by Anna Perera
“Do you want to burn the potatoes?” Mahir, her father, leans over her, head tilted sideways from the steam.
“What?”
Shareen catches sight of his sticky-out ears and thin neck in the mirror and drops the spoon. Opening the oven, she swiftly picks up black potatoes with her bare hands, flicking them to the lap of her galabeya. Soon the meal of sweet potatoes, rice, and pale lentils from yesterday is served on metal plates.
As always, they take the food from the tiny upstairs cooking and living space down the concrete steps to sit in the doorway and eat while watching garbage being cleared and ferried around by their neighbors.
Next door she can hear Aaron aimlessly scraping the last of the food remains into the center of the open room.
“We have a decision to make,” her father says, biting into the black crusty potato as if it’s an apple and sending fluttering burned flakes over his chin.
Shareen knows what he’s going to say and doesn’t want to hear it ever again. At the same time she’s pleased to see Aaron hovering nearby, trying to guess what mood she’s in. It’s a dance they do every day: The pros and cons of wheelbarrow lending—helping, ignoring, delaying, refusing—go back and forth between them with each sideways look.
“Time’s running out,” Mahir says.
“No, it isn’t. Don’t make things up!” Shareen hits back. “Daughters shouldn’t argue.”
“Fathers shouldn’t whine.” Always one step ahead, Shareen pinches rice into a ball with her fingers and deposits it on her tongue. “You can’t talk about it until you buy me some sandals …”
“Where will I get money for those?” Her father frowns suddenly as the conversation veers away from his intended path. “What am I to do with a daughter like you?”
“Buy her more stuff,” Shareen snaps back immediately. Next door, Aaron turns away to pretend he’s not listening. “What with?” Her father sighs. “If you want things, then marry Daniel like I asked. He makes good money from the walking sticks he carves in the craft center.”
It was all going quite well until that moment, but at the mention of the wizened, toothless Daniel, Shareen bangs her metal plate on the concrete step and jumps up, thrashing her arms about and hurling her long black hair from side to side.
“I WON’T MARRY DANIEL!”
“She’s got the Devil in her again,” Youssa shouts, and thunders downstairs to watch.
Lijah appears from nowhere. The whole street falls silent. That’s Shareen.
Finishing the last mouthful of lentils, Mahir taps his plate on his knee before standing up to stretch his stiff limbs. Without blinking or showing any emotion whatsoever, he calmly wanders off down the lane, plate in hand, to visit Daniel, the man in question. Leaving Shareen to quieten down with everyone watching each stamp of her dainty little foot.
Aaron’s fascinated and annoyed at the same time, until she turns to face him.
“And you …”
“Me?” Aaron raises his eyebrows. “What have I done?”
“You,” she says again.
“Yeah?”
“You can shut up about the wheelbarrow!”
She tilts her head, pointing a finger at his chest. There are people here who can shrink Aaron to the size of a pea just by looking at him, but only Shareen can make him feel smaller than a pinhead.
“I didn’t say anything!” “Well, don’t, then!”
Turning away, Aaron begins calculating how many bags are needed to clear the heap of food in the middle of the floor. Now the drama has finished, Lijah and Youssa disappear. Aaron glances over his shoulder at her. Not that he likes her, though he’s about the only boy who doesn’t. Even Jacob fantasizes that she’s his, apparently.
The sound of rustling breaks out as people return to sorting garbage.
Shifting the food slop is so much easier with the wheelbarrow and now the fact that Shareen won’t lend it means Aaron will have to load more bags and carry them one by one to the other end of Mokattam to the pig enclosure. If Lijah was allowed to leave the pony outside he could use the cart instead, but there are rules to obey here and keeping ponies out of the alleys and away from the cooking pots is an important one.
With a tired heart, Aaron begins scooping cupped handfuls of unrecognizable yellow and brown stinking glob into the plastic bags. He fills two to the brim before the smell overwhelms him and he’s forced to stop for a second. Again he becomes aware of the pain in his elbow, which is now too old and constant to make him wince much, while his throbbing knee is hurting more than ever and distracting him. He tries bending it right back and moans softly.
Trust Shareen to lose it today, when he really needs the wheelbarrow. That’s her all over—nothing but trouble.
Chapter Four
Abe
Before long Abe is beside him again with the soccer ball under his arm. He seems more anxious than ever for Aaron to come and play.
“What happened to your knee?”
“Lijah pushed me off the cart. I banged it on the road.” Aaron gives him a sad smile as Abe sets the soccer ball in a safe place to one side and starts to help with the food.
“It’s OK,” Abe reassures him. “We can play tomorrow.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Are we taking this swill to the new place?” Abe asks.
“Yeah.”
Aaron frowns at the memory of the Zabbaleen’s problems last month, when government officials ordered the slaughter of all the pigs in Cairo as a precaution against an outbreak of swine flu. A procession of four cars and vans arrived in Mokattam to carry out the order, but they hadn’t reckoned on the importance of the pigs to the community and the resistance they would encounter.
“They say it was you, Abe, who threw a brick at the van’s window and smashed it.”
“Nah, it wasn’t me. There were loads of us crowding them,” the small boy replies.
“The government said they’d pay after slaughtering the pigs, but everyone knows that’s a lie. The priest says they’ll be back to carry out the order. Anyway, what can we do with the rotting food if we don’t have pigs?”
“Maybe goats would be OK?” Aaron says.
They stand back to wipe their arms on their jeans and eye the four bags they’ve filled. The smell is sickening.
“Simon’s going to buy a jellyfish on the Internet,” Abe says, his face lighting up with excitement, which makes Aaron smile as he drags a stinking bag into the limestone-dusted lane. Simon’s one of the oldest and cockiest kids in Mokattam and Aaron’s never understood why Abe wants him as his best friend.
“Where’s Simon going to put the jellyfish?”
“I don’t know.” Abe frowns.
“You need a credit card to buy stuff on the Internet,” Aaron warns.
“He’s going to get one from somewhere.” Abe almost trips on the bag as he positions himself to swing the slop on his back to allow him to head down the alley. “You’ll see.”
“Simon’s never going to get a jellyfish on the Internet, or be a famous soccer player and play for an English team.”
“But he promised,” Abe says.
“Yeah, but he won’t.”
Leading the way down several alleys to the pig shacks with Abe trailing behind, Aaron passes families lounging on the ground, feet out, resting after the morning’s work and eating spicy noodles from plates on their laps.
When they arrive at the shacks, two sandy and three black pigs are sprawled under the crumbling, wooden shelters, which are held together with nails and wire. Shelters that are too small and broken to keep the sun from the animals’ skin. The pigs are spread out in different enclosures throughout Mokattam, and the hotels and tourists of Cairo would go without pork, bacon, and sausages if it weren’t for the Zabbaleen’s pig-rearing.
“No one’s filled the water up.” Aaron bristles at the sight of the empty trough.
“I’ll do it!”
Abe drops the bag and races for the limp, bent hose hangi
ng from the tap. Swinging it around his neck, he twists the screeching tap until water starts to flow down his blue shorts and bony legs before stretching the hose to fill up the rusty trough. Aaron empties the waste from the bags into a heap beside the fence.
These pigs belong to four different families, but they leave their care to whomever is the last to dump rotten food here. The deal is that everyone fills the water trough, though. It’s never been empty before, so something’s gone wrong. Aaron frowns, then breaks into a smile, taking pleasure in watching the smallest pig snuffle his way through the overflowing water. As Aaron and Abe turn to leave, Shareen appears, pushing the creaking wheelbarrow.
“There you are again.”
“What are you doing here?” Abe asks. “You’re too late. We’ve finished.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.” Shareen drops the barrow with a thud. “I’ve been looking all over for Aaron.”
“We’ve emptied the food now.” Aaron gazes in awe as she runs a dainty bare foot over the barrow’s front wheel to display her new toenail varnish. The red color—dark and rich, the same shade as plums—shocks him. The thought occurs to him that after all her yelling and her father walking off in a huff, she’d calmly sat down to paint her toenails, then come to find him as an excuse to walk through the village and show them off.
“How do you get that stuff off your toes?” Abe asks, goggle-eyed.
“You don’t.”
Shareen twists her ankle up and down and from side to side, to give them a better view of her delicate foot from every angle, while throwing in quick flicks of her shiny black hair. All of this has the desired effect of hypnotizing Aaron and Abe, firmly rooting them to the spot, open-mouthed.
“You just paint over it when it chips. Malia’s done ten layers so far, but her toes don’t look good anymore. You can overdo things, you know.”
Aaron and Abe respond to her pouty smile with a sneaking awareness that girls—any girls—can ambush their thoughts and feelings just by waggling red-painted toes. Luckily, Aaron comes to his senses and grabs Abe by the shoulder.
“Let’s hope the football’s still where you left it.”
He strides ahead, arm resting on Abe’s shoulder, leaving Shareen to straggle behind, clutching the handles of the barrow high in the air to allow for the best view of her feet as she trots along.
“Jellyfish were alive before dinosaurs,” Abe announces.
“How do you know that? You weren’t there then,” Shareen shouts crossly.
“Leave him alone,” Aaron warns. “He knows everything there is to know about jellyfish.”
“Yes, shut up.” Abe turns to glance at her. “For six hundred and fifty million years there have been jellyfish on earth, with tentacles longer than a soccer field.”
“You expect people to believe that?” Shareen laughs, but her mind drifts off to imagine a huge, slippery jellyfish lolling in front of the goalposts of the International Stadium, hundreds of tentacles reaching across a sea of green.
“Have you had anything to eat today?” Aaron asks Abe.
“Not yet.”
“Follow me. There should be some bread left.”
Without another word they cut through an alley as the beautiful sound of the call to prayer echoes over the city. Eyes to the sky, Shareen follows behind, with a jellyfish fight playing in her head. They carefully avoid disturbing the heaps of stinking bags packed tight against the walls of the open-sided buildings and head toward the last lane on the left, where Aaron lives. By the time they reach home Shareen has vanished, after stopping to talk to a friend.
Aaron lets go of Abe’s shoulder when they spot the soccer ball resting on the same spot on the stained concrete floor where he left it earlier. Abe runs to kick it into the air, but suddenly Lijah’s there and belts it with the flat of his arm. The ball shoots to the ceiling, bouncing back with a thump. They scramble to catch it, but Lijah knocks Abe out of the way, grabs the ball with one hand, and tackles Aaron to the floor, kicking him in the side for good measure the second he’s down. Lijah has only one method of communicating: his fists and feet.
Aaron curls into a ball to protect himself, but Lijah loses interest and walks off with the ball under his arm, smiling happily.
“Hey! Hey!” Abe shouts.
“Don’t worry.” Aaron picks himself up. “He only wants it because you’re with me. He hates soccer.”
But Abe’s close to tears. Lijah’s taken the only thing he owns.
“I promise you’ll get it back.”
Doing his best to reassure Abe, Aaron leads the way up the filthy concrete stairs to the muggy room where his family eats, lives, and sleeps. In a corner cupboard is a hole in the floor—the toilet. Four curling mats are thrown against three walls. A small gas stove dominates a tiny area full of bent pots and pans crusted with baked-on food. There’s a blackened bucket and tap beside it and two threadbare towels on a nail. Soiled sweatshirts sit on top of a straggle of dirty jeans. Another bucket, a large metal box, a picture of Jesus on the cross, and an apple core are under the small open space that serves as a window.
Aaron drags the metal box out to the middle of the floor and edges off the lid with his fingernails. A whiff of stale herbs and sweet spices fills the air as it clatters to the concrete floor. Half-empty screw-top jars of paprika, coriander seeds, black peppercorns, and green cardamom pods roll from side to side, clonking against the sides of the tin. Paper bags of rice, lentils, falafels, three fat tomatoes, and a bottle of chilli sauce take up the corner spaces, along with a bunch of hibiscus leaves, a stack of flatbreads, and a box of eggs.
Abe gazes in amazement at the contents. “How come you’ve got so much food?”
“It’s Monday. Hosi buys everything for the week today. It will all be gone by Wednesday at the latest. Here.”
In a flash he hands Abe bread, a tomato, two crumbling falafel and the bottle of chili sauce, then sits on the floor beside him to picnic.
“Wait a minute.”
Aaron leans over to replace the lid on the box so he can drop his food on top before awkwardly getting up to turn on the tap and wash his hands, as the priest said they must before eating. But the dirt is too ingrained for the water to make much difference to the color of his skin, and the scrap of soap stuck to the sink is dirtier than he is.
Aaron shoves his mouth under the sparkling, warm water, gulping quickly before patting a dirty towel with dripping fingers. Abe’s too busy pushing bread into his mouth to follow suit and is almost finished before Aaron starts. Three minutes later they’re on their feet, wiping crumbs from their jeans, and Aaron smiles.
“You wanna sit on the wall, then?” he asks.
“What about my soccer ball?” Abe can’t believe Aaron’s forgotten about it already.
“Lijah’s always hanging around near the church.”
Aaron tries bending his knee once or twice before putting his weight on his left foot. It doesn’t feel too bad, but the side where Lijah kicked him is tender to the touch. He tries not to think again about how much he’d like to kill Lijah.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll find him. Do you know who I saw today?”
“No. Who?”
Flies track their footsteps as they leave the dark room and head into the harsh, airless heat of the afternoon.
“Mary, Mother of God.” Aaron smiles nervously.
“The picture that Jacob’s cousin Karim has stuck on the back of his cart? I saw it too. What’s the point of putting it there? Someone’s going to steal it, aren’t they? I’d sell it if it were mine. Where did he find it anyway?”
Aaron was going to tell Abe the whole story of the vision he saw on the swinging glass doors of the Imperial Hotel, but the boy’s questions make him feel suddenly tired. Torn between lying and brushing him off, he decides to keep quiet and just shrugs.
Once they leave the stinking alleys behind, the sweet scent of jacaranda descends. They walk arm in arm beside the cream quarry walls, which
are decorated with religious scenes. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are carved into the limestone to show the Holy Family arriving in Egypt after their journey from Palestine.
The vista of an uphill winding path, empty of filth, opens up like a magic walkway with small bushes and trees. The route to the church has an oasis-like feeling of peace and harmony. Its beauty is in stark contrast to the hellhole they’ve left behind and never fails to make Aaron smile ruefully.
Aaron notices Michael, the church’s shy sculptor and artist, up a ladder with a handkerchief on his head, carving a new shape into the high wall with a hammer and chisel.
Aaron glances to the right at the vast church with its curved stone benches, enough to seat fifteen thousand people. Literally hollowed into the mountain, the church is the beating heart of Mokattam and sets the moral code for everything that happens here. Do good and avoid evil. Don’t steal. Don’t harm. Don’t lie. The seats form a semicircle leading down to an altar that is carved on either side with scenes from the Bible.
Aaron and Abe watch Michael chip away, their eyes roaming over his creation to fill in the gaps in their minds. They conjure up hands and feet for the figure he’s unveiling from the wall, and for a second Aaron wonders if he has the nerve to tell Michael about the vision of Mary he saw this morning. But Michael’s too engrossed in his work to notice them.
It’s a while before Michael shakes the dust from his hands and pauses to gaze at the marks he’s made. By then Aaron has completed a huge Madonna for him in his head.
“Are you doing a carving of Mother Mary?” Aaron asks.
“Not this time.” Dropping the tools in the flap of his dungarees, Michael turns to them and smiles.
“No?” Aaron’s disappointed.
“Joseph?” Abe asks.
Moving quickly down the ladder, Michael lowers his eyes to the ground and walks quietly away.
“Doesn’t say much, does he?” Abe sighs when he’s gone. “He once told me he dreams the whole thing first. That was ages ago,” says Aaron proudly. “Come on.”
They walk past flowering trees and a small stone table and benches where children are playing, and head toward the low wall beyond the church where they always sit. For the first time today, Aaron notices his knee isn’t throbbing as much and for a moment wonders if a second miracle has occurred. But as soon as he sits down there’s a bone-crunching noise and the pain starts up again. He’s about to roll up his jeans to examine the damage when Abe yells, pointing wildly.
