It wasn’t that many weeks later that Uncle had died, and at the funeral Dido ignored me. He walked into the mosque, kissed Mama, Aunty, Taunte, wiping both his and also her tears, then sauntered to the farthest row of chairs and sat down, burying his head in his phone. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him cry before. The mosque had been packed. People poured in. Uncle seemed to have known everyone. Yousra was there, the widow of Sadat was there, for a moment even the pop star Amr Diab. The farmers came from Faiyûm. The service was held in the only mosque in the city that allowed men and women to be seated in the same large hall. I imagined that Dido might not have come had we been segregated. I watched him, kept my eye on him, but hadn’t noticed when he left. Mama remarked later how withdrawn he seemed. A cousin asked why we weren’t speaking, then said she worried that his activism had become as much about intolerance of experiences that strayed from his ideals as it was the tolerance he preached. She worried he was too influenced by those around him. I imagined Uncle would have said he was hardened by life. It saddened me, the sudden change in him, our distance, but I wondered if perhaps he was also simply brokenhearted.
—
Everything seemed to happen that summer. It was the end of August. I had come up the stairs with a bag of oranges for Mama and found the door open. I peered into the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, TV on, muted. A talk show was playing. It seemed to be a program about Ahmed Zeweil. Mama had got rid of Granny’s fan some summers before, but the new plastic one seemed to have become equally noisy. It drowned out my footsteps. I walked in. Mama’s face was to the television, but I could feel her neck, her entire being, turn towards me. She spoke without moving, her eyes focused on an abstract point on the screen. I could feel the words wrestle with her throat, until eventually they came out. Drawn, slow, deliberate. I have some news, she said. She started by telling me about a dream she had the week before, in which Baba had tapped her on the shoulder. I stood, didn’t say anything, waited. She spoke.
Apparently.
Your Baba is back.
He is staying at your aunts’.
He would like to see you.
As you can imagine, he has been through a rough time.
I stared at Mama, then the TV. I stood in silence for a moment. She sat in silence for a moment. My body felt transfixed. My mind blank before it began to spin. I wanted to ask where he had come back from, how long he was staying. Had she spoken to him, had he come to the house? What kind of rough time? Mama pressed the mute button to bring back the sound. I stood there for as long as I could in my daze, staring at her steely profile, then I turned around and moved, as if automated, in the direction of the kitchen. I emptied the bag of oranges into the white plastic basin in the sink. Turned the tap on. Took the blue Bril liquid soap and squirted some into the container. I held the tap until the soap had foamed over the oranges. Turned it off. Stared at nothing in particular for a long time. I went onto the balcony and looked out at our neighbor’s building, and all the apartments I had watched for years with their shutters closed. Baba was back. Had anyone seen him? Would they know who he was? My lip trembled, and I bit on it. Hours might have passed. Baba was back. I tried to mentally conjure who an older Baba might be. Would his hair have grayed, thinned, run the span of its life course, leaving him bald? Would the years have eroded his frame, making him smaller? Would he still walk as he used to, his head held high as if pushed up at the chin by a father’s disapproving thumb, his steps slow, deliberate, his shoulders tilted back? Would he laugh in the way I remembered, throwing his whole head, his neck, his chest, back in a forceful bellow? Everyone had always remarked on Baba’s laugh, how emphatic it was. I remembered what Uncle said about memories. All my own overwritten memories were ones I wished to have back. I imagined the memory of Baba was one Uncle would have chosen to preserve. For a moment, standing on the balcony, seeking balance in Mama’s words, I wondered if it might have been what I would wish I could choose too.
—
In those first weeks I couldn’t look at Baba for long without needing to turn away. We would meet every few days and sit by the pool at the club in a near silence, watching people walk by. I hadn’t anticipated the lapse of time would hang so heavily on his face, or maybe I simply hadn’t known what to expect. Baba’s lip trembled, and I would feel him staring at me, taking me in, assessing the change, the years, who I had become. I thought Dido had probably been right, I felt an anger, but didn’t know what to do with it, what to make of it, even where it belonged. I started to get irritated by most everything Baba said. We bickered, argued. I felt resentment, both at his absence and now at his presence. Things felt fraught, and at moments I even wished he weren’t there.
—
Months later I called Baba spontaneously, exhilarated after the first day of protests, wanting to share my excitement. There was no cell reception those days, the government had shut it off, and Baba began to call early every morning on the landline, just after dawn, and then again late at night, past two a.m., when he knew I came home. Our relationship found a grounding in politics, and then towards the end of that first year, when Baba came to terms with the reality that he couldn’t slip back into the life he had left behind, he talked about finding himself a wife. He would speak to me about the cycles of history, how we were reliving a past, almost like déjà vu, then he would trail off about companionship. Baba was lonely. He was also deeply skeptical. He repeated himself, as Grandmama used to, telling me about his generation, their experience, the losses and disappointments of his youth. We have lived it all before, he said, we already tried it. He didn’t want my hopes to be too high.
At first I thought it was just the emotional lesions of life, Baba’s weariness. He seemed to have become a pessimist, not the Baba I had remembered or imagined him to be. I kept a journal every day of that first year he was back. I wrote down everything he said, everything I remembered of our conversations, our days, his expressions, what he was wearing, what he would order to eat. I wrote down how I felt, the vacillating emotions, the realizations, the chasms between the memories and stories I had imagined, pieced together, held close, and the truth of who Baba was, who he had become. Now I pick up the notebook chronicling that time, starting in the summer of 2010. On every page I take note of the question marks. The word truth seems to repeat itself multiple times on each page. My handwriting is barely legible.
—
I became less and less reactionary to Baba’s pessimism when I fully digested all that he had been through. Then day by day, as the months drew on, I saw intimations of change. His group of friends got larger. Those who had once pursued him through government and legal cases now sat side by side, also victims of this cyclical history I was just beginning to grasp in the aftermath of uprising. They would sit around rusted tables pulled together, piles of newspapers between them, peanuts in brown bags, sometimes sandwiches of ful and taamiya, debating the news. The army will do this. The Islamists will do that. My source tells me the Americans forced the army to let Morsi win. It was forged. I have documents proving it. Impossible. I swear. They all had theories, sources, certainty. Once an outer mourning had left and marked their faces, they all began to laugh, about the old days, how they used to live. One man: Remember when I was a Basha. He would then throw his head back and growl with laughter. Another: At this time one year ago I would be sitting down to drink tea with Mubarak and briefing him. And look at me now, practically in my boxers, being served stale bread. Roaring laughter. Baba pointed to one man one morning. He looks at least ninety, doesn’t he? I nodded. But you will never believe that he is actually my age. We did business together. He ran the most successful cement business. He supplied me the raw materials for the factory. They put him in jail. They couldn’t benefit in any way because he was so straight. They forged papers. Ten years, look at what they did to him. There was a time when either you stayed and lost your life, or you fled. Baba pushed his glasses up his nose. He pointed to another man. The
n a woman. Then a couple in the distance. Those two, he would begin, and then tell me their story. Here is the former state security agent. He used to be the most successful currency trader. This man used to be the minister of foreign affairs. This man was Mubarak’s adviser on Israel. This man was his photographer. This good-looking man is the son of the most glamorous couple in show business. This woman used to be Miss Egypt. Once the most important newspaper columnist in the Arab world. This man used to own a bank until they nationalized and confiscated it. He lost everything. If you had heard this woman’s voice when she was young…Age hasn’t been so kind to this lady here.
—
I begin most days at the club with Baba now, surrounded by his friends of circumstance. I run while he swims, then we have coffee before I go home to work. We have never really spoken about his years of absence. I have a vague idea of what happened, the problems, his refusal to offer a major contract he had tendered to one of the president’s sons, the corruption charges they manufactured and landed him with, case after case, unrelentingly. Where he went, what his life was like during those years, I have pieced together stories, but never ask questions, never raise the conversation, despite still holding it all close. Sometimes Baba will make mention of what life has taught him. After all I have been through, he will say. I nod, then try to change the subject, to steer conversation to something else. I came to understand from my own experience that Baba had been a victim too. They had broken him. I knew he would also never really come to terms with being absent when Grandmama died. I could see all this in his face, every single day, the nervous tic that marked him. The right corner of his lips would turn downward for a second, pulling his whole face into a droop, before turning up again. He would then scrunch his nose, as if in discomfort, and blink. It was the kind of blink that lasted longer than necessary. The kind of blink you took notice of. It was almost as if he were trying to blink something out of his eye, or perhaps even his memory.
Although Baba’s twitch seems to have lessened these days, I now understand what Dido used to say about my anger, that Baba’s circumstances should have unleashed it. Only in writing this now, reflecting back on it all, projecting myself into these pasts, real and imagined, considering the last few years, do I understand that in the end it did. Things built up; our frustrations, desires. And we all released something, given the chance. Our breaking point was about opportunity, human emotion being offered an outlet, in tandem discovering its source. In a notebook I write this down. I also make note of my anger. I seem to have developed more empathy than anger. Is this normal? I write. I find that note now, circled in a green pen and underlined twice. It is dated December 31, 2012. My desire to pull Baba from a past that lurked at every corner and bring him into a new present felt extreme during that time. I wanted him to be excited about revolution, to shake off his skepticism, the shadow of past lives. I wondered, constantly, about memories overwritten, what it would take to overwrite his—all he had seen, those years of hiding and distance. I now realize that it takes either a larger trauma or fleeting euphoria to erase what was. I can’t imagine what might efface our most recent disappointments, except maybe the passing incandescence of love.
—
I ask the taxi to pull over just after the Azhar Mosque. A year ago to this day in July, the city was at a standstill. Millions in the streets calling for the ouster of then-president Morsi. I counted myself among them. Most friends, acquaintances, colleagues I know, even those who now say his ouster was a coup, were there with me. Baba found the crowds too much and preferred to watch it all on television, calling in every hour or so for an update from the ground. Mama had come with me. She had started to attend more protests than I. She had been scared when the protests had begun those years ago, but then after a few, she said she felt liberated. She would take her flag and march, chant, clap, wave her arms emphatically with the crowds. I didn’t know it then, but her stamina came to outlast mine. I hear her voice in my head now as I step onto the street. A building-size flyer of the new president, Sisi, hangs off the sides of one, two, I count five buildings on the street. Time changes perspectives, she used to say. Things become darker, like paint. I also think of Uncle, warning Dido and me that in life we have to assess things and always take a position. It’s all relative, he told us. I wonder if my position is too often ambiguous. A position of trying to weigh things and assess and be objective is sometimes a clear position, and sometimes no position at all. I think a lot about what it means to be a witness, the responsibility of it. I wonder about my writing, if fiction is a political statement or simply no position. Is the silence of objectivity and being an observer, witness, the same as complicity? This question occupies me. H categorically tells me it is not. She says I shouldn’t mix things. She no longer believes that everything in the universe is connected, but she says that intent is the most important thing. What is one’s intention? I imagine it’s the position of the yogi, which she now is, teaching classes every day. I know that Dido thinks otherwise, and it makes me question why I am more forbearing in the name of change when he only stands by the absolute. These thoughts stay with me as I give the taxi two pounds more than the tolled fare. When the meter was first introduced, we all complained and said it was thievery. Then we forgot. Swiftly. I appreciate a meter after a lifetime of bargaining.
I maneuver myself through the cars that are paused at an angle, waiting midstreet for takers. It’s midday in the summer heat, and tourists are scarce. Travel warnings are reissued for Egypt each month. I spot a couple coming out of the mosque with backpacks, she with a scarf draped lightly over her head. I walk towards the pavement. The call to prayer filters in somewhere from a distance, echoing, one muezzin mimicking the next. No matter what time of day it is, there always seems to be the chant of prayer. An old man, frail, in a paper-thin white shirt, leaning over a cane, shuffles in my direction. I dip into my pocket and pull at the corner of a five-pound note. I scrunch it into my hand. I watch the man as he moves towards me. He doesn’t look up, and people clear the way, moving from his path. Most pedestrians are this way, they walk, they cross, they move in the direction they are going without looking up, or to either side. He walks right by me, not raising his head. I turn around, watch him, then step forward towards the alley. It is lined with cavities, stalls, layered with brightly colored T-shirts, socks, bras, underwear, galabias, scarves, ties. Some of the things are made locally, but most of them, more and more, are from China, shipped across the world to accumulate in homes as junk. SpongeBob T-shirts. PedEggs. Wind-up dolls. Padding the walls of one stall are mattresses, lined, piled, straight, at an angle. Two boys lie around playing Nintendo. In another, mesh sacks overflow with Egyptian cotton. This was the founding street of Cairo. It’s hard to stop, to browse. What remains of its width fits two people and the bustle is intense. To pause means to obstruct the entire one-kilometer stretch, from one side of the Old City to the other. Music filters out of a crackling radio somewhere, Quran plays like a drone in the background. When I look up, I see the glistening silver dome of the Citadel perched on a limestone rock above the old city. I pause and then sidestep into a shop. Makhazin Sono Cairo, I say. The man gets up from his stool. Sticks his head out of his stall. Points to a line of neon plastic beach balls hanging from one shop. Gives me directions. I thank him, bowing my head. He asks if I will stay and have a glass of tea. I thank him again. Something cold to drink? Thank you. You don’t like our tea? It’s not that. Give us the opportunity to host you. Thank you, but I have to meet someone. He laughs. In a breathing space between people I step back into the moving crowd. I mimic the steps of the woman before me. In her I find my pace.
The storeroom of Sono Cairo is a shuttered garage space on an offshoot of the once-street-now-alley. A young man sits on the pavement. A cigarette is perched behind his ear. He seems to know who I am. Mohamed, he says. Hag Ahmed told me to be at your service. I nod my head. Thank him. He gets up, pulls at the waist of his sagging jeans. Turns. With a
ll his force, he pushes up the corrugated metal shutter gate. Dust blows onto both of us. We turn our heads. I shield my eyes with my arm. Sorry. You’re the first person to come here in years, he says. No worries at all, I say. I dust myself. We step forward into the dark. A single lightbulb hangs from a bare wire. A flyer has been pushed in the space between the floor and the shutter. I bend and pick it up. He looks. His laugh is like a smirk. I can’t tell if it’s one of ridicule or disillusionment. The flyer is denouncing Morsi’s ouster, calling for solidarity with the democratically elected government and legitimate president. I take Mohamed in, with his scraggly beard, and wonder what his views might be. I say nothing and begin sifting through boxes, piles, stacks of old vinyl. Dust coats everything. Mohamed hovers nearby. I feel him. He shifts from one foot to the other. Watches me. I keep my head down, leafing through records. Our silence seems to be on pause. He volunteers. By the way, I am not a Brother, but I supported Morsi. All this area we supported Morsi. They used to do good for us, the Brothers. They helped us a lot. Financially, I mean. But we were going down a bad path. I have become weary about engaging in political conversation. Hopefully good will come, I say. I turn my head down and continue flipping through the stacks. He stands over me for a minute, then moves to the other side of the room. Just so you know, the Brothers would have destroyed this storeroom and all these records had they stayed in power. Music is a sin for them, you know. Where in the Quran does it say music is a sin? For them it was a sin. They were going to teach us about our own religion? He walks back to me holding a record. With the sleeve of his shirt he dusts it. He reads. It’s one of Umm Kulthum’s rarest. They printed only 850 copies that were quickly taken off the market. Someone criticized her voice. They compared it to a young and upcoming male singer. Mohamed tells me she’s his favorite singer of all time, and also his idol. I wonder if he knows she loved women. I know of the record in his hands but have never heard it. It’s a collector’s item, sold for hundreds of dollars online. He tells me I can have it for one hundred pounds. I tilt my head and consider bargaining, then put it in my pile. We talk about music and what I’m looking for. I pick up an old gramophone record of Asmahan. This, I tell him. He laughs. You know your music well. That’s a rare one. He is surprised that someone of his generation would want vinyl. He tells me the revolution has connected us to a past that preceded us. I nod, tell him I’ve gone back into our history books to understand. I’ve read everything. I can’t believe all this I didn’t know. You might not believe me, he says, but I have too. He’s learning that history is repeating itself. We talk about Nasser. The first revolution. 1919. The Wafd revolting against the British. It wasn’t really a revolution, he says. It was a popular uprising. I raise my eyebrows. But it was a revolt, I say. But there wasn’t a change of a system. The country didn’t completely change. The British didn’t leave until years later. So what is a revolution? I ask. 1952. But it was also a coup? He shakes his head. It can only be called a revolution. Could it have been both? People didn’t take to the streets, it was just one system of power ousting, usurping, another. That’s a coup? Yes, he says, but it was against something that didn’t represent the people, so it was a revolution, for the people. Then 2011 was the same? I ask. That was a different kind of revolution, he says. There are different forms of revolution. But in the end all that happened is the army forced Mubarak to step down, as in ’52? The people forced him out, he says. But the army also wanted that? They didn’t want Gamal to succeed his father. They might have scripted this whole thing, January 25. He pauses. I offer: And 2013 was no different, really, except that millions and millions more came out.
Chronicle of a Last Summer Page 10
