by Donia Kamal
We began to move. As I tried to determine the trajectories of stones over our heads, a small one hit my shoulder. My father panicked. “What was that? Are you hurt?”
“Not at all, Baba. It was just a pebble.”
We walked until we were farther away from the action and quickened our pace as we approached Tahrir Square. By the time we got there, my father’s breathing had quickened and his chest was wheezing—not at all reassuring. “Baba, you’re going home now,” I told him. “This is too much for you, and we have no idea what’s going to happen.”
“But I don’t want to leave. Listen, when I get tired I’ll tell you to put me in a taxi.”
“Oh, so you’re just going to abandon me here? I thought you would at least tell me I should go home too.”
He went quiet for a few seconds, and then said, “Look, even if I tell you to leave, you never would. And I wouldn’t have the heart to tell you to leave in the first place. You must stay. Stay close to where it’s happening. Stay with the people. Let’s see what the bastards are going to do next.”
We walked around the square and kept running into friends and colleagues. My father also met friends and began to feel better; his breathing was calmer as he got into lively discussions. I stayed close to him and kept an eye on the time. The square was filling up. A skinny young man climbed a lamppost near the middle and installed a pair of big speakers. He started to say something into a microphone—his voice was distorted and barely decipherable, and I strained my ears to hear. “This is the Radio of the Revolution. Statement number one.”
I didn’t hear the rest because I burst out laughing. It was a revolution now, the boy had decided. Did a few thousand people in the streets of Cairo, and in some of the provinces, make a revolution? I couldn’t stop laughing.
Then I heard my father’s voice: “Enough now—it could be a revolution with half this number. Clearly you don’t understand a thing, you pessimist. Who knows what could happen?”
“So how about you go home,” I told him, “and come back if it turns out to be a revolution? I promise I would come get you myself. I’ll pay for your taxi to the revolution’s front door.”
He was annoyed by my sarcasm, but was persuaded in the end to go home. I put him in a taxi at the edge of the square.
“Don’t leave unless it gets too violent. Don’t give up too soon.”
“You really want to get rid of me, don’t you?”
“Don’t be scared of getting caught,” he said in a serious tone. “I would get you out.”
“Yeah, sure, because you have so many police officer friends.”
“No, but I’ll find people who are friends with the bastards.”
I finally said good-bye to him and went back to wait for the inevitable moment of dispersion.
11
The vegetables at the greengrocer’s looked fresh. Eggplant it was, then. I selected a few of the large black ones, feeling them with both hands to make sure they were neither too soft nor too hard. They had to appeal to my sense of touch, as did the few tomatoes and green peppers I picked next. I also got baladi onions. It baffled me that some people preferred the milder shallots. There was fresh garlic, so though I was only going to need a few cloves, I picked two bulbs. With garlic in particular, I always liked to buy more than I needed. I paid and carried my plastic bags to the nearby corner store. I didn’t like big supermarkets and preferred instead to go to this small store, five minutes’ walk from my place. I got a large can of tomatoes, a bottle of vegetable oil for frying, another of corn oil, a large packet of salt—I was out of salt—and a medium-sized bottle of vinegar. Then I went to the butcher shop right next door. I asked for three-quarters of a kilo of ground beef and watched as the butcher pressed and minced it. The bags were getting heavier in my hands and leaving marks on my fingers. I added the bag of ground beef to my load and set off on foot. At the spice store I asked for an assortment: nutmeg, ground mint, black pepper, ground coriander, some mastic. The bags were heavy. I considered taking a taxi home, but decided to walk. There was no bakery nearby, so I thought I’d later ask the building’s caretaker to get me a few loaves of baladi bread. Back home, I dropped the bags on the floor and threw myself onto the sofa. The pain I was feeling was real—it didn’t go away when I rubbed my hands. The bags were on the floor before me. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I woke up three hours later, I had no idea where I was.
You are the hope, the world, the dreams
When you’re pleased I smile to the hidden days
Warda’s voice would help me cook. The bags had been waiting on the floor for hours. I stood in the corner of the kitchen and unpacked them. Then I started peeling the onions. I didn’t like food processors and preferred to chop the onions by hand to get the size and shape right: small cubes that were still thick enough to add substance to the recipe. To that end I would endure the tears and burning in my eyes. I placed the onion in a small saucepan with a bit of butter. Warda’s voice continued to flow out of my laptop.
I love you as much as what has passed
I love you as much as what’s yet to come
She could be so optimistic, Warda. Though she somehow managed to reach the heights of optimism and the depths of depression in the span of the same playlist. The onion turned golden. I added the ground beef and covered the saucepan. Now I needed to peel the eggplants. They were just right, not too soft and not too hard. I wondered if I should peel all of them, but no, six would be enough for a medium dish. Once they were peeled and sliced, I placed them in a big bowl of water and added a couple of drops of vinegar. I cut the remaining onions, the green peppers, and the tomatoes into rings, then heated some oil to fry everything.
There was a lot to think about. My relationship with Ali hadn’t changed. His innocence, his passion, the fresh look in his eyes—I was still in awe of all these things. I did not tire of looking into his eyes.
I told my father about Ali and he listened with interest. “Do you love him, then?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. He is just significant. You know when you feel like someone is holding on to the leg of your pants—you don’t want to give him your pants but you don’t want to kick him away either. You just want him to stay near you.”
My father laughed at my unromantic analogy. I really wasn’t sure how I had become so attached to Ali in such a short time. Maybe it was just a period of general susceptibility. There was a lot of passion in the air—demonstrations and intense emotions everywhere you looked—and we must have simply been susceptible to falling in love. Nothing was stable, and love was the opposite of stability. Ali himself was the opposite of stability.
I fried the green pepper rings. The meat was done. I ground the garlic cloves the traditional way: wrapping them in a plastic bag and crushing them using the bottom of a glass. It was a primitive method but it produced the exact consistency that I wanted. I let the garlic sizzle in a little bit of ghee, then added some vinegar for the taqliya, releasing an aroma that characterizes every Egyptian kitchen. I added the tomatoes and let the sauce simmer.
Ali almost never called. He mainly sent me text messages to say that he was or wasn’t coming to see me. I barely knew what he sounded like on the phone. I would just see his name on my cell phone and find a short message, usually with the time of our next meeting, rarely accompanied by chatter of any kind. When I was done frying the vegetables, I layered the eggplant, pepper, onion, and tomato in a baking dish, mixed the garlic into the meat, added that too, then put the dish in the oven.
Count the stars
Count the people
Leave me but always come back
Warda was still singing. The aroma of moussaka filled the apartment. No one had called. No one was coming to eat with me. I wasn’t really hungry. I lit a match and smoked my seventh cigarette, then turned off the oven and went to bed.
12
I could barely move around my apartment, which might have been the smallest studio in the wor
ld: four walls, a small corner for the kitchen, a small built-in cupboard. It took exactly seven steps to get from one end to the other. I paced within the walls of the apartment, in my shoes, patiently counting my steps, until I got bored and made the difficult decision to go out. In the elevator I avoided looking at my neighbor, who always regarded me with curiosity. I knew he was dying to know who I was and what I did for a living, but I wasn’t going to let myself be pulled into small talk merely to fill the fifty seconds it took to go down eight floors. I didn’t have space in my life for a transient stranger who in a few weeks or months would no longer be part of it.
I walked to the end of the quiet street until I got to the main road, noisy and full of cars and buses. Suddenly filled with panic, I turned back to the quiet street and kept walking. There were so many embassies, but I could never make out the colors of the flags, as they were all usually folded on themselves, even when it was windy. I looked up at the nice old buildings, mostly covered in soot but still beautiful, ruined only by their ugly neighbors that had been built during the Sadat era in the 1970s—ugly times those were.
Finally I stepped into the Italian café in a street parallel to mine. It was a small, modest place—I didn’t know who owned it, but the fact that it had wooden columns was enough for me to frequent it. As usual, I was on my second cup of coffee before I started to look around me. There were no familiar faces, thank God. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew and have to force a smile or make the effort to fill the void that came after the first greeting. I put my headphones on and plugged them into the laptop. I wondered if I should listen to ABBA or Baligh Hamdi, Georgette Sadegh or Hoda Haddad, but Fairuz was the choice I had stuck to every morning for at least ten years. She sang “Morn and Eve” while I drank my coffee until my nose reached the bottom of the cup.
I was terrified of the world that lay beyond me. That desire to be isolated from the world, from the details of streets and living beings, was constant. The imaginary lives I held within me were enough for me and the populations of a few more worlds. I wasn’t exactly indifferent to life, just to this particular life. Stories of other worlds appealed to me: magical galaxies with different planets and different creatures. I regularly read NASA reports to feed my dreams of travel to other worlds. One day I was going to have my own mini-planet. I would be a wrinkled old woman by then, possibly senile and suffering from dementia, with hardly enough brain cells left to process the new mini-planet I would reside on. Nonetheless, I would build a room on it and paint all the walls dark purple and put up photos of all the people and all the places I love and organize my mementos in small boxes on shelves, like I did everywhere I went.
I stared at the wall before me. Fairuz sang about a tall, fenced-in pigeon tower. The sky outside the café’s window had darkened. It was time to go back to my tiny home.
13
I sit on the edge of my sofa for days or weeks, maybe months, detached from the details of everyday life, just contemplating and anticipating, thinking mostly depressing thoughts. Maybe I have lost that yearning for the unknown that I used to have. Fearless, they used to call me. I was going to do whatever I wanted: visit unknown lands, explore orange rivers, arid fields, and soft mountains. I was going to run with all my might toward the unknown. Travel was going to be my destination, and passion for the unknown my prayer.
I do not want to settle. Settling would be my death. I do not want to know what might happen, where I might go, who I might wander down dreamy roads with, sharing an innocent moment of stolen happiness.
Maybe I’d visit neatly paved roads like those we see in French children’s movies, or find myself in a town where they speak only Swahili. I could watch stories unfold around me and not understand a word. Maybe tomorrow I would be drinking coffee in a sub-Saharan town, with a view of the Victoria Falls, wild animals roaming the unfamiliar spaces around me. Or I might find myself living an impossible romance with an unattainable lover. I’m always drawn toward the impossible, particularly in desperate love stories, like my story with Ali. Dramatic stories, full of pleasure but with no stability. I don’t ever want to settle—not in love or in place. I don’t want to settle politically or domestically. Sit-ins, strikes, and protests make me happy. Unfinished stories inspire me. Regular, happy family gatherings make me nervous. Hurricanes and rainstorms bring me back to life.
But I’m edging toward thirty and I still haven’t found any soft mountains or orange rivers. I still haven’t dyed my hair blue like Kate Winslet in that movie. I haven’t jumped out of a plane, held only by a rope; maybe I would discover the secrets of the universe or the rope would break, leaving me to a gentle fall. I haven’t met kings or slaves; I haven’t lain on my back on smooth ice that would either break and swallow me, or hold me and let me watch a sky full of stars. I haven’t seen the world from the top of a mountain or from the depths of the ocean. Nor sipped the local coffee of every country in the world. Nor held hands with a man in every city and been told there was no one like me, and then cried at the moment of parting.
I still haven’t lived a single story to match my fantasies or the books I’ve read.
I lay on that sofa for weeks—or was it months?—and got lost in a maze of repetitive thoughts. I was bored—bored and settled—settled on the sofa, and settled in my lack of passion and longing. I was settled with Ali and because of him. We spoke at certain times, and met at certain times. When the times came, I rose with difficulty out of my long slumber to change my clothes. He might or might not have noticed my outfits, but I changed anyway, with calm, mechanical movements. For the first time in my nearly thirty years I knew exactly what was going to happen next: the passion of the first moments, the sacred embrace at the door, then food and maybe some boring TV, very few words, a little arguing over details that reflect our dull lives, then sleep.
What did Ali see in me, I still wonder. Was I a reflection of what he wanted but lacked the energy to do? Was I just some girl with whom he woke up one day, and because he found his hand holding her wrist he decided to hold on to that moment until he got bored? Did he see me as successful and accomplished? Did I represent a vague idea to him? Did I arouse his curiosity? Or just his desire? I didn’t know why he stayed. And I had no idea when he would decide to leave. That might have been the only unknown in the simple and settled life we led.
My dreams of colorful mountains and vigorous waterfalls were gone. I got used to seeing my awaited cosmos in Ali’s eyes. I didn’t collect clippings and photos of mysterious places to stick on the walls any more, in anticipation of the day when I would carry my backpack and go. Had I really stopped dreaming? Maybe I had just lost my private dream worlds, and the stories and imagined details about people I was yet to meet. I still dreamed, but only in whirlpools of repetitive and predictable events. I didn’t want anything more than the worlds and people I saw in Ali’s eyes. That was my compensation for the imagination I had lost. His eyes were imagination itself. All his disappointments, defeats, and perpetual confusion disappeared in those moments of serenity when his eyes sparkled and became windows on the world.
I wanted to take him with me to the soft, colorful mountains. I wanted us to dip our hands together into the orange river. I wanted to lie on the roof with him and watch the stars, both fixed and falling, in a sky clear of pollution and smoke. Neither of us belonged here—in these closed circles, fixed appointments, and routines emptied of all spontaneity and wildness. We didn’t belong on this sofa that was swallowing our bodies. I saw us all the time, with what little imagination I had left, entering foreign realms and meeting new people. I saw us dancing to unfamiliar songs in foreign languages. I saw us in cities at the edge of the world, waiting for rain, and our childlike glee when the raindrops wet our faces and roused us out of the dryness of the lives we led. So I waited for him, and the fear of boredom filled me. I was scared that boredom would bring us to our end and leave us to regret all the things we did not do. I waited for the real Ali, waited for the passion and
curiosity in his eyes to replace the look of fear and sometimes suspicion that had taken over.
He was who he was: reckless and wretched, with the imagination of a child. I was who I was: willing to sell my soul to a mercenary wizard on a street corner for the sake of a new experience. We were just ourselves, and we owned nothing. From curiosity we came and to curiosity we would return. We had no plans, and lived only for those moments of absolute joy, of abandoned laughter, a meditative vision, or one second of innocent awe. Maybe we were miserable because of the historical moment. Or maybe because he was at a crossroads in his life. It was as if we lived in a context that was devoid of our truths. I couldn’t know how long that limited course would run before we were drained of our will to live. The only truth I knew—and knew that he knew—was this: we would end a thousand times, in anguish or in boredom, in silence or in tumult, but after every ending, we would return to begin again.
14
It was going to be a decisive day, and I was anxious. I put on a thick hoodie, and in my bag I carried a water bottle and, reluctantly, a small onion. I couldn’t call anyone. The “bastards” had cut off all communication. I took a taxi from Zamalek to Heliopolis, where I found my father having breakfast on the balcony. It was still an innocent morning.
“Did you read the paper today?” he asked me.
“No,” I answered. “Is there anything other than the usual garbage?”
He read a few al-Ahram headlines out to me: “Muslim Brotherhood elements call for demonstrations and security forces succeed in foiling the intrigues of the banned group. Cautious calm returns to city streets. Security forces on standby in case of renewed protests. Renewed protests in Suez demand better wages. One hundred million pounds in losses to the municipality due to vandalism, fire, and looting. Freedom of expression is guaranteed. Chaos will not be tolerated.”
