Chronicle of a Last Summer

by Yasmine El Rashidi

  Time passed slowly then the doorbell rang again. Mama came out. Go to your room. She had a visitor. I went. My room used to be Mama’s room until she turned sixteen. After that they gave her a bigger one. It used to be blue, but Mama let me change it. I chose mustard. It was a strange choice for a young girl, Mama said. The color was different now. Darker. I wanted to change it again but Mama said I had made my choice and that it was a fact of life, things get darker. I stared at her.

  I lie on the floor and stick my head under the bed. I open one of the hidden albums. The pictures are black and white but I imagine them in color. The first is of Granny at the door of the house. Her fur is slipping off her shoulders. She is standing with three women looking at the camera. Someone is kissing her. Here is Granny with her English friends. And the woman with the big pearls. Her lips look black in the picture but I know they are red. In this one, Granny is surrounded by people. Everyone is listening to her. They are frowning like Mama tells me not to. This picture, my favorite, at the dining table. Everyone is laughing. Granny is talking to them with her hands in the air. Some pictures but not many have Grandpa. He is wearing a tarboosh. In one of the pictures it is colored red. In another picture his eyes are colored green. Mama tells me that she took Grandpa’s eyes. They contained in them secrets like the sea. My eyes are different. They are dark like Baba’s and you can’t see into them. There are six pictures of me. Square ones with a white border. Three of them are from the same day. In one picture Baba is carrying me on his arm. I am holding my bear, Fluffy. In another Mama has me on her lap. Then Aunty is carrying me with both arms. These pictures are colored. I’m wearing green pajamas. Baba, Mama, and Aunty are all in black. We are in the garden. Aunty has on dark glasses. I asked Baba once to tell me what happened that day. It was the day Uncle Hussein died. He was Mama’s brother-in-law. They had just come back from burying him and were in the garden. Baba said he remembered the day like it was yesterday. It was the day Sadat made peace with Israel. He wished Uncle had lived to see.

  After they killed Sadat, Baba stopped talking to his uncle, Ashraf, for a whole year because Uncle’s son was one of the killers. Baba said it was Uncle’s fault for not paying close enough attention. I heard him say that if he hadn’t spent all his time with a glass in his hand things might have been different. But nobody spends all their time with a glass in their hand. How would they sleep? I was scared Uncle Ashraf might be a killer too. Baba said I shouldn’t be silly. It was just a trend with young people who were lost. They turned to religion. When he wanted to fight in the war was he one of them? He laughed and said they were different things. Baba’s cousin was still in prison for killing Sadat. He would be there for the rest of his life. It was a different prison from the one we went to when we saw Mama’s thief. Nobody could go to this prison. They did terrible things to people there. More terrible than we could imagine. They tried to break people’s souls. Baba said sometimes there was little difference between the living and the dead. His cousin might as well have been dead.

  I stand in front of my mirror. I pretend I have flowers in my hair. I smile and twirl around. I’m in a field, on a hill. I open my mouth and sing without sound. There is a small picture of Mama when she was a girl on the mirror. I also have a picture of Baba carrying me. Grandmama says my relationship with Baba is special and no matter what, I should know that he loves me. She said Baba’s situation is very common and many people were going through the same thing. I hear a loud sound. I open the window and stick my head out. There’s a truck at the corner. Men next to it are planting yellow flowers around one of the trees on the side of the road. Others are painting the pavement. One is painting black. One white. They move forward, slowly. I watch. Paint. Plant. Plant. Paint. They are the only people on the street. It’s Saturday. Nobody goes out on Saturday in the summer until the sun goes down. The streets are quiet, then at prayer the men come out. They walk to the mosque. When the prayer finishes the women and children come out too. It is cooler by then. Many people go to the club. The club also used to belong to the king. Then Nasser came and gave half of it to the people. He made it free. Half the fields and half the horse-racing track and half the golf course. The other half is for other kinds of people, like us. We have to pay. In the summer when we came back from Alexandria we would sit at the club with Baba under the eucalyptus trees and order a jug of lemonade.

  I watch the truck move until it’s right outside the house. Mama comes in. What am I doing? I point. They never paint the pavement or plant flowers. It’s because the president’s wife is coming to open the library at the end of our street. It’s the most beautiful villa on the island. It used to belong to the Karassos, she says. Last time when the president was coming to the Opera House they did the same thing. Mama tells me, Come on, we are going out for a while. Where are we going? Out. Where? To buy fabric. For what? The armchair. From where? Downtown. How come?

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  In the morning Uncle came. He brought the newspaper and sat plonk on the armchair without kissing anyone or saying hello. Look at this. They are floating it, but no doubt they will adopt it. He put his finger on the front page then threw it onto Mama’s coffee table. It slid and landed in the gap between the leg and the sofa. I was standing by the mashrabiyya doors that lead to the bedrooms. Mama had been in the kitchen and walked in. She had on her reading glasses and looked at Uncle from over them and down her nose. Mama didn’t like things lying on the floor. I picked it up. Uncle came every Sunday after Baba left. He wasn’t really my uncle but we called him that. What are they floating? Mama asked. He waved his finger. The flag. I stared at the flag. It didn’t look so different. You see, if they approve it we’re going to have to reprint everything. Everything, everything. It will cost the country a fortune. All this for what? Ego! He made a sound like a huff, as if he were running. Uncle was always talking about ego. Before Baba left, he told him that his problems were because of ego. They looked serious. I could tell it was an adult conversation. Uncle was at the house a lot before Baba left. They would go into the dining room and close the doors and talk. It was always night when he came and I would go to bed before they finished. Now Uncle came in the mornings. Always on Sunday.

  The flag was like the old flag, with three stripes. Black on the bottom, white in the middle, red on top. It also had a golden eagle but the eagle in the new flag looked different. His wings were different. They were bigger and had feathers. Uncle asked me to read. Arab Republic of Egypt. Did I know what the old flag said? It also said Arab Republic of Egypt. But it also said Federation of Arab Republics. The coloring on the new eagle was also different. Uncle had a big belly. You would see his belly before anything else. He looked at me and leaned forward. He was frowning. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset. You can say this is a modern eagle. An eagle for the times. Do you know how many flags we have had little girl? The sweat was dripping down his head. There were puddles on his shirt. He kept looking at me. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. Don’t they teach you these things in school? Uncle laughed heavily, also like Baba. You know how many flags there have been? I’m sure even your mother doesn’t know how many flags there have been. He turned to Mama. Of course not. He laughed more heavily. Please, one of you, an ice-cold glass of water. Mama went. While she was gone he told me we had nine flags. This would be our tenth. It was testimony to how rich our history was. No other country had as many flags as we did. Mama came back with the water. She gave Uncle the glass. We watched. He drank it in one gulp then banged it on the table. Uncle never used the coasters and Mama picked it up quickly. I asked Uncle what the flags were. Mama said she would leave us to our history lesson. She went through the mashrabiyya doors to her bedroom. They were swingy doors but Mama never let them swing. She opened and closed them so that they wouldn’t make a sound. Uncle asked me for a paper and my coloring box. I sat next to him. He began to draw. These things no one will teach you. Uncle drew well. He was an architect and designed houses. I liked drawing wi
th him better than anyone else. He lived in a big house far away, in Faiyûm, by the lake. His house was different from any other house. It had domes, like the kind in Aswan at the hotel we stayed in. Each dome had small holes, like windows, but tiny. Uncle said it was a cooling system. It was also about shadow and light. He told me that architecture was about making art as much as it was an exercise in finding practical solutions. Architects who thought like him were a dying breed. Uncle had studied with Hassan Fathy. People no longer designed and built the way Hassan Fathy did. He was eighty-four years old now and Uncle said it’s that time. And only when he died would he be celebrated in Egypt. That’s what Uncle said. I loved Uncle’s house. Mama said it was too eccentric. Baba said it was too simple and not his style. He had a courtyard in the middle with a fig tree and a wooden bench. We would sit on it together and watch the shadows move. For one hour Uncle made me draw all the different shadows on a paper until in the end I had a drawing. He called it an abstract and told me it was a replica of a famous painting in a European museum. I can’t remember which one. Everyone who had a house had a fig tree and an olive tree. They gave the house a longer life. The Quran said so. Granny planted four but we only had two now. Mama said they were our protection. I could hear her in the bedroom on the phone. She took it in with her at night and brought it out again in the afternoon. Mama never sat with Uncle and me. She would wait until we finished drawing then tell me to go to my room because they had grown-up things to discuss.

  Uncle was still drawing the flags. I liked the flag of Ottoman Egypt the most. It was red with a white moon and star. My second favorite was the Egyptian Revolution flag. It was a mix of three flags, including the one we used to have when we had a king. The ugliest was the United Arab Republic flag when we were one country with Syria. It looked like our flag now but with two green stars. One star was for Egypt and the other for Syria. Uncle said the idea of a United Arab Republic was a failed idea from the start. I looked at him. Everything Nasser did was a failed idea. I waited for him to say something else. He asked for more water. When I came back with it I asked him about Nasser. Dido says Nasser was a great man. The men who made the revolution were all great but their children are corrupt. Nasser did great things for Egypt. Mama doesn’t like him. Baba does. Dido hopes there will be another Nasser one day. How come they never tell us about Nasser at school? Uncle slapped his hand on his thigh. He had only finished half the water. The glass was on the arm of the sofa. He put it to his mouth and swallowed the rest. He put his arm out and I took the glass. Uncle started telling me about Nasser. He had no vision. He was delusional. He didn’t think into the future. He took from the rich and gave to the poor. It was the worst thing he ever did. The poor got things for free and then became lazy. They got land and benefits then thought they could do nothing and Nasser would still give them more. He also made education free, which was very expensive, and so very quickly he didn’t have the money to pay for it anymore. Education went down the drain. Teachers weren’t being paid properly, so they didn’t make an effort. Students had to start taking private lessons. They started memorizing and stopped thinking. Everyone became lazy and stopped thinking. It was a lethal combination. He paused to breathe. What does lethal mean? To kill a country and its future. To destroy any opportunity for future generations. To take a beautiful field of flowers and pour concrete on it and still expect the flowers to grow. I was always falling and hurting my knees on the concrete playground at school so I decided this must be bad. Nothing he did was sustainable, Uncle said. He took a big breath. Mama was always using that word. She used to tell Baba that his lifestyle was not sustainable. Uncle said we were still paying the price for Nasser’s mistakes. But how come Dido said Nasser was a great man if he did so many terrible things? It was about education. At school they taught children that all the Egyptian presidents were great. Only the king was bad. Why was the king bad? Because he was a creation of the British.

  Uncle asked if I ever went with Mama to the co-op. I nodded. Every week. Sometimes on Saturday, other times after school. The co-op was close to the house. It was like a shed on the pavement, a big shed. It was painted blue on the outside but the paint was peeling. You could see the wood. At the beginning of the month there would be a long line from the inside to the outside and onto the street. In the middle of the month it was emptier. The shed was lined with shelves. It was dusty. Sawdust covered the floor. They had bags of rice, flour, sugar, oil, boxes of tea. There were also frozen chickens, but they were in a freezer behind the counter. If you wanted a chicken you had to ask and a man would bring it out. He took your booklet. It was small, the size of the box of cigarettes hidden in the bathroom cabinet. In the front of it was Baba’s name, Mama’s name, and a number. A code for how much we were allowed of each thing. Sometimes people would try to take more than what they were allowed. They would raise their arms and shout. One man tried to take a chicken but wasn’t allowed. You were allowed a whole chicken only if you were a family. Some people were only allowed half a chicken, so they could have one chicken every two months since they only sold chicken by the one. People shouted and tugged at their clothes. It was only the men who got angry. I would stand by Mama’s side holding her hand. She never spoke to anyone. She would stand and look straight ahead as if nothing were happening.

  I watched until I understood everything about the co-op. They also sold bread, but you had to get it from a window on the side. We were allowed five baladi breads a day. Uncle told us one day that bread was our downfall. People were taking their allowance and selling it to other people who wanted more. They sold it for much more than what they bought it for. Mama looked at him with her hands crossed on her chest. There is a black market for everything now, I heard her say. Uncle shook his head. The catastrophe is the government employees are doing it too. Some people couldn’t get booklets because they didn’t have birth certificates, and you needed a birth certificate to get a booklet. So what would those people do? Black market. Uncle said co-ops exist because of Nasser’s mistakes. He bankrupted the country so it had to ration subsidized foods. Why can’t they just sell things in a supermarket? He laughed loudly. It would be a revolution. The country wouldn’t survive another revolution. But Baba said we had two revolutions and nothing changed. Baba said we need a real revolution. Your Baba means a different kind of revolution. If the revolution were to come, it would be one of hunger, like the bread riots. I looked at Uncle. They didn’t teach us these things in school. Only Uncle and Dido told me. And Baba too, until he left. Mama said it was best to keep such thoughts to oneself, but Uncle never kept any thoughts to himself. He said that where he lived was like putting a finger on a pulse. Measuring a heartbeat. In Faiyûm, where all the farmers lived, you knew what people would accept and what they wouldn’t. If they stopped having co-ops, the farmers would go into the streets and start throwing stones and setting fires, like when flour became more expensive. It made bread more expensive. People revolted. Those were the bread riots. This is the revolution of hunger. It was the year you were born. Uncle put his hands on the sofa and pushed himself up. He put his hand on my hair and ruffled it. You learned a few new things today.

  There was a picture of Mama and Baba’s wedding on the wall. Every Sunday Uncle would stand in front of it and stare for a long time. Mama’s hair was long then, it almost reached her waist. Baba had on thick glasses and sideburns. He was wearing a ring in the picture but Mama said he took it off after the wedding and never put it on again. I asked where it was. Mama wasn’t sure. Some days when she went out I would look through her drawers. I wanted to put Baba’s ring under my bed with the albums. I also wanted to take something from his office but was scared Mama might notice. I went and stood next to Uncle and asked what he was looking at. I miss your Baba, he said. He squeezed my shoulder and told me to get Mama. They had business to discuss. I asked Uncle if he had been to Geneva. He bent his head down and frowned, then started laughing. What makes you ask about Geneva? Mama came through the
mashrabiyya doors and told me to go to my room. I heard Uncle ask why I wanted to know about Geneva. Mama lowered her voice. I heard her say Baba. I didn’t know why nobody talked about Baba even though everyone missed him. I still counted every day but didn’t know anymore what I was counting to.

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  After Uncle left, Mama said we were going to the Mugamma. It was the biggest building in Cairo and everyone’s papers were there. Mama had some business to take care of. The driver would be here in twenty minutes. I needed to make sure Ossi had enough water in his bowl. I needed to tidy my room. Was my bed properly made? We would have lunch when we got back. What would we have? Could I help choose?

  Mama gave me a breadstick. She had on a dress the color of sand with a thin belt around it. She was wearing the sandals Baba had bought her when he met the famous Egyptian spy. They were from Hamburg. They were brown with many straps. Mama went down the steps. She told me to hurry and close the door behind me well. I sat in the back of the car next to Mama with the window down. We drove across the street named after the revolution towards the bridge. Mama stared out of the window. She was sad for Egypt. The driver slowed down. One of the big red buses had stopped. He stopped beside it. Its front was open and smoke was coming out. People were watching. Everyone had come off the bus. Men and women. A boy and girl sat on the side of the pavement with two plastic bags next to them. Women fanned themselves with newspapers. One man poured water from a bottle over his head. Some of the men were barefoot. I had asked Mama before how come people walked barefoot in the street. She told me it was a product of disillusionment. Then she explained. It was like looking at a painting and someone telling you that you see one thing, but you know that when you look, you see something else. Then every time they show you a painting, they do the same thing. You don’t believe them anymore. After a while you stop caring. I listened. The driver started moving again. I asked if the bus was going to explode. I knew buses exploded. I crunched my breadstick. Mama turned her neck and watched as the crumbs fell onto my lap. She told me to be more careful. She looked away and I brushed them onto the floor.