Sociology. The professor is showing us slides of different types of drugs. The most common is a form of cannabis grown in the Nile Delta. We had been with him on a field trip to Qanater prison the week before. The prison is divided. There is the new prison, with tiled floors and a TV and shaded courtyard, where the men are kept, and the old one, where the women are. At the prison gates families are waiting to visit. They come each day with food, clothes, medicines, begging the guards to let them in. The guards make them wait. Take their names, IDs, the names of their loved ones. They also take tips. It’s no guarantee for entry. They still wait all day. Some spend the night. On the day of our visit, one woman is wailing. She’s been waiting for three days in the searing heat. She came all the way from Qena, seventeen hours by bus. She is large and has on layers. Sweat pours from under her scarf. She screams. This is unjust, have mercy on me. The guard opens the gate to let us in. She tries to push through. We are the first people they’ve let in for days. I feel bad, almost guilty. Two men grab her and push her back. They are the same men I saw in the Mugamma, the same men who came to the house, the same men I see downtown now, standing at street corners, watching. We were let in to the main courtyard. It looked like a construction site, strewn with sand and rubble, littered, lined on one side with three-story buildings. Cigarette butts were everywhere. As we walked toward the low-lying visiting area, the whistles and shrieks began. I turned my head. From the windows, behind bars, I could see the women. They stuck their arms out. Their legs. Tongues. There was a clamor, and it was hard to make out what they were saying, each one. At one building galabias were lifted to expose bare bodies. A pair of breasts dangled from a window, squeezed between the bars. The building is where the prostitutes are kept. They are the least harmful of all the inmates, none of them have killed, none have cut their husbands into cubes, none have drowned their children. None fed poison to families. None murdered for money. But they are the most disruptive, the prison warden explained. One woman screamed that she wanted to drink us all. Suck us. She was thirsty. Her thirst could never be quenched. We looked delicious. Everyone turned away. I tried to stare at her without making it known, out of the corner of my eyes.
The clicking of the projector continues from the cannabis to the cocaine. The drug market is largely controlled by the state’s security apparatus, the professor explains. It’s convenient for the government that ful is the national food since beans make people sleepy. He laughs at his own joke. And that’s why the government floods the market with cannabis. The street name is hashish. He tilts his head. Between us, he whispers in his Lebanese accent. I close my notebook and slip out. Down the long open hallway, around, down three flights of marble steps, to the other side of the building. Room 202. I’m early, always, and everyone else late. I take my seat by the door and bring out my thesis project, a film proposal. The title pays homage to a film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. The filmmakers ask people on the street a single question one summer. Are you happy? I don’t yet know quite what my question is, but know I want to set it in the summer. In my journal I write about wanting change. I have a cousin in America who left Cairo abruptly one summer. Something happened to him, but nobody speaks about what. I imagine myself in America. I think about the last summer before Baba left. The last summer we were all together. Mama saying that all she knew after the palace coup was that the summer ended quickly. Maybe I could ask people if they are angry. People seem disheartened. We all have frustrations, grievances, but anger? I watch them at sidewalk coffee shops, drinking tea, smoking, watching TV, for hours. They sit quietly, their faces blank. I imagine if they harbored anger, they wouldn’t be so quiet. They wouldn’t sit for so long. Their faces, expressions, would hang differently. I wonder, if I ask them, what they will say. I imagine they might fall silent. Feel uneasy. But if I keep rolling into the silence, will they fill it by talking about their lives? Or will they just get angry that I am asking? People get scared when you ask them things on the street. For a writing assignment we are asked to approach passersby with the question of what they would like to see improved in their city. People walked away. They looked at me skeptically. They asked who was asking. They asked who was really asking. They said they couldn’t answer such questions. They put their hands up and shook their heads. They took steps backwards, sideways. They said they couldn’t speak about the city. They couldn’t speak about the country. Sorry. You know how it is. I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want any problems. So why are you asking exactly?
Habiba walks in and sits next to me. She flicks her hair to the right and shows me a dyed purple strand by her ear. The highest spiritual color, she says. I laugh and call it cute. She frowns. It’s not cute. Don’t use that word cute so freely. Not very much in this world is cute. I flip my page. She tells me it’s for karma and good energy, then peers at my papers and puts her finger to a paragraph and laughs. She recognizes herself, in a character named Dido. She looks at me. Then says, You should write a novel, not a screenplay. How? Do everything you want with the screenplay but in the novel. It’s easier. Less costly. You don’t have to produce it. We spend the class playing word games on the margins of my pages, zoning out the professor’s reading of Albert Hourani. He reads aloud from chapter five. Z broplem wiz z Arap world. H rolls her eyes at me. We have twenty-one chapters yet to go. On the first day of the semester he had told us there were a few things we needed to know. I am, from, the middle class, he said. My family had nothing. In the 1960s I studied hard at the university, and I was granted one of Nasser’s bursaries to go to the United Kingdom to complete my PhD. Without Nasser I would have never had the chance to travel. He said this as if standing atop a podium giving a public speech. His English is weak despite having studied in England and obtaining a PhD from Leeds. H and I laughed about this later as she mimicked him, sitting on a step after class, initiating the rites of passage to become friends. She rattled off a monologue mixing p’s and b’s, z for th. I am z lucky ones to have gone to z English school, I said. Then laughed, trying to earn her laughter too. Her reaction was fierce. The occupation was the worst for us. They were the dark ages. They took us back decades. My education undermined my identity. It broke my character. I should be furious that the British school even exists. I shouldn’t even joke about it. She paused to catch a quick breath. I hesitated and didn’t say anything but realized how much I liked her. Wanted to be her? We sat under the shade of a flame tree. She asked about my film. She talked to me about her major, physics, and then of her interest in artificial borders. She didn’t buy anything made in Israel or America. Didn’t drink coffee because the money benefits Israel. Didn’t wear certain kinds of shoes because the soles are made in Israel. Even the plastic cups in the cafeteria, they benefit Israel. Did you know? She didn’t use the term Middle East because it is a creation of the British. To use it is to remain colonized. I used Middle East all the time. I nodded and made a mental note to be careful.
—
I cross the paved courtyard towards the library. It looks like a giant slab of concrete with slim glass shafts. None of them open. The only fresh air into the building comes from the door. When I started university, one of the librarians told me it is because of Baba and his friends the new library is built this way. They used to throw books out of windows as students. I looked at the lady as she told me the story, not sure if I should believe her. She was wearing a dress with a lace collar and had on black sandals. Her body was soft. Her thick glasses were attached to a chain that sat on her shoulders and draped around her neck. On her dress I spotted a stain.