Chronicle of a Last Summer

by Yasmine El Rashidi

  The massacre had taken place in the early morning on the eastern bank of Luxor, just before Hatshepsut’s Temple. The cruise ship had been approaching the city when the gunmen opened fire. Forty-five minutes of continuous rounds. Sixty-two people killed. Dozens injured. Within minutes of the attack, the message circulated through Cairo’s state security headquarters. Special forces were dispatched to all the Islamist strongholds. Amina’s neighborhood, across the river from our island, was the first place sealed shut. We heard sirens that morning but didn’t know what they were. The neighborhood was nicknamed the Islamic Republic. Kandahar. I could see it from my bedroom window, the beginning of it, right across the river. It extended for miles. Amina said they had been stuck in their room for two days until they cleared them. It was Al-Gamaa Al-Islaamiya, she said. Not the Brotherhood. Mama looked with brows raised and asked what the difference was. This was another of those shrouded statements. Amina put her hands to her hips. Of course there is a difference, a vast one. The Brotherhood doesn’t believe in violence. Mama tilted her head sideways and looked at her sternly. Amina was quick to blurt, Not all of them. I swear Sayed had nothing to do with this. Many of the Brotherhood are denouncing violence, they are beginning to, the groups are different now, separate. Mama had never trusted the husband. He had come to the house when Amina was sick to collect her salary. He had a wild beard and glum face. Carried a short stick. Didn’t look women in the eye. Wouldn’t shake hands. Mama had warned Amina she had to be careful what she was dragged into, but Amina insisted she had nothing to do with any of his business. After the bombings began, she said that even her husband was having second thoughts about the Brotherhood, even the nonviolent faction of them. He was thinking of leaving them altogether. Many of their members had left. Mama told her that she had to realize that I went to university right near the site of the last bomb. Even though it was aimed at tourists, it might easily have hit me. Amina shook her head and asked God the Greatest to erase and forgive these words. Allah protect the girl. Mama poured the hot water into her mug. She seemed on the verge of an emotion I had never seen from her before. Anger? I imagined this as a scene in my film and picked up a Biro from the table, making a note on the back of my hand. I watched as Amina tore a strip of bread and dipped it into the pan, scooped out a piece of fried egg, then circled the bread in the oil. She stuffed her mouth and chewed. Mama took a sip of her coffee and shook her head.

  —

  I go into my bedroom and sit at my desk. It’s facing the big window overlooking the Nile. I can’t see the Nile. I can’t see anything except the overgrown mango trees. We keep talking about pruning them. The gardener says nobody in the country knows how to prune. He doesn’t know what we mean. He tells us he can cut them down if that’s what we want. Mama gets upset when he says this. She slams the window. Shakes her head. We let the trees grow. They are higher than the house. But there aren’t any mangoes. There haven’t been mangoes in five, six, maybe seven years. Every summer I wait to see. Maybe this year they will fruit again. And then they don’t. I ask the gardener and he says the soil is bad. How does the soil become bad? He shrugs his shoulders. It’s just the way it is, something from Allah. I think of maybe starting my film with the mango trees. I flip through my script and wonder about the soil.

  I start writing:

  Over lunch Dido says the only way our lives will change is if we demand it. People like our cousin in America are the reason we’re in stagnation. Leaving is the greatest evil. Then silence. Or maybe the other way around. He isn’t sure. We just can’t be passive, he knows that. My friend’s theory is nonsense. Nothing is pre-planned. Every moment is pregnant with the possibility for change. It’s important to look at everything that happens with a view for the future. Dido is eating the eggs that Mama has made. They are covered in Tabasco. He is wearing jeans and a casual shirt but also a tie. It’s flung back over his shoulder. His work doesn’t require him to wear a tie but he likes to. It’s a sign of respect for the cases he’s working on. He chews slowly and speaks between bites.

  I make notes in the margin: Have we inherited defeat, the very spirit of it? Is it seeped into who we are? Do we have to reconcile with our parents’ losses to build again? Where does Dido’s anger figure in? If in fact we are angry. I circle this and think about all that I feel has been stolen from me, from us. I wonder if anger is too simple a word, too reductive. Maybe I could have a conversation or debate between Uncle and Dido about this? I underline and write out the word languor. I don’t want my film to be scripted, but I have a sense of what I would like the tenor, atmosphere, of it to be. I want to create enough cues and structure for it to be a cinematic feature, and enough space to also include spontaneity and cinéma vérité. I write: Quotidian. I wonder what it would mean to have people from my life acting scenes as well as being trailed with a camera every day. Could I script certain events? Or have someone recount them as part of a family discussion? Like showing the different viewpoints that reflected the complexity of the national psyche, exposed in the days after Mubarak returned from Addis. Maybe something that captures the gap of generations? For days afterwards the TV played, almost on loop, Mubarak giving his speech on landing back at Cairo International Airport. Suddenly I found a blue van blocking the road, and somebody jumped to the ground. A machine gun started….I realized there were bullets coming at our car. I saw those who shot at me. Everyone said it was the Israelis. Guests on Channel One and Two all said el yahoud. The Jews. Mossad. There were Ethiopian Jews too, they told us. I thought Kebbe might have been one. Nobody asked, but it was presumed. Mama and Baba had never minded the Jews. They had many Jewish friends and loved Kebbe. It was the Israelis they had a problem with. People had started putting up posters on their buildings wishing the president a speedy recovery. They made posters with the Star of David washed over with dripping red paint. The Jews had blood on their hands. Everyone said this. People worried it would be ’67 all over again. Then one day, a few days later, new evidence was found. The gunmen were Arab. Uncle was with us that day. We heard the news on TV as it broke. He erupted, about there being no difference between us. Mama and I both looked at him, eyes wide. Spit flew from his mouth to the floor. He meant the Arabs and Jews. Under his breath he muttered that common sense is not that common. I could see Mama’s neck tense. I didn’t know if it was something Uncle was saying or his spit. I sat there until he stopped talking and we were all quiet. I asked if anyone wanted a glass of water. Uncle asked how my writing was going.

  I gazed at Uncle and Mama that day and wondered about fate. Could I build all this into what I’m writing, my script, the eventual film? I want to do something different, merge forms, speak to people on the street about their desires, and also capture this internal life, the intimate moments at home, the mundane. How did we land in our lives? The silence and the evenings in front of the TV are as comforting as they are fraught. In my mind’s eye I envisage Baba, his absence ever present in the questions unasked. Even Dido and I don’t talk about it, though we talk about everything else. I imagine the questions linger for everyone. There had been problems with the government. They were selective about who they went after. It is all I know. It might be all anyone knows, even Baba himself. In ways I understand what Dido means when he says it should be the source of my anger, that my placid exterior is a mask. An arbitrary system is an unjust system, he says. Or maybe it’s no system at all. Maybe H can play the main protagonist, enacting parts and playing herself in others. Maybe she’s right that I should just write a book.

  Mama has her hands crossed on her chest. She sits upright, as if watching and listening intently. An advertisement for Al Jawhara tea. Three men sit at a café playing backgammon. Two wear safari suits. One is in a gold-threaded galabia. Colored tea lights are strung across an alley. As they play, they begin to slouch into their chairs. One man nods off into sleep. Enter the belly dancer. Singing, dancing, a tray of glasses with tea balanced on her hand. Her body writhes. The café is suddenly
packed. The men perk up. They dance around her. Uncle’s face is blank.

  The cleaning lady found Uncle in bed one morning a few months before the revolution. His coffee was untouched. Biscuit crumbs were on his bedcover. He was sitting upright, holding the newspaper, not moving. They said it was a heart attack, high blood pressure. The last time I had seen him was on the Sunday after they pulled down the church. He came with three newspapers and rang the bell insistently. I stuck my head out of the window ready to shout. Young boys were always ringing our bell and running away. I saw Uncle’s bald head and went down to greet him. We went up the back stairs together. He put one hand on the banister and hauled himself up. I could hear his breath getting heavier ahead of me. He asked if Mama was home. Mama was always home in the mornings. Some days she wouldn’t come out of her bedroom until noon. Uncle paused at the first floor and peered in. Each time he came, he would say that he hadn’t been downstairs since Granny died. I would tell him to come, look. He would shake his head, pat my shoulder, look up at the stairs ahead of him, and tell me that it was better this way. Some memories need to be preserved. He didn’t want to write over them with something new.

  I was living downstairs by then. I slept in the room where Granny and Nesma had lived and died. Their things were in storage in the basement, except for Granny’s bed, which was now in Mama’s room, the same room she was born in. We went up to Mama’s floor. I put my key in the door and coerced it until the lock turned. All the locks in the house had problems. Some of them opened backwards, others jammed. Mama refused to change them. She worried the locksmith would change the lock and keep a copy of the keys for himself. I had become skeptical like her. Everyone would cheat you. Uncle would say that corruption and thievery were what made the country. Without those things it would fall apart. A low-lying level of corruption was critical, something like oil on a machine. Dido and he argued about this endlessly. Dido had paced the room the last time it came up, not long before Uncle died. He was adamant. He didn’t participate in this insidious corruption. Anarchy was better. Uncle asked him. Did he tip the parking attendant? The man who helped with his papers at the Mugamma? Dido gestured with his shoulders and hands as if to say, Ridiculous question. Uncle laughed. Dido barked back that it was culture not corruption. He was part of a movement that would take to the streets chanting about being fed up with the status quo. Kifaya, it’s enough. He had tried repeatedly to get me to go with him to the marches, to make a film called Kifaya. I promised I would go one day, but just not that day. Every few weeks he would try again, but I knew that deep down he knew. Activism was in the genes, and if not, it came from upbringing. We are informed by the experiences and behaviors of those around us. Dido loved me, but when he said these things, I could feel his disappointment. I knew I lacked the gene. I was more interested in abstracting experience with my writing and films than representing it. Unless it was the mundane, like a nine-minute short I filmed in a record store downtown. The owner was wary at first. He asked who I was making a film for. Why was I making a film? Who would see it? What would I do with it? Why his shop? He said I could film, then changed his mind. I showed him other films I had made. I went to him again. Again. We drank tea. Eventually he agreed. I filmed. Hours of B roll. A customer comes in with a CD he has bought of Umm Kulthum. He tells the shop owner to go to the second song. He asks him to listen. The song is one hour and forty-four minutes long. It happens in minute twenty-three. The quality isn’t what it should be. He knows Umm Kulthum, and her voice doesn’t crack like it does here. They listen. She is singing at a decibel higher than she should. It lasts a second, maybe it’s intentional? It’s a crack, she lost control. But she never lost control. Is it age? Was it? It’s just a bad recording? It is a bad recording. It must be. They call a man walking by from off the street. What does he think? The café owner next door. The bawab of a building across the alley. Does her voice crack? This is her most famous concert, it can’t be. They play minute twenty-three over and over. They turn to me and ask what I think. In my mind I think that I can just sit there for hours, camera on, listening like them. This was what Dido had meant about placid, I thought.

  Uncle had walked into the house and collapsed onto the sofa. He asked me for a glass of water or something fizzy. There was no sign of Mama. He put his neck back and tried to catch his breath. I could tell his heaving was as much about the church as his weight. The police had gone into a village on the outskirts of Cairo and bulldozed a church to the ground overnight. It lacked a permit, they said. In the newspaper there were pictures of Copts protesting, crying, wailing around the rubble. There were also pictures of young men, kūfiyyahs wrapped around their mouths and noses, dust clouding their knees down, arms hurled backwards, or forward, rocks flying through the air. Their faces strained. A friend, a longtime newspaper editor, told me he had never seen anything like it before. In all my years, and I am sixty-one, he said. The youth looked like they were in Gaza. It was the same kind of despair. I told Uncle when he came. I knew he would look and understand. He had been saying all year that it was untenable. La faim. He told me to watch for certain things. The price of tomatoes and okra. If the man carrying the bread on his head as he cycles is whistling or not. If people are watching TV at cafés, or sitting in silence, or debating. If the radio begins to play repeated patriotic songs. Without tomatoes and okra we can’t live, he said. I didn’t like okra but understood. It was prickly on the outside and like slime inside. Deceptive. People consumed it almost daily, scooping it into bread and gulping it down, oblivious to texture. It was the cheapest vegetable. We cooked tomatoes with everything. Every day the opposition newspapers would print a picture of a cart piled high with tomatoes. The price per kilo was hand-drawn on a card in their midst. That summer I set up a camera on a downtown corner each morning and zoomed in from across the street. Carts piled like pyramids. The better tomatoes on top, the bad ones hidden beneath. One minute, three minutes, five. If nobody bothered me, I would have let the camera roll all day. Invariably I was asked to leave. When I asked one cart owner why, he said we all know that tomatoes are politics, he didn’t want any trouble. The prime minister had announced he couldn’t do anything more about the price of tomatoes. He had done everything he could. He also couldn’t do anything about the power cuts and heat, except change the clocks, to put Cairo into a different time zone, on GMT+3. It happened arbitrarily one day. Two days later I found out, when I was late to meet a friend. For others it took a week. Mama had stopped buying tomatoes. She said they were exorbitant and we could do without. I reached for a glass from the cabinet. I poured water from the bottle Mama must have taken out of the freezer at some point in the night. Nobody drank tap water anymore, the government had announced some years ago that it was contaminated, and the fridge was so old it hardly cooled. We would fill the freezer with plastic bottles of water, then take them out and let them sit on the counter and melt through the day.

  Uncle and Mama argued that morning. He insisted the demolition proved the government had been behind an attack on a Coptic village that had gone uninvestigated by the state. Mama was adamant it couldn’t be. Her best friend Farida was a Copt and said the government was the only thing protecting them. Mubarak and the Pope were one. It was politics, pure and simple. Uncle turned to me and asked what I thought. All through the summer he had been saying we were on the brink. He told me I had to learn to feel the air change. It was all in the sounds, the way particles moved, echoed. The sounds of the city had shifted. We had sat on the balcony on consecutive Sundays over the entire summer and listened. He pointed to the reverberations of car horns. How the honking had both quieted and intensified, taken on a different impatience. We listened to the voices that echoed in from the streets and across the river. The constant chatter had given way to more abrupt bursts of expression. Something was pacified, followed by discharge. We could make out none of it, but the very tenor had shifted. We also listened for when the sound of the city suddenly stopped. A/Cs and the dron
e of business and machines and generators would roar and then collapse. For a moment there would be quiet, then the cars and the honking and a rumble would begin. It was a sign of excess, a city over capacity. We were breaking down. It was like a building, Uncle said. Filled beyond measurable proportions, badly wired, with extensions, borrowed power, borrowed pipes. He would look at me and shake his head, say nothing, but I knew what he was thinking. He had said it many times before over the years. This was what my generation was inheriting. It was up to us to mitigate the losses, the mistakes. Uncle tried to hold on to as many of the better memories as he could, many with Granny and Mama on this same balcony, eating mangoes, watermelon, white cheese, watching the Nile and looking out onto the expanse of green fields. It reached the horizon, and seemed to extend further, into the unknown. All we could see now beyond the sliver of Nile and the bushes of the garden were miles of a sepia city, and past that, in a horizon marked by a chalk line of rust red, the informal settlements. They made me think back to when Baba used to take me with him to the factory when I was a child. Back then the roads in the center of town were paved, but once you got to the outskirts of the city, much of it was dirt track. You knew you had come to the city’s end, it was like reaching the edge of the earth, where one line and color and atmosphere ended, and a plunge into something less certain began. Baba would slow as he maneuvered the car down from the tarmac onto the rougher, pebbled tracks. The sprawling tapestry of sepia and unfinished redbrick blocks that now extends for miles was then just desert, or crop. The colors around us changed. As I looked out from the balcony, I remembered all this. Rows and rows of redbrick and concrete buildings, unfinished, not connected in any way to the infrastructure of the built city. It was there, Dido had said, that the fight would erupt. He urged me to read Vertigo. Set in 2030, it was prophetic. Dido spoke of the fight as if he wanted a war, but he was a romantic, and I knew that in his heart what he really wanted was for comrades, dissidents, to unite: raise a flag, occupy the streets, talk about love, peace, revolution. I couldn’t imagine it, but I listened, read Ginsberg and Darwish to him aloud, asked him to describe what came after this utopia he envisioned. What would he do next?