The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t see Suhail and I couldn’t picture what Si looked like. Mercifully, my parents made no cameo appearance this time. I was floating in empty space and shifted to autopilot. I had imagined this moment so many times, of how I’d be positively effervescent with emotion, but instead all I felt was a deep, dull emptiness. I didn’t dare move for fear I’d bust my bag of blood before it was time, and lay there trying to cup it in the small of my back. I hovered imperceptibly over the sheet while Suhail figured things out. I winced when he pushed in. I delivered my line, “Ouch.” He hitched up my legs to see the blood. I struggled to frame the stain in a more convincing spot, knocking skulls with him as we both looked down at the result.

  Suhail went to the bathroom to get a damp towel and returned, patting me down clinically. I lay back, rubbing the blood off my back and onto the sheet. This time it was more a bloody shadow than an oblong heart. He also lay back down and put his head on my belly. “I’m sorry,” he said, and within seconds had taken off dreaming as I listened to the scuttling under the floorboards.

  The next afternoon I accompanied Suhail to the airport, where we hugged awkwardly to an audience of very prying eyes.

  “I’ll see you in Doha next Eid?”

  “Sure,” I told him, though I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  As soon as I got into the cab, a heavy blanket of exhaustion fell over me. In contrast to the first time I’d ridden into Cairo from the airport, it seemed as if the city were on mute, air sticky with a charge like that before a storm. When I made it back to Kit Kat, I slammed the gate on its iron hinges. Hanafi was sitting on a lawn chair enjoying a quiet night in the garden. As I took the stairs three steps at a time, he yelled, “Little by little!” warning me to slow down. The force of my flight ended with my hips pitted against the rail of my deck. I had a scream scraping up my insides but couldn’t let it out. I needed to do something to get out of and get over myself. I scrambled up the ladder past Si’s room and up onto the roof. From there I could see much farther out along the flat tops of the other boats, downriver to Agouza and upriver to Imbaba.

  I heard the mourner ladies’ voices wailing somewhere along the banks beyond my view. I tried to scream, but it just came out in a wheezy, crippled whine. Like Kamala, I was a yippy, feral child faking her way into being a wolf. I would never have the right vocal cords to muster a real howl. That was part of being an alien—I’d never be so deeply rooted as to feel the most profound pain. I realized in a bewildered flush that I had no reason to mourn the skin I’d just shed. Could I really be so ungrateful as to forget the fact that I was free? I could say what I wanted and even see whom I wanted; now I had nothing to prove. I looked down into the swirling river, blacker than the Puyallup river and far wider. From here it felt like being on the edge of a cliff. I was terrified and exhilarated, and didn’t think I could trust myself not to jump. The water was flowing north, I calculated. If those kids on the bridge could jump into the middle of the river, I could certainly make the jump from here. Hadn’t I been thrown into the deep end as a baby? I’d throw myself into the Nile. A rebirth. According to my calculations, the current would just carry me over to the bank, and I’d wash up in the bulrushes and pull myself out, easy. I backed up a few steps on the roof of the boys’ apartment, practiced my pacing once, and then, before I could stop myself, I jumped, only remembering Ma’s advice from the swimming pool to tuck my head in on a dive after I’d crashed into the Nile with a graceless belly flop.

  Every day we pass farther away from the time spent in our mothers’ wombs, our mammalian diving reflex grows weaker. When I opened my eyes in the murky river I couldn’t tell which way was up. With the water lit only dimly by the lights on the boat, panic rather than instinct set in as I bobbed up, thrashing for breath, and went under again. I realized dimly that I’d miscalculated. The flow in the middle of the river was north, but the edges close to the banks formed an undertow, and now I was being dragged under the pilings of the boat by a stealth current. My baggy clothes were pulling me down, heavy like lead. I ended up under the house in the pitch-black filth. I felt the surprisingly big bodies of fish curl and brush my legs in the dark. I gasped at the brief pockets of air that came with the bobbing of the boat and went under again, now calling back to the rescue those lessons spent practicing the dead man’s float with Dima and Ma in the Apartment 1303 pool in Doha.

  When I opened my eyes again, it was like in a dream, and time really did slow, just like they say it does in an accident. My heart sounded distant to me, like a Joe Meek track’s satellite-echo in space, and I knew absolutely for the first time why my mother had always wanted me to swim. A flash of light broke the murk, and I yelped under the water for help. Another gasp of air came, and I gave up fighting, letting the current pull me all the way under the boat and out the other side, where Hanafi fished me out by my armpits. I was so dazed from the jump I didn’t care and couldn’t really hear what he was yelling at me. I knew I had to take a shower immediately before I got bilharzia, and then I should vomit up any water I’d swallowed. Despite all of this I felt a bizarre elation, a powerful feeling of control after having lost control.

  21

  DELTA GEMINORUM • MIDDLE OF THE SKY •

  After my stunt jumping off the boat, I received a call from the landlady.

  “We agreed you’d keep a low profile,” she said coldly. “Instead, you’ve drawn a lot of attention to yourself.”

  I knew but didn’t want to acknowledge what she was inferring.

  “You understand my concerns.” There was a spiny suggestion in her tone that made me rise to her bait.

  “I’m leaving anyway,” I replied.

  I returned to spending most of my time in the sanctuary of the library and surfed couches in Agouza, Zamalek, Garden City, and Mounira. Thankfully the library was still open all through the summer. With no coursework or required readings or in-box to hover over, I drifted back to the 301s. It was while hunting for something called Space-Time of the Bororo of Brazil that a small book caught my eye. I pried it out of the tight shelf to read the spine: Born Under a Wandering Star by Dr. Harold Stark. This was stamped in crooked silver embossing, and like many of the library’s acquisitions from the 1980s, it had been rebound by the university in an appealingly mysterious tar-black leather. Most things about it were unremarkable. As with everything else in this corner of the library, the book was written by a white male, was an account of his travels with an untamed people, and was full of fulsome observations and eulogies for a way of life that had no hope of resisting modernity. There was nothing to signify how precious it might actually be to me.

  That is, until I came to the subtitle, which leaped out at me and made my heart race: Night Journeys of the Al-Dafira Bedouin. I let out a little yelp of surprise. The book was dedicated “To all the youth of the Al-Dafira, who face probably the greatest changes of any people in the world.” I let out more little yelps of disbelief and excitement as I leafed through the pages. The book was full of pictures. Photos of a town, of trackers and their sons, pictures of male faces I recognized in my own. There were diagrams of living arrangements that matched up with our tents in Saudi, drawings of Umi Safya’s tripod for milk churning, and detailed drawings of her weaving designs. All these little details I had observed myself were now retold to me as anthropology. It was too weird. There was even an explanation of the tic-tac-toe-style game we used to play in the sand with the white rocks and dry black goat turds. At first I felt indignant. How did this guy know all this?

  But I was also breathless from this discovery. I had one more surprise in store. On the last page of the book was a black-and-white photo of the young anthropologist Harold Stark, dressed in full Al-Dafira regalia, complete with baldric holster, Omani-style dagger, and gutra. The description was brief. There were a few mentions of his areas of expertise, including his work studying the poetry of Sinai tribes and the astronomy of the Bedouin in the Negev. The last line in the bo
ok read, “Stark continues his research in Cairo, where he is a lecturer at the American University.”

  The book was older than I was, so I didn’t expect to find his name in the staff directory. But there it was, complete with contact details. I clicked his name and sent him a frantic-sounding message of introduction. Dr. Stark replied within minutes. I was nervous while I waited in the long white hallway of the anthropology department for him to show up at his office. When he arrived he respectfully didn’t shake my hand.

  “Call me Abdul Hayy. I changed it from Harold a long time ago. Gone native. Your e-mail was a serendipitous surprise for me. A stroke of fate, I think.”

  Dr. Stark wore a trim white beard, a skullcap, and the short-style thobe of a religious man. He listened patiently while I explained the particulars of, well, everything—how I’d come to find his book, how I’d come to be in Cairo, and, of course, how I had come into being in the first place. He responded to my gush at having found this treasure trove of information about my family in true academic style: “The life your father led was premodern, elemental; it must seem irreconcilably foreign to a digital native like yourself.”

  I suddenly felt inadequate and uninteresting. At ten years old I had played Oregon Trail on a computer, shooting squirrels with pixel bullets and getting virtual dysentery on a wagon train. My father, at ten, was on an actual epic trek, hunting with an actual falcon and risking very real tuberculosis while riding in a bona fide camel caravan.

  Dr. Stark switched into astonishing Al-Dafira dialect and addressed me by my Arabic name. “Safya, I was eager to meet you because I need your help.”

  A native informant, to use an anthropological term, was what he really needed, but because he couldn’t find one who could use a camera and, most importantly, one who was a female, I would perhaps do. He needed someone young and spry who could communicate with the women of the current tribe he was studying, the Qarasin Bedouin in eastern Sinai. Shady as that might sound, it was my ticket out of a listless summer of imposing on other people’s hospitality. The job was simple: climb into the mountains with a woman named Kawthar while she herded the goats to graze and record her oral history along the way.

  “Try particularly to get stories about her father. He was a famous smuggler and poet who composed beautiful verse from jail,” Dr. Stark told me. I had concerns about my level of comprehension but he deflected my concerns. “You’ll find it very easy to speak with them. Most Bedu Arabic is astonishingly similar.”

  Either way, I was nervous. Dr. Stark furnished me with a video camera and paid for a private ride into Sinai. No passports? No problem. We took the back way, passing half-finished hotels and summer lodges that had been abandoned in the mire of bureaucracy and zoning as the Israeli-Egyptian border passed back and forth over the years. I caught glimpses of these ghost homes, Sinai’s forgotten dreams just crumbling in the wind.

  The Qarasin territory was along the coast and backed up into the mountains, where hidden plateaus and crags in the rock hid oases, and pastures for the goats to munch. The Qarasin had managed to maintain a reasonably traditional lifestyle despite the unusually intense politics of their turf, which contained Palestinian border tunnels, international smuggling routes, a secretive Israeli security presence, and Egyptian police patrols. Add this volatile mix to the tourist developments built for sunbathing and reef diving—and the fact that a sizable chunk of their land had been colonized by a strange new tribe of dreadlocked German, French, and Israeli people who referred to themselves collectively as “Rainbow”—and it’s nothing short of miraculous that the clan had survived at all into this strange time. Compared to Al-Dafira they had far more interaction with the outside world, so the fact that the tribe was still relatively nomadic made them both something of a marvel and extremely sought-after quarry for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists like Dr. Stark.

  A road cut through between their base camp and the groves and meadows in their mountains. It carried Israeli hippies to the beaches in the south and Korean pilgrims to Mount Sinai in the interior. When I arrived there it was night. I walked a little way into the water and let the Red Sea baste me. Patches of phosphorescent plankton clustered a little way out in the black water and, for a moment, I couldn’t tell if it was stars or the sea. I sculled out to them and floated on my back, spinning myself in a circle, sending ripples out to lap all shores. The water was gentle, the perfect antidote to the swirling confusion that had nearly drowned me in Cairo. Here, in one of the most symbolically loaded, fought-over plots of land on earth, it was a total paradox that life should suddenly seem so much simpler.

  I spent the first week under the wing of Kawthar, a very petite chain-smoking mother of seven who kept me close and let me film her while she went about her days. There was little that was poetic about Kawthar. She was sort of a cross between Ma in personality and Aunt Moody in her dress. The smoking left a little circle of white in the black fabric of her face veil. It sucked into her mouth when she spoke, then reappeared like a punctuating period when she’d ended her sentences. I filmed her—a lot. I stopped only to recharge the batteries with the extensions from a generator. I wasn’t sure quite how to broach the subject of folktales or poetic qasaid or her famous outlaw father when the day was so full of these “exotic” people doing, well, normal shit. I shot tapes and tapes of Kawthar hand-washing the family’s laundry in a bucket (and finding her daughter’s red G-string). I filmed her chopping up salad (impressive without a chopping board). I sat by, electrical tape over the little red recording light, while she yelled at her kids for playing chicken with a semitruck, watched must-see TV (a badly dubbed Turkish soap opera everyone was talking about), and strung shiny beads onto thread to sell to the Rainbow Tribe farther down the beach. The only thing that was picturesque in the romantic sense I’d been sent to capture was the epic landscape we were pitched against.

  One afternoon I sat with Kawthar while she embroidered a big black wedding shawl with silver sequins, videotaping the light glinting on the long, beautiful pattern. But even then she interrupted the “timeless” shot I knew Dr. Stark wanted me to get by hacking a tubercular-sounding cough and lighting up a cigarette that she left dangling in her mouth, squinting away the smoke like a female Clint Eastwood.

  Kawthar’s husband was curious about me. He had been the University’s contact for this project, and so he often appeared out of nowhere to ask questions, then disappeared again for days. He and most of the other men were rarely around the camp, especially at night, when it was generally understood they were out somewhere up to no good.

  “I’m very curious. Where are you from?” He spoke to me in Israeli-accented English rubbed off from years of taxiing people. “You’re not Egyptian, are you? You looks Egyptian but something tells me no.”

  Here was a man used to dealing with tourists on spiritual quests. I tried a friendly mug and shook my head no.

  “Indian?” He squinted at me, trying to read the small signs. He answered his own question: “No. I have it, you are Spanish!” His observation had the confident delivery of a wildly guessing fortune-teller. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. We are all the same, no?” He pretended to be disinterested, hoping I’d take the bait. But he couldn’t resist the guessing game for long. “Moroccan? Tunisian? Turkish? Italian?”

  He thought he had me pinned. And maybe he did. I was neither surprised nor pleased with his guesses. “Just give me time,” he said, and returned back out to the darkness somewhere down near the beach.

  “Don’t let on to the men where you’re from,” Kawthar warned me that night. It had been an uncomfortable encounter. Her husband must have badgered her about my background. “Believe me. It’ll just cause trouble if they know your family are Bedu. Better they think you’re just a foreigner.”

  The next morning we headed up into the mountains with a herd of about twenty goats. Almost as soon as we’d passed out of sight of the road and the main camp below, everyone was louder and more boisterous, an
d the faces came out. Kawthar walked uphill fast with a baby goat on one shoulder and her youngest son on the other, all the while smoking. I felt ill from the hike, and all I had to lug was the camera. When we made our camp in a wadi against a ridge the first night, Kawthar introduced me to the others. I set up the camera on its tripod, set up a light near Kawthar, and introduced myself variously as Safya or Sophia, depending on which one tripped out of my mouth first.

  While Kawthar prepared a satellite dish for making bread, she asked, “So what’s your name really?”

  “Whichever.”

  I pressed record to capture Kawthar’s incredible repurposing of an old hunk of technology.

  “What do you mean, whichever?”

  “I mean, it’s both.”

  She poured the runny flour and water in a spiral over the hot metal dome, and I came in for a close-up of the bubbling batter. “I don’t understand. How do you write it when you sign?” she asked me.

  “In English I write Sophia, but in Arabic I write it Safya.” I demonstrated with my finger in the sand.

  “Bah.” She flipped the bread on the satellite dish.

  I knew she wasn’t interested in all my noncommittal answers, but I wanted to clarify. Shift the blame off of myself. “In my official documents one says Safya and the other says Sophia.”

  “Screw official documents!” She jabbed a twig under the metal dome to rustle the embers. Kawthar had had international borders shift across her land from Egypt to Israel and back again, and with each shift there was renewed bureaucracy, renewed bullshit. I should have known she’d be dubious of officialdom.

  “Khelli welli! See if I care! What’s important is your folks. What do they call you?”