These are the memories of Pharaoh’s Hills that have stayed with her. Everything else she’s forgotten, because she now forgets a lot of things. She often leaves the food to burn on the stove and the smoke alarm disturbs her neighbours. She doesn’t quite understand how she’s stumbled into old age so suddenly and without warning.
Said picks her up in his limousine. He sits next to her in the big church with the high ceiling and she listens politely. The priest stands in front of her, neat and smiling in a simple grey suit, and welcomes her warmly, as does everyone else. They shake her hand energetically and introduce themselves without any fuss. They make her feel that she has always been one of them. She smiles politely and stands up when they do and sits down when they do. She nods her head at them and returns their smiles in kind. She listens closely to the sermon.
One day a man approached Christ to ask about his future. ‘You will die when your oldest son reaches the age of twenty-five,’ the Lord replied. The man, who did not have a son, wept, for he didn’t want to die. Fearing the prophecy, he avoided marriage altogether and lived alone, never going near any woman. One day a young man knocked on his door and begged leave to spend the night, as he was a traveller. In the morning, the young man shook his sleeping host and found him dead. Twenty years later, the young man discovered that the kind host who had taken him in and died on the morrow was his father.
Hend has heard different versions of this story, but she can’t remember where or when. She muses on its significance. It seems to be saying that man is a pitiful creature. As far as Hend is concerned, there was no need for Christ or any other prophet to prove this truth. She nods her head wisely. The parable has moved her and she wants the others to see this. The man in the grey suit descends from the pulpit and shakes her hand again enthusiastically. He sits next to her and another priest takes his place in the pulpit. He too wears a grey suit and a wide smile, and he welcomes her publicly to the church. The congregation all turn to stare at her and smile. She is getting tired of all these smiles and nodding heads and decides to change the expression on her face to one of mute indifference. The second priest says, ‘A traveller met a wise man and asked him for counsel. The wise man pointed to his heart and said, “Cultivate therein three things: modesty and the knowledge of sin, fear, and lastly courage, for if a heart understands not sin it will never change, and if it feels no fear it will discover no need to change, and if it possesses not courage it will be incapable of changing.”’ Hend used to believe that she had managed to exorcise the ghost of sin that had accompanied her throughout her childhood and youth, and that she had finally freed herself of her fear, but she realised long ago that this was untrue. As she is making up her mind to leave, the hymns begin, rising from the lips of the congregation in powerful waves of sound.
In the corridors leading to the room where lunch has been laid out, she examines the pictures of Christian missions in familiar places: the alleys of Sohag, the neighbourhoods of Darfur. A feeling of listlessness and despair creeps over her. It appears that the only man ever to ask her out in New York is trying to convert her. She feels nothing looking at the images of children who resemble her own son crowding around the milk cartons and relief supplies. She feels that she is nothing but an indefinite noun, a pitiful anonymity, a woman solitary and neglected, sitting by herself at the far corner of a table. Said sits next to her; Said, whom she had imagined – only imagined – was in love with her. The thought had made her happy, because she wanted to imagine that someone was in love with her. Said smiles and laughs as he exchanges pleasantries with friends and neighbours. She eats slowly, mechanically, never taking her eyes off the hamburger on her paper plate. She smiles absently as the memory of Angele and the halva sandwich comes floating back to her. She wonders if she’s turning into a version of Angele, a plump woman with short hair, crushed by fear, seeking out imaginary walls to flatten herself against. Pluto is facing her down for the next few years, after all. The house she grew up in, the familiar houses of neighbours, have vanished into the thin air of time. Her only vista now is the endless corridor of Flatbush Avenue, twisting and turning into alien side streets.
She leaves just as she came. She gets into the car with Said. She notices that he seems unusually cheerful.
‘How come you’re in such a good mood?’ she asks him timidly.
‘I’m always happy, as my name says.’
‘How lucky for you.’
‘If a person has faith, they’ll always be happy.’
She feels as if she’s heard this before. She’s heard it a lot, heard it and even repeated it herself many times. But she feigns innocence, to please him.
‘Faith in what?’ she asks stupidly.
‘In God, of course.’
The look on his face leads her to worry that he’s about to start preaching in earnest. She suddenly realises that he has prepared his catechism in advance, thinking to change her life, to save her from herself, but she alone knows that in this lesson lies her destruction. She struggles to evoke a cord of empathy with which to bind this stranger to her. She gazes at the vertical scar on his face.
‘Do you know that you’re the first man to ask me out in this city?’ she murmurs wistfully. She hopes to soften his heart and to make him see her as a woman.
He smiles and avoids her eyes.
She continues, ‘I want to feel free tonight. Free from expectations of any kind. Free to save myself in my own way, free to be myself. Do you know what that means?’
She laughs and throws her head back coyly on the passenger seat of the limousine, but he doesn’t say anything. She suggests they take a walk so that she can tell him more, but she’s all wound up now; she feels hurt and also offended. She would have thrown herself into his arms if he’d asked her to, would have stayed next to him in the car forever, with no shame. Her excitement is cosmic. Mars has recently moved into her zodiac, adding layers of cruel impetuosity to her usual anxiety. Said is unmoved. She tells him the story of her grandmother the Guest as they sit eating ice cream on Seventh Avenue, but he is restrained and uncomfortable, an insipid smile plastered on his face.
She watches his car move away down the long dark street, then she goes into Coco Bar – the bar below her apartment – and orders a beer. She regrets not having told him her father’s story instead: maybe it would have been more effective. She reproaches herself for not having given him the opportunity to be a hero: men have their dream roles too, she muses sadly. Now she feels unbearably heavy with a longing to open up and talk. She looks around her. Most of the customers in the bar are women sitting by themselves, like her. She wonders who listens to the stories spinning around in dusty corners of their brains.
She remembers her father sitting on the mat in the eastern balcony surrounded by camphor and tamarisk trees. He was telling how Noah spoke from his ark to his son, who was standing on the mountain that would save him from the deluge: ‘There is no protection from God’s judgment, save for those who have earned His mercy.’ The eastern balcony lay wide open to the sky. Hend was rubbing her father’s feet. His head lay in her mother’s lap. Stars shone down on the circle that her brothers formed around him. They were all close to each other in age, except for the oldest, who had grown tall and proud of his small beard. He disappeared into God’s way for a few days every month and his mother would say, ‘He’s studying,’ because she refused to believe that the handsome, gentle son who used to collect stamps and play the harmonica and devour comic books had become an Islamist. Little Hend didn’t understand why he came up the steps that led to the eastern balcony with those deliberate, epic strides that day and screamed in her father’s face: ‘Shame on you! It’s forbidden – what you’re doing is a sin!’
Their father raised his head from his wife’s lap and sat up. The younger brothers, who were all engrossed in the story of Noah, looked at each other and then at their big brother. Their father tapped his knee with his fingers in a silent drumbeat of fury. He didn’t say a word and
the oldest son, tall and skinny in his spotlessly white scented jalaba, ran away, shouting an expression that he’d learned by heart: ‘May God curse the one who drinks it or traffics in it or buys it.’ He hid in the pantry and cried alone amongst the sacks piled up in the corners and the odour of mouldy wheat. He cried like a small, terrified child. ‘I’m afraid that he’ll go to hell, Mother. You know how much I love him.’ Their father withdrew into his room, leaning on little Hend’s shoulder. ‘Are you sad, Papa?’ she asked him. He didn’t reply. He lay down on his bed and turned on the small radio on the nightstand to listen to the BBC news bulletin.
She massaged his tired feet, as he liked her to do. Her palm was small and frail and comforting. With each stroke she tried to dissipate the unnatural fog of silence that enveloped him. Their mother came in, leading her oldest son, still crying, by the hand. Their father smiled when he saw him, then he suddenly burst out laughing as though just at that moment discovering that this young man was his firstborn child. Her brother hung his head and said, ‘I’m afraid for you, Papa.’ Their father smiled. ‘The mountain will save me from the waters.’ The son replied with a practised formula to prove his claim: ‘“That thing of which much intoxicates is forbidden even in the smallest quantity.”’ Their father smiled again. ‘“A little of it strengthens the heart and does away with sorrow.” Do you know who said that? The famously strict jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Which means that you’re more of a Hanbali than Ibn Hanbal himself.’ Her eldest brother cried and her father laughed. He’d found his sense of humour again now, and was insisting that beer was ‘a great pharaonic invention’. Then he went to sleep, complaining of a pain in his left shoulder.
Many years later, his daughter sits in a small bar in a neighbourhood of Brooklyn. She stares at the foam in her glass, the white bubbles popping as they settle on its surface. The pretty young bartender looks at her sympathetically. She asks about her son. ‘Where’s the cute little man who I always see you with?’ Hend smiles at the question and points to the ceiling of the bar, above which the boy lies on his bed waiting for her to come home.
Hend sleeps a lot because she is always tired, because she is all alone, and because she doesn’t have anything particular to do. She pulls the covers over her face to hide her exhaustion from him. He snuggles up to her as he watches drawn faces like her own talking on the TV screen. ‘The signs of depression are constant fatigue, irritability, apathy, feelings of sadness, and suicidal thoughts. Ask your doctor about treatment. Depression is painful. Ask your doctor about Cymbalta. Cymbalta can help.’ He watches the faces in the commercial as they materialise and then fade into nothing. He shakes her under the covers. ‘Mom, sometimes you don’t answer me when I talk to you and you act sad – very sad,’ he repeats in English.
‘So?’ she asks wearily.
‘You should go see a doctor. You might die!’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘But if you do die, for example, what would happen to me?’
‘You’d go back to Egypt.’
‘But I don’t want to go back to Egypt.’
‘We have to go back sometime.’
‘Why do we have to? If you’re not happy here you could take Cymbalta, or go to the doctor.’
She buries her head in the pillow and laughs. He doesn’t like it when she laughs at him. He turns his face away angrily, and she burrows her head deep under the pillow and goes to sleep.
6
Tango
She hears his footsteps on the stairs, and wonders how one person can make all that noise. The first time she saw him in the building he was standing on the landing in front of her door. He had tripped over her son’s bicycle and dropped the carton of bottles that he was carrying. When she opened the door, he was picking up the pieces of broken glass that had scattered all over the landing and cursing the landlord and the tenants and anyone else he could think of. She quietly took her son’s bicycle inside and shut the door, leaving him to figure out how to clean up the spilled beer. The smell of alcohol lingered on her floor for a long time after, the smell of hops and beery foam, as well as a few tiny shards of broken glass. The second time he saw her he tried to be more pleasant. He said that the landlord rarely rented apartments to families with children and that he was glad she and her son had moved in – it made the building seem more cheerful. She nodded as she looked at the dark, narrow stairs and breathed in the strong wood smell that rose from the old banister. As he talked, she looked everywhere but at him, then she quietly went up to her apartment.
He lives in the apartment right above hers. Every time he goes up or down the stairs he always has a carton of bottles with him. He wears a baseball cap and rides around on a bicycle that he locks up on the ground floor of the building. He lives alone. She guessed this from the slow, rhythmic sound of his footsteps tapping above her every night. She has come to know the sound of his hurried steps on the stairs too, what time he goes to work, and what time he comes back. She knows that he eavesdrops on the tenants with those sharp ears of his. Whenever she meets him on the stairs, he says the same thing: ‘Did you hear the ruckus in the building yesterday? That band and the loud music? I have no idea why the landlord rents to crazy people like that. I can’t sleep in this building! Children, live music, bizarre neighbours . . .’
She leaves him cursing and complaining and goes into her apartment. She knows for a fact that he has his own share of bizarre visitors, such as that petite woman who comes to see him from time to time. She locks up her bike next to his and climbs the stairs with a six-pack of beer. When she comes to visit, the loud music moves from the apartment next door to the one upstairs – his apartment – and drowns out the rhythmic noise of their love making. The climax of their sighs and moans floats in and out of the regular, booming beat above her head. She turns up her TV or the AC but she can never sleep until the battle upstairs is finally over. The woman always leaves at midnight on the dot. She descends the stairs with the empty beer bottles, which she throws in the garbage chute, then takes her bike and rides off into the night.
Occasionally the tiny fair-skinned woman disappears for days, and sometimes weeks, and then he enters into a period of absolute silence. During these periods she rarely hears the sound of his footsteps above her, just the rush of water flushing in the toilet or the clanking of pots and pans in the kitchen. She smells the odour of coffee coming from his open window. She knows that his bed is exactly above her own, and when he tosses and turns she pictures him mumbling restlessly in his sleep.
During these periods of hibernation, Hend turns her attention to her downstairs neighbour. She has woven a story out of the young woman’s comings and goings and her boyfriend’s visits. The smell of tacos drifts up to her from the downstairs window.
Hend draws perverse comfort from the cheerless building. She takes pleasure in sharing intimate moments with anonymous, unsuspecting people; people who surely recognise the timbre of her voice when she yells at her son and the sound of water bubbling and purring in her pipe at night. They know that she sleeps alone, and that she talks in her sleep. She always leaves the TV on at night because she is afraid of the silence. Her next-door neighbours know her son’s name and which school he attends. They see her crossing the street with him every morning. They know what time she washes the dishes every day, and recognise the smell of tea with cloves wafting out from her window in the evenings. They know the sound of her laugh and the nights when insomnia stalks her: the nights when she lies awake, terrified that her heart might suddenly stop beating and that she’ll be forced to leave behind forever the young boy peacefully asleep in his bed. She imagines him rubbing his eyes awake in the morning, then shaking her cold, rigid body in a growing crescendo of terror. She has scrawled the names and numbers of all the people she knows in Brooklyn on the kitchen wall – Emilia, Said, Fatima – and she keeps his passport visible on the kitchen table. That way anyone who finds him could send him to his father. He would simply pick up his passport and go bac
k, leaving her body for the landlord and the police to deal with, and the Refugee Aid Society would toss it into any old cemetery.
She hears footsteps from the old wooden stairwell. She knows they aren’t her upstairs neighbour’s heavy steps. She recognises them: they belong to his blonde lady friend. But the tiny woman doesn’t keep going up the next flight of stairs to his apartment. She stops at her apartment. Hend waits for the knock, and when she opens the door she notices that the woman’s nose is red and swollen. Up close, she looks to be in her late forties or early fifties. She holds a little girl by the hand, about the same age as her own son. ‘Excuse me for barging in on you like this,’ she says tersely, as though they’ve known each other for a long time. ‘Could I leave my daughter with you for a few minutes? I have to talk to him. I’ll be right back.’ Then she sprints up the stairs. The girl, who seems very wise for her age, steps inside as though being taken in charge by a stranger is the most usual of circumstances, something that happens to her every day. She walks into the room and sits down next to the boy, who is busy watching TV. They don’t exchange a word at first. They just sit there and watch the cartoons for a while. Finally, they begin to talk as though they had been sitting on that couch together since the day they were born.
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