Rebels by Accident

by Patricia Dunn

  “You don’t know this artist’s name?”

  “The painting isn’t signed, and when I asked Baba, he just said, ‘some guy.’ I don’t think it’s his kind of thing. He didn’t even want me to bring the painting into the apartment, but Mom convinced him to let me have it.” I shrug. “Mom needed more storage space for all the stuff she never gets rid of. You know,” I say, trying again to make Sittu laugh, “she still has shoes from when I was in first grade.”

  “The painting that made you feel on fire—was it blood orange and canary yellow with stripes of red?”

  “That’s the one! How did you know?”

  “It’s your baba’s painting.”

  “Baba?! I’ve never seen him paint or do anything creative at all.”

  “When he was younger, one of his favorite things to do was go to the Egyptian Museum and sketch.”

  “The ancient artifacts?”

  “No, the tourists. Your father loved to sketch people, and then he’d come home and make abstract paintings, like the one in your room.”

  “You mean that painting is of a tourist?”

  “Or inspired by one.”

  “Probably an American.” I laugh.

  “Why do you say that?” Sittu asks, but her chuckle shows she knows exactly what I mean.

  “Deanna says American tourists are loud and obnoxious and always pissing people off, which makes locals want to punch them in the nose.”

  “Not all American tourists,” Sittu says with a smile. I wonder if she thinks of me as a tourist, though I guess that’s what I am.

  “Would it be okay for us to go to the Egyptian Museum?” I ask.

  “Of course we can.” Sittu smiles wide at me. “I’d be very happy to take you.”

  “How about tomorrow? I mean today. It’s already tomorrow.”

  “Today, it might be best to stay near home instead.”

  “Is the museum very far? As far as Giza?”

  “It all depends on traffic.”

  “We can just go for a little while—”

  “You are like your father—persistent.” She sighs, looking out into the night.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Habibti.” Sittu touches my cheek. “Don’t apologize for asking for what you want. I would love to take you, and we will go, but the museum is at Tahrir Square, and tomorrow…” She pauses. “Well, it’s best to be closer to home tomorrow.”

  “What were you going to say? What’s happening at Ta…Ta…”

  “Tah-rir,” Sittu says.

  “Does it have something to do with Tunisia?”

  Sittu pulls her shawl tighter around her body. “Do you want to get a sweater?”

  “I’m not cold,” I say, frustrated that she’s changing the subject. She’s doing exactly what my parents do—treating me like a child.

  Sittu just nods. At least she’s not trying to tell me how I should feel—“You must be cold” or “You must be hot” or “Put on a sweater anyway. Trust me”—like my parents do.

  “You know,” she says, forcing a smile like that’s going to make me forget about my question, “when your baba was a kid, we would all sleep out here in the summer. Your baba called it balcony camping.”

  “Sittu, please tell me what’s going on tomorrow,” I say.

  The expression on her face makes me want to run back to bed and pull the covers over my head.

  Instead of answering my question, she says: “‘I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.’”

  What is she talking about?

  She continues, “‘Instead, they overlap and share common principles—principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.’” She pauses. “Mariam, do you know who said these words?”

  I’m sure she can tell from the clueless expression on my face that I have no idea. I shake my head.

  “Your president.”

  “Wow, Obama said that about Muslims? That’s so cool.”

  “The summer he took office, he addressed the world from Cairo. It was an important, historic speech—and you don’t know this?”

  If Sittu is trying to shame me, well, it’s working. I don’t want to tell her that Baba always shuts off the world news.

  “It was important that your President Obama won the election and that he made this speech, but words without action are like those cars down there when they’re out of petrol: they get us nowhere. Since your president made his speech last summer, conditions in Egypt have only gotten worse, much worse. For Muslims and Christians—for everyone.”

  “President Obama has something to do with what’s happening at the square today?”

  “Tahrir Square,” she says, sounding like Baba when he’s lost patience with me. “The United States has given Mubarak a lot of aid over the thirty years he’s been in power, but it goes into his pockets and those of his corrupt police force.”

  “Mubarak, he is the president, right?”

  She slams her hand on the railing. “A president is elected. In the thirty years that he has been running this country into the ground, Mubarak has never been elected. The elections we have here are not real.”

  “They’re fixed?” I say, remembering the conversation from yesterday.

  “More like broken!”

  “Well, if President Obama knew this—”

  “Mariam, don’t they teach anything in those American schools? Doesn’t your father talk to you about what’s going on in this world? I didn’t raise my son to turn his back on his country.”

  “My father loves America.”

  “Your father’s country is Egypt!” Sittu shouts.

  She must see that I’m totally confused, because she takes my hand and says, “For the past thirty years, this man has kept all the money America gives us. So our streets stay dirty and food prices soar. Parents can’t feed their families. And our people grow more humiliated and angry. Do you see this?” she asks, showing me her palm.

  It looks like a hand. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see there.

  “The dirt. It’s from pollution—pollution that only gets worse as the streets get filthier, as the people become hungrier and their shame deepens, all because of this man who calls himself the president.”

  Sittu’s anger and my confusion are making me tired and cold, and I suddenly just want to go to bed.

  Sittu turns her head toward the traffic. “When your father was at the university—”

  “I had no idea Baba went to college here.”

  “Yes, before he went to America. He had one semester left before he would have graduated. But during a student demonstration against the government—”

  “He was arrested, like you were?” I ask, not believing that my father would have ever done anything illegal.

  “It was much worse for your father.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Habibti, forgive me. I don’t know why I’m talking of such things.”

  “Please tell me,” I plead.

  “I can’t tonight.”

  “You’re treating me just like my parents do.” I stand, snagging the back of my nightshirt on the cracked plastic of the chair back. “Please don’t.”

  Sittu looks up at me, and instead of the tough-ass grandmother I’m used to seeing, she looks fragile, breakable.

  “It’s too much right now.” She looks away.

  “Please, Sittu. Talk to me.”

  She sighs. “He was interrogated.”

  “You mean, like, he was tortured?” I sit back down, not sure I want to hear any more but desperate to understand this piece of my father’s life
that I’ve never heard spoken about before.

  “The protest, like the others, was peaceful. Students were chanting, holding signs on the campus. I believe they were protesting against the government for arresting a writer.”

  “Like the bloggers who were arrested?”

  “Yes, except writers wrote for printed newspapers at that time.” Sittu clears her throat and shifts in her seat. “Your father was one of many students arrested that day, and all of them were beaten very badly.”

  “Baba’s scar,” I say. “The one over his right eye. He always says he doesn’t remember how he got it.”

  “Yes, the scar comes from that time, but not from a police baton. Your father would never tell me what happened in any detail, just that it was a…burn.”

  We sit without talking for what feels like longer than the flight to Egypt. I break the silence first. “Sittu?”

  “Yes,” she says, still not meeting my gaze.

  “Is that why Baba wanted to leave Egypt?”

  “My son,” Sittu says, turning to me, “never wanted to leave. It was his father and I who forced him to go. We were too afraid of what might happen if he stayed. But your father didn’t want to go. I don’t think he’s ever forgiven his father—or me.” Sittu wipes her eyes with the back of her shawl. I don’t see tears in her eyes, but it looks like she’s been crying for years.

  “I didn’t mean to upset—”

  “Mariam, my love, there are many things that upset me right now, but you, habibti, are not one of them.”

  I think about what I said to Baba, calling Sittu a horrible woman, and now I want to beg her to forgive me.

  “It was a peaceful demonstration—no violence. Then the police came and beat the students and used tear gas on them.”

  “You did the right thing,” I say quietly. “You wanted him to live in a country where people don’t risk going to prison for speaking out.”

  “Oh, Mariam. To me, they teach history in America the same way they teach it here—with many distortions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a smart girl. You will understand someday.”

  “Sittu, what’s happening tomorrow? Please tell me.”

  “Tomorrow is a national holiday for the police.” She shakes her head. “There is a call for people to gather and protest the police’s abuse and oppression we experience every day in this country, as well as all the other things we have talked about tonight. Habibti, this is a very hard time for Egypt right now, and, well…Egypt needs to take care of Egypt.”

  “Is that what you wrote about online?”

  “I blog a little.” She half smiles.

  “I don’t even have a Facebook page.”

  “Your parents.”

  I nod.

  “Well, maybe when you’re sixteen. Isn’t that the day after tomorrow?” she asks, looking happier now.

  “Do you want to go to the protest tomorrow?” I ask. Now I’m the one changing the subject.

  “Habibti, this is for the youth of Egypt.”

  “Should Deanna and I go?”

  “No!” Sittu looks upset, but this time I don’t take it personally. I know this isn’t about me. She clears her throat. “Miss Deanna seems to be having a good time in Cairo.”

  “A great time,” I say, realizing this is the first time Sittu and I have been alone since Deanna and I arrived.

  “Love makes everything great—even the mediocre.”

  “Hassan seems to like Deanna a lot too.”

  Below us, brakes screech. Then there’s a large bang. I jump to my feet to peer over the balcony’s railing.

  Right below us, three cars have crashed into one another in an exit from the traffic circle.

  “Sittu! Should we call someone?”

  “Soon there will be more someones to help than will be helpful. Just sit and watch.”

  Sure enough, Sittu is right. The drivers get out, inspecting the damage to their cars, but so do all the drivers and passengers of all the other cars that are stopped in the traffic circle because of the accident.

  “Back home, they call that rubbernecking. But people don’t get out of their cars or anything. They just slow down to look. My mom calls them looky-loos.”

  “Looky-loos,” Sittu says. “I like that. There are those who live life and those who stand by and comment on it. Here in Misr, it’s not enough to just look. Everyone needs to give advices.”

  “Advice,” I correct.

  “No, I meant advices,” she says. “You see, in Misr everyone gives advice in the plural. Everyone knows how to best live everyone else’s lives, you know? The problem is there aren’t many people who have any idea how to best live their own life. But who knows? Maybe tomorrow there will be less advices and more action.”

  “Advices,” I say. “I like that.”

  “Do you mind some more advices from your old Sittu?”

  “Okay,” I say, now wanting to hear everything she has to say.

  “First loves are a very powerful and all-consuming phenomenon. It is stranger than politics. Deanna will seem for a while like she’s from another planet. Just know it’s not space invaders or you; it’s just crazy love.”

  “Like crazy drivers?”

  “Exactly. You think you know where you’re going, and you’re happy getting there until, one day, you realize you haven’t any idea where you are or how you got there.”

  “I understand that,” I say.

  “Oh?” Sittu says, arching her eyebrows. “Why is this?”

  “No reason.” Could I sound any less convincing?

  “I ‘fessed up,’ as they say in your country, about all that happened with my son and me. Now it’s your turn. My lips are sealed to others. You can trust me.”

  I believe her.

  “Well, Hassan…”

  “You like Hassan.”

  I nod.

  “Maybe love?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Do you feel crazy?”

  Looking down at the street and the people who just had the accident and everyone who gathered around them sharing advices, I realize that’s exactly how I feel. “Like crazy traffic.”

  “But you are willing to step aside for your friend,” Sittu says.

  “It’s clear he likes her, and she’s so into him.”

  “Remember what I said about giving away too much?”

  “That I’ll end up with a hole in my heart.”

  “You are a good friend, Mariam, and maybe your friendship with Deanna is strong enough to fill that hole.” Sittu pauses before she says, “Life doesn’t always give us what we want.”

  I nod. I know this very well.

  “But sometimes, Mariam,” Sittu says, grabbing my hand, “life gives us exactly what we need, though we don’t always know we need it until we get it.”

  “I’m feeling kind of tired now.”

  But Sittu keeps talking. “Sometimes we expect more from those who are closest to our heart. They reflect back so much of ourselves. Of course, this isn’t always the best. But like I said, in Misr, we all know how to best live your life, yet we are never too sure how to live our own. You understand me, habibti?”

  I nod, but I don’t know what it is I really understand—except that just now I could hear her love when she called me habibti.

  “See,” she says, pointing at the traffic, “everybody’s back in their cars and traffic is moving again. Sooner or later, we always get back to it.

  “And, Mariam, if you’d just gone a few more feet in the pyramid today, it would have gotten so much easier. It’s still hot, but the ceiling is almost forty feet high, and there’s much more light. Sometimes if you force yourself to keep going, you find the most amazing surprises.” She shrugs. “But we all are ready in o
ur own time.”

  She knew all along. Of course she did.

  As I kiss Sittu good night, she whispers one last piece of advice in my ear: “Roll Deanna on her side. She’ll snore less.”

  Back in my room, I move Deanna so she is facing me, and the snoring stops. I stare at her and wonder if Sittu is right. Will love make her act crazy?

  chapter

  SIXTEEN

  “Mar, wake up!” Deanna screeches from in front of the computer.

  With one eye open and the other half-shut, I grumble, “Let me sleep.”

  “Do you hear that singing? All the voices echoing each other?”

  “It’s the adhan—the call to prayer.” I rub my eyes. “There are a lot of mosques nearby,” I say, realizing I do remember some things from when I was here as a kid.

  “I love this place,” Deanna says. “To wake up to a symphony every morning…” She turns to the computer.

  “I’m going back to sleep,” I mumble, rolling away from her.

  “You have to see this,” Deanna says.

  I ignore her. She keeps talking.

  “I checked out Hassan’s Facebook page. I wanted to see if he, you know, mentioned anything about yesterday or me in his update.”

  “And?” I try to sound disinterested, but I jump out of bed so fast I bang my knee into the edge of the nightstand, knocking the book with the pseudo-Arab lover boy on the cover onto the floor.

  “Ow!” I rub my knee as I wobble over to Deanna.

  “You okay? That had to hurt.”

  “So did he say anything?” I ask, more focused on the computer screen than on the pain in my leg.

  “I don’t know. His update is in Arabic. But look at this page—there’s this group with eighty thousand fans. It’s huge. They’re calling for today to be the Day of Revolt. It’s officially some national holiday for the police, who they say torture people and stuff.”

  “Yeah, I know about it.” I turn away, catching my reflection in Sittu’s true mirror, still not seeing how I look any different than I do in any other mirror.