I had come to the Mugamma with Baba many times. We made passports, we got my birth certificate, we made a special paper so I could travel with Mama without Baba. We also came once when Baba bought the land in the desert for the other house. When Granny died we came too. I didn’t know what Mama was doing this time. I listened to people next to me talking about Zawahiri. One of them was looking at the newspaper. Two ladies put their hands on their chests and said yalahwee. He should be in jail forever, and they’ve now set him loose on us. Yalahwee. They kept talking but I stopped listening when the man came and sat next to me. He sat with his back straight up. I straightened mine. He took off his slippers. He rolled and unrolled the papers in his hands. He had a small beard like Baba’s when he didn’t shave. But he was thin. His shirt was wet. He turned to me but didn’t say anything. I looked down at my hands. I could hear his paper rolling again.
When Mama came out I had a bottle of 7-Up in my hand. She asked where I got it from. I pointed. The man with the beard. I’m not supposed to take things from strangers. But it was so hot. You were gone so long. He gave it to me. I said I can’t and he said I had to. Mama started walking. I got up quickly. I left the bottle on the floor. I followed her. The driver was waiting. To the house, Mama told him. She was exhausted. She would need to nap before lunch.
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I put the fan on in the living room while Mama napped. I was allowed TV as long as it couldn’t be heard. They kept playing Quran, then Mama Nagwa came on. Mama Nagwa was always talking about Mama Suzanne. She was also always telling us what was good and what was not. She told us we had to read. Children weren’t supposed to talk a lot. We had to thank Baba and Mama Suzanne for all the good things they gave us. We had to love our teachers. I got up and turned to the other channel. A silent film. I stood by the TV with my finger on the panel. I changed back to Channel Two. Still Mama Nagwa. Channel One. Film. Channel Two. Mama Nagwa. I look at the door to Baba’s study. I go to the kitchen. I take a chair and drag it to the counter. I stand on it and reach for a glass. I bend my knees and put the glass down on the counter. I push it so it slides back near the wall. I get off the chair. I drag it back to the table. I get my glass and fill it with water from the tap. The English girl in my class says tap water is dirty. It’s from the Nile and will make you sick. Her mummy says. I told her what Grandmama said about the Nile water and its promises. She made a face. I drink my water and make a wish.
I open the balcony and go outside. The streets are empty. I look next door. Every single balcony. Every single window. They are all closed, with their shutters too. When the shutters are closed in Nana’s house it’s dark. Even with the lights on, it’s dark. I think that maybe for my next story for school I will write about the Dark People who live with their shutters closed. Mama likes to close the shutters when it’s too hot. It helps keep the house cool. Baba said it’s rubbish, but he let Mama close them when she wanted. In my bedroom the shutters only go down halfway. They broke a long time ago and nobody fixed them. Mama said she had to remember to phone the man to come and look at them. I told her I didn’t want the man. It means it never gets dark.
I go back inside. Channel One. Football. Every day there is football. Football is the people’s oxygen, Baba said. They have nothing else. The team that lost last time started fighting. The police took them away. We watched on TV, Baba and I. It was the day he told me I had to remember what people had been through. When you have a dream and someone makes promises they keep breaking, it is hard to recover. You lose hope. That was the day Baba told me I was luckier than many people, and no matter what happened, I had to remember that.
Football is boring. I go to my room. I look out of the window for a long time and imagine there is nothing there. Just the grass, like Mama said it used to be, and a sandy slope down to the river. It’s ages since Mama’s nap. I’m hungry. I finished coloring and watched everything on TV, looked at the albums under my bed, played with Nesma’s cards, stood in front of the mirror, pretended I was singing onstage, played garden, planted flowers all over my room. I now sit on the edge of my bed waiting. It’s dark outside. I get up. I walk on my tiptoes to Mama’s door. She doesn’t like to be woken up. Most of the time Mama closes her door, but sometimes when she takes her siesta she leaves it open the size of a pea. I put my ear near the crack. I try not to breathe. Mama hears everything. She also knows everything, even when I don’t tell her. Grandmama said it’s how mothers are made. When I become a mother I will understand. I told Grandmama there were too many things I was waiting to understand. She laughed and patted my head. She said it’s better not to know too much anyway. I take one step closer and hear whispers. The phone is outside. Maybe Mama is talking to herself, like Uncle does. I stand for a long time then put my small finger on the door. It doesn’t move. I’m scared it might squeak. Everything in the house squeaks. I suck my breath in and push again. I put my eye to the crack. Mama is on the floor. Sitting on her knees. She has a scarf on her head like Grandmama and the evil woman in the street. I stand as still as I can. Mama keeps whispering. After a while I hear my name. Then Mama says Al Salam Alaykum. I suck my breath deeper and tiptoe back to my room. Out of the window I see a small cloud. We never have clouds. I wish I could catch it and keep it.
Part Two: Summer 1998, Cairo
The line of ants extends from the neck of the toothpaste tube across the sink up the wall by the mirror and into a crevasse between two tiles. On television they have been warning about ants, these small black beady ones in particular. In a moment they can be all over you, and their bite, if a collective effort, can kill. So says the TV. Uncle insists it is a metaphor, that the regime is sending subliminal messages about the Islamists who have been staging sporadic bombings and attacks. He suggests I start taking notes, keeping a diary of phrases, creating an archive of messaging and making the connections. It could be a book, he tells me, or maybe a short film. I watch the ants for a few minutes, considering the theory. It seems far-fetched. I also find it hard to kill the ants in the way the TV advises, filling a plant mister with medicinal alcohol and boiling water and spraying it over everything, even the inside of your shoes. I turn to the mirror. I twist and roll my hair into a bun. I button my jeans, faded Levi’s with an e printed upside down. My navy T-shirt is oversized with a logo of a man on a camel playing polo. I put a long white cotton shirt over it, unbuttoned, sleeves rolled. I turn around and peer over my shoulder. I stretch out the bottom of the T-shirt so there’s less of a silhouette from behind.
It’s early, Mama wakes up late, but I knock lightly on her door each morning and whisper that I’m going down. Does she need anything? I leave a note on the fridge. I go down the back stairs and walk around the house to the street on the Nile. Billboards tower on the pavement advertising the new mobile phone company. Flyers for a new coffee shop are strewn on the tarmac, muddied by footprints. I take the bus. We lost the driver some years before, unable to afford the raise he requested, or to find someone who would work for less. We had lost most everyone, family first, then the large and varied staff that Granny had kept and Mama inherited. For all the sprawl of the house it was just me and her now, and a woman who came every ten days to clean. The house was like an echo chamber, most rooms kept permanently closed. You could hear the wind when it would come brushing even lightly against the old wood-framed windows. The floor continually squeaked. During the night inexplicable rumbles would wake me up. As a child, I had imagined these murmurs of the house to be tea parties on the roof. Now I wondered about the poetics of space, the cavities people once filled. Mama never spoke about how things had changed, but it hung heavily on her. I could see it in her gestures, how she sat at her dressing table each morning, ends of her hair in hand, combing, endlessly, as if treading in her own oblivion. Her hair was shorter now, there was little to brush through. Eventually she would come out to make breakfast. Mama drank her coffee black and ate just a quarter slice of toast with date jam. Some days I tried to make her coffee the old way, thick with sugar and cream, but she would look into the mug deeply as if she could see the bottom, then leave it untouched. The only days she made breakfast were the ones when Dido passed by on his way to work. She made him scrambled eggs and coffee the way she used to for Baba, putting shatta in the eggs and adding a spoon of salt to the coffee before mixing in five spoons of sugar. You didn’t feel the salt, but it brought out the flavors.