by Donia Kamal
“Come. Let’s go sit over there for a while.”
I walked beside her back to the entrance of the square, and we sat on the sidewalk. Months later, during the summer sit-in, the sidewalk would become our sanctuary. From this same spot we watched dozens of sunrises and sunsets. That day we sat in silence for a few minutes. I knew her pain. She’d always been a natural optimist. When she walked, it was as if she were flying. She exuded freedom, oscillated between joy and confusion, wrote down what she felt. All my memories from the square have Rima in them. We sat on that sidewalk and on countless others. I watched the square around me and started counting the faces. I gave up after a hundred.
“What’s going on?” I asked Rima.
“I don’t know.” She sounded tired.
Every now and then the chants would pick up. There were dozens of street sellers. I noticed a wooden table on which woolen socks were laid out. I laughed. “Why is this man selling socks?” Rima replied seriously: “For the people camping here, Nadia. They can’t all stay without changing their socks. The smell would end the sit-in!”
Armored vehicles and tanks blocked all the entrances. No one bothered us. The soldiers tried as much as possible to avoid friction. Some of the guys would pick up conversations with them, offering them cigarettes and bottles of cold water. Rima and I got up and went to a nearby bakery and bought a few dozen loaves of bread. At the store next to it, we got a box of water and some small cartons of juice. Some passersby offered to help us carry the bags, and we stood at the side of the square and started to give the stuff away. Within minutes the bags were emptied.
“What I would do for a Merit cigarette,” I sighed to Rima.
She eyed me coldly. “Just smoke what we have, Nadia. This is not the time to be spoiled and demand imported cigarettes.”
“I’m just saying,” I said in irritation.
She pulled me off to go and find Layla and Galal.
The square was calm. Nothing signaled violence or clashes. The four of us gathered at the edge. Galal was disheveled, his shirt discolored by dirt. Layla was tense. We all talked over each other, trying to ascertain that everyone was OK.
I took Galal by the hand and told him nervously, “You know, of course, that you shouldn’t leave the square. There are so many rumors flying about outside, and they’ve been arresting people on their way out.”
He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Nadia, I know. I’m not leaving any time soon. Let’s just wait and see what happens.”
As I looked at him, fear flooded my heart. I tried to appear calm, and at times felt that I was overreacting. Layla was nervous too, but she wasn’t emitting as much negative energy as I was. Galal laughed and said, “We need to find some Valium for Nadia. What’s the worst that could happen? So, they might arrest us. They might bomb the whole square. There’s no way of knowing, but being anxious won’t change anything.”
“Weren’t you just five days ago telling me that nothing at all would happen? ‘It’s just a demonstration, Nadia. Don’t get your hopes up.’”
“You say that as if I or anyone could have predicted all these people turning up.” He was visibly moved. I touched his shoulder.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my father. I didn’t want to leave him alone for too long. I would go to see him and maybe come back when he went to bed. I said good-bye to everyone and hugged Galal tightly. They all laughed and called me overdramatic, so I swore at them and took off.
21
My youngest aunt owned a small flower kiosk. She also designed silver jewelry, adorned necklaces and bracelets with colorful precious stones, and sold them to friends and relatives. She did many things, and she liked colors and strange designs. She had never married. Since my childhood, I had always seen her as the most beautiful woman in our family. She wore delicate clothes with lace details. She was in her fifties when she gave up everything else and bought a small kiosk, using the money of her share in the sale of my grandfather’s land. There was no one to tend the land, but she could tend flowers. She read a lot about flowers, and began by growing chrysanthemums. I didn’t know much about flowers except that I liked lilies. Any man I got close to soon discovered that a bouquet of lilies could put me in a good mood for at least a day.
But my aunt grew chrysanthemums, delicate flowers with pinkish petals and a dark yellow heart. The flower’s name was beautiful, but it didn’t do justice to its delicateness and sweetness. My aunt arranged flowers in vases and sprinkled them with cold water. She also grew daffodils, irises, tulips, and Egyptian red roses, which filled her kiosk with their fragrance—real roses, not like the odorless, spiritless ones I saw in the fancier flower shops. She sourced plant food from strange places, and asked anyone coming from abroad to bring her seeds so she could add new species to her beautiful, mesmerizing bouquets.
Zayn always brought me flowers. He used to go to my aunt’s kiosk and buy me a bouquet of his favorites with a single branch of lilies with closed buds in the center. I’d receive this gift eagerly. In each flower I saw a word Zayn had told me in a moment of clarity. I placed the flowers in the big vase at his place and instructed him to sprinkle them every morning with cold water, until the lilies opened and their dark hearts leaped forward with a passion for life akin to my own in those days. I don’t think I have ever been as open to life as I was when I was loved by Zayn.
I miss his words, his tenderness, the pleasure of feeling his hands on me. I remember my eagerness to taste life. I wasn’t exhausted back then. I didn’t wake up every morning dreading the start of a new day. I woke up at peace; no preemptive damning of the day to come, of which I knew nothing yet. I woke up early and raced through the day until the time I saw Zayn. He was good-natured, serene, understanding, mature, and just brilliant in every way. I wanted every new day to go on forever, because of Zayn and for him. With him I could be myself and no other. I could rest my body and my nerves. The scent of lilies penetrated my every cell. I closed my eyes and felt a deep calm—a sensation that I and everyone I loved were safe from illness and death. As Zayn read poetry to me, I entered a gentle trance.
If only we were two branches of a tree
Our veins fed together by the sun
Drinking together the dawn’s dew
Turning together a buoyant green
Standing tall and reaching out
We dress in colors in the spring
Shed our clothes in the fall
Expose our naked bodies
And in the winter, we bathe
Kept warm by devotion
I slept in Zayn’s arms with a smile on my face. Nothing that had come before or was still to come mattered then.
22
Ali was coming over for dinner. It had to be something new because I thought he must be bored with the usual. Though he used to say that I cooked with my soul, and once, when I was away on one of my long trips, he wrote to me: “Come back. I miss you and miss your cooking! Whatever you make turns out good!” Ali had a clumsy way of expressing his feelings sometimes, but I got him. I opened the freezer, got out some chicken breasts, and put them under hot running water. I had some potatoes and thought I could make mashed potatoes, which Ali liked. I would add some cheese. But I wasn’t going to start yet. The day was still long.
I lit a cigarette and inhaled the smell of the burning match. I looked out of the window to the horizon and thought of Ali. He always came up behind me when I stood at this spot, putting his arms around me and resting his head on my shoulder, both of us looking out at the world. I’d smile—a smile he didn’t see. Nothing mattered in those moments but the silence between us. I smiled at the memory, then frowned again. I always knew those moments were transient. He knew that too, but as usual he didn’t seem to care.
“So what if I wake up one morning and feel I don’t want to come to you any more? What’s the big deal?” he would say.
“It’s no big deal, Ali; it’s just that endings are always kind of painful.”
; “Yeah, but what matters is that we’ll always have this beautiful thing between us.”
There was no point in trying to persuade a child that life wasn’t that simple. Endings were painful and cruel and left permanent and bloody scars. If I had said any of that, he would have frowned and shut me out. I would have spent the rest of the day trying to make it up to him. It was better to let it be and leave endings to another day.
Ali always came over late in the evening, when he was done with his coffeehouse sessions with his friends whom I didn’t know. I knew some of their names, but he was careful to keep his life a closed circle I couldn’t enter. And I didn’t ask. Mostly I didn’t want to know. The solitude of my dimly lit studio was all I could handle at that point in my life. I’d had my share of searching for peace in people’s faces and stories and only rarely finding it. I had the old places I used to visit, my own coffeehouses and hangouts, desolate and dreary now that most friends had dispersed—those who got married, those who left the country, and those who, like me, had had enough.
And so I didn’t want to know what I didn’t need to know.
Ali always came in the end. On the doorstep he would take me in his arms and hold me tightly, for five minutes, maybe ten. I no longer experienced time as I used to. We would eat together, maybe spend some time watching TV—I looking for news, he grabbing the remote to look for anything that was devoid of violence and disturbance. As we sat side by side on the sofa, he would take me in his arms again, maybe for an hour or two. Maybe less. I only noticed the time when the call to prayer rang out from the neighboring mosque, signaling daybreak. We were quiet for a few minutes before sleep, or sometimes we talked about random things. I could be talkative when I was in a good mood, and Ali liked to hear my stories and reflections.
I remembered our shared details and lost track of time. I watched cigarette ash drop to the floor and breathed in the unpleasant burning smell of the fourth cigarette filter, or was it the fifth? I turned on the TV to find Kamal al-Shinnawi holding Shadia and whispering in her ear, “Nawal, forget everything but this moment that we have together.” I had watched this film so many times before, but it still always held my attention. The ashtray beside me slowly filled up. I empathized with Shadia, the cheating wife resisting the end of the affair with her lover. The same scene got me every time. Endings are the same in all their forms, but are especially painful when one side does not accept that it really is the end and gets stuck instead in an endless loop: final attempts, pleas, anger, repeat. The end is the end. I shivered at the thought. I put out my seventh cigarette and hugged myself, trying to expel all thoughts of leaving and dying. There wasn’t much difference between the two. Leaving is a form of death for me. Every time someone I loved left, my subconscious translated that as a death. He was not coming back. Those who die do not come back. My brain buried them in a darkness akin to the grave. Those who leave do not come back.
The chicken was completely defrosted. I had to cook it before it went bad.
23
I knew Ali well. He was like a child. When he listened to me, he was full of curiosity and passion, always wanting to know more. When I stopped, he begged me to finish the stories I had begun. I became his Scheherazade of sorts. A story was always required to keep him interested and happy, even if it made him nervous. Without stories, he found everything about our post-coffeehouse closeness boring—the dinner, the TV, and me. He didn’t talk much, and when he did, his stories were no match for those of his sad Scheherazade. He was like a child asked which he loved more, his mom or a toy, and who replied with endearing enthusiasm, “I love the toy more because it’s pretty and doesn’t yell at me.” He was clumsier and more tactless than a child; he would lie next to me and talk about boredom, and about his lack of feelings. He would go on about his sins and mistakes, occasionally blaming me, often making me so angry I had to get up and lock myself in the bathroom, behind the only closed door in my apartment. I cried a few tears then, before washing my face and rejoining him as if nothing had happened. When I did that, though, he became sensitive for a few days in order to avoid upsetting me or maybe to avoid the feelings of guilt that would follow him into his closed coffeehouse circle.
The streets remained unchanged. So did the ceiling of my room. And time. Time passed slowly and heavily, as if the hands of the clock were carving the numbers on my body. Death remained present too: in the kitchen knife, in the large window that tempted me to see the view upside down, in the delicate noose-like scarf I wore for warmth, in the speeding cars that I barely avoided, their drivers yelling at me in panic. Death was present in everything around me. I was scared of where those thoughts might lead me; my fear was of losing the bit of fear still left in me and one day finding in myself enough courage to follow those thoughts to the end.
Ali always came—sometimes he was days late, but he always came in the end. Sometimes I went away for long periods, other times we fought over trivial matters and didn’t speak for a while, and sometimes we were just silent, but we always found each other again. And every time, there was the doorstep hug, which I never tired of.
On those days when Ali came and brought happiness with him, the food was delicious and the TV fun to watch, our bodies on the sofa merged into one, a fading sun shone through the large window. When he was in a good mood, I could see his very soul shine through his big, childlike eyes. On those days, he talked without fear or inhibition, or he shed his inhibitions as he talked, at peace with me and the whole world. Those days flew past with unbelievable smoothness, like hours stolen from time itself, spoiled by nothing but the moment of parting.
We held everything between us: dreams, warm moments of happiness, shared paths, and virtual universes; each other and what we used to be, many years ago; our life experiences, our friends and families, the bridges we tore down to eradicate all the distance that separated us, the faint yellow light of the room that saw our partings and encounters. There were white lilies between us, and a small colorful box that I had before me day and night in which we carefully placed our memories.
But there were also so many people between us, with no purpose but to watch us and impose their strange world on us, with its ways, words, habits, and pretenses; they pulled us into their coffeehouses and gatherings, and we lived in constant resistance. Between you and me, Ali, were your eyes, which I have run out of metaphors to describe. There was everything between us, but it all existed in a very tight space. There were no gaps or emptiness. Nowhere to move. We were held closely together by a strong glue that we had discovered and decided together to use, even while we knew that removing it would be painful as hell. Pain is a generic word, meaningless unless you’ve lived it. Pain was nothing compared to what we put each other through.
I could not compare this with what I had with Zayn: he was a safe haven. When I rested my head on Zayn’s thigh, the world slowed down around me. That was a time before this smell of decay started to appear in my kitchen. These days I find strange things. There’s a tiny spider that has made its home in my kitchen, so tiny that if I blink it disappears, only to reappear a few days later from behind the fridge. Now, the smell in my kitchen comes and goes. I look for its source, to no avail. Sometimes I find a moldy tomato or something left in a corner, but other times I find nothing at all, just the smell. Ali can’t smell it. I’ve used all types of cleaners and disinfectants. Two or three times I saw a big cockroach crawling slowly and confidently across the kitchen’s threshold. The last of those times, Ali was there and it made him jump, but then he killed it and threw it in the toilet. I looked at the dead cockroach and couldn’t think where it could have come from. I live on a high floor in a tall building and there are no openings through which a cockroach could have crawled into my apartment.
In Zayn’s days, there was just peace and poetry and our walks hand in hand in the streets of Downtown. I clung to Zayn. Now Ali was clinging to my clothes and waiting to get bored.
24
I Skyped with Rad
wa and told her what was happening. She told me that Ali was a child and that he would break my heart. I told her I knew. I could predict all of Ali’s actions and was waiting for the day of the final heartbreak. I told her that I didn’t know if I was happy or miserable. I just knew that I saw Ali’s eyes everywhere—in the bathroom mirror while brushing my teeth, at the door. At every turn, his magic eyes were watching me go through my day. I remembered Zayn and cried a little. Radwa got upset and told me that I had become soft, not as strong as I used to be. “Where’s the Nadia I know who used to simply shoo away half-men? He’s not a full man, Nadia. Forget about him and take a breath. You got yourself into a difficult tangle. You know what? Just say bye. You know how to say bye?”
I laughed, feeling somewhat choked. “No, I can’t say bye. I’ll wait until he says it.”
“Suit yourself,” she said angrily. “Just keep torturing yourself until a vein pops out.”
Radwa didn’t know, when she used that expression, that I would wake up a couple of months after that chat with a strange bulge in my neck. When I looked in the mirror, there was a big, bulging, blood-red vein in my neck. I touched it and murmured to myself, “Careful what you wish for, dear Radwa.”
Some days I woke up and found myself completely alone. Radwa was on the other side of the globe. Ali was never there in the first place. My mother was dead, but she too was never really there. Like Ali, her presence always crushed my own, but she only ever existed in a parallel universe.
My father. I would go to my father. On dark mornings like this, I went to my father. I called him.
“Good morning.”
“What’s wrong with your voice, Nadia?”
“Nothing. Just feeling glum. Do you want to get lunch?”
“OK. Come on by, and let’s have lunch here in Heliopolis.”
