by Donia Kamal
After my mother’s death, the shape of our lives changed. I had new responsibilities. Cooking for myself and my father was relatively easy, but my father also decided I was now the lady of the house—he insisted on sharing all the particulars of the household expenses with me. He wrote down the different items of expenditure in small handwriting in a little notebook:
Newspapers
Rent
Butcher
Garbage collection
Electricity
Nadia’s pocket money
Medicine
School fees
Schoolbooks
School uniform
My father’s salary wasn’t great, but it was enough. He was proud of the fact that we didn’t need help from anyone and didn’t want for anything and that we got to that without him ever accepting a bribe or stealing or doing anything we would (both) regret later. Life wasn’t unhappy. My father talked all the time. I listened to him in silence, as he told me unending stories about his childhood, his father, his sisters, and his prison years in the sixties. He also told me about his travels, the long travels and the short travels. He didn’t often talk about my mother, but sometimes he did. He talked about his previous lovers, describing them in detail, and sometimes opening his second drawer to get out photos to supplement his stories. I was mostly silent, but sometimes I asked questions, and I always enjoyed the stories. I linked arms with him as we sat on our blue sofa and he talked and talked until I fell asleep.
I didn’t abandon my father. But it was necessary to leave. Since I was a kid I’d been against the idea that a girl goes straight from her father’s house to her husband’s house. I did not abandon my father in his illness and old age. I just wanted to break away from that norm. He’d known me since I was in my mother’s womb: he knew my restlessness that had kept her awake at night. He knew I couldn’t sit still in a place that I hadn’t chosen of my own volition. I sat him down and informed him of my decision. I was a grown-up now. I worked in a big company and had a good salary that would allow me to pay rent on a small apartment. He was pensive for a few moments, then: “You want to leave me, Nadia?”
I was moved. “No, I don’t want to leave you at all. Moving out doesn’t mean leaving you. I’ll come visit every day, and you will come and stay over, two or three times a week. I won’t leave you. And please don’t pressure me.”
“I’m not pressuring you. I know I can’t. When I was little, I was always first out the door for school. I would stop in front of the train station and look at the trains, and think to myself that as soon as I had money I’d run away and go to Cairo. I felt suffocated by the village where we lived, not because it was a bad place but because I hadn’t chosen to live in it. I know you don’t hate our home, but you need to do your own thing.”
I got up and hugged him. “So do I have your blessing?”
“Because not having it would have stopped you?”
“Yes. If you said to me honestly and directly that you didn’t want me to go, I’d stay.”
That annoyed him a bit. “Because you know I’d never do that!”
“All’s good then,” I said. “How much will you contribute?”
He gave me a tight smile. “You’re in charge of the household money, Nadia. See how much you need and work it out. When are you planning to move out? Have you found a place yet?”
“I haven’t started looking. I wanted to talk to you first. So I’m thinking that maybe in, like, three months I will have sorted something out.”
I could see a trace of sadness in his face. I didn’t want to be the cause of that sadness, but I had made up my mind. I would pack up my stuff and have a new place, a new start, and I’d create on my own all that came with it.
My father couldn’t live alone for long, so he moved in with my aunts in Heliopolis. They were widows who lived together and didn’t mind him joining them. He didn’t know how to live alone. I continued to manage his monthly expenses even after I moved out. I found my small studio and bought my beloved sofa, which became my cocoon. I would lie within it like a tortoise in her shell. I only worked when I ran out of money and had to pay the rent. I didn’t have many needs. I bought things I didn’t need when my wallet was full, and when it was empty I stayed at home, in the cocoon of my sofa. I watched old movies on TV, and smiled childishly when Zaynat Sedky cornered Ismail Yassin in the kitchen of Ibn Hamido.
17
When I was twelve, two years before my mother’s sudden death, Radwa and I decided one day that we wouldn’t take the school bus and would walk back home instead. I told her that was madness; that it would be a long walk and it was very hot, and then there would be a fight with our mothers at home when they found out about what we’d done. She laughed carelessly and said, “But they fight with us anyway. Don’t worry, we’ll walk fast and won’t be that late.” Deep down I wanted to go with her so I didn’t resist much, just mumbled some objections.
We walked for over two hours, holding hands and crossing streets, jumping on and off sidewalks, laughing loudly. Out of breath, with our heavy schoolbags on our backs, we stopped every once in a while for a few minutes’ break, then kept on walking. It was my first time to walk independently in the street.
“You know what I want us to do?” I asked Radwa. “I want us, one day, to walk and walk, at night, and stay out all night until the sun comes out.”
She laughed. “One day we will. But when we grow up, so that we’re allowed out at night. But I promise you we’ll do it one day—you remember that.”
“And we’ll walk to the other side of the big bridge and go to the midnight cinema,” I said.
That was the height of my ambition—to stay up till morning in the streets of Downtown, walking with Radwa until our feet hurt, with not a care in the world, no fight at the end of the adventure and no calculations needed to avoid it.
Years later, when I went to visit her during a snowy winter where she lived and worked on the other side of the globe, we thought back to that day. We sat together on a sidewalk in a large square and watched all sorts of people walking in hurried steps around us. No one noticed that we sat on the ground. No one harassed us with any annoying pseudo-flirty remarks like we would have heard back home.
“Men here are certainly not like men in Egypt,” I joked. “I mean, there’s no one harassing us or accosting us or making our lives hell.”
“Yep. Everyone ignores each other here.”
Surprised, I asked, “Does it bother you?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “But sometimes I just wish someone, anyone, would talk to me. Sometimes I go for days without talking at all.”
I saw bitterness in her eyes, which hadn’t been there when we were younger. She was outgoing and sardonic and had an ability to cope with anything. It must have been the loneliness.
In this strange country, Radwa and I went out and danced in bars we didn’t know and where no one knew our names. We made fun of everyone. We remembered our teenage years, her little gerbil, the headphones of my red Walkman. We remembered how we hated school. We drank everything we could afford. When men chatted us up, we frowned and consulted with each other in Arabic, then smiled and danced with the strangers. When it got late and everyone left, we decided to walk home. We walked and walked until our feet hurt, only to discover that we had been circling her house for two hours. Time flew and carried us home and we slept with childish tired smiles on our faces. The next day we would go to the cinema, then walk around town, or maybe we would take the bus or the train to another town. We were going to spend our days doing what we wanted, without thinking too hard about anything, until it was time to leave again.
I used Radwa’s phone to call my father. It was a bad line.
“How are you? I really miss you. Are you well?”
“I’ve missed you so much, Nadia. When will you be back?”
“Not long now. Only a few more days. Are you OK? How’s your heart? It hasn’t been acting up, has it?”
He laughed. “What do you care? Didn’t you choose Radwa’s company over mine?”
“Baba, stop fooling around. I need to know how you’re doing.”
“Yes, my love, I’m fine,” he said with tenderness. “My health is perfectly fine. How’s Radwa?”
“She’s good. Dissecting people at the hospital all day and roaming around with me all night.” I finished the phone call with my father and found Radwa smoking by the window, with a pensive look on her face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ve really missed your father. I’d give anything to have one of my old chats with him.”
“Well, I miss him too,” I said with a tight smile. “Come back to Egypt, then at least we’ll be together.”
“Maybe. Maybe we’ll all meet again one day.”
She blew out the smoke of her cigarette.
That winter I spent New Year’s Eve with Radwa. We took the bus from her small town, and three hours later we were in New York City. We had all our winter clothes on: scarves and hats, two heavy sweaters each, and woolen socks to keep our feet from freezing. I shivered in the cold and she told me she’d seen worse. “This is nothing. You need to toughen up.” When we stepped off the bus, she started to run and jump in the street. I told her I’d slip and break my neck if I did the same. My fingers trembled when I lit my first cigarette. When I pulled a hand out of its woolen glove, I felt all the blood leave it. I smoked less than half the cigarette and put it out quickly to return my hand to its glove.
We went to a pizza place and found that it was run by an Egyptian guy. He shouted over to us: “Dessert is on the house, girls! Happy New Year!” We laughed, and she said I was a magnet for Egyptians wherever I went. We walked together down New York’s busy streets. There was an air of festivity everywhere.
“So what’s our plan?” I asked when we stopped for a little rest. I was rubbing my hands together in the hope of generating some heat.
“I don’t know. We’ll just stay out until the sun comes up.”
“What sun? There’s never any sun in this place.”
“Oh, don’t be so miserable!” she exclaimed as she got up, forcing me to move fast to keep up with her. “Come, let’s go get coffee.”
We drank our coffee and laughed, posed for photos with random people in the street, then decided to head to Times Square, which I only knew from the movies. “I want to watch the New Year’s celebration in Times Square,” I declared. “Isn’t there a big ball they drop at midnight?”
“Oh, it’s a stupid ball and stupid Americans cheering,” was Radwa’s initial response.
But I insisted: “I want to go. I haven’t put all my savings into a plane ticket to come all the way here and leave without seeing the ball—or Times Square, that is.”
She laughed and relented. “OK, then let’s go now. It gets busy.”
We stood around watching the celebrations and enjoying the loud music. I counted my money and found I only had a few dollars left. I sighed and told Radwa, “If only we weren’t so poor, we would have been at some glamorous party.”
She replied cheerfully, “There’s nothing more glamorous than this. We’re sitting on the sidewalk waiting for your ball. Aren’t you having fun?”
I punched her shoulder jokingly and hugged her. “Well, at least we’re together.”
My phone rang. It was a call from Egypt.
“Hello . . . What’s wrong with your voice? . . . What happened? . . . OK, OK, calm down . . . Are you crying? . . . Shit . . . When was that? . . . Just calm down.” I got cut off.
Radwa asked anxiously, “What’s wrong?”
So I told her about the bomb that had gone off in a church in Alexandria a few hours earlier. There were no details yet, but it sounded terrible. We were silent for some moments.
“Did you say many people died?”
“It seems so. ”
She sighed. “That country will never get rid of its filth.”
“Don’t say that,” I scolded. “There are people who are willfully keeping it filthy. Damn them all to hell. It has to end one day.”
We tried to forget the news and enjoy the rest of the night, but our happiness was tainted. The clock struck midnight. We hugged each other but made sure not to get too emotional.
18
My father wanted to go to the countryside. I had only been there a handful of times—usually only for weddings or funerals—and didn’t know it well at all. I just knew that we had a large family there, with branches of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, and their children and grandchildren. My father’s family was not the richest in town, but it was big and well-connected. I knew that having roots in the province of Sharqiya meant I was a “Sharqawi.” It’s a place known for its generosity, a town that is said to have once invited all the passengers of a train for the Ramadan meal. I often invoked this legend, as my only connection to the countryside of my origins.
My father called me early one morning. “I’m going to the countryside tomorrow and you’re coming with me.”
I tried in vain to persuade him to postpone, so I could make travel arrangements, but he said, “We’ll go by car.”
Of course we’d go by car—I didn’t drive and he had stopped driving a while back. “What car, Baba? Who will drive?”
“We’ll get a driver,” he insisted.
I knew how much he loved road trips and how he used to take long ones when he lived abroad. I remembered when he took me and Mom to faraway summer holiday destinations and insisted on driving there. He used to say that a whole world went by outside a car’s window, and he liked to see that world so that one day he would return to it.
I booked a small car with a driver and headed the following morning to Heliopolis. My father came down with a small bag, his face full of enthusiasm. I knew this pre-travel enthusiasm quite well. But I was irritated already. I didn’t know why we were going or how many days we were going for. My father got into the car and proceeded to give the driver directions. Then he glued his face to the window and started to chat without looking at me. He talked about traveling by car, about trees and fields and cows, about narrow country roads and rural towns, about the coffeehouse on a street named after the post office, where he used to hang out as a teenager and which was no longer there. A modern multistory building stood in its place now. He talked about his teenage years, about his unrequited love for his friend’s sister and the notes he left at her door; about his grandfather, and about his uncle who had gone to Germany on a scholarship and come back a qualified doctor, but had also become arrogant and dull. He talked and talked, then went quiet for a few minutes as he stared out the window.
I yawned. I needed to get one hour of sleep before we got to the village. But I wasn’t allowed that hour.
“Wake up, don’t sleep,” said my father, shaking me awake. “I want to tell you about your hometown and your people. Wake up. You sleep for hours on end in Cairo. This is no time for sleeping.”
“But you’ve told me these stories a million times before,” I said. “Is it not enough for you that you’re dragging me at such short notice? Please let me have a little rest.”
“No, I won’t let you. Wake yourself up so you don’t arrive in the village with your eyes full of sleep.”
He returned to his never-ending stories: coffeehouses and schools and streets, the big house his grandfather built in Zagazig where his maternal uncle continued to live with his children until they were all married, and those who were widowed returned to the same house, and how proud his uncle was that he’d never left his father’s house, how he restored and renovated it every few years. And about his uncle’s wife and her big, fat butt. He laughed as he described how she would knock vases over and sweep dishes off tables when she tried to move around in a small space. So I joked about how all the women in our family seemed to share that attribute.
He talked and talked, then stopped and sighed. “Those were the days.” He said his village
used to be a small hamlet, and when we finally got there, he added scathingly, “All towns have changed. Alexandria is not what it used to be. Mansura and Sohag now attract tourists. Everything has changed except in Zagazig, where every millimeter stays the same.”
I mumbled, “Nothing ever stays the same.”
We finally got to the house—my great-grandfather’s home that became my great-uncle’s home and was now transformed into the extended family home again. It resembled the house in Heliopolis that my grandfather had built for his children and grandchildren, and where my widowed father and aunts were now living.
We went in and were received by a straight-backed old woman wearing a black gallabiya with a pattern of blue flowers and a headscarf that only covered a small portion of her clean, cotton-like hair. My father hugged her and kissed her shoulder. I, of course, did not remember her.
“Rawya, do you remember my daughter Nadia?” he asked her.
She hugged me and said, with seeming familiarity, “Of course I remember you. You’ve grown up so much, Nadia!”
I smiled as she kissed me.
As we sat in the big reception hall, my father whispered to me that Rawya was his uncle’s eldest daughter. It was suffocatingly hot and there were many insects sticking to my skin. But in order to avoid trouble with my father, I tried not to look grumpy. There were several children playing in the courtyard. They wore dirty clothes, and looked like they would have been cleaner and more presentable at an earlier stage of the morning.
I asked the old woman if I could use the bathroom to wash off the dust and sweat from the road. She leaned on my arm and led me to the bathroom, then stood at the door and handed me a clean towel. The bathroom had the refreshing smell of old-fashioned soap. The tiles on the floor were old but spotless. “Have you finished college, Nadia?” the old lady asked me. I wasn’t sure how to address her—the Cairene word ‘tante’ would fall flat in this environment, and—as she was related to my father on his mother’s side—I didn’t know which would be more suitable, the word for maternal or paternal aunt. I opted for the latter, and said with a nervous smile, “Yes, Ammeto, I’ve finished.”
