The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  “The Koran, turn on the Koran,” he whispered.

  By the afternoon more neighbors had arrived, people we hardly knew, and by nightfall the place was packed with silent mourners. I had never seen our house so full yet so quiet. Naima was joined by an army of servants, lent by neighbors, whom she managed with a new authority.

  I took the lift up to the roof to escape. The city stretched in all directions. It hummed and clanked like an engine in the night. The streets coiled into knots here and there. Not even the Nile tempered it. If I could I would have erased it, wiped it clean. I have never before or since experienced such a careless desire for violence. Then I felt a presence behind me. Naima, even with her endless duties, had noticed my absence.

  In the morning my mother’s three siblings, Aunt Souad, Aunt Salwa, and Uncle Fadhil, arrived from our country. I had never met them before, but recognized them from photographs. My aunts kept remarking how brave I was and how unusually long my eyelashes were, and teased me about my Cairene accent, my skin. They said that because I was darker than Father and Mother I was really the son of my great-grandfather, who was, by all accounts, nearly as dark as I am. They tickled my toes, hugged me when I laughed, dug their faces into my neck and inhaled deeply before kissing. At night, they took turns lying beside me, telling stories that usually included a mention of the waterfalls or pomegranates or palm trees of our country. If in the night I went to get a drink of water, one of them would appear behind me, asking whether I was all right.

  They sweetened my name to Abu el-Noor, calling it out whenever they saw me daydreaming. The slightest hint of contemplation worried them. If I was in the bathroom for a little longer than usual, I would hear one of my aunts whisper, “Abu el-Noor, habibi, are you all right?”

  Father let his beard grow. It surprised me how heavily streaked with gray it was; he was only thirty-nine and the hair on his head was completely black.

  Once, Uncle Fadhil embraced him, speaking solemnly and with a hint of urgency. Father eventually began nodding in a resigned sort of way, his eyes still on the ground.

  Another time the door of his bedroom was ajar, and I saw him cornered by my two aunts.

  “He is unusually aloof for a boy his age,” Aunt Salwa was saying.

  “Let us take him back. He will grow up among his cousins,” Aunt Souad added.

  “We will bring him up as our own,” Aunt Salwa said. “This way, when the country comes back to us, he can play a role.”

  After a long pause Father spoke. “I could not do that to Naima. She would never forgive me.”

  Long ago, when Naima was ill with bilharzia, Father, at Mother’s insistence, brought me to visit her. It took about an hour to reach the maze of her neighborhood by car. But, as our driver, Abdu, was keen to tell Father, the journey on public transport took at least an hour and a half.

  “Three hours’ round trip, Pasha.”

  Father did not react.

  Every time Abdu rolled down his window to ask someone for directions, the pedestrian would lean down and study our faces. Eventually we found Naima’s street. It was so narrow that the car could barely fit through.

  “Careful,” Father said in a near-whisper, while holding on to the handle above his window.

  “Don’t worry, Pasha,” Abdu replied, also in a whisper.

  Raw sewage meandered down the middle of the road, passing between the wheels. Father asked Abdu to roll up his window, but by then the stench had already entered the car. Above us clotheslines sagged under the weight of laundry and veiled most of the sky. Every so often Abdu had to press the horn, which sounded like an explosion in the narrow street. People had to find doorways to stand in, and even then we had to pass ever so slowly, almost brushing against their bodies. I watched a buckle, a detail of fabric, the occasional child’s face. These people who lined the road stood still and kept their arms by their sides. I was sure that from that angle they could see my bare knees on the beige leather upholstery.

  Naima, her seven siblings, and her parents lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a four-story building that was covered in flaking red paint with the words Coca-Cola repeated across it. Abdu waited with the car. Children preceded Father and me up the stairs, announcing our arrival and occasionally stopping to look back, giggle, and elbow one another before running up again. On each landing small paper bags sat bulging with rubbish, many of them punctured or torn. Flies the size of bees weaved lazily around them.

  “Don’t touch,” Father said, and I immediately pulled my hand off the railing and placed it in his open palm. He did not let go until we were at the door of the apartment.

  Naima’s father, who was a security guard at one of the museums, met us on the landing in his uniform. He looked worried. The mother cried when she saw Father, then was ordered by her husband to go and make tea. There was hardly any furniture in the living room. One carpet, the size of a prayer rug, lay in the center of the tiled floor as if concealing an imperfection or some secret passage. Naima lay on a mattress in a corner. I sat beside her. She took hold of my hand. My skin burned in her grip. She neither smiled nor cried, but stared at me with a peculiar gentleness, as if I were a kind of nourishment.

  “Nothing, really,” the father said. “Her mother spoils her. She’s just after attention.” Turning toward Naima, he asked loudly, “Aren’t you?”

  She did not respond.

  “She will be up in no time,” he told Father, anxiety making him blink his eyes.

  “She should take as long as she needs,” Father told him. “We only came to wish her well.”

  The mother returned with a plate and placed it on the rug: crumbled feta and sliced tomato submerged in the pee yellow of cotton oil. She stopped for a moment and looked at Naima and me.

  “Isn’t that right, Umm Naima?” the father said. “You spoil your daughter.”

  She waited a few seconds before speaking.

  “She loves him like a son,” she said to Father.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  Although Naima would not let her eyes leave my face, she had taken note of this exchange. I squeezed her hand. I thought of saying something. Instead, I placed my palm on her cheek. She held it there. I thought perhaps the relative coolness of my skin was a comfort to her. But then tears welled in her eyes.

  “Come, girl, don’t be afraid,” her father said, fear detectable in his voice.

  And just as suddenly Naima’s tears vanished.

  The parents insisted that we eat. Father shook his head. I wished he were better able to conceal the frown on his face. Naima’s father handed us loaves of bread. Mine was hard and speckled with flour stones. The mother poured a thick black liquid, and when I asked what it was the father said, “Tea, of course,” and I was convinced I had offended him. About two centimeters of the powdered leaf sat in the base of the glass. Father kneeled down, broke a small piece off his loaf, and dipped it in the solitary dish on the floor.

  “There, thanks very much.”

  I bowed all the way down, feeling the blood gather in my head, and kissed Naima’s hot forehead.

  Uncle Fadhil seemed to have come to Cairo mainly to accompany the women. As a man, he faced the greatest risk of retaliation for visiting his “backward, traitor” relatives. He mostly sat smoking. Whenever I sat next to him he would squeeze my skinny upper arms and say, “Flex.”

  Three days after they arrived, he told my aunts it was time to go. “Just in case the authorities think we are enjoying ourselves,” he said, weariness curling his eyebrows.

  Naima and I stood watching Amm Samir and his eldest son, Gamaal, fasten the luggage on the roof rack. We waved when the car pulled away, then went back upstairs. When I was in my room, surrounded by the smell of my aunts, I wept.

  Our apartment struggled to resume its original character. Naima moved soundlessly, cleaning the indifferent surfaces, preparing our joyless meals. I felt a tremor whenever I heard the clang of pots in Mother’s kitchen. Father seemed awkward and nerv
ous around me. The beard was gone, and now he spent most of his time out or in his room. Naima no longer slept at her home but on the floor in my bedroom. There was an abstract urgency in the air.

  The arrival of Hydar and Taleb, old friends of Father’s who, after the revolution, had settled in Paris, rescued us. Hydar brought his wife, Nafisa, who raised her voice every time she addressed me.

  Father gave up his room to Hydar and Nafisa. When they resisted, he said, “Listen, ask Nuri, I hardly sleep there. I prefer the couch. Honestly.”

  Then he insisted that Taleb take my bed.

  “This man knew you before you were born.”

  Taleb blushed, nodding.

  I slept on the floor, in Naima’s place, and she slept in the kitchen.

  Mother had not liked having guests, particularly these guests, and this had been a recurring source of disagreement between my parents. But now Father and his friends could stay up drinking whiskey until the early hours. I would hear Taleb getting into bed. I think if he had not tried so hard to be quiet he might have made less noise. His breath would quickly fill the room with the chemical smell of alcohol.

  I could not help but feel that Mother’s coldness toward Father’s old Parisian friends was somehow part of a general unease that marked my parents’ relationship to Paris. They almost never talked about their time in that city. And on the rare occasion that Mother did speak about how I came to be born there she would always begin by telling me how Naima came to work for the family. I did not then understand how this detail mattered at all to the story.

  She told me how she and Father had gone to Cairo expressly to employ a maid. And how, on the two-day drive back to our country, thirteen-year-old Naima had hardly stopped crying. But every time they had tried to turn back she objected.

  “At one point, she began begging us to go on, so we continued.”

  Perhaps mistaking my silence for disapproval at the maid’s young age, Mother said, “I wanted someone young, to get used to our ways, to be like a daughter.” Then she stopped and looked at her fingers, and only when she glanced up again did I realize that tears had been gathering in her eyes.

  Eighteen months after my parents employed Naima, our king was dragged to the courtyard of the palace and shot in the head. Father was a government minister by this stage and, instead of risking ill treatment, detention, or even death, he decided to flee to France. Naima was the last to step onto the boat, right behind my parents, pulled on board by Abdu the driver. They all stood watching the coast drift away, the smoke rise.

  When the boat arrived in Marseilles, Taleb was standing at the dock waiting for them. Was he smiling, was he sucking at the end of a cigarette, did he wave? Mother did not like to talk about Taleb.

  “Why? Is he a bad person?”

  “No, not at all.”

  It never seemed like anger that she felt toward him. More like shame. And I think she thought of Paris and the time in Paris in the same way. So I was eager to ask Taleb, to find out what had happened after they arrived.

  “Poor Naima could hardly stand,” he said. “She had been throwing up the whole way. But your mother was determined. She didn’t want to stay in Marseilles. I never understood that. She didn’t even want to rest the night. She insisted we go directly to the train station and get on the first train for Paris.”

  I pictured her marching ahead and imagined Father behind her, glad for her stubbornness, glad that someone at least knew what to do next.

  “And how was she on the train?”

  “Who? Your mother? Like the Sphinx. I told jokes, but they were obviously bad ones.”

  “And Naima and Abdu? Did they go back to Egypt?”

  Here Taleb looked at me as if I were suddenly standing a long way away. He seemed to consider the distance and whether it was wise to cross it.

  “Abdu went back from time to time, but Naima didn’t, of course.”

  “Where did they stay?”

  “In Paris.”

  He seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. I thought of how to bring him back.

  “Uncle Taleb?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you lived in Paris?”

  “Since university. Too long.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “What does it matter? It seems to like me.”

  “Did Mama and Baba stay with you?”

  “No, I found them an apartment in the Marais. Not ideal, but close to the hospital. A nice place, but a big step down from what they were used to.”

  “Not a hotel?”

  “Six months is too long for a hotel. And in the end they stayed a year.”

  “Really?” I said. “I always thought they were there only a couple of months.”

  “You breathed Parisian air for the first eight months of your life. You will be ruined forever.”

  I liked Taleb. Unlike Nafisa’s, his sympathy was not patronizing. He took me to places I had never been. One afternoon, as I followed him through the arches of Ibn Tulun Mosque, I asked him, “Uncle Taleb?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did my mother die of?”

  He stopped and looked at me in that way again but said nothing.

  Late one night, he on the bed, I on the floor, the room as black as a well and filling up with the smell of whiskey, Taleb suddenly spoke.

  “Some things are hard to swallow,” he said.

  I recalled a dog in our street that had choked on a chicken bone. It wheezed and coughed and then eventually lay on its side and surrendered, blinking at me.

  “You must know, regardless of anything, about her great humanity,” he said, the word utterly new to me. I repeated it in my mind—humanity, humanity—so that I could look it up later. “She never ceased to be tender with Naima, who was innocent, of course. Ultimately, everyone is innocent, including your father.”

  After a long silence, just when I suspected he had fallen asleep, Taleb spoke again.

  “You have no idea what he was back home. It’s difficult, looking at him now, to believe that he is the same person and that the world is the same world. And he wanted someone to inherit it all.”

  The following day Taleb, Hydar, and Nafisa flew back to Paris. And although Naima changed the bedsheets, I could still smell Taleb’s head on my pillow. I asked Naima to replace it.

  “Why?” she said, and pressed the pillow against her face. “It’s perfectly clean.”

  Karl Taro Greenfeld

  Mickey Mouse

  AFTER OUR TRIUMPHANT WINTER, the pink-white cherry blossoms already budding on mossy branches, the first cicadas buzzing in the late afternoons, our Empire’s prospects boundless, our fleets triumphant, our soldiers valiant, our Divine Emperor infallible, I received in my third-floor office on our deserted campus a visitor, my former classmate Kunugi.

  He was dressed in a three-piece tweed suit, worsted wool from London, with a paisley pocket square peeking over the selvage and a gold watch chain dangling from another cavity into the fabric. He had always been a dandy, and now, in his new prosperity, in his high office, with his surfeit of imperial spoils, he could afford such finery. He shook an English cigarette from a box and lit it with an American lighter.

  I had been seated at my drafting table, working on some pen and ink sketches, and as the ink was still wet I did not cover the illustration before answering the door. Kunugi immediately crossed the room and inspected the drawing, a mother and son, each tightly bundled in a kimono, walking on a country road, first snow falling. The mother was carrying a military uniform bound in white string. My first attempt had them walking with a crippled soldier hobbling on crutches, still in uniform but with one leg missing. In this version, I had tried it without the soldier, and it was more effective, his absence implied.

  This does not inspire, Kunugi observed as he exhaled. He offered me a cigarette.

  I did not smoke, not since I had had tuberculosis in my twenties. But I reached out for one.

  Take the wh
ole pack, he said, we seized warehouses full in Singapore.

  I looked at the package, black and gold, an elaborate coat of arms, lions on hind legs facing off under Roman lettering.

  It’s just a sketch, I explained, pointing to my drawing.

  But Kunugi had already moved on.

  We have a problem, he declared.

  I removed a cigarette and searched on my drafting table for a box of matches until Kunugi held out his lighter.

  I coughed the first time I tried to inhale, but the tobacco tasted delicious, so I inhaled again and felt the pleasant, still-familiar dizziness brought on by the nicotine.

  Mickey Mouse, he began, is on the list of enemy characters.

  This did not surprise me.

  I thought back to when Kunugi and I had both been students here together. He had been among the best in our department, winning several student prizes and even gaining entry into the Nikka group, his canvases hanging next to those of renowned artists. His affectation then had been a beret, a pipe, bodkin trousers—and now look at him. We had been rivals for the same professor’s attention, and even shared stylistic similarities—work that I now can see was our naive imitation of impressionism. We rarely interacted despite being intensely aware of one another. Shortly before graduating, I had abandoned that derivative form of painting, moving into uncomfortable territory as I searched for more individual expression. Kunugi continued in the faux European vein, and when he was invited to the Nikka group, I was so jealous I couldn’t bear to say hello to him at the show.

  I lost touch with Kunugi after university, as I continued to paint, even winning a small scholarship that allowed me to live in Paris for a few months and on my return securing a prestigious gallery show in Asakusa. Kunugi must have stopped painting, for I never saw his name among the lists of entries to various contests and prizes that we all vied for. I heard from a classmate that he had taken over his family business, something to do with fabrics and patterns. His name reappeared in my life a year ago at the bottom of a letter addressed to several dozen of us explaining that in voluntary accordance with the National Mobilization Law, the Weekly National, the liberal magazine publishing my illustrations, had suspended publication. I suspected I would lose my position at the university as well. Instead, I was to lose my livelihood by attrition. I was reduced to one class of four students, all of them physically unfit for active duty, for which I was allowed to keep my office. For income, I took on a few private students, pampered children of officials who only wanted to paint in the traditional style, no foreign subjects or influences.