalia. I need to know if you were ever . . .” The story of the cleric, of course. Who’d done what he’d done and came back later to do it again. The story Hana had tried to rip from Dalia to lay it bare on the table for that other woman to see. What was her name? Margot? Margery? Hana wasn’t proffering an apology so much as squaring a debt.

  The letter went on to say that Hana was going home. Though not exactly by choice. My mother is sick, she’d written. The prognosis, which was notably absent from the letter, had made itself known surreptitiously. The ink had run in the spots where Hana had wept. Dalia remembered the time she’d wept on her own letter in Charlie’s office. She found solace in knowing Hana’s grief had been recorded in the same insane way. The feeling allowed Dalia to put Hana somewhere else in her mind. In the way back, where she needn’t be thought of so frequently and not always in a bad way. Hana was another Iraqi, wasn’t she? Whose life had been torn up by war? That meant something. That bound them in some powerful way. It would’ve been a shame and an injustice to wish anything upon her but luck.

  The letter ended with the dreaded postscript, which was Hana’s failed attempt to be of some practical use after rambling for so many pages. P.S. It occurred to me that someday you might try to find your own way to leave Egypt. Not legally, I mean. I felt compelled to tell you. Don’t trust the smugglers. Please don’t trust them. Whatever you do. The postscript was longer than any postscript Dalia had ever read before. The smugglers, it said, were cash-strapped and known for overloading their boats. That inadvertently lifted the centers of gravity. It was dangerous to do that. The boats rolled more easily in rough seas. Coast guards around the Mediterranean (and the UNHCR, being informed through official channels) were well acquainted with the results: bodies floating lifelessly in the sea. The postscript didn’t befit the rest of the letter. Plus, Hana wasn’t telling Dalia anything she didn’t already know. Thankfully the writing appeared on only one side of the page, so Dalia was able to remove the postscript without tearing a hole somewhere else in the letter. She kept the remaining pages and read them from time to time. Dalia liked to think that somehow Hana would know.

  The fisherman arrived more than an hour late, looking skittish. He kept peering back at the road. “Um al-Dunya leaves tonight,” he said in a hushed tone. The fisherman gestured ambiguously to the landing spot. The implied vessel was of unknown size and seaworthiness. “Nine or ten, depending. No refund if you don’t show. Bring food unless you’re not hungry for three days. Four days, maybe. The weather is . . .” Out of respect or possibly fear, the fisherman bowed to the sea. His baggy pants fit poorly and weren’t suitable for a man of his trade. Then again, he’d not been a fisherman since he’d become a smuggler.

  Omran handed over the last of their cash. The agonizing exchange belittled the Herculean task of earning money. After all, hawking trinkets in the alleys of the Khan el-Khalili was dangerous work with paltry margins. When Omran and Dalia hadn’t been on edge—lacking, as they did, the required work permit—they’d been actively fleeing the police. Normally Omran and Dal
ia saw the police ahead of time and ducked behind other touts or into shops, where they escaped by pretending to be customers. They’d been caught by surprise only once, but with dire consequence. Dalia and Omran had been rearranging trinkets at the time. This after a distracted passerby had tripped over them. The trinkets had scattered like birds after a gunshot. “God gave you two eyes so you could open at least one of them!” Omran had shouted at the passerby. A policeman had approached in the time it took them to clean up. He’d asked for a permit, a license, a national ID card, a bribe, and, albeit implicitly, the utmost respect. “Huh?” asked Omran. “What did you say? A permit? What permit?” The policeman had rolled his shoulders until muscles had bulged from his neck. The sight had caused both Omran and Dalia to panic; the panic had caused them to run. Thank God the policeman hadn’t been so fit as his neck had suggested. He’d sped after them through the winding alleys, but wore out after just a few turns.

  Omran and Dalia nevertheless paid a steep price for the crime of trying to work: their hats, their bottles of water, their trinkets, and the rug on which the trinkets had sat. Everything had been stolen by a competitor or confiscated by the police. The rug, designed to seduce even the most incredulous passerby—the beautiful red symmetry had drawn eyes and thus wallets—had been the hardest of the losses to take. The rug had been their only business plan. Their way of distinguishing themselves from other sellers hawking the same crap. But the rug, a hefty investment, hadn’t yet paid for itself. How then could it be replaced? “Our business is doomed,” bemoaned Omran. He might’ve been right had it not been for Dalia’s resourcefulness. Her idea wasn’t elegant, but it was effective. She walked the Khan until men whistled, hissed, or made crude remarks. “Do you fuck?” “Are you married?” These men were easy to find and could be trusted to follow her. “Where are you going?” “Can I come?” “Can I come on you?” She’d led them to Omran’s spot on the sidewalk, where a wry look would shame them into buying something. If the wry look didn’t work, Omran would say, “I see you’ve met my wife.” His vaguely homicidal tone would scare vulgar men into becoming reluctant customers. They’d buy small trinkets, bundles of tissues, or individual cigarettes sold at a negligible markup from one-twentieth of the pack price. Omran was pained by the scheme and feared it would wreck Dalia, but she told him to stop worrying; she liked earning money, was enlivened by it. The truth was a little more complicated. Dalia needed to collect on these men’s vileness. A similar vileness had twice cost her a great deal.

  The fisherman stared blankly at the money in Omran’s hand. Dalia suddenly and vehemently hated the fisherman. He must’ve felt undervalued by the operation to which he’d pledged his vessel. Hadn’t he quit fishing to get rich? How would he get rich at this rate? His grubby paw finally grabbed the money.

  * * *

  The long and wending path to the beach had started in the most unlikely place: the Refugee Relief Project one week after Omran had arrived in Cairo. “What are you doing here?” Charlie had said when he’d finally, and after such a long wait, embraced a man he’d only known as a voice. The meeting should’ve been an evolution in their friendship, but turned out to be the opposite. Charlie seemed agitated, distracted, in some kind of pain after touching Omran. “You shouldn’t have come! I told you not to!” The bad reaction had grown more severe by the second. Charlie had laughed in complete disbelief. He’d shaken his head. He’d even reached out to touch Omran a second time. As if he wanted to be sure he wasn’t hallucinating. “My dear Omran,” said Charlie, apparently so heavyhearted that he had to sit. “What have you done?”

  Thereafter Omran hadn’t been able to visit the office without enduring some bitterness. Dalia had tried to visit on his behalf to see if Charlie might help Omran apply for asylum. This to prevent the otherwise necessary crime of overstaying his tourist visa. But Charlie had lost some part of himself. The drive to go beyond where other lawyers would go. He’d said Omran had come to Egypt of his own accord. “Not under duress. The official definition of that word is, I’ll admit, a little flawed. Damn it, very flawed. Duress should mean all kinds of things it doesn’t mean to policymakers. But I can’t change that. I can’t make them understand. I can’t even ask that they try to understand. The people who make decisions are insulated by people who don’t. Any criticism launched at such machinery just disappears in the void.” Charlie spoke as if he was reporting the news and not decrying injustice. His heart, it seemed, had changed. Had grown armor. Had shrunk to fit normally inside his chest cavity. He’d become a more practical man. Also strangely bereaved by that metamorphosis. It was as if Charlie missed his old self.

  Dalia was glad not to be alone with that longing. She missed his inhuman persistence. The fire, she called it. The shedding of sparks as he worked like hot metal struck with a hammer. She even missed the curious personal concern that used to embarrass her. The absence of those familiarities stole the last of her hope the way black holes steal light from the cosmos. It was a quiet, invisible obliteration. Even Dalia didn’t notice it. Not until the screen door opened and slammed closed again. The sound reminded Dalia what was waiting outside: the same unknowable fate that had always been waiting there. Somehow it was nearer than it had been. Would she ever leave Egypt? Would Egypt ever change? For the better? These questions rose anew from the pit in her stomach where she’d buried them.

  Dalia couldn’t bring herself to leave the office even though its usefulness had run its course. She needed a few minutes to absorb that she and Omran were on their own. The idea gave her a kind of vertigo, the feeling she was slipping ever deeper into a life that was beyond control. She leaned against the translator’s desk to steady herself. The smooth, clean surface called attention to the desk’s emptiness. Why hadn’t she noticed before? The work normally conducted there was vital and the man who normally conducted it was cherished. Dalia didn’t feel comfortable asking Charlie outright what happened. Instead she asked why he’d not filled the vacancy.

  Watching Charlie bow his head scared the shit out of Dalia. Suddenly she didn’t want to know; suddenly she was ready to leave. That readiness grew into something more desperate. She needed to leave before Charlie answered her question. There was no polite exit on that timeline, but Dalia tried nonetheless. She said she’d forgotten something. It was urgent. Salaam. Bye now. I’m going. Then Dalia ran down the hall, down the stairs to the yard, down the street, down the stairs to the subway, and finally down the platform to the women’s carriage. She rode the train impatiently under the river. A few women gave her nasty looks for tapping her nails on the pole. The looks couldn’t stop her; Dalia tapped away until the train came to a stop at the nearest station to her apartment. It wasn’t close at all. She hailed a cab from there. It was a ludicrous expense but she couldn’t bear any further delay. “Charlie’s hands are tied,” said Dalia when she’d finally arrived at her apartment. Her desire to slam the door was precluded by the more prescient desire to stay calm in front of Omran. “He can’t help. Something about machinery.” She tried to sound optimistic and not scared when she said they needed to find work. Any way they could. Hawking trinkets in the Khan, if it came to that. They would save money and, God willing, flee to Italy. She’d heard talk of these boats. “Europe,” she said as if that one word might yet save them.

  * * *

  Um al-Dunya was a strange name for a vessel in a shadowy fleet of vessels known for sending their passengers to heaven. Dunya meant “world” and “Earth.” Everything a living person could touch. The terrestrial. The mundane. It was a strange name, too, for the place Dalia and Omran were trying to flee. Cairo. Masr. Um al-Dunya. The mother of the world. That title hadn’t been appropriate in several thousand years. Since then, mother had grown old. Since then, mother had died. Now despots followed each other into oblivion. The army generals had followed Mubarak. Who would follow them? Dalia was relieved to know she needn’t worry. If the boat sank, she’d die. If the boat didn’t sink, she’d be long gone in anothe
r way. She and Omran, having made it to Italy—either stopping there or continuing by land farther north—would start another life. A lonely life, to be sure. Far away from the call to prayer, which had kept company as much as it had kept time. A kind of companionship. Omran said children were the obvious cure to that quiet problem. Dalia supposed he was right. And that she might want children. Having Omran in bed again had reminded her.

  Dalia shifted her weight in the sand. Standing on such an uneven and ever-shifting surface for so long had revealed all kinds of new muscles. Eight had become nine, which had become ten. They hadn’t left the beach out of fear the boat would’ve come and gone in their absence. Moonlight turned seawater into what looked like coal tar. “I can’t remember the last time I was this cold,” said Dalia. A sudden gust of wind felt like God’s way of telling her to go back. She refused. She refused to even turn around. There was nothing behind her except a conflict bordered on three sides by worse conflicts. Israel, Sudan, Libya. The sea may not have offered safe passage, but it did offer a way out. So long as the weather cooperated and the captain did his job properly.

  “Did you know I can’t swim?” asked Omran, as if they were young again and smitten and playing some kind of guessing game to learn each other’s embarrassing secrets. “I can’t think of a reason I would’ve told you before now.”

  Dalia thought of a reason, but didn’t mention it: the vacation they’d nearly taken (years ago) to the gulf. The American war had put a hopeless kink in their plan. They’d arranged to drive south to the water. They were going to stay in a hotel. Dalia, remembering their conversation, found it almost funny. She remembered Omran saying he couldn’t wait to “dip” his feet in the water. It was easy to see now that he was confessing something. “I can’t swim, either,” said Dalia in a hasty attempt to comfort him. She regretted the lie even before she’d finished telling it. Omran knew the story about how she’d learned to swim. Her father, in a blessed and rare mood, had woken Dalia one morning before dawn. She was young. No more than ten years old. “Let’s go swimming,” he’d said. “The Great Zab River awaits.” It had been one of the few times he’d permitted Dalia to behave outside the bounds of his crushing morals. She hadn’t been allowed to play football, wear makeup, or read books in which people married. The man who’d imposed these rules and others like them had also taught Dalia to swim. The delicious mystery had gone unexplained for years. Then Dalia had realized the truth. Her father’s morals had crushed him the same way they’d crushed everybody else. A man such as that must’ve had days when he loathed his zealotry, seeking to escape God by regarding something besides Him. His wife, his daughter. It was deplorable. It was pure cowardice.