On one of these afternoons, Mohamed and Magda were talking over each other when I noticed a large pink grasshopper staring up at me from the windowsill. Its segmented armor was a shocking color of pure-process magenta. For eyes it had smooth pea-size bumps. Like a marooned alien dragging itself across a lunar landscape, it made it halfway across the dusty ledge before I recognized it was injured, the back of it splayed out and broken as if it had only barely escaped someone’s footfall. I looked down into the garden below, where a groundskeeper was tromping along using his leaf blower to clear a path through the leaves. Only these leaves were also candy pink. Then I recognized that he was blowing dead locusts around as they collapsed into the grass from the sky. Thousands of them, poisoned from gorging on pesticide-doused plants on farms outside the city. Then the rest of the class noticed the sky over Tahrir darken briefly as if by smoke. I gasped. The air was full—millions of flitting fuchsia streaks. Everyone came to the window to see. Despite the blind hordes smacking against the window, Mohamed and Magda persisted in their argument. It was the first locust assault on the city in this generation’s memory, just momentous enough for us to be dismissed from class.
I walked backward into the swarm as I crossed Tahrir in the direction of home. There wasn’t a single cab, and drivers were wiping pink mash from their windshields. I came to Qasr el Nil Bridge, where I saw a man standing in the mottled light, watching me. Unlike the distant figures I saw running for cover near the Mogama and on the other side of the bridge, he seemed unbothered by the plague of locusts that roiled overhead, avoiding the river. This was only my fourth month in Cairo, and the anger I was feeling toward men had worked up a good head of steam.
During the coming five years in Egypt, I would be catcalled, dirty-talked, insulted, felt up, slapped, hotly breathed upon, and groped. There would be confrontations—many of them. There would be cabbies who jerked off in front of me, there would be a soccer mob who dragged me out of a car to mass grope me, and there would be countless other scary and dangerous situations. Worst of all, I would be blamed for all of them. Scolded by onlookers, police, and even my father: “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been there, wearing that, at this hour.” As a result of the regular bouts of molestation, I went through waves of retaliation, trying out various tactics to have my revenge. Mace worked well for me after I figured out Rule 1: don’t spray into the wind. There were many hours spent in police stations pleading my case, many meetings with women’s rights NGOs. And yet I never did learn how to deal with this particular aspect of living in Cairo. I suspect that few women have.
But back to the bridge. I was almost to the middle of the walkway when he postured himself defensively to prevent my crossing. Apparently he had a toll to collect before allowing me to pass. That toll was, of course, a riddle. A riddle I definitely didn’t have the answer to.
“Where from?” he barked as I drew near. In his mouth “Wherefrum?” didn’t seem like words at all. To me it sounded rude, this guy’s bad idea of a mating call. I wondered if he might be crazy. Who would be out here in the open in the middle of this swarm of insects? Emboldened by the emptiness of the road, he stepped into my path and croaked out another charming disyllabic come-on: “Howmuch?”
I skittered off to the side trying to circumnavigate this self-appointed bridge-keeper, but I didn’t move fast enough. Then I saw what it was he wanted me to look at. Shock like rigor mortis worked its way out of my body from the toes up. His thing stuck out brightly against the open fly of his slacks. It branded itself upon my brain like some kind of sick joke while it jutted there in the open, the same horrible, raw pink color as the locusts. He thrust it at me.
Bile rose up in my throat at the sight of his flappy thing, and I wished I could projectile vomit on command. A surge of adrenaline went gushing into my right arm. It shot out like it was possessed and pushed his chest out of my way at the very same moment he let out a spittle-ridden kissy noise. What happened next was in slow motion. His skin flushed a ruddy tone of red. I’d see the switch many times in the years to come. What starts as just having a bit of fun teasing a girl alters into an excuse to do her harm. His eyes widened and his cheeks shuddered with anger and then thunk! I heard nothing. He had punched me in the head. Suddenly lying flat on the road, I saw the treads of a tire narrowly miss me. I rolled over to right myself and saw the Fiat screech to a stop. I got up from the street, shaking with rage more than pain. The length of my skirt was soaking wet and clinging from the gutter full of candy-colored pieces of bug. The driver came running back to me. She led me away from the scene and drove me to a police station on the island. My assailant let out a mighty cuss as we drove off, but I won’t repeat it. As we drove I saw a policeman taking shelter from the bugs under the paws of the great lions guarding the bridge.
At the entrance of the police station I was greeted by a young policeman smoking a cigarette with his rifle across his knees; his face glowed when he dragged the light off his smoke.
“I want to report someone for harassment,” I said.
“Not my jurisdiction.” He shrugged.
The lady driver clicked her tongue at him. “Shame on you. This girl needs help.”
“Who touched who first?” the cop asked, bored.
“I did.”
“So why are you complaining?”
“Because he . . . exposed himself to me and was saying rude words.”
“What do you want us to do about something you can’t prove?”
“He threw me into the street! He punched me in the head!”
The woman driver chimed in, “He did punch her, and I almost hit her.”
“What can we do? She initiated it by touching him first.”
“I did not hit him. I pushed him away from me.”
“It’s still touching, and so you are to blame.” Blank face. Silence.
“Can I see who’s in charge here?” I asked, fuming.
The lady driver advised I give up and go home. She offered me a ride, but I refused. This would only be the first of what ended up being many futile attempts at legal recourse, and like all those that followed, my words were twisted in my mouth and I went from victim to suspect.
The policeman led me into the station. “ID?”
I passed him a passport.
The young cop flipped through forward and back before I realized my mistake. “There is no visa to Egypt here. Where’s your visa?” My conviction dropped out from under me. “Come with me,” he said sternly.
I followed him into a little tiled room with high windows where a man in an epauletted black sweater sat, legs apart, on a rolling office chair. The day’s newspapers were spread over a table; a sticky cup of Lipton bled an orange ring into a full-page spread of Mubarak in sunglasses. A small television with a satellite box sat on one corner of the table and beside this lay a black handgun. A standard-issue Beretta, so completely matte black it looked like a spray-painted toy.
“What’s the problem?” he asked the officer who was dealing with me.
“She’s got no visa.”
“Wait! You’re missing the point! I want to report someone for physical assault!”
“What nationality?” the commander spoke through me.
“I gave him my passport.” I pointed at the young cop who flung my blue passport out of my reach to the commander as if they were playing keep-away.
The commander thumbed through it with one hand. He shut the passport and had a long look at the TV, where the comedian Zakia Zakaria was in a downtown street wearing drag. He was performing for stunned members of the public.
The chief addressed me without looking away from the spectacle. “Miss, can you tell me what you’re here for again?”
I could tell he was annoyed at this interruption of his program. I had a hard time modulating my voice now. “I want to report a man who harass—” I stopped to look at the young cop who was trying to hold back a laugh, cheeks bullfrogging. Was he laughing at the outraged newspaper salesman w
ho was fighting Zakiah Zakaria off, or at my apparently ridiculous request for help? Tears of frustration were close. A commercial for Close-Up toothpaste came on, and they returned their attention to me.
“Why are you here in Egypt?”
Good question, I thought to myself and gave him the abridged answer, “I’m studying.”
“And I see your last name is Al-Dafira. What are you really?” the cop asked. I bristled at the question and pretended not to understand. “What are you?” was only the slightest variation on my attacker’s jibe “Wherefrum?”And I knew he was really only asking which part of the Arab world I was from.
His lackey called out a few guesses. “Jordanian? Moroccan?” This was classic.
When I refused to fess up he decided to play rough. “Well, we can’t let you go, miss, if you can’t explain your lack of a visa.”
The commander told the younger one to leave. And what he said next wasn’t spoken with tenderness, it was a threat. “All you have to do is explain to me who you are. Your passport tells me foreign, which means you can’t be here without a visa. But your name tells me something else. So just say it. Anti Arabiya wella egnabia?” Are you an Arab or a foreigner?
In this situation I knew which answer might appeal to his better nature. “Ana Arabia,” I croaked like some inspirational chorus to a pop song, “I’m an Arab woman.” For the first time the “ain” hooking out of the word declared it was true. And then, as if all I’d had to do was admit it, he flicked my passport across the desk. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now go,” he said, and waved me off. I left the police station feeling confused. What was going on!? How had the situation turned out like this? Why wasn’t Suhail returning my calls or e-mails? Where was I going to go from here?
A week later, once the locusts had been swept up by the street sweepers and I’d simmered down from my encounter with the police, I emerged from the lit-in-translation class one afternoon and noticed a crowd gathering around a security guard’s television set outside the campus. I crossed Mohamed Mahmoud Street with my head in another Na-wal El Saadawi book. I passed a shisha café where another TV was blasting, surrounded by onlookers. It was a tiny place, mirrors covering its walls with a television as its centerpiece. With all the grave people gathering around, it reminded me of a shrine.
It was there that I saw the second plane hit. A unified yelp went up from the crowd as it happened, followed by questions about whether it was live or not. The proprietor of the café turned the volume up. I could hear the American anchor’s voice, unnervingly shrill through the live Arabic translation. I registered gray smoke billowing out of a tower but didn’t guess where in the world it might be. The only thing I had to compare it to was distant memories of the Oklahoma City bombing on the evening news at Gramma’s house. I heard the anchor on TV say “New York City.” My first reaction was one of surprise, That’s New York? We all gasped together as the silhouette of a human launched itself out a window. A body falling from the sky lent terrible perspective to the dimension of the disaster, and was an access point to understanding the scale of what was happening.
That night I watched in the lounge on the female side of the dormitory. All the Gulfie and American foreign students were sprawled out with popcorn and candy. They had gathered to watch Friends but ended up snagged on CNN, where the constant refrain was “It feels like a movie.” We sat in our jalabiyas and pajamas watching the reports: eyewitness accounts from the dust-covered people on the streets, wildly variant death toll estimates, and half-cocked theories about who could be responsible for this. Everything from kamikaze revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a Charles Manson killer-cult. These were all so cockeyed in hindsight.
“Please don’t let it be an Arab.” One of the Kuwaiti girls voiced what many of us were thinking. No words I write could even begin to touch the horror of the event, but whether in New York or Cairo, everyone was afraid.
By the end of that week, we had all started to get repetitive stress headaches from the TV. The frantic loops of conversation and the patter of car commercial/horrific images/insurance ads were the symbolic externalization of all our internal monologues, wavering back and forth between empathy and self-involvement. The rest of the semester was spent in a sort of limbo. Crippled by the exodus of international students, some of my classes were canceled or postponed. I still waited for Suhail’s e-mails. He only occasionally wrote to me, which I guess meant Boston was treating him well. When he did write to me, it was with vague suggestions of how and when he might come to visit Cairo. I measured how much he cared by how many kilobytes his e-mails were. Most often he mentioned wanting to visit so we could “be alone together,” which was his euphemism for the eventual consummation of our relationship. Then he’d recede from contact for weeks while I camped in the dormitory computer lab faithfully refreshing my Hotmail, deleting spam, and searching Yahoo! for my last name, which mostly yielded images of mullet-sporting terror suspects and racecar drivers. The mug shots of rumpled Al-Dafira men always led me back to conspiracy theory pages and national security websites, a whirlpool down which I would sometimes get lost late into the night, a real-life cyber replacement for the paranoid dystopian narratives I used to love reading.
After the attacks on New York, a jagged tension pinched the campus. All the entrances to and from the university were reinforced with metal detectors and armed police. The dormitory emptied of many American students, recalled by their universities or parents or scared off on their own. By this time I was sick of being insulated in the dormitory; I was also running out of money from my scholarship to pay for it. I knew a home of my own with no maids or roommates or television would be a tiny fraction of the price, and if I managed to find an apartment, Suhail could come to visit without any problems. I started my search going door-to-door downtown. Usually these buildings had begun life in Cairo’s belle epoque and had a disintegrated elegance that made my imagination run wild. Many of these buildings were rent-controlled, and so some entire buildings remained vacant, the owners preferring to leave them empty rather than deal with the hassle of tenants. Most landlords I met were doctors, lawyers, or retired police officials who regimented their lives around oily Turkish coffee, cigarettes, and thirty-year-old paperwork they kept shuffling around in the dining room sideboard.
When my pavement-pounding didn’t turn up a home, I finally caved and allowed a very pushy simsar named Ahmed to assist me. He promised he’d find me something “sooberdalucks,” by which he meant “super deluxe,” by which he meant it had hot water and wasn’t a bug colony. Many of the flats were both charming and foreboding, as was Ahmed, for that matter. He looked commandingly into my eyes as if he were trying to use the Force: “You will love this one.” Before entering each apartment he would pause to say, “For real, miss, this apartment.” He pinched his fingers before his lips and kissed them into a blossom—“Sooberdalucks!”
We had come to the end of a long day’s search, and setting my purse down on a sideboard in a hallway, I let Ahmed show me around yet another place.
“Satellite! Washing machina! Balcona!”
He took me into the inner chambers of the apartment and opened the bedroom window to reveal an inaccessible dead space looking into the windows of the adjacent block. Fallen laundry and soda cans littered the ground below, and above were ten stories with a hexagon of sky barely visible beyond the protuberant butts of air conditioners. The rest of the flat was furnished in a pan-cultural retro-maniacal mishmash: a golden Louis XIV couch squatted defiantly in the middle of a spare living-room set. Zebra-skin carpets lined the room wall to wall, a clock in the shape of the mosque at Medina rang the hour, and the walls were covered with ugly papyrus souvenirs and bucolic paintings of the English countryside. This apartment was more confused about its identity than I was.
“I’m sorry, it’s super, but just a little too deluxe,” I said, turning to address Ahmed.
But the room was empty, silent but for a dusty wind blowing in through th
e fly screen and ruffling the potpourri flowers. I rushed to the sideboard where I had left my purse—gone! I imagined the passport inside the secret compartment of my bag. Everything that was officially me on paper had vanished. It had happened in a flash, just like that. I skidded down the stairs of the apartment building and out into the busy street, where I paced from one end to the other half-shouting to no one, “Help!” After my previous trouble at the police station, I knew I’d get no sympathy there. Ahmed was long gone and, for all official purposes, so was I.
I reported the theft to the embassy but they just advised me to wait a few weeks before undergoing the whole process. Maybe someone would turn my purse in, they assured me. I doubted it. With my rental possibilities severely impaired by the fact I had no valid identification, I reconcentrated my search on under-the-table sublets. After many shady dealings, I finally found a landlady who would exempt me from the tenant registration required by law if I paid a premium rate and kept to myself. It was a precarious situation in more ways than one. The landlord could ask me to leave without notice, and it so happened that the room she had to offer me was on a houseboat. She led me across the river from her chintzy Zamalek flat to her properties off Kit Kat Square, then farther down to Imbaba. This is where the banks of the Nile were moored with decrepit pastel houseboats full of ready-to-let, no-questions-asked, cheap rooms available for junkies, expats, and all type of wayward strays and suspicious persons who I guessed were now my people.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 18
