Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

“Closer to the train,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. “When do you want to go see it?”

  “Tonight?” I say. “I mean, they were painting it when I saw it, that’s how long it’s been available, and it’s really very nice. I was afraid it would be gone, so…so I put a deposit on it,” I finish in a small voice. I’m hoping he will hear how nervous I am and not be mad at me.

  He frowns a little. He doesn’t like that I put a deposit on it without him seeing it, but the truth is, he hates looking for a flat. It took him months to even start looking, and then he would only look once in a while. So part of him is relieved I’ve found something and he doesn’t have to look anymore, and part of him is worried he won’t like it, and part of him-I know this-wishes we didn’t have to go through the bother of moving at all.

  “What about dinner?” he asks.

  “My mother and I made couscous,” I say. “It’s ready.”

  It’s early, but we sit down to eat. Tariam crawls into Alem’s lap and he feeds her. “I’m not hungry,” she says, but when he offers her couscous with zucchini and carrot, she eats it. Then I change her into street clothes, just a simple blue dress and a scarf for her hair-she has a wild head full of hair, curly like Alem’s, and it stands out like a halo away from her face, so she’s glad to get it tied back.

  “Where are we going?” she asks. “Where are we going?”

  “To look at a flat,” Alem says.

  “Are we going on the train?”

  “We are,” he assures her solemnly, and she skips, holding his hand.

  “Hurry up!” she says. “Hurry up! I want to ride on the train!”

  It’s cool underground, but Tariam fidgets on the train and wants to hang on the pole. Alem gets up and stands with his feet wide so his legs are on either side of her while she clasps the metal pole in the middle of the aisle and sways back and forth. The lights flicker and they disappear and reappear and I’m happy to see them there. It’s going to work out, I think.

  And it does. We find the man who has the apartment. Alem likes the apartment. The landlord likes Alem. We can move in three weeks.

  Tariam goes from room to room, singing a popular song I always hear playing on the street, “Silly boy, silly boy, you want to be my lover?”

  * * *

  “I saw him,” I tell Hariba. It just pops out. I think about saying it and I know I shouldn’t and pop, I say it. I won’t have much time to see Hariba anymore, not with moving and all, and I’m relieved about that. I hate coming to see her, I hate passing the harni .

  “You saw him?” she says. She doesn’t ask who.

  “I was going to catch the train. Alem and I are renting an apartment in the Debbaghin,” I say.

  “Where did you see him?”

  “At the end of my street,” I say. “He was waiting for me.”

  “Did he have a message for me?” she asks, her hollow face hungry and alive. We’re sitting outside the door to her aunt’s house.

  I try to think of a lie, but my mind is blank. “He said to ask you what you want him to do.” It occurs to me that I could lie, tell him she said to go away.

  “I need to see him,” she says.

  “For what?” I say, exasperated.

  “To figure out what we’re going to do,” she says. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, he’s always waiting at the end of my street.”

  “You’ve seen him before?”

  “Yes,” I say. “And I shouldn’t have told you.”

  She covers her mouth with her hands. “O Holy One,” she finally breathes between her fingers. “I was afraid he was gone.”

  “You’re just going to get in trouble.”

  She shakes her head. “You don’t understand. Tell him, no, wait, you said he’s at the end of your street? The end of our street? When? When you’re coming here?”

  “You can’t go meet him,” I say, aghast.

  “I have to.”

  “I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell Zehra. They won’t let you out of the house.”

  “Don’t,” she whispers. “Please, Ayesha, don’t.”

  “You can’t go meet him on the street, you’ll get arrested. You’ll get him arrested.”

  “They’ll kill him,” she whispers. “Won’t they? They’ll put him down.”

  Which maybe they should do.

  “They want to arrest you; look what they did to Nabil. You have to get better and then decide what you’re going to do.” We’ve all been talking about what she is going to do and we all think she’s going to have to run away. She can’t stay here.

  “I have to see him again,” she says. “At least one more time. You’ve got to help me see him one more time.”

  “Then you promise you’ll decide what you’re going to do?”

  She nods. “I will. What do you think I should do?”

  “Go abroad,” I say.

  She nods. “Okay, I’ll plan it out. I’ll decide where to go and I’ll go away.”

  “Start a new life,” I prompt.

  She nods.

  “So your family won’t be in danger anymore.”

  That’s hard for her. I can see it hit her. But she nods slowly. “Okay. Maybe he could meet me in a tea shop? Do you think?”

  An unmarried woman meeting a man in a tea shop is going to attract stares. “Don’t be stupid,” I say.

  She bites her lip.”

  “I know a place,” I say. “You could meet in our new flat.”

  * * *

  Tariam says, “Are you going to the new flat?”

  “No, baby,” I say, “I’m going to see Aunt Hariba.”

  “Can we go to the new flat?”

  “No, you stay here with Grandmamma.”

  “No,” Tariam says, looking down, her fat baby lip poking out. “I don’t want to stay with Grandmamma.”

  “Mama has to go see Aunt Hariba,” I say.

  Tariam fusses. She’s my guilty conscience. Sometimes she looks so-not frail, so provisional, as though I love her so much I shouldn’t be allowed to have her and someone’s going to take her from me. She’s too tiny, too perfect in every detail, down to the utter loveliness of her teeth. Tiny white teeth like corn kernels. She wants to go on the train. I hear her wail as I leave my mother’s.

  I’m clutching my veil so hard it pulls across the top of my head like a band. I make myself relax. Maybe the harni won’t be there. Sometimes he isn’t.

  But I see him loitering alone at the corner. Why doesn’t anyone ever call the police on him? A strange man standing there.

  He lifts his head from where he’s been tracing the dust with his shoe, his face open to me.

  “She wants to see you,” I say. Until I actually say it, I’ve been pretending to myself that I might lie, but the truth is I never really would have.

  “Where?” he says, as if this has been a foregone conclusion, and his easy assumption makes the anger rise up in me. What right does he have to assume!

  “At an empty flat in Debbaghin. Do you know where that is?”

  “I know,” he says.

  I tell him the address.

  “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you so very much.”

  “Don’t thank me,” I say. “If I had my way, you’d never see her again.”

  “You do it out of love for her,” he says. “I can thank you for that.”

  * * *

  It was the way he was so unmanly that made me so uncomfortable. If I had spoken to any man that way…I think Hariba had raised her brothers and she had always been bossy, so that was why she liked the harni, because she wanted a man like that.

  “Hariba and I thought maybe she could go out with me today,” I tell Aunt Zehra.

  “She’s not very strong,” Aunt Zehra says.

  “I can go in a pedicab,” Hariba says. “It would be good for me.”

  I can see Aunt Zehra doesn’t like the idea. “What if someone sees you and calls the police?”

  “She cou
ld dress like a new widow,” I say. I have brought my mother’s chador and I unfold it.

  Zehra blinks and pulls her head back, startled. “Well,” she says, “at least you didn’t decide to use mine.”

  Zehra is as big as Hariba’s mother is little and Hariba would have been lost in the folds of her chador, like Tariam in something of mine.

  “We are just going to go around a bit,” Hariba says. “Stop in a tea shop, go to the Moussin.”

  Zehra is not the kind of person who goes to the Moussin except when called to worship, but maybe she thinks Hariba has been so frightened by her sickness that she wants to go. It will certainly explain why we’re gone for a few hours.

  Hariba holds her thin arms up like a child and Zehra and I throw the chador over her head and help her straighten it so she can see. My mother is bigger than Hariba, but it’s not so bad. One woman in a chador looks like another.

  Zehra lets us use a card phone to call a pedicab and together we bundle Hariba out the door and into the seat. She leans over and kisses her aunt on the cheek. “If my mother comes by, tell her I won’t be long,” she says.

  Now that we have actually succeeded, I feel terrible about lying to Zehra. But Hariba doesn’t seem to have any second thoughts. She seems as natural as if we weren’t sneaking off to see her lover. She lies so easily and so well. It even seems to fill her with energy, but maybe that is just the anticipation of seeing the harni .

  We take the pedicab to the train, and Hariba leans on my arm to get down the steps. She’s full of questions about what the harni said and how he looked. The more she chatters, the angrier I get about how thoughtless she’s being.

  “I can’t believe you,” I finally say.

  “What?” she says.

  “The way you can lie to Zehra.”

  “You didn’t seem to have any trouble,” she says.

  “But you don’t even care,” I say.

  “Of course I care, but I have to see Akhmim.”

  “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I say.

  “If you didn’t help me, I’d just do it myself.”

  “You shouldn’t see him,” I say.

  “You don’t understand,” she says.

  I can’t think of anything I could have done different, except maybe tell Zehra. Then Hariba would have just run away, she’s so obsessed. I don’t believe that she thinks this is the last time she’ll see him.

  The train comes in and both of us are angry so neither of us says anything and then it’s off the train and Hariba hanging on my arm to get up the stairs. We stop a couple of times for her to rest, and she’s shaky and sweaty when we get to the top. Luckily there’s another pedicab. I’m spending so much money on pedicabs today. But Hariba doesn’t have any money and she can’t walk to the flat.

  I hate having them meet in my flat. It’s so clean, so nice, I want it to stay that way in my mind.

  The harni is waiting across the street from the flat and when he sees the pedicab he starts forward to cross, but I put my hand up for him to stay where he is. Hariba doesn’t see him until I move my hand, but then she tenses as if to cry out and I put my hand on her arm to stop her.

  “Wait,” I whisper.

  I help her climb down. The harni stands on the other side of the street, watching us. He’s so stupid. Can’t he pretend not to notice us? And Hariba’s as bad, watching him. I’m so embarrassed I could die.

  The owner has left the door set to my thumb-I called and told him I was bringing a friend to see the flat today. What if they’re working on it? Some painting, something with the cooling system? What will I tell him? That the harni is my cousin. And that he’s going to help us move, so he’s meeting me to see the flat, too.

  But the flat is empty. Hariba says, “I need to sit down,” so I help her sit on the floor. Then I go to the window and wave to the harni .

  “Is he coming?” Hariba asks.

  He comes up the stairs faster than I expect.

  “Akhmim?” she says.

  He kneels down next to her and her hands flutter around his face, across his shirt. It’s as if I’m not even there. I wish I could leave. I could die at the way they act-I would never, ever have believed Hariba would act this way.

  I turn my back and look out the window, but then I can’t stand it and I look back at them. The harni isn’t saying anything, but Hariba keeps saying over and over, “It’s all right now.”

  “What do you want me to do?” he finally says.

  “We need to get away,” she says.

  I am furious. She promised me that all she wanted to do was see him one more time. Hariba was never a liar, but she lied to me about this.

  I have a silly thought, a thought that shames me, but Alem will never treat me this way. Not that I would want him to, not really.

  I walk through the other three clean, cool, light-filled rooms of my flat. It feels as if we have dirtied this place. I wish we’d never come here.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe you,” I say on the train.

  Hariba is worn out, her eyes look bruised. I should feel sorry for her, but I don’t.

  “What?” she says.

  “You lied to me,” I say. “You said this was the last time you would see him.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she says.

  “Yes, you did,” I say. “And you never intended not to see him again.”

  “Ayesha,” she says, “I can’t leave him. Look at him, he needs me.”

  “Well, sell him to someone else.”

  “Sell him! I can’t sell him! He’s a person,” she says.

  “Then let him get over needing you like any other person.”

  “He’s not like any other person,” she says. “You know that. But he’s a person. He’s intelligent. We love each other.”

  “Holy One protect us,” I say. “Well, do what you must, but I’m done with you.”

  “Ayesha! No!” she says. “I need your help! You’re my best friend!”

  “Was,” I point out. “But you’ve changed, Hariba. You lie to me now, and you use me.”

  “That’s not true,” she says. “I didn’t tell you everything because you wouldn’t help, that’s true, but that’s because you won’t listen.”

  Is that true? “I’m listening now.”

  “If I love Akhmim and he loves me, what’s so bad about our being together?”

  “It’s illegal,” I say.

  She pauses. Finally she says, “You’re right, but-”

  “But nothing-” I say.

  “Listen to me! Okay, maybe what I did was wrong. Maybe I should have left him a slave to that woman, who treated him like a footstool, but-”

  “That woman owned him,” I say. “Just like she owns the footstool.”

  “All right, and I think that’s wrong, and you don’t. But now that it’s done, I can’t just give him back. He’s unstable. They’ll kill him.”

  Maybe they would. I didn’t know what they would do with him. I nod.

  “So why shouldn’t we both run away together and be happy?”

  “Because it’s wrong,” I say. “Suppose you run off and live happily ever after in some western country where people eat pork and drink all the time and are unhappy and frenzied. You can’t have children, you have no family or friends.”

  “Do you think I’m going to have children if I stay here? Jessed women don’t have children. I’m not going to be hired by some rich man whose wife died and who is lonely and falls in love with me and buys me out and marries me. That only happens in films.”

  “At least people here speak the same language as you.”

  “But I’m still alone,” she says. “At least with Akhmim I’m not alone.”

  “At least here you have your family. What are you going to do when you’re alone and there’s no one like me to do things like this?”

  “The same thing I’ll do now,” she says, “since you won’t help me.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.
/>   She turns her head and won’t answer.

  * * *

  I wish I had someone to talk to. The person I would normally talk to about this is Hariba, so I can’t, and I’m trapped. I should tell her mother and her aunt, but if I do, I know Hariba will run away. And she’ll run away with the harni . I don’t know any way that things can get back to normal.

  “Mama, can I have an ice?” Tariam asks.

  “We don’t have any ices,” I say.

  “I want an ice,” she says.

  Alem wanted me to find a flat, so I did. Now he wants me to do all the packing, so I’m collecting boxes from stores that are going to throw them away and bringing them home. Hariba wants me to help her find a way out of the country. Tariam wants everything all day. Who is there for me? Who gives me what I want? Not Alem. I mean, he’s a good husband, but there’s no romance to him. I thought I didn’t need romance, but I need something.

  “Mama?” Tariam says. “Take me to the store and buy me an ice?”

  “No, Mama can’t right now,” I say. “Mama has to pack.”

  Tariam whines, with her voice full of tears, “I want an ice.”

  “We can’t always have what we want,” I say sharply, and she bursts into tears. She might as well learn now.

  I stolidly pack blankets and linens while she stamps her feet and cries until I can’t stand it anymore. “Tariam,” I say, “that’s enough. Stop it now or you’ll have to lie on your bed.”

  “I won’t,” she says.

  I grab her arm and swat her and then pick her up and put her on her bed while she howls. We’ve only got two rooms, so there isn’t very much space to get away from her. When we move, we’ll have four rooms, I remind myself. She’ll have her own room.

  “I wish you weren’t my mama!” she shrieks.

  I don’t say anything, no matter how much it hurts. Alem will be home in another two hours. Although that won’t make so much difference, since all he does when he’s home is complain.

  When he comes home, he starts in.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “I had a terrible day. I can’t believe they don’t fire that dispatcher,” he says, and then he launches into a long story about how this dispatcher sent him to someplace in the city, even though someone else was closer, and how if he doesn’t get enough jobs logged in a day, then he gets a bad evaluation.