—
I go into my bedroom and sit at my desk. It’s facing the big window overlooking the Nile. I can’t see the Nile. I can’t see anything except the overgrown mango trees. We keep talking about pruning them. The gardener says nobody in the country knows how to prune. He doesn’t know what we mean. He tells us he can cut them down if that’s what we want. Mama gets upset when he says this. She slams the window. Shakes her head. We let the trees grow. They are higher than the house. But there aren’t any mangoes. There haven’t been mangoes in five, six, maybe seven years. Every summer I wait to see. Maybe this year they will fruit again. And then they don’t. I ask the gardener and he says the soil is bad. How does the soil become bad? He shrugs his shoulders. It’s just the way it is, something from Allah. I think of maybe starting my film with the mango trees. I flip through my script and wonder about the soil.
I start writing:
Over lunch Dido says the only way our lives will change is if we demand it. People like our cousin in America are the reason we’re in stagnation. Leaving is the greatest evil. Then silence. Or maybe the other way around. He isn’t sure. We just can’t be passive, he knows that. My friend’s theory is nonsense. Nothing is pre-planned. Every moment is pregnant with the possibility for change. It’s important to look at everything that happens with a view for the future. Dido is eating the eggs that Mama has made. They are covered in Tabasco. He is wearing jeans and a casual shirt but also a tie. It’s flung back over his shoulder. His work doesn’t require him to wear a tie but he likes to. It’s a sign of respect for the cases he’s working on. He chews slowly and speaks between bites.
I make notes in the margin: Have we inherited defeat, the very spirit of it? Is it seeped into who we are? Do we have to reconcile with our parents’ losses to build again? Where does Dido’s anger figure in? If in fact we are angry. I circle this and think about all that I feel has been stolen from me, from us. I wonder if anger is too simple a word, too reductive. Maybe I could have a conversation or debate between Uncle and Dido about this? I underline and write out the word languor. I don’t want my film to be scripted, but I have a sense of what I would like the tenor, atmosphere, of it to be. I want to create enough cues and structure for it to be a cinematic feature, and enough space to also include spontaneity and cinéma vérité. I write: Quotidian. I wonder what it would mean to have people from my life acting scenes as well as being trailed with a camera every day. Could I script certain events? Or have someone recount them as part of a family discussion? Like showing the different viewpoints that reflected the complexity of the national psyche, exposed in the days after Mubarak returned from Addis. Maybe something that captures the gap of generations? For days afterwards the TV played, almost on loop, Mubarak giving his speech on landing back at Cairo International Airport. Suddenly I found a blue van blocking the road, and somebody jumped to the ground. A machine gun started….I realized there were bullets coming at our car. I saw those who shot at me. Everyone said it was the Israelis. Guests on Channel One and Two all said el yahoud. The Jews. Mossad. There were Ethiopian Jews too, they told us. I thought Kebbe might have been one. Nobody asked, but it was presumed. Mama and Baba had never minded the Jews. They had many Jewish friends and loved Kebbe. It was the Israelis they had a problem with. People had started putting up posters on their buildings wishing the president a speedy recovery. They made posters with the Star of David washed over with dripping red paint. The Jews had blood on their hands. Everyone said this. People worried it would be ’67 all over again. Then one day, a few days later, new evidence was found. The gunmen were Arab. Uncle was with us that day. We heard the news on TV as it broke. He erupted, about there being no difference between us. Mama and I both looked at him, eyes wide. Spit flew from his mouth to the floor. He meant the Arabs and Jews. Under his breath he muttered that common sense is not that common. I could see Mama’s neck tense. I didn’t know if it was something Uncle was saying or his spit. I sat there until he stopped talking and we were all quiet. I asked if anyone wanted a glass of water. Uncle asked how my writing was going.
I gazed at Uncle and Mama that day and wondered about fate. Could I build all this into what I’m writing, my script, the eventual film? I want to do something different, merge forms, speak to people on the street about their desires, and also capture this internal life, the intimate moments at home, the mundane. How did we land in our lives? The silence and the evenings in front of the TV are as comforting as they are fraught. In my mind’s eye I envisage Baba, his absence ever present in the questions unasked. Even Dido and I don’t talk about it, though we talk about everything else. I imagine the questions linger for everyone. There had been problems with the government. They were selective about who they went after. It is all I know. It might be all anyone knows, even Baba himself. In ways I understand what Dido means when he says it should be the source of my anger, that my placid exterior is a mask. An arbitrary system is an unjust system, he says. Or maybe it’s no system at all. Maybe H can play the main protagonist, enacting parts and playing herself in others. Maybe she’s right that I should just write a book.
Mama has her hands crossed on her chest. She sits upright, as if watching and listening intently. An advertisement for Al Jawhara tea. Three men sit at a café playing backgammon. Two wear safari suits. One is in a gold-threaded galabia. Colored tea lights are strung across an alley. As they play, they begin to slouch into their chairs. One man nods off into sleep. Enter the belly dancer. Singing, dancing, a tray of glasses with tea balanced on her hand. Her body writhes. The café is suddenly packed. The men perk up. They dance around her. Uncle’s face is blank.
Part Three: Summer 2014, Cairo
The cleaning lady found Uncle in bed one morning a few months before the revolution. His coffee was untouched. Biscuit crumbs were on his bedcover. He was sitting upright, holding the newspaper, not moving. They said it was a heart attack, high blood pressure. The last time I had seen him was on the Sunday after they pulled down the church. He came with three newspapers and rang the bell insistently. I stuck my head out of the window ready to shout. Young boys were always ringing our bell and running away. I saw Uncle’s bald head and went down to greet him. We went up the back stairs together. He put one hand on the banister and hauled himself up. I could hear his breath getting heavier ahead of me. He asked if Mama was home. Mama was always home in the mornings. Some days she wouldn’t come out of her bedroom until noon. Uncle paused at the first floor and peered in. Each time he came, he would say that he hadn’t been downstairs since Granny died. I would tell him to come, look. He would shake his head, pat my shoulder, look up at the stairs ahead of him, and tell me that it was better this way. Some memories need to be preserved. He didn’t want to write over them with something new.