Chronicle of a Last Summer

by Yasmine El Rashidi

  The bridge to downtown had two lions on each side. I gave them secret names in my head and whispered to them as we drove by. The lions guarded the Nile. They also protected the fishermen and their families who lived on boats as small as our bathtub. I imagined living in a bathtub. I asked Mama how they went to the toilet. She tsssked and made a face. Maybe the lions cleaned it up. On the other side of the bridge were two more lions. Beside them on a lamppost was a poster of the president. There were posters of the president everywhere. My cousins giggled when he came on TV. Dido made fun of them. He said the president was old enough to be their father. They didn’t care. He didn’t look old. Their dream was to marry a pilot and officer. The president used to fly planes in the war.

  The Mugamma was shaped like a curve and had millions of windows. Uncle said that when it was built it was an architecture of hope. That was also something of the past. Mama told the driver to stay parked where he was. We would be out soon. We were double-parked next to a big black car. You weren’t allowed to double-park but Mama gave the police money then we could stay. We walked towards the big metal gates. People stared at us. There were policemen everywhere. Outside, inside. There were also men who looked like the Saturday men. Mama took my hand. She pulled me. We walked up the big marble staircase. It turned. We went up more. Then again. How many more floors? Come on. Is it far? Mama asked a policeman which way. He pointed. People were shouting. We walked. There were hundreds of doors. Policemen were sitting on chairs by every door. We kept walking. The corridor was long. It smelled of food. My feet hurt. I was hot. I looked into one of the offices. People had newspapers on their desks and were eating with their hands. I couldn’t see what they were eating except for the bread. Everyone ate bread. They used it instead of forks or spoons. Mama shook her head. I was never allowed to use my hands. At the end of the corridor we turned left into a hall. There was a counter with many windows and people waiting in lines. They were pushing. People were always pushing. They pushed in the street. They pushed on the bus. They pushed at the co-op. They pushed in Port Said. When there were lots of people outside the shop near school they pushed there too. If you were tall it was better because you could stretch your hand over everyone and get what you wanted. I watch a short woman shaped like Grandpapa. She is wearing a red galabia and blue slippers with a white flower, like the kind we buy in Alexandria in the summer that break after a week and make Mama upset. A man who looks like a giraffe is standing next to her. His arm is stretched over everyone and he has it almost in the window. The line is meant to be one line but it’s now three. People stick out from all sides. The red lady taps the giraffe man’s hand. She nods with her head. He takes her paper. Both their papers are almost at the window.

  Mama stood looking for a long time then took my hand again. She pulled at me towards the corner, where the blue door was. It had a gold sign. Two men stood on each side of the door. Mama whispered to them and brought out a paper from her bag. One of them knocked and opened the door. I saw chairs. A TV. The room was smoky. Everyone around us was smoking. The walls were dirty. The floors were dirty. People had scribbled and scratched their names on everything. A man, then another man, threw cigarettes on the floor. Only men smoked. Mama turned and looked. She pointed. Sit. I looked up at her. I couldn’t see the color of her eyes. She nodded with her head again then turned and went inside. The door shut. The two men stood still like statues. I turned and shuffled to the chair. I knew Mama wouldn’t be a minute. Baba used to say he would be a minute then I would sit and sit and it felt like time had stopped and he was never coming back. Sometimes people went places and never came back.

  I had come to the Mugamma with Baba many times. We made passports, we got my birth certificate, we made a special paper so I could travel with Mama without Baba. We also came once when Baba bought the land in the desert for the other house. When Granny died we came too. I didn’t know what Mama was doing this time. I listened to people next to me talking about Zawahiri. One of them was looking at the newspaper. Two ladies put their hands on their chests and said yalahwee. He should be in jail forever, and they’ve now set him loose on us. Yalahwee. They kept talking but I stopped listening when the man came and sat next to me. He sat with his back straight up. I straightened mine. He took off his slippers. He rolled and unrolled the papers in his hands. He had a small beard like Baba’s when he didn’t shave. But he was thin. His shirt was wet. He turned to me but didn’t say anything. I looked down at my hands. I could hear his paper rolling again.

  When Mama came out I had a bottle of 7-Up in my hand. She asked where I got it from. I pointed. The man with the beard. I’m not supposed to take things from strangers. But it was so hot. You were gone so long. He gave it to me. I said I can’t and he said I had to. Mama started walking. I got up quickly. I left the bottle on the floor. I followed her. The driver was waiting. To the house, Mama told him. She was exhausted. She would need to nap before lunch.

  —

  I put the fan on in the living room while Mama napped. I was allowed TV as long as it couldn’t be heard. They kept playing Quran, then Mama Nagwa came on. Mama Nagwa was always talking about Mama Suzanne. She was also always telling us what was good and what was not. She told us we had to read. Children weren’t supposed to talk a lot. We had to thank Baba and Mama Suzanne for all the good things they gave us. We had to love our teachers. I got up and turned to the other channel. A silent film. I stood by the TV with my finger on the panel. I changed back to Channel Two. Still Mama Nagwa. Channel One. Film. Channel Two. Mama Nagwa. I look at the door to Baba’s study. I go to the kitchen. I take a chair and drag it to the counter. I stand on it and reach for a glass. I bend my knees and put the glass down on the counter. I push it so it slides back near the wall. I get off the chair. I drag it back to the table. I get my glass and fill it with water from the tap. The English girl in my class says tap water is dirty. It’s from the Nile and will make you sick. Her mummy says. I told her what Grandmama said about the Nile water and its promises. She made a face. I drink my water and make a wish.

  I open the balcony and go outside. The streets are empty. I look next door. Every single balcony. Every single window. They are all closed, with their shutters too. When the shutters are closed in Nana’s house it’s dark. Even with the lights on, it’s dark. I think that maybe for my next story for school I will write about the Dark People who live with their shutters closed. Mama likes to close the shutters when it’s too hot. It helps keep the house cool. Baba said it’s rubbish, but he let Mama close them when she wanted. In my bedroom the shutters only go down halfway. They broke a long time ago and nobody fixed them. Mama said she had to remember to phone the man to come and look at them. I told her I didn’t want the man. It means it never gets dark.

  I go back inside. Channel One. Football. Every day there is football. Football is the people’s oxygen, Baba said. They have nothing else. The team that lost last time started fighting. The police took them away. We watched on TV, Baba and I. It was the day he told me I had to remember what people had been through. When you have a dream and someone makes promises they keep breaking, it is hard to recover. You lose hope. That was the day Baba told me I was luckier than many people, and no matter what happened, I had to remember that.

  Football is boring. I go to my room. I look out of the window for a long time and imagine there is nothing there. Just the grass, like Mama said it used to be, and a sandy slope down to the river. It’s ages since Mama’s nap. I’m hungry. I finished coloring and watched everything on TV, looked at the albums under my bed, played with Nesma’s cards, stood in front of the mirror, pretended I was singing onstage, played garden, planted flowers all over my room. I now sit on the edge of my bed waiting. It’s dark outside. I get up. I walk on my tiptoes to Mama’s door. She doesn’t like to be woken up. Most of the time Mama closes her door, but sometimes when she takes her siesta she leaves it open the size of a pea. I put my ear near the crack. I try not to breathe. Mama hears everything. She
also knows everything, even when I don’t tell her. Grandmama said it’s how mothers are made. When I become a mother I will understand. I told Grandmama there were too many things I was waiting to understand. She laughed and patted my head. She said it’s better not to know too much anyway. I take one step closer and hear whispers. The phone is outside. Maybe Mama is talking to herself, like Uncle does. I stand for a long time then put my small finger on the door. It doesn’t move. I’m scared it might squeak. Everything in the house squeaks. I suck my breath in and push again. I put my eye to the crack. Mama is on the floor. Sitting on her knees. She has a scarf on her head like Grandmama and the evil woman in the street. I stand as still as I can. Mama keeps whispering. After a while I hear my name. Then Mama says Al Salam Alaykum. I suck my breath deeper and tiptoe back to my room. Out of the window I see a small cloud. We never have clouds. I wish I could catch it and keep it.

  The line of ants extends from the neck of the toothpaste tube across the sink up the wall by the mirror and into a crevasse between two tiles. On television they have been warning about ants, these small black beady ones in particular. In a moment they can be all over you, and their bite, if a collective effort, can kill. So says the TV. Uncle insists it is a metaphor, that the regime is sending subliminal messages about the Islamists who have been staging sporadic bombings and attacks. He suggests I start taking notes, keeping a diary of phrases, creating an archive of messaging and making the connections. It could be a book, he tells me, or maybe a short film. I watch the ants for a few minutes, considering the theory. It seems far-fetched. I also find it hard to kill the ants in the way the TV advises, filling a plant mister with medicinal alcohol and boiling water and spraying it over everything, even the inside of your shoes. I turn to the mirror. I twist and roll my hair into a bun. I button my jeans, faded Levi’s with an e printed upside down. My navy T-shirt is oversized with a logo of a man on a camel playing polo. I put a long white cotton shirt over it, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled. I turn around and peer over my shoulder. I stretch out the bottom of the T-shirt so there’s less of a silhouette from behind.

  It’s early, Mama wakes up late, but I knock lightly on her door each morning and whisper that I’m going down. Does she need anything? I leave a note on the fridge. I go down the back stairs and walk around the house to the street on the Nile. Billboards tower on the pavement advertising the new mobile phone company. Flyers for a new coffee shop are strewn on the tarmac, muddied by footprints. I take the bus. We lost the driver some years before, unable to afford the raise he requested, or to find someone who would work for less. We had lost most everyone, family first, then the large and varied staff that Granny had kept and Mama inherited. For all the sprawl of the house it was just me and her now, and a woman who came every ten days to clean. The house was like an echo chamber, most rooms kept permanently closed. You could hear the wind when it would come brushing even lightly against the old wood-framed windows. The floor continually squeaked. During the night inexplicable rumbles would wake me up. As a child, I had imagined these murmurs of the house to be tea parties on the roof. Now I wondered about the poetics of space, the cavities people once filled. Mama never spoke about how things had changed, but it hung heavily on her. I could see it in her gestures, how she sat at her dressing table each morning, ends of her hair in hand, combing, endlessly, as if treading in her own oblivion. Her hair was shorter now, there was little to brush through. Eventually she would come out to make breakfast. Mama drank her coffee black and ate just a quarter slice of toast with date jam. Some days I tried to make her coffee the old way, thick with sugar and cream, but she would look into the mug deeply as if she could see the bottom, then leave it untouched. The only days she made breakfast were the ones when Dido passed by on his way to work. She made him scrambled eggs and coffee the way she used to for Baba, putting shatta in the eggs and adding a spoon of salt to the coffee before mixing in five spoons of sugar. You didn’t feel the salt, but it brought out the flavors.

  I stand at a slight distance from the stop, looking in on the garden and house as I wait, watching others peering in too. It is a maneuver to get on the bus. By the time it reaches this stop, almost at the end of a line to downtown, it is always full, windows open, heads sticking out, people dangling from the door, one foot in, one foot out, hands grabbing onto what they can. I let a first bus pass, then a second. When the third comes, I push my way in, sticking my twenty-five-piastre note through the crowds, crinkled, dirty. It’s pulled from my grip and a pink scrap is probed back into my palm. I scrunch my fingers around it and push. The last row is reserved for women, if they can find their way through the glut of men. I do. It’s full, but one woman lets me stand close to her feet, offers to take my bag. I hold up my palm. Thank you, it’s okay. She puts her hands to my hips and pulls me closer. I feel conscious of my groin almost in her face. She holds me there the entire ride. I try not to make eye contact. I focus on the conversations nearby about the heat. I hold my tense body as if relaxed, or unawares.

  The route to downtown is one I’ve taken for years, around the perimeter of the island. What was once a view of the Nile, of rowers plowing through thick waters in the morning, is now just fence, wall, fence, overgrown garbage-filled hedge, more fence, more wall. Dust coats it all like rind. Army clubs and government cafés take what space they can down to the banks, reserved only for those in upper executive ranks. The river is barely visible, except on one solitary stretch of a few meters where the hedge refuses to grow. Going to school we would drive down the island’s length, then curve back to the eastern side. To university I continue, over the bridge with the lions and towards Tahrir Square. Police line it, slouched young conscripts leaning on loaded rifles. A man sits on the pavement selling roses. Another shining shoes. One swinging key chains. Leafy greens mark the spot of another vendor, who might have left earlier, or been taken away. They let some people stay. They take others away. Some are placed undercover.

  I cross from one pavement to the next in the direction of the museum, looking right, across the square. Railings are being drilled into the tarmac, coated with enamel, painted black. The city’s little green space is now fenced off, but the grass is dead anyway, the color of straw. I cross from one pavement to another around its edge. The overhead pedestrian walkway is long gone, torn down one day after my tenth birthday. Uncle had come to the house a few days later, a Sunday, newspaper in hand, complaining. Mama had been sitting on the sofa, I on a cushion close to her feet. There was never anything in the paper anymore except the bridges the president was building, the new cities, schools, libraries, hospitals he paid for. There was also the triple-outlined front-page daily box, untitled, listing phone calls and letters of praise from world leaders. It still existed, almost a decade later. Uncle had fallen into the armchair with a thud that day, dropped himself down, arms following, my eyes plummeting with him, catching his words. A national monument has been destroyed. He shook his head with rigor. I remember looking at him and thinking he meant the Pyramids, Mama’s jaw dropping too. Then he launched into describing the most elegant circular walkway in the world, perhaps even the only one. Its proportions and elevation meant that no matter where you stood, you could see the entire green lawn of the circle in the square and the complete fountain and Italian-made sculpture. Nothing obstructed your view, regardless of what height you were at. Mama had picked up the newspaper to look for the story. Uncle groaned about the government’s neglect, not even informing people that the square would be closed. He had driven into the city to attend a meeting honoring fifty-five years of the Egyptian Surrealists, held in a storied building just off the square, and as he approached, found it barricaded. Why? Because. Can’t you at least put a sign up? He parked. A quarter of the walkway had already been demolished. The square was a mess, the lawn and fountain covered in rubble. It was just one of many acts of destruction, he had said, erasing the identity of a city. Everything we ever knew will be gone. Anything with traces of past histories. It
was the legacy my generation would inherit, one of destruction and loss. He was sad for what we had been born into. Tadmeer. Tadmeer. It meant devastation. He worried it was who we had become. Sweat dripped off him like melted wax.

  My memories of Uncle are the sharpest, most defined. Then, now. He complained about the walkway, and in my mind’s eye, even as a child, it brought back the flag. He had been as upset about one as the other. As I walk through the square I see, hear, feel him. I relive past moments. With Baba, only the stories are left.

  I take a step up onto the pavement, maneuver over broken tiles patchworked with tarmac and pockets of sand. The gates of the museum.

  Egyptian?

  Egyptian, you’re sure?

  Yes, Egyptian.

  Egyptian? But you pay less.

  I nod. Pay the twenty-five-piastre ticket. Enter. Two girls in colored veils hold hands by Sekmet. A friend snaps a shot. They giggle. I walk past the last dynasties, the fake Rosetta, Thutmosis III, Thutmosis IV, Amenophis II, Hatshepsut, granite coffins, black cats, Ibis, the relief with part of Nefertiti, her head turned sideways. Kohl holders, carvings, relics piled almost atop one another, crammed in corners, onto shelves, on staircase landings. The museum smells like Granny’s floor, musty, air trapped from decades earlier. I walk through, imagining the British looking for space, more space, trying to make sense of all they have found, creating labels, partial labels, incorrect labels. It’s haphazard, disorderly, a relic from the time it was built as much as it is a work in progress. Students are clamoring around one set of reliefs, drawing, putting papers onto exposed limestone and taking down rubbings. I hear the murmur of a young girl wanting to take home a beaded gold necklace. Imagine if it were mine? I find the statue of Akhenaton, the one where he is peering down, one hand on the shoulder of his young son. Black granite, alabaster eyes, lips pursed as if in motion, about to breathe. I sit cross-legged on the floor and bring out my notebook. I’ve taken to writing letters to people who don’t exist or once existed or exist only as statues or gods. I’ve spent many hours by this statue, the only one of a pharaoh, a ruler, depicting love towards a child. The steely formalism of pharaonic sculpture was set aside in the case of Akhenaton, his humanism represented in gestures, expression, the lines of his face. My letters to A are obsessive, about who he was, how he inhabited his body, expressed love, came to find such conviction in his worship of the sun god Aton. How did he deal with difference? I want answers I know I will never get. Dear Akhenaton, I begin. I trace the outline of his body with my eyes. His breasts, his curved hips. I imagine him lying beside Nefertiti in bed, fingers tracing parts. In the margins of my notebook I make note to read more about Nefertiti and her love for A. I write: What does it mean to be devoted? I underline these notes and then circle them, with a question mark.