Cairo in White, page 16
“And you didn’t stop the wedding?”
“What could I have done? There were many reasons your mother chose to marry Ali, and they were all the same ones I chose to stay silent. She knew she and Jamila had no future together here in Cairo, and if she refused to marry Ali, Suma would be a single mother for life. Would it have been better for her to become a social outcast, two unmarriageable daughters under one roof, wasting away their lives?”
“I guess not.”
“Zahra might have been the youngest, but she had the strongest will—a character trait she has passed on to you, I’ve learned. I knew no matter what, she would survive. So I let her go find her place in America and waited all these years for her to return. Then you came. So your grandmother found what she thought was a good match for you. Where’s the harm, when it turns out Kareem really was a good match? She did what she thought was best.”
He patted her arm, the first time he had touched her during her trip. She closed her eyes and just listened to the sounds of Cairo bustling beneath their perch. The honk of horns, the greetings passed by men on their way to work, and the vendors calling out their wares to the same old women who had shopped there since her mother left her home on the day that had changed all of their lives forever rose up to her.
The next morning, after a fitful sleep and several turns watching over her grandmother, Aisha woke to Muhammad sitting on the edge of her bed. He had never entered her room since that first day, and as soon as she saw his hunched back, she knew what had happened. He handed her a few tissues from his pocket, crumpled paper like the discarded letters her mother had written and then thrown away. Though he said nothing, he stayed with her until her tears stopped. His face was blank, unmoving, and as soon as she stopped crying he wandered to the door with a cigarette already in-hand.
“Remember her well,” he said in a dull voice. “For no matter how it seemed, she loved you more than anyone else.” Then he was gone, lost in the world of his sorrow, and for the next few days, she could not reach him through his dull eyes.
* * * *
When Aisha returned from buying vegetables at the market the next day, she found the front door open and heard loud sobs coming from the living room. After she placed the bags down gently, transferring them from her hips to the floor like children, she followed the sound to the living room. A large group of women were perched on furniture and floor like so many cats, crying and making more noise than she had ever heard in her life. A few of them were screaming, their mouths open like specters, while others beat their breasts or hit their heads in rhythm. In the middle of the turmoil was her great aunt, Muhammad’s sister, her pale, wrinkled face contorted in pain as she produced several curdling screams. The rest echoed her like a pack of wolves, heads raised up as they emitted their calls, trying to outdo the others’ noise.
In the kitchen, the husbands of the women were gathered around a radio, turning the Quran reading up to drown out the disturbing mourning calls in the other room. Two of them played chess at the kitchen table, and a few others debated the latest soccer match in voices she could not even hear over all the racket.
“What in the world is going on?” Aisha shouldered her way through the kitchen to put the bags on the counter.
“When someone dies,” one of the men explained, “all the women gather to cry, scream, and do whatever else they can to mourn the dead in the loudest way possible. Your grandfather tried to fight them off, but your great aunt had a key and let the others in. I think he’s holed up in his bedroom, probably looking for his ear plugs.”
“Thanks.” She walked down the hall to her grandfather’s room and knocked. She couldn’t hear whether he answered or not, so she turned the handle and found him standing by the window, looking out as a prisoner would look through his bars.
“Why won’t they go away?” he asked her. “Make them go away.” In his hand was one of Miriam’s dresses, the one she had worn whenever she had a long day of cooking ahead of her. He wrung it through his hands over and over again. He would not say anything else, so she closed the door and went back the way she had come to try to convince everyone to leave.
“My grandfather is not well,” she was in the middle of saying to her great aunt when someone walked past her. She saw her grandfather holding something in his hand. By the time she realized it was a shotgun, she had no time to get closer to him or knock it out of his hand. He looked like an aged cowboy, John Wayne in The Train Robbers before everything started to explode, and the only emotion present on his face was rage.
“Get out,” he yelled.
The women scurried like rats across the wooden floor and into the arms of their husbands. All except her great-aunt, who stayed seated and gave her brother a defiant glance before continuing her hysterics. In a second, her grandfather raised the gun, aimed, and fired. A sound like the crash of a trash bin’s lid but louder echoed through the room, causing Aisha to duck. All of the relatives ran back to see what had happened, and then he prepared to fire again. Luckily, he had missed her leg and shot through the floor instead, whether accidentally or intentionally Aisha could not tell, and her great-aunt ran as fast as her arthritic legs could carry her.
Aisha checked with the neighbors downstairs to make sure that no one living below them was injured. She promised to pay for the damage and ran back to her grandfather, who sat in the same easy chair he had collapsed into right after the last guest ran from the apartment.
“Grandfather, I think it’s time you let the gun go,” she said in a soothing voice.
Slowly, he handed over the heavy weapon, and she took it carefully, switching on the safety and then placing it out of easy reach.
“Isn’t the quiet nice?” he asked.
“Very nice.” She was about to say more when she heard a loud knock on the door. She immediately began praying it was not the police or a pack of angry relatives who would set her grandfather off again.
“Coming,” Aisha said as the knock got louder. She swung the door open, prepared for the worst, but instead saw a familiar form with a red carry-on bag and straw hat with a blue ribbon wrapped around the middle. “Mom?”
Chapter 19
Cairo, July 2010
During the day, Zahra mourned her mother with Muhammad and Aisha. She boxed Miriam’s clothes and donated them, cooked the intricate meals they had grown accustomed to, and talked about all of the pleasant times they had that summer. She learned about her daughter’s newfound loves and losses. But at night, the city unfolded around her like a moonflower. She visited Cairo Tower, the tallest structure in Egypt, and the city lights spread around her like fallen stars. She spent nights incognito in coffee shops and shisha bars, listening to the symphony of her native tongue. She walked through the markets at dusk, the shopkeepers and their children packing their carts and closing their shops as one would close the eyelids of the dead. In a way, it was her own mourning tradition. Miriam would have wanted her to reattach to the umbilical cord of her country, to let its colors and smells soak into her skin and clothes like steeped tea, to use the strength of her people to relive the moments that had taken her abroad and let go of her regrets.
Aisha’s boyfriend called regularly. Every day Zahra or Muhammad told him the same thing, “Aisha’s not ready to talk yet. When she is, she will tell you.”
Zahra could tell that Kareem was an honest man, a kind, easily pleased man, but she also knew her daughter well enough to leave the decision-making to her. Aisha filled her mother in on the drama she had missed, the list of characters—Rose, Selma, Hoda, Nor, Kareem—who had occupied her days. Zahra learned them as one learned the descriptions of public figures, their photographs on Aisha’s wall like cutouts of belly dancer Tahia Carioca or actress Somia El-Khashab. Thus, she was not surprised when one night she heard a voice hesitantly call her name as she wandered a side street near home. She saw Rose, Aisha’s friend, standing in a doorway.
“Zahra Ahmed, right? I recognize you from photos, but you two look so similar I would have known you anywhere.”
“Rose, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s what I go by now. How is she?” Rose walked toward her with several baskets on her arms.
“It’s hard to say. She took her grandmother’s death very hard, and with everything that happened with Kareem, she just needed some time to think.”
“I understand completely. I’ve been through that phase several times, especially when Nor… Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot.”
“It’s okay. Aisha told me. What are the baskets for, if I might ask?”
“It’s food. Every week I pass out food and any medical supplies or school supplies I can get my hands on, extra stuff from our homes and those of our friends, and deliver them to all of the families living on these roofs.” Rose pointed up eight stories to the darkening sky.
Zahra imagined the poor children sitting on the concrete like raggedy birds who could never fly home.
“Aisha used to help me before Miriam passed away,” Rose said, “but now it’s back to just me again.” She hoisted one of the baskets onto her hip, and put the second one down on the ground.
“Here, let me get it.” Zahra took the second basket in her arms. “I’ll help you deliver the supplies tonight, and hopefully by next week, Aisha will be back to her old self again.”
“Really? Thank you, Mrs. Ahmed.”
“Please, call me Zahra.”
“Then thank you, Zahra. These deliveries mean the world to them.”
Zahra followed Rose through the apartment’s lobby, then up eight stories and out through the fire escape. A family of five sat huddled in a circle, their clothes dusty and street-worn. The mother held a crying child against her breast. One of the children lay on a pile of blankets, his legs misshapen and short. Rose knelt by him first to give him the used history book with Selma’s name on the cover. She made her way around the group, bestowing gifts as her own version of the Christians’ Santa Claus, until she knelt by the mother and handed her the rest of the first bag: fresh fruit, band-aids, extra sheets, and of course, money. The woman kissed Rose’s cheek, the baby stirring slightly against her when she moved, then blew a kiss to Zahra, who waved back and tried not to let any tears fall until they were out of eyesight.
Back on the stairs, Zahra could not help choking up when she thought of those families scattered around the city, building fires on their small roof turfs that burned like fireflies all over Cairo. “How many do you care for?” she asked Rose as they waited for the elevator.
“As many as I can.”
“You are very kind, Rose, to do all of this for them.”
“There is no one else to do it.”
Rose’s eyes burned with a passion Zahra had seen in Aisha’s eyes that week. Zahra knew now where Aisha’s new direction had come from. “Someday, all of this is going to change.”
That night, when Zahra finally returned home, exhausted, Aisha and her father were waiting nervously on the porch for her arrival. “Two peas in a pod.” Zahra stood behind Aisha’s plastic chair and put her hands on Aisha’s shoulders. Now that she was home safely, her father retreated to his bedroom, quiet in his mourning but at least willing to leave the house. Zahra took his seat, feeling the warmth of him on her back.
“Guess who I ran into tonight,” Zahra said.
“Who?”
“Rose. You were right by the way, she’s wonderful. You know, I’ve been thinking—”
“Uh-oh.”
“Rose is right. Egypt it changing. I can feel it, like the foreshocks of an earthquake. Things are different than they were, and we’re different.”
Aisha thought for a minute. “I think you’re right. Maybe that’s what this summer is about, more than anything else. The past, yes, but even more so the future. I’ve been trying to piece it all together in my head, to figure out what I want and what everyone else wants from me, and how to do it all, and it doesn’t work.”
“No, it doesn’t. It’s not selfish to take time to find yourself. In fact, it’s the opposite of selfish.”
“Thanks, Mom. You’re right. So what now? I mean, for you?”
“For me?” Zahra took a deep breath, preparing not to say the words but to accept them. “It’s time for me to make amends.”
* * * *
Zahra walked up to the gate of the Ahmed’s household, which belonged to Jamila now, and stood with a finger poised at the doorbell. The familiar pulse of panic ran through her body, and though she had crossed an ocean to reach the woman she had loved for over two decades, she could not take the final step into the Ahmeds’ home. Doubts, fostered during the years of responsibility and disappointment, bred in her mind. The innocent passion of her childhood, which had sent her crawling over the wall before, had been replaced by insecurities. What if Jamila was embarrassed by their past? Or worse, what if she did not recognize Zahra?
Instead of pushing the doorbell, Zahra walked the perimeter of the wall and found the familiar footholds imprinted like gripped fingers on her memory. She put one hand and then the other into the high holds, fuzzed by moss, then put her feet in the lower ones and pulled up to hoist her now motherly body against the wall. She reached for the next set of holds, and again she strained against the pull of gravity and age, until she finally felt the wall’s warm, flat top beneath her palm.
This is it, she thought as she secured her hands on the other side and dragged her chest over the edge. Please, Allah, let her remember me.
In the garden, under a canopy of vines held up by a trellis, sat a woman wrapped in a sky blue shawl. Jamila’s hijab rendered her unidentifiable from the back, but when she turned at the sound of her name, Zahra saw the same familiar round face and the same surprised smile that she once had climbed that wall to win.
A pile of clipped flowers sat in Jamila’s lap, slowly becoming an arrangement in a vase on the wrought-iron table. Jamila stood and let them fall to the ground in a flurry of pink and white when she realized who had breached the wall.
Perhaps under that hijab Jamila’s hair was white or gray. Perhaps, when she came closer, the sun spots and wrinkles would turn her face like a photograph too long in the sun. But from Zahra’s spot on the wall, looking down at her lover, Jamila seemed to have stayed frozen in this garden the entire time Zahra had been gone, an immortal goddess trapped in the confines of her family home.
“Enta et akhart leh?” Jamila approached the wall. What took you so long?
“I had to swim the ocean.” Zahra rested her hands behind her on the wall and relaxed into their support. “But now I’m back. And I might as well tell you that if you invite me down from this wall, I’m never leaving you again, no matter what.”
Jamila stood below her, looking up and squinting into the beams of sunlight filtering through the trees. “I’m counting on it. Now come on down, so we can plan the journey back together.”
Chapter 18
Cairo, August 2010
Aisha had asked Kareem to meet her in their coffee shop early in the morning, while her family and the rest of Cairo slept. She trudged along the familiar path to the shop, while dawn broke like an egg yolk on top of the apartment buildings nearby. On the phone, he had sounded relieved to hear her voice but hesitant, the silence pregnant with tension. The conversation had been short. She wanted to see his face in person when they spoke. She was the only patron in the cramped café, claiming the same table where she had watched Kareem play chess for the first time. As she sat down, their phantom selves seemed to linger at the adjacent table. She ordered before he arrived—one black coffee for her and one tea for him—and tapped the side of the coffee cup nervously with her fingernails.
Kareem walked in a few minutes after seven, the ding of the bell startling her out of her thoughts. He held a book under his arm. When he sat down across from her, he slid the book across the table and said nothing, just slouched into his seat.
“Memoirs of a Woman Doctor,” Aisha read aloud. “What is it?”
Kareem took a deep breath. “Remember how I said we didn’t have feminists in Egypt? It turns out I was wrong, and this is one of them. I thought you might appreciate her work.”
“It’s perfect.” Aisha paged through the paperback. “This might be the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received. Thank you.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds as she collected her thoughts.
Before she could speak, Kareem finally blurted out, “I’m so sorry about your grandmother. And I’m guessing by your silence over the past two weeks that she told you about her influence over our relationship. But I promise you, I had no idea you would walk into that coffee shop that day, or that you would steal my heart in the first few minutes we spoke. That was real, and no amount of grandparents’ influence could have made me fall in love with you. It just happened. I should have told you, I’m sorry, but I was so afraid that you would stop talking to me.”
“I understand.” Aisha took his hand. “I didn’t stop talking to you because I was mad. I stopped talking to you because I needed some time to think.”
“About what?”
“About what I came here to say.” Aisha paused and took a mental picture of that moment: their interlaced hands, his hopeful smile, the book between them on the table. She smelled the scent of his cologne, some kind of spice, mixed with his freshly washed hair. She ran her fingers over his warm skin as it heated her cold hands. Then she tucked that beautiful photograph away in her memory for the many times she might need to call on it for strength and began to speak.
“After college, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had a degree I couldn’t use, an Egyptian family I didn’t know, and a past founded on lies and deceit. This summer, I finally found my calling. I want to open a nonprofit to help disenfranchised women get back on their feet. It’s not going to be an easy job, and I know I won’t be able to put my heart into planning a wedding while doing it.” She took the ring, which she had been nervously turning round and round, off her finger, the small weight a noticeable burden gone from her hand, and put it in his upturned palm. “I’m not saying I want to break up, because I don’t. But I need time to learn and grow here.”
