Brooklyn Heights

by Miral al-Tahawy

  Her father owned a single small briefcase, but it wasn’t made for travelling. It never occurred to him to leave the town bounded by small villages that he had grown up in. The case was full of papers: legal briefs and contracts and petitions that he had been entrusted with and that he took very seriously. He pored over them endlessly. It was a way of showing off how important he was, and also of proving to those who might want to forget it that he held a degree in law. But the truth was that he didn’t give a damn about courts or briefs because he believed that everything could be solved by direct negotiation between the parties concerned. He didn’t like to leave his house, and the times that Hend travelled with him were few and far between. The white Cadillac crossed the mud flats called Pharaoh’s Springs; Shepherd’s Hills, where communities of gypsies and nomadic Bedouins lived in canvas tents pitched on the edge of a brackish swamp; the Bedouin Estate, an endless sandy plain bordered by farms and small, isolated villages; the Lady’s Estate; the Faridiya Estate; the Hill Estate; and the School Estate. The long green ribbon unwound itself along miscellaneous parcels of land until it emptied into the road that led to the gates of Cairo, that faraway city that people simply called ‘Egypt’.

  They entered the city from the east and the neighbourhood of Heliopolis, where most of her uncles lived (though Hend can no longer remember those long-ago visits that she paid them as a child). They always made the same stops: the pastry shop Gatineau, Omar Effendi, the fancy medical complex where they went for doctors’ visits and lab results. They would while away the hour before one of these appointments at Groppi, the famous confectioner in Tal’at Harb Square. Her father would slowly sip his coffee as her mother finished up her window-shopping on nearby Qasr al-Nil Street. Her father loved to recount the origins of the names of the busy streets they walked down, especially the ones named after famous leaders of the nationalist movement, but in spite of his encyclopedic knowledge he somehow always managed to get lost. She recalled him stopping at the corner of Muhammad Mahmud Pasha Street, named after the leader of the Liberal Constitutional Party, and saying, ‘He was a great man.’ Her mother nodded her head knowingly as she tottered behind him in her high-heeled shoes. ‘And this, my dear, is Sherif Pasha Street. Sherif Pasha oversaw the drafting of Egypt’s first constitution and he was responsible for outlawing the slave trade.’ Her mother sighed. She was thinking about things that were much more important than the history of Egyptian liberalism, things like doctors’ appointments and lab results and shop display windows. She held Hend’s wrist in a vice-like grip to keep her from running off and getting lost in the crowded, dangerous squares that were full of itinerant peddlers. The three of them stumbled around the maze of streets with a growing sense of claustrophobia. Her frustrated mother declared that the popular saying ‘the person who built Cairo must have been a confectioner’ was sheer nonsense and that God had thankfully spared them the hell of having to live in this city.

  They took the road back home in a hurry. On the journey, her mother carried her on her lap. Her plump, soft legs were sheathed in velvety stockings and she wore a typical regional dress printed with big flowers and a blue coat lined with satin. The days were short and it got dark early, but they always went back the same night because her father was only comfortable sleeping in his own bed and because her mother had left half a dozen small kids behind and in any case driving at night was much more comfortable than driving by day. At night she missed the blue of the sky and her dreams of flight were thrown into sharper relief: ‘Papa, I want to be an airline stewardess.’

  ‘Over my dead body!’ He laughed. ‘No daughter of mine is going to wait on people.’ She didn’t understand what he meant by ‘wait on people’. All she knew was that planes flew high up in the sky, and she could already picture herself as an elegant stewardess pulling a suitcase and a pile of dreams behind her. She fell silent for a while, then piped up again. ‘Papa, I want to grow up and be an astrophysicist.’ This time her mother answered wryly. ‘You just want to fly off into space and leave us behind, don’t you?’ The cold wind came in through the window. She fell asleep on the way, and didn’t see the small farms wrapped in the silence of the dark night.

  The only time her father went on a long trip was to Mecca for the hajj. But he didn’t stay long. He came back well before any of the other pilgrims – who inevitably fell in love with the noble lands of the Prophet – and he excused this shortcoming by declaring it to be ‘an unlivable place. No wonder the Prophet emigrated!’ Her mother interpreted this declaration as a manifestation of his eternal idleness. To her lasting chagrin, her husband had no desire to seek his fortune in the wealthy Gulf countries like everyone else. All he did was act strangely and endlessly hang around in reception houses, his own and other people’s, always trying to solve problems that were no business of his. She was always complaining that he would never fix the universe, just fritter away his money – hers and the kids’. But she was afraid to tell him what was in her heart, and he refused to listen anyway. She would only sigh and dab at her tears and watch him from a distance as he sat every evening on the portico of the reception house on the hill and lit the fire and invited any and all who passed by on the path to come in for some tea. ‘Please make yourself at home . . . you’re welcome, by God . . .’ Even after all his friends packed their suitcases and went off to find jobs in the oilfields, her mother still hoped that he could be persuaded to go too. Meanwhile, she overheard him declaring his firm intention to stay put to Doctor Shamil the pharmacist (who eventually decided to emigrate to Libya): ‘Oh no, Shamil, I’m neither poor nor hungry – the hell with oil contracts! I’ve got a house of my own and my father’s land from al-Sheikh to Ard al-Haysh. You go, and good luck to you, but me – never.’

  And so the father stayed behind and tended the fire in front of the reception house, and Hend would sit next to him and say, ‘Papa, I want to travel.’ He told her that life was one big journey, and that she would certainly travel a lot, maybe even get altogether sick of travelling when she grew up. ‘Papa will be a lonely old man by then and no one will want to keep him company any more.’ He predicted that, by that time, he would no longer be able to see her when she stood before him because he would be blind, and would have to rely on his sense of smell to know his own daughter, his beloved daughter. Who knows, he would say, maybe her presence would even restore his sight, just like in the story of the Prophet Jacob, and then she would become a cane for him to lean on in his old age, and he would take her by the hand and they would walk together from way up on the hill down to the gypsy camps. These prophecies always made Hend laugh. Satisfied, her father would then move on to the story of the Prophet Joseph.

  *

  Hend gazed at their house and it looked old and squat and decrepit to her because of the new, multi-storeyed buildings made from the red bricks fired in the kilns that had sprung up all over the surrounding marshland. Its old wooden roof could no longer support the stagnant rainwater that gathered in pools on cold winter days. Her mother hurried to put a tray with clay jars and a few brass pots under the holes in the living-room ceiling. She could hear the drops of water falling rhythmically into the receptacles at night, and the fire in the stove did nothing to warm the room packed with sleeping children. Her father came home late and she heard his slow steps approaching the door. He stopped in sometimes to check on the children wrapped in blankets that had grown worn and threadbare, and he sighed and rubbed his hands anxiously. In the morning he sat in the living room surrounded by his romping offspring and felt vindicated. ‘Who would leave all these blessings behind for a bit of money?’ he murmured to himself.

  The ‘blessings’ gradually became bigger and their needs multiplied. The father made a few more signs advertising his expertise at the High Court of Appeals and distributed them in villages further afield. He took to calling the reception house his ‘office’ but he still wouldn’t go abroad, even after all the other men in the village had gone. The people he knew dispersed –
some of them to Iraq, others to the Gulf – and soon all kinds of imported velveteen blankets, soft and warm, could be seen hanging on the rooftop clotheslines, and stereo systems from Libya or TV sets from Dubai began to pop up everywhere. He would only smile at all these transformations – the suitcases that came and went to distant places – and shut himself up in his room with the following words on his lips: ‘Whatever the Levantine wind brings, the Yemeni wind takes away.’

  Maybe the mysterious phrase was meant for his wife, who had begun to cast an anxious eye on the tattered blankets and the clothes that she kept patching up time after time for the children, who were growing at breakneck speed. But she only nodded her head and held her tongue. Her father slipped his Maria Callas record back into the sleeve covered in writing that no one understood and settled down to smoke and read his book, Liberalism and Egyptian Modernity. He was careful that everything should remain just so: stable, distinguished, and tranquil, like the dreams that were growing before his eyes in the shape of his children. He never seemed to have any regrets, even after all the town’s houses had emptied of their inhabitants, houses through which gigantic suitcases strapped in ropes came and went with the words scrawled on them in broad letters, such as: ‘This bag belongs to Sayyid Abu Ibrahim who lives on the western bank in Mansha’ or ‘This suitcase is from the sons of Antar to their mother who lives on the White Estate’. And along with the traffic of travelling suitcases, the entire rhythm of life changed. Fatma al-Qarumiya no longer discreetly carried around her cloth bundle stuffed with odds and ends of women’s clothing for sale. She began walking around town with a huge vinyl suitcase on her head that she would open on any random corner and call out, ‘Sharjah satin! Imported nylon and silk! Blooming colours for lovely young girls! Abayas from the Hijaz, and the Prophet’s musk!’ And while the street across from their house was buzzing with the trade in imported goods, her mother continued to alter their old clothes to fit the next child down the line.

  Hend wished she had a dainty red case of her own to take on the long trip that she was sure to make one day. This was why she eagerly appropriated the white handbag that she found sitting in her mother’s closet. Her mother let her have it because she never went out anyway, and no longer had any use for it. The bag was rectangular and had sharp edges, like those that hung on the arms of leading ladies in old movies. Hend put a comb and a mirror in it, as well as a few small bits of paper on which she’d written signed letters to herself, since everybody was writing letters to their absent relatives in those days. But hers were cold and lifeless and they mouldered away, unread, in the white handbag.

  *

  Hend liked to talk about her father to the Capricorn. He had grown into her closest friend, and the spirals of fretful smoke that he blew out through his mouth made her think of her father. He reminded her of the old rush mats and the story of the Prophet Joseph, and his presence filled her with a feeling of warmth and security. He really listened to her when she talked, and she knew that he believed in her. She in turn found pleasure in his endless stories and the long walks they took together – just as she used to do with her father. She would fall into a kind of happy trance as she listened to him tell the same story over and over, in the same monotonous tone and with the same quiet enthusiasm. They met without reason or rhyme – they never actually made an appointment to meet – and she never had to weigh her words in his company, never felt self-conscious or obliged to hide her depression. He made her feel that he had been put on this earth just to make her happy, to dedicate his life to the sole purpose of walking with her along the meandering city streets. ‘This is the Muhammad Ali Club, and this is the old Opera building. And this, my dear, is Jabalaya Street, where young lovers used to embrace in the dark. But they’re all gone now. There are no more lovers in Egypt.’

  He told her that he used to live on Mohandiseen Street with his friend Yahya. It was a quiet street, with hardly any traffic, only a few buildings owned by the Othman Company. He told her that Yahya used to like hanging around in Stella Bar, which was very different back then. Sometimes, when he walked a few steps behind her or hung on her every word, or expressed delight in her company, he reminded her of her son. He often said to her, ‘If Yahya had met you, he would’ve fallen in love with you, and maybe then you would’ve been happier.’

  She still didn’t really know who Yahya was, but the repeated remark made her realise that he understood just how miserable and alone she was. She accepted it as an insight and a form of condolence, though sometimes it struck her as cruel, this yoking of her potential happiness to a dead man that she had never met. She attributed her bad luck to her zodiac.

  It happens, she thinks to herself, that you’re born on some summer night and suddenly find that you’ve been taken hostage by a star: always moving in the wrong direction, always pretending to be strong when in reality you quake in mortal fear, always wanting things but never reaching out for them, never knowing the difference between truth and illusion. It happens that a tentative, murky moon rises, a shape-shifting moon that slowly moves across the dome of the heavens, and your disposition grows dark and changeful like a chameleon. You cry and laugh at the same time, you love and hate at the same time. It happens that milk still seeps from her breasts because her brain has not sent the right signals to her glands. Milky clots cling to the inward-turned nipples, wells of hunger in which her star fate dwells, fast propagating and growing perhaps into small tumours like the ones that killed her mother. Would she die suddenly like her mother, she wonders.

  The patterns traced by the stars give some measure of meaning to her life. She believes that the past and the future form a cosmic circle whose traces are inscribed on her forehead. She is possessed by the cruel certainty that providence and fate govern the world, and that men and women are powerless to change their destinies, as her mother had believed before her.

  Hend can still picture her mother as she looked in her wedding photo, young and beautiful. Her uncles had carried her off one day, when night had fallen over that fertile green land, and the old Cadillac spirited her across peaceful deserts and wretched villages plunged into silence. It was summertime and the frogs croaked ferociously from their hiding places in the waterwheels. The car stopped on the long driveway along which electric lamps and coloured lanterns had been hung to welcome the new bride. Their steady hum scattered the thronging mosquitoes as the woman who would become her mother began to explore the old house that was now her home. The next morning she inspected the new clothes hanging in her closets. She put on the rose-coloured dress that revealed the fullness of her breasts and arms, and the rich ornaments that marked her noble ancestry – a necklace of real diamonds and a few gold bracelets in the form of snakes. A few years later she would sell them all to make ends meet.

  The old house with the wooden roof was not as lovely as the new bride had imagined it to be, even after she hung her colourful curtains on the windows and a few paintings on the walls. Over the bed and the pillows that would soon grow wet with her tears she hung a painting of a naked and reclining houri of paradise. She hung a needlepoint canvas depicting a bowl of fruit overflowing with clusters of grapes behind the huge dining table, and another of a tearful child in the bedroom destined for the children to come. The perfume of a mango tree wafted in from behind the balcony as she dusted the cakes with sugar and set out the elegant cane chairs to make the new house worthy of her. Grandmother Zaynab sprinkled the marriage incense in every corner and the guests who had come to pay their respects gossiped about the young bride’s hair, done up in small ringlets that delicately framed the edges of her face. Hend imagines that her mother must have been happy at first because she could turn on the radio and listen to all the songs that used to be forbidden to her: Don’t kiss me on the eye, eye-kisses divide lovers.

  Hend’s grandfather’s house was not far off but people frowned upon a young bride visiting her family, especially in the first years of marriage. They considered it to be a sign of
the frivolity and rashness that ruin homes. In any case, Hend’s mother could not remember her childhood fondly. Her father, who was also a Bedouin sheikh, married three women and sired many sons and daughters very close to each other in age. He insisted on sending his daughters to a convent school for a few years – as was the custom amongst the big families in the countryside in those days – so that they would learn to be obedient housewives. Her mother once showed Hend an old photo of some of her friends. ‘This is the daughter of the mayor of Kafr al-Zayyat. And this is the daughter of the Bedouin chieftain al-Henadi Abd al-Hamid Bek Sultan. And this is the daughter of the mayor Lamlum Basil, my father’s paternal cousin.’ Her mother didn’t remember much about her school days except for a few mysterious phrases in French that she had memorised: Comment ça va? Très bien. Bon. She used these phrases only in exceptional circumstances and when she wanted to show off her education – in conversations with doctors or strangers who came to visit, for example. She also liked to impress people with her exceptional talent for homemaking, which she gleaned from articles in ladies’ magazines that she carefully copied into a notebook in which she kept her recipes for jam and preserves and vegetable casseroles and delicate flaky pastries. With the passing of time, and when the only talent required became the ability to feed seven mouths on a limited budget, these skills would become the object of general mockery.