Thirteen Months of Sunrise

by Rania Mamoun

  The woman changed her position as the sun moved. In the morning she sat on the north side of the wall, in the neem trees’ shade, and in the afternoon she sat at the base of the wall on the east side, where shadows of trees and buildings advanced towards her. At night she sometimes curled up there, while other times she disappeared. Some people supposed that she slept in the mosque, while others guessed that she went to a courtyard across the street, to shelter from the rain like anyone else would. Either way, she always appeared shortly afterwards like a rainbow.

  At night she laid her head on her dark bundle, and in the morning she always set it aside. The bundle intrigued me. She often gently rested a hand on it, or stroked it as tenderly as a mother running a hand through her child’s hair, which always made me wonder. I asked myself: Does it hold a precious treasure, her life’s achievement? Or just a bunch of worthless odds and ends? Maybe it contains mementos from a past from which she alone survived? She seemed like a deep well of secrets, and her bundle was a source of curiosity to me – every time my eyes fell on it, I felt compelled to find out more.

  She unfurled a piece of hessian cloth to shield herself from the cold, while we considered if the thin dress she wore was enough cover. She kept a big tin can nearby which she drank from, a yellow plastic kawra that served as a bowl, a jar for her oils and old bottles of sparkling water, as well as other things I could never identify as I walked past.

  I ran into my neighbour from across the street on the bus one day. She was carrying heavy bags laden with vegetables so I offered to walk her home. When we passed the woman, I gave her two tomatoes and a cucumber, and my neighbour said she would send her some bread.

  ‘Why do her children let her live like this?’ I asked, in yet another attempt to learn more about her. ‘They shouldn’t let her stray so far from home!’

  ‘She’s mad, and mad people don’t let you tell them what to do,’ my neighbour said.

  ‘What’s her story?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a long one. People say she went mad when she lost all her money. Lord protect us.’

  ‘But she’s not mad!’ I said defensively.

  ‘My dear, isn’t it mad for someone to leave her home and go live in the street!’

  This was her logic for convincing me that the woman was mad, but I refused to let it sway me. Nor would I believe that she was a beggar. She seemed self-aware to me, as if she’d chosen this life willingly for reasons that were hers alone. To me, she was unlike the crazy man who my friend Mohamed and I often saw on our way back from university. That man was very tall, and wore an old, discoloured jellabiya that stopped just above the knee. He looked, in other words, just like other crazy people who’ve decided to go about in rags. He used to wander down the middle of the street, walking on the asphalt as if it were a tightrope in the circus. He held his arms out to balance and took slow steps, incredibly carefully, perhaps thinking that the cars’ blaring horns were the cheers of the crowd, and that the pedestrians were monkeys jumping about beneath him.

  ‘He thinks the gravel is a rope!’ I remember Mohamed saying.

  ‘Samuel says that madness is an illusion,’ I replied. ‘He thinks he’s tightrope walking. He believes his illusion, it’s fixed in his mind.’

  The woman with the bundle was also different to the man who walked through the market stark naked. Even when someone threw him a scrap of clothing he tore it up and stamped on it with his bare feet. It was a good thing I’d only seen him from behind, and kept my distance. He'd once thrown something hard at my friend Souad and struck her on the head.

  And she didn’t beg like the woman who pan-handled on the unpaved road, or the one with elephantiasis outside the hospital, who asked me for more when I gave her 50 piasters, saying she’d pray hard for me. I gave her a pound, and she told me to give her the 50p too.

  She was unlike all of them because she wasn’t aggressive, quarrelsome, or sly. She didn’t ask people for money, and yet, many passersby gave her what they could, as did the neighbours. One day as I was coming back from work I saw someone bring her a plate full of food, and collect another empty dish nearby. The woman thanked her and said a prayer for her, as she often said a prayer for me when I gave her a handful of change from my purse.

  On one occasion she took a roll of blue paper from the pocket of her dress and showed it to me.

  ‘Girl, will you tell me how much this is? Someone just gave it to me.’

  ‘It’s two of the new pounds, or two thousand pounds in the old piasters.’

  ‘Huh! So he tricked me, gave me a useless scrap of paper.’

  ‘No, Ma’am, they aren’t useless… they’re the new currency.’

  I smiled as I walked away. I could tell that she understood. I was surprised by her scepticism – incredulity, perhaps – that someone would give her so much money.

  Our eyes met and our fingers brushed against each other in that brief interaction. I touched her stiff, dry hand and half-expected it to crumble. I still wanted to sit with her every day, to have our morning coffee together and hear her stories, heedless of the dust kicked up by cars and inquiring looks from passersby.

  I missed her when I didn’t see her in her usual morning spot and I grew nervous, afraid I wouldn’t find her there, or hear news of her departure. My heart felt ragged when I saw her at night at the base of the mosque’s east wall, a black mass gathered in the dark. Even the dogs were afraid of her. I felt bad for her; I felt helpless. I longed for her, and thought about helping her or inviting her to come home with me, but I always feared how she might respond. I feared her stones that lay buried in my memory, because just like all villains, I too had fears.

  Cities and Other Cities

  It was starting to bother me, so I tried to shoo it away from my face but it refused to be shooed.

  There was nothing on my face that would attract a fly; no granules of sugar or specks of dirt. Even though I knew my face was clean – at least clean enough not to entice flies – I wiped it with a tissue and then took out my wallet with the little mirror to make sure.

  The fly seemed to have been waiting for me to get on the bus. I felt certain it had been expecting me; from the moment I stepped aboard and sat down, it began buzzing around me, teasing me. Before long it really started to annoy me, making me feel even more nervous than when I’d set out that morning.

  *

  I was sitting next to a woman, perhaps in her mid-forties, at the front of the bus next to the driver’s seat.

  The road unfurled itself before us, and in that moment I remembered my mother’s advice to always sit on the driver’s side as it would increase your chance of survival. I chided myself for not following her advice that day as I’d often worried about getting into an accident back in Khartoum. In the seat across from us, directly behind the driver, sat a man with a young girl next to him.

  *

  I pulled back the dark blue curtain as we passed a cemetery and recited the Fatiha for my father and all the other muslims long gone.

  From the bus, I let my eyes wander into the heart of the city, feeling filled with both a sadness for the departed and an eagerness to see everything.

  The fly, meanwhile, tried to ruin a Mostafa Sid Ahmed song for me, which was playing on the bus speakers and usually helped to calm my nerves. My initial frustration turned to steely irritation, and I became convinced that flies were the most annoying of all God’s creatures.

  I checked again that there was no reason for it to be buzzing around my face… landing on my nose... my cheek... my forehead... my eyelashes... Every time I tried to swat the fly away it outsmarted me, and eventually landed on my lips. I felt disgusted.

  At that point something evil awoke inside me: anger, hatred, the desire to kill. I slapped the fly as hard as I could, but it backfired and I hit myself square in the face. The fly slowly zig-zagged away before dropping from the air. I leant forward and took a long, hard look at it. I started to feel bad for the fly, especially as I’d also be
en caught in the crossfire. I thought it was dead, so scolded myself for killing it, and felt even worse.

  After a while I saw that the fly was moving, but hesitated to brush it off my skirt where it had fallen. It started moving more, and I realised that maybe it was just dazed or knocked out. I was relieved.

  Whatever the case, the fly had earned my sympathy, and thus my friendship. It had clearly learned a lesson from the altercation and didn’t land on my face after that. But it didn’t leave me entirely either; it began circling me gently without touching my skin.

  By then we’d reached al-Hasaheisa, about two hours outside Khartoum, and the young bus steward began passing out sweets, biscuits, chocolate, and a brand of sponge cake called Naity. I reached out to take a sweet, but the face of Hoda, a friend I’d left behind, appeared in the windowpane and she guided my hand towards a piece of the Naity, her favorite cake, instead. All of a sudden, many other beloved faces appeared and stared right at me: my mother, my sister, my friends. Some faces held a faint encouraging smile, while in others’ sadness seemed to swell, all except for his face, which wore no expression at all.

  *

  The fly circled above my head, distracting me and interrupting my daydreams until I heard a male voice call out. It came from the man sitting behind the driver, and sounded like an outburst of road rage.

  ‘Be careful, zamaleh!’ he said to our Turkish driver. The word ‘zamaleh’ isn’t part of our dialect; the only place we hear it is on TV. Maybe he’s from the country this word comes from, I thought to myself. The man who said it now had my full attention.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ the woman next to me asked, eavesdropping on the driver’s phonecall. ‘It all sounds like gibberish to me.’

  ‘Listen closely,’ I told her, unsurprised by her ignorance. ‘He’s speaking Turkish.’

  *

  Again I recalled my mother’s advice and tried not to show how annoyed I was with the woman next to me. She began snoring in her sleep and kept leaning on me; her shoulder and part of her arm were on top of mine. I edged away from her and my eyes followed a trail of little dotted clouds. They looked like cotton candy, so white and delicate and finely constructed.

  I overheard one of the passengers behind me rebuking another.

  ‘When you open the bottle the hot air gets inside… you’re on a packed bus, remind yourself you’re on a bus.’

  ‘Bro, this dip is making me need to spit.’

  ‘Then spit in a bag,’ the woman sitting next to me interjected. ‘It’s not the kind that gives you gum cancer, is it? What do you get out of it anyways?’

  *

  The music had stopped playing, so the steward put on another cassette by a young singer.

  ‘What is this rubbish?’ the man behind the driver objected. ‘We want to hear singing… this is just shouting!’

  The steward responded by playing an Othman Hussein cassette instead.

  ‘Can’t you play a music video?’ the man asked.

  ‘The TV’s out of order.’

  ‘Then fix it!’

  The steward turned to him as if he were about to say something, and then changed his mind and kept silent.

  This belligerent passenger confused me; every time he opened his mouth a different dialect came out. At first I thought he was returning from the Levant, then I guessed perhaps he was back from the Gulf. But after hearing him chat to the driver, I decided he must be from Egypt.

  *

  Meanwhile, the fly had found itself a companion and left me for the windowpane to play with its new girlfriend or boyfriend, I didn’t know which. I took the cake from my bag, broke off a tiny piece, softened it in my mouth, stuck it to the windowpane, and said to myself: No doubt I’ll be accused of a crime against civilisation for dirtying the window of a public vehicle! I began to try and lure the flies to the cake. They ignored me, so I smeared it on the glass closer to them and, eventually, my efforts succeeded.

  Why are these two flies travelling, I asked myself, and do they even know they’re on the road? What will they do in Khartoum, my old hometown? I would never have left if I hadn’t been forced to years ago. What would happen if I opened the window and shooed one of the flies out; would it feel lost and miss its companion?

  Would I feel lost when we arrived in Khartoum, after having lived elsewhere for so long? My worries returned: how would I feel about returning, how would I navigate the city as a stranger? Could I handle its crowds, dust, high temperatures, and fast pace? And how would I deal with being lonely?

  *

  ‘You’re all I have in the world,’ he said that day, and then asked: ‘What do I mean to you?’ I didn’t answer him, I just looked into his eyes and saw that he meant it.

  Much later, after I’d left everything behind, long after the man I’d loved more than anyone had left me, I asked myself: Could it be that the sincerity I’d seen in his eyes was false? Or had I misread it at the time? My only companion, now, was loneliness.

  *

  The steward handed out bottles of soda, and there was just one kind to choose: 7Up. The irritable man sitting behind the driver turned down the 7Up and asked for Pepsi instead. With exasperation, the steward told him that they were out of Pepsi, this was all they had.

  ‘Fine, I don’t want anything,’ the man said.

  ‘Good Lord, what an ungrateful… So rude!’ The woman next to me said.

  Although I thought she was being a bit harsh, I smiled in response, wondering why the man didn’t speak like everyone else on the bus.

  The young man handing out drinks offered one to my seatmate with a grin.

  ‘What’s up, 7Up?’

  She seemed to catch on to his sense of mischief. ‘Oh no, we don’t drink 7Up here,’ she said in an accent.

  We all laughed, the steward handed the woman a bottle for us to share, and I thanked her.

  *

  My reverie transported me far away from everything around me, even my fly. When we arrived at the Souq esh-Shabi station and market, I looked towards the window and found my fly still enjoying its friendship with the other fly. ‘At least you won’t face Khartoum’s midday heat alone like me,’ I told it.

  The door opened, and as soon as my feet touched the ground the fly landed on my face, just for a moment. I didn’t swat it away; I imagined that was its way of saying goodbye. I felt a sense of tenderness towards it, and thanked it.

  My nervousness spun faster, accompanying me as I joined the crowd, while above us the sun shone mightily down.

  One-Room Sorrows

  ‘Mama, me hungry,’ says the little boy of four, begging his mother. She looks at him, her heart torn to shreds by hunger, sadness, pain and defeat.

  ‘Patience… patience, baby.’

  Five children and their mother open their eyes, and mouths, and hands, entreating God. In their one-room home, the bleak and lonely night wraps itself around them, bitterly cold, and a sharp hunger tears through their bodies.

  In the centre of the room is a stove with a few pieces of kindling gathered by her eldest son, twelve years old. She wishes for warmth to flow through their joints and give them what everyone, if only with a bit of kindling, deserves: a feeling of warmth.

  She puts a pot of water on the stove, and wishes for them to fall asleep with faint smiles upon their lips, for them to imagine, just like every other night, they are eating meat, for them to do what everyone else does: dream.

  ‘I saw Dad’s friend Abu Salah today,’ says the eldest. ‘That tall guy was with him, the one I don’t like, and he said that I’m not clever like his son. He was driving a nice car, I couldn’t tell what colour it was, but I heard somebody say it’s really, really expensive.’

  He is met with his mother’s silence, maybe sadness.

  ‘Weren’t they with Dad when he went to war?’ he continues, trying to get her to talk.‘He was killed and they came back?’

  Again he is met with silence, or sadness.

  ‘If Dad had come hom
e, would he have a car like the one I saw?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why, Mum?’

  ‘Because they... ’

  ‘Why!’

  ‘Shush, that’s enough.’

  In an out-of-the-way corner, a cat joins them in everything: conversation, cold, and hunger.

  ‘She’s hungry.’

  ‘I saw her eating one of her kittens yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, it had died.’

  ‘Why, Mum?’

  ‘People say that cats eat their dead kittens as their way of showing love.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ says the eldest. ‘It just shows they’re hungry.’

  ‘Mum, are you gonna eat us when you get hungry?’ asks the boy of four, and she smiles, tells him no, hugs him, and sadly considers his need to ask.

  Stray Steps

  I hadn't intended to push myself to the edge of my ability, a full two streets from home. I had planned to go beg at the bakery on the next street over.

  My crippling hunger set me in motion. It kept me from doing anything, even sleeping. I rallied myself and pushed past it to go out, dreaming about bread, even just a single stale piece. I’m used to begging from workers at the bakery: they’re used to giving me what I want, and taking what they want in return. Some buy me falafel from the woman who sells it fresh in front of the bakery, hot and delicious, just so I’ll stop howling. I know what they want from how much falafel and bread they give me. I don’t care what they do with my body, they don’t have much desire for it anyway. What can this sickly, tired, and skinny body give them? What flames can it quench?