Chronicle of a Last Summer

by Yasmine El Rashidi

  That summer, sitting on the terrace with Uncle, I asked him what he thought. Is it possible? Could it happen? What would it mean? Uncle said it was inevitable, eventually some change would come, but much more so he wished our lives were different. To fall in love, to build a life with a loved one, was the greatest freedom. He hoped I, we, would have that one day. He understood that none of it was so straightforward. Most young people can’t afford to build independent lives. Love is a calculation, of resources and pedigree. Uncle never spoke about his own love, but I knew of her. They met in college, but she had been married by arrangement to a family friend in their sophomore year. Uncle promised he would wait for her until the day she divorced. They wrote letters to each other, mailed from across the city, looking out at the same horizon, the same skyline. They would meet when they could, at the supermarket, the club, on the corner of the street before she picked up her children from school. Dido had told me that Uncle would wait for her forever. Her husband would never leave her. It was a matter of pride. It was one of the things Dido had encouraged me to fight for, that we had to fight for, the right to divorce as women. Uncle died waiting. He died before her. We had never spoken about his own emotions, but he was the only one who talked to me about desires. I had found the courage to ask him about our cousin in America that summer. What happened? Why had he left? Why would no one talk about it? Why did Mama’s neck tense whenever his name came up? What were the problems? Why couldn’t he come back? Uncle had looked me straight in the eye and said that I must have known. I have a sense. He paused. Muttered something about the terror of the state and personal choices and freedoms, then paused again. You know how it is, he said. I couldn’t understand if they didn’t see it in others or it was something they just chose to ignore. I turned my eyes down to the newspaper and asked him if he was hungry.

  —

  Mama appeared through the mashrabiyya doors in her robe. She had heard us talking. Did she want a coffee? She shook her head as she tied a second bow on her satin sash. Her robe was a pale pistachio. She had stopped wearing the one Baba had given her the autumn before. I had sat in her bedroom as she went through closets, bringing out winter clothes, packing away summer ones. On the armchair in her room she made a pile of things to give away. It was the first time I had seen Mama give away anything. I lay on her bed, elbow propped, head on my hand, her back towards me as she rummaged. I could see my reflection in her mirrored closet doors, and as well her face. That was the day she told me about the dream. The house had been painted white, there was a white wooden fence around it, the garden was in full bloom. She saw Granny. Flowers sprouted everywhere. Flowers that had never grown before. Tulips. Colors we’d never seen. The grass shimmered emerald. It was pouring with rain. A cherry-covered cake was placed on the lawn. The rain fell around it. The dream was a good one. The white was an indication of new beginnings, and the rain a good omen. I asked why Granny was there, what she thought it meant. Mama raised her eyebrows as if to say who knows, then said that only God knew.

  I got up and went through her pile of clothes to give away. I wanted to ask if she was sure about the robe, and what about the white silk blouse, and this belt, really? They were all things Baba had bought. I swallowed the thought as I felt it rise and roll onto my tongue. I had cleared out downstairs myself two summers earlier with a tepid urgency, getting rid of what I could from the past. Mama had come down as I was putting things in bags, going through drawers, marking piles for storage or to be thrown away. I had felt her in the main room before I saw her, the tension emanating from her body. I could tell she was uncomfortable. Downstairs had been closed for years. Nobody spoke about it anymore. It was as if the floor, its entire lifetime, had been banished or erased. Then Granny and Nesma visited me in my dreams, calling me downstairs. I saw them in the dream, standing on the stairs, repeating my name, telling me to join them. I wondered if it was about death. They say you know in the days before you die that they’re your final ones, signs come to you. Or was it just a dream about space, my own consciousness of it? When I told Mama, she had been sitting at her dressing table combing her hair. I could see her inhale deeply, her chest rising, her neck pushing back against her head, but she didn’t say a word. Her pause was so long, it felt like disapproval, and I got up after a while and left. Then the dream came again. That August, finally, Mama told me I could do as I pleased. She said it without words, just with her eyes and a nudge of her head. Ours wasn’t a culture used to change. Permanency was valued. We lived in the same places we were born in. We married and moved around the corner. A job was held for decades. The less change, the less movement, the better. It was a view to stability, rather than the oppression I had internalized it to be. Everyone we knew preserved lives as they were, over generations. Sofas stayed covered in plastic, glass cabinets with proliferating displays were not to be touched, every gift, every token, every ticket, stuffed somewhere, or in a drawer. Most people’s homes were like time capsules, offering panoramic views of every year until the present one. The narrative of Granny’s floor had begun in 1940 and ended three days after she died, in 1983. The piles of hoarded newspapers and magazines spanned those years. The gadgets, gifts, flyers, phone books, postcards. Her letters were stored in shoe boxes and tied with ribbon. The last one dated December 31, 1981. It was postmarked Lalibela. Inside was a string of brass beads. It was signed, Devotedly yours. The letter before that was locally stamped, from the brother of Sadat, offering greetings for the Eid. A few days before came a government notice about tax. Mama had asked me to keep certain things, even though she knew we might never look at them again and until that moment we had no sense they had even existed. I put what I could in boxes, covered the furniture in sheets, bubble-wrapped paintings, glasswear, porcelain, china, and silver. Boxes and boxes of letters, postcards, photographs, film reels, negatives, crochet thread, stamps, brooches. Suitcases of clothes, Granny’s, folded and put away. Everything was moved to the basement. I kept a single photograph from Granny’s collection, framed it, and had it hung on a wall by the entrance. It is of downstairs, one day when Granny was still alive. It looks like it might be winter, judging from the dress, although the house is always cold. Granny is sitting in a corner, Nesma by her feet, both of them drowned out by the deep cocoa tones of the furniture and curtains and paintings and the great grandfather clock looming nearby. A blanket covers Granny’s lap. A furry shawl is flung over Nesma’s shoulders. A seven-layered chandelier cuts across one side of the frame. Granny’s lips are a deep pink, jumping out amid somber tones. I kept that, and as well a series of Granny’s paintings, miniature, Polaroid-size oils of the view from the main terrace, painted on November 28 of each year since the house was built. They hung on the largest wall in the sitting room, off-center, to the right. The palette changed very slightly on each canvas, from greens and earth tones to scales, eventually, of sepia, rust, and grays. Four of the years were missing. Mama didn’t know why. The gaps of those years were left as spaces on the wall that themselves had become tinted with time. It was the single wall I didn’t paint white. Once I moved downstairs Mama would come down often and look at the paintings. She would sit with her coffee cup on the rocking chair facing them and tell me that it was like watching a film. The stories would come flooding back, filling her, occupying her mind’s eye.

  The last morning with Uncle, Mama had walked into the living room and stared at the newspapers. At the bottom of the front page was a picture of Toshka, the president’s New Valley Project, intended to turn thousands of acres of desert into agricultural land. Uncle called it the greatest failed promise of any president. Nasser’s project had been the Aswan High Dam. Sadat’s the Suez Canal. Mubarak’s was Toshka. Every day Al-Ahram ran stories about the promise of Toshka. It had been ten years. Mama had looked at the picture, the desert landscape with strata of color, and let her eyes drift, then asked Uncle, seemingly out of nowhere, about the paintings downstairs. He tilted his head sideways and asked if she remembered the
day they sat on the balcony eating mangoes until they both got sick? It was the day after Granny had painted the eighteenth miniature in the series. She had propped it up against the ledge of the balcony. It had always been his favorite, because it was like the horizon, the beginning of a palette shift. I made a mental note to look at that painting later. Maybe it could even be the cover of my book. Then I pushed myself up from the sofa and stood over Uncle and Mama. I have to go. Where? Dar Merit. Why? I’m editing a manuscript for a forthcoming book. The first-ever translation of Khairallah Ali. A novel? A story of listlessness, and falling in love on the coast. A love story that is understood later, long after its moments of conception. Mama slowly nodded her head. Uncle told me he was still waiting for my book. I smiled, told him I was working on it, leaned over, kissed him on one cheek, taking steps backwards and giving Mama a half wave with my lowered hand. She told me to be careful. Uncle told her to let me be and kept talking. I heard him tell Mama that my writing would free me, and then after some murmuring I couldn’t make out, he repeated the word catastrophe, ma’saa, as I went down the steps. He may have been speaking about Toshka, or even the Copts. It never occurred to me that he might have been referring to me. I had no sense it would be our final goodbye. Later I wondered if Mama might have known, if that’s why she had asked about the paintings. She had premonitions about things.

  I walked around the house that day and saw a neighbor from afar. She was one of the ones who lived with her shutters closed. I hadn’t seen her in months. She looked shrunken and sallow. Her daughter, an only child, had fallen out of the window of her fifth-floor bedroom eight months earlier. The parking attendant had found her at dawn. She was Dido’s age. He had known her through a friend. When Mama had called to offer condolences, they told her it was a sugar coma. Diabetes. She had been sitting at the window and fell out. Dido said it was more than that. She had been depressed for years. I watched the mother, hunched over the walking stick she now used, Mama’s age but looking eighty. I avoided her, my eyes down, tracing the potholed street. At the corner, the bawab of the next-door building was watching TV. It was set up on the pavement, and he sat on a small wooden stool. I traced his wire, up to a balcony on the first floor. He heard me pass, raised his head, nodded, smiled. I could hear the laughter of Ismail Yaseen from his set, then Sabah’s voice break into song. I raised my arm, trying to stop a taxi. The black-and-white cars slowed as they approached. Downtown, I called. Most of them sped off as quickly as they had slowed beside me, sometimes shaking their heads in apology, other times as if to say, Are you crazy? Downtown was impossible to move through by car. There were barricades everywhere, around all the government buildings, streets had been blocked, traffic rerouted. There was no explanation as to why. It happened overnight. People said it was out of fear, but fear of what, we didn’t know. On one street they said it was because the president’s son had bought property there. They hadn’t closed the street but rather redirected traffic to go from north to south, instead of the other way. There was no logic as to why. One taxi driver tells me I’m better off walking. I wait fifteen more minutes as each taxi slows and zooms off. One hesitates, asks how much I will pay, hesitates some more, then declines apologetically. Nobody walks, but that day I did. I walked down the corniche, along the Nile, under sagging trees, over broken pavements, piles of garbage, past the cultural center that had been started in an abscess of space under the bridge. I walked all the way down the fenced-off Nile. I could see none of the river except at the rowing club where a metal gate was flung open. Hedges had overgrown and turned ashen and been littered and then covered with corrugated metal. Walls had been made higher. There was no sense, anymore, of being surrounded by waters. It was another reminder of the battle over the Nile’s waters. Before he died, Uncle had said that he hoped Ethiopia would submit. He would turn his head up and say it as if making a wish, throwing it out into the sky to be heard or maybe caught in the wind and blown to open ears. Uncle said our future, possibility, was all in the Nile waters. The dam could never be built. It would be colonialism all over again.

  —

  It has been almost four years since Uncle died. Forty-one months since the revolution. Like all my friends I find it hard to sleep through the night. My sleep is fitful. I get up, pace, check the news, Twitter. I try to work. My desk faces a wall. A sketch of Mama’s, a portrait, hangs above it. Piles surround me. Newspapers, books. On the floor, leaning against walls, opened randomly, left on the sofa. What I thought was a script is slowly turning into a book. It’s an hour past dawn, but the heat is already scorching. My shutters are partially down, blocking out the sun. A plastic fan whines in the corner. In the background I can hear the chatter of birds. I pick up Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, Booklet No. 48, fiction, Nawal El Saadawi writing for the art biennial Documenta. I browse, leaf through pages, book after book, mindlessly, searching. I flip through a photocopy of an Arabic study on the literature of defeat, what was conceived in the aftermath of ’67. It is described by one writer cited as a new language that spoke to the times. Everything was stripped down to fundamentals, bare, deflated. I read about this new language, one I have read through its novels for years. The more ornate social realism of such prominent writers as Naguib Mahfouz and the virtuous eloquence of Arabic literature were abandoned for more experimental, fragmented works that expressed the anxieties and crises at hand. I pick up another book. Another. Everything has resonance. I wonder about structure, and form. Genre. Can literature, the novel, be written in the form of a script? At what point would it become that, a script? I think about this as I relive summers and try to write, grapple with the beginnings of a manuscript. The summer before Uncle died. The things that were said. The summer before things changed. Dido and I becoming estranged.

  We fought sitting at a café on a pedestrian street in El Borsa downtown. Dido was smoking apple-flavored shisha, I was drinking mint tea served extra sweet. Over the years our views had differed and veered apart. Dido believed fervently that anarchy was better than the despotism we had. My reservations were inherited. He had hoped I might turn out as political as he was, but I’d failed him in every way. He consumed literature voraciously, but thought writing in a country like ours to be an exercise in passivity, a luxurious musing, not a tool for change. He spoke of the need for an urgency to one’s actions, a physicality. I insisted that writing is an action, becomes a physicality. We debated this often, argued about it, sometimes even wrote impassioned letters that we would read to each other out loud. When we fought, though, it was about the two young men who sauntered off the street and sat at a table down from ours. They held hands and wore tight T-shirts. One of them had a yellow headband through his hair. We sat in silence for a long time, Dido inhaling his pipe, watching them from an angle, his head slightly revealing of his scrutiny. I watched with no attempt to conceal my gaze. People walked by. Young men sat down. Two girls with wild curls. Four young boys, also in tight T-shirts, also holding hands. They put two tables together and asked for the unused chairs from nearby. Dido and I looked on. I could hear him inhale. As he exhaled, blowing a single smoke ring into the air, I watched him raise two fingers languidly, gesturing with them and as well with his eyes. His charcoal was out. He wanted a refill. We looked past the white robes of the man placing more cubes of lit charcoal into the mouth of the shisha. Past the growing crowd around us, and to the table with the two young men. A man in a gray safari shirt and faded black trousers had walked towards them. He had been standing at the corner for close to an hour. I had noticed his shoes. Dido had too. They were familiar shoes. Shoes we saw a lot. Shoes of the undercover police. They were pointed, with a ledge. With his head the man gestured to the extra plastic chair at the table. Could he join? The young men hovered forward from their waists, their feet verging on pushing themselves up from the ground. Their gesture: of course. He pulled back the chair and sat. The server rushing forward, saluting him, bowing. The young men in their tight T-shirts, touch
ing hands, leaned forward. Words were exchanged. Dido flicked his head, so fiercely that the tube of his shisha leaped from his hand onto the floor. He swore under his breath. Minutes passed. The man and his shoes got up and walked away. The young men resumed their laughter. Dido fumed. I could see it in his nostrils, in the movement of his chest. He tapped his foot nervously. His thigh trembled. We shared a friend who had fled the country years before. He had been on the moored Queen Boat–turned-nightclub when it was raided by plainclothes state security agents. Someone had noticed them walking on board and alerted those inside. They had revealed themselves by their shoes. More than one hundred men were arrested. Our friend had slipped out. He now lives in Seattle, a political asylee. Those who stayed, some of them, were roped into the state’s network of informers, like the Islamists and dealers. Snitchers, someone had called them in the months after as the trial progressed and we sat at cafés like this one, hesitantly, talking about their fate. Survivors, another had said.

  The transaction of words across the table was clear. Dido burst forward. His plastic chair pushed onto its hind legs and then over onto the floor. I watched as he took fierce strides towards them. His legs were skinny, his jeans sat just below the line of his boxers. He had lost weight over the past year, his face now drawn. He had stopped wearing a tie some time ago and only ever wore plain T-shirts and colored hoodies. Even in the summer. He would tell me to meet him at El Borsa, and I could spot him by his hood, which was always over his head. We didn’t speak about all that much anymore, not the way we used to, even though we spent hours at cafés on the pedestrian streets in downtown together. His eyes still twinkled and his mouth was always verging on a smile, but he had become somewhat dispirited. One afternoon I noticed his engagement ring was off. I asked. He shrugged. It’s over. His second fiancée. She isn’t right anymore. Why? Don’t want to talk about it. I said nothing but could see he was hurt, so tried to change subject, make conversation. I brought up my book again. The main narrator, what did he think, how should I deal with form? We were both interested in this, what a new Egyptian modernism, founded in the vernacular, might be, and some afternoons Dido would spontaneously want to talk about it, things I should read around it, an idea he had, even as he concurrently wanted me to put my writing aside and join the movement. But that afternoon he swung back onto the hind legs of his chair, pulled the cords of his hoodie, tucked his head deeper in. We sat in silence. His friends, overlapping groups of old leftists and a new, much younger generation of activists, all looked much like him. Less in their dress, but more so in their demeanor. Dido’s red hood slipped off his head as he barged toward the young men. He lowered his face between them, clenched his fists. I made out the insults. Heads had turned. The café paused. The yellow-headbanded boy put his hands up as if in surrender, or appeal. Dido flicked his hand in the air and swore. He paused over them. It might have been less than a minute that felt like time had stopped. Traitors, he said under his breath as he strode back towards me and sat with a thud. He became incensed when I expressed a sympathy, suggesting that they were only trying to find a way of making a life for themselves, that he should be more forgiving.