More than 130 years have passed since the Great Fire, but its memory lived on like a scar on a beautiful face, recalled by Chicagoans from time to time sorrowfully and emotionally. The word fire acquired a different meaning for them. If anyone anywhere in the world uttered the word, it wouldn’t have quite the same impact as it would in Chicago. Fear of fire has led to the city’s development of the best firefighting system in the world. A firefighting academy was established on the site of Mrs. O’Leary’s house where the Great Fire started. Thus the citizens of the city did their utmost so that the tragedy might not be repeated. Officials in the city, half jokingly, but proudly, have come to repeat a famous saying: “The firefighting system in Chicago is so efficient that it warns you of a fire even before it starts.”
HOW WOULD SHAYMAA MUHAMMADI KNOW all this history, having spent all her life in the Egyptian city Tanta, which she rarely left other than to attend a relative’s wedding or to go to Alexandria and spend the summer with her family as a young girl? Shaymaa came from Tanta to Chicago, in one fell swoop, without preparation or preliminaries, like one who, not knowing how to swim, jumped into the sea fully dressed. Anyone who saw her roaming the hallways of the medical school at the University of Illinois (in her loose, shari‘a-dictated garb, the veil covering her chest, her low-heeled shoes and wide, straightforward strides, her rustic face unadorned by any makeup, turning red for the slightest reason, and her faltering, heavily accented English, which made communicating by gestures easier than speaking) must have wondered: what brought this girl to America?
There are numerous reasons:
First, Shaymaa Muhammadi is one of the most accomplished and highest ranked graduates in the Tanta College of Medicine. She is extraordinarily intelligent and has a legendary capacity for work, which makes her devote long, continuous hours to studying without sleeping or getting up except to perform her prayers, eat, or go to the bathroom. She studies in a calm manner and with deep concentration, without haste or impatience. She spreads the books and notes on the bed, crosses her legs, and tilts her head a little to the right, letting her soft hair cascade down the side of her head. Then she bends, and in her beautiful, fine handwriting she writes down the main points of the lesson and proceeds to memorize them. She savors that, as though indulging in a favorite hobby or weaving a garment for a faraway lover. Her unmatched distinction in her studies easily earned her an official Egyptian government scholarship.
Second, Shaymaa is the eldest daughter of Ustaz Muhammadi Hamid, principal of Tanta Boys’ Secondary School for many years, during which dozens of students graduated and assumed prominent posts. Five years after his death people throughout the governorate of Gharbiya still remember him with love and appreciation and sincerely pray for mercy on his soul as a rare model, almost extinct, of a true educator: in his dedication and integrity, his firmness and kindness toward his students. However, Ustaz Muhammadi’s life, like that of all others, was not without setbacks, as providence chose to deprive him of male offspring, giving him three daughters one after the other. After the third one he stopped trying, much to his grave chagrin. But he soon overcame his sorrow by channeling his unbounded love to his daughters and raising them just like his students at school to be straightforward, studious, and confident. The result was dazzling: Shaymaa and Aliya were instructors in medicine, and Nada, the youngest, an instructor in the department of communications in the College of Engineering. Thus the education and upbringing that Shaymaa received played a role in her accepting the challenge and the scholarship in America.
The third and most important reason: Shaymaa is over thirty, still unmarried because her position as instructor in the College of Medicine has greatly reduced her chances, since Eastern men usually prefer that their wives be less educated than they. Besides, Shaymaa lacks the instant qualifications for marriage: her loose garb totally hides her body, and her face is not strikingly beautiful. The most that her plain features leave a man with is that she looks familiar, and that, of course, is not a sufficient incentive for him to marry her. She is not rich; she lives with her sisters and mother on their salaries and the pension of her father, who refused throughout his life to work in the prosperous Arab Gulf countries or to give private lessons. In addition, and despite her academic excellence, she is totally ignorant of methods of seduction — methods that most women are good at and which they use skillfully, either directly by preening and using perfumes and wearing tight and revealing clothes, or indirectly by using titillating modesty, enticing coyness, or awkwardness fraught with meaning and a captivating, voluptuous stammer coupled with meticulously using the weapon of the distant gaze enveloped in sadness and mystery. Nature has provided women all these real techniques for the preservation of the species but, for one reason or another, decided to deprive Shaymaa Muhammadi of them.
This does not mean at all that she suffers a deficiency in femininity. On the contrary, her femininity is overpowering and would suffice for several women to lead a natural life; but she’s never learned how to express it. Her feminine desires persist so much that they cause her pain and make her irritable, capricious, and prone to weeping fits. Nothing relieves her tension except her forbidden dreams of the famous Iraqi crooner, Kadhim al-Sahir, and her stealthy bouts of delight in her naked body (after which she repents every time and performs two prayer prostrations in sincere penitence before God; but she soon does it again). The psychological pressures that she’s suffered because of her failure to get married thus far were a direct reason for her traveling to the States, as if she were running away from her situation or postponing facing reality. For many months Shaymaa exerted strenuous efforts to complete the requirements for the scholarship: she had to fill out applications and forms and go on endless trips from her college to the university’s administration and vice versa. Then there were those violent and complicated negotiations with her mother, who as soon as she learned of her desire to travel, erupted angrily and yelled at her, “Your problem, Shaymaa, is that you’re obstinate, like your father. You’ll regret it. You don’t know what it means to be away from home. You want to travel to America where they persecute Muslims and while you are veiled? Why don’t you get your doctorate here and protect your dignity in the midst of your family? Remember that by traveling you lose any chance of getting married. What good would a PhD from America do when you are a forty-year-old spinster?”
The idea that a girl might travel alone to America for four or five years was alien to the family, acquaintances, and perhaps the whole of Tanta. But Shaymaa’s diligence and persistence and her resorting to violent quarrels sometimes — and to begging and crying at other times — forced her mother finally to acquiesce to her desire. Shaymaa’s enthusiasm kept increasing as the appointed time drew near. Even in the last days she had no fear or anxiety. And when it was time she was not affected by the tears of her mother and sisters. As soon as the plane took off and she felt that little tightness in her belly, she felt quite refreshed and optimistic. She thought to herself that only at that moment was she turning over a new leaf and leaving behind the thirty-three years she’d lived in Tanta.