—
Everything seemed to happen that summer. It was the end of August. I had come up the stairs with a bag of oranges for Mama and found the door open. I peered into the living room. She was sitting on the sofa, TV on, muted. A talk show was playing. It seemed to be a program about Ahmed Zeweil. Mama had got rid of Granny’s fan some summers before, but the new plastic one seemed to have become equally noisy. It drowned out my footsteps. I walked in. Mama’s face was to the television, but I could feel her neck, her entire being, turn towards me. She spoke without moving, her eyes focused on an abstract point on the screen. I could feel the words wrestle with her throat, until eventually they came out. Drawn, slow, deliberate. I have some news, she said. She started by telling me about a dream she had the week before, in which Baba had tapped her on the shoulder. I stood, didn’t say anything, waited. She spoke.
Apparently.
Your Baba is back.
He is staying at your aunts’.
He would like to see you.
As you can imagine, he has been through a rough time.
I stared at Mama, then the TV. I stood in silence for a moment. She sat in silence for a moment. My body felt transfixed. My mind blank before it began to spin. I wanted to ask where he had come back from, how long he was staying. Had she spoken to him, had he come to the house? What kind of rough time? Mama pressed the mute button to bring back the sound. I stood there for as long as I could in my daze, staring at her steely profile, then I turned around and moved, as if automated, in the direction of the kitchen. I emptied the bag of oranges into the white plastic basin in the sink. Turned the tap on. Took the blue Bril liquid soap and squirted some into the container. I held the tap until the soap had foamed over the oranges. Turned it off. Stared at nothing in particular for a long time. I went onto the balcony and looked out at our neighbor’s building, and all the apartments I had watched for years with their shutters closed. Baba was back. Had anyone seen him? Would they know who he was? My lip trembled, and I bit on it. Hours might have passed. Baba was back. I tried to mentally conjure who an older Baba might be. Would his hair have grayed, thinned, run the span of its life course, leaving him bald? Would the years have eroded his frame, making him smaller? Would he still walk as he used to, his head held high as if pushed up at the chin by a father’s disapproving thumb, his steps slow, deliberate, his shoulders tilted back? Would he laugh in the way I remembered, throwing his whole head, his neck, his chest, back in a forceful bellow? Everyone had always remarked on Baba’s laugh, how emphatic it was. I remembered what Uncle said about memories. All my own overwritten memories were ones I wished to have back. I imagined the memory of Baba was one Uncle would have chosen to preserve. For a moment, standing on the balcony, seeking balance in Mama’s words, I wondered if it might have been what I would wish I could choose too.
—
In those first weeks I couldn’t look at Baba for long without needing to turn away. We would meet every few days and sit by the pool at the club in a near silence, watching people walk by. I hadn’t anticipated the lapse of time would hang so heavily on his face, or maybe I simply hadn’t known what to expect. Baba’s lip trembled, and I would feel him staring at me, taking me in, assessing the change, the years, who I had become. I thought Dido had probably been right, I felt an anger, but didn’t know what to do with it, what to make of it, even where it belonged. I started to get irritated by most everything Baba said. We bickered, argued. I felt resentment, both at his absence and now at his presence. Things felt fraught, and at moments I even wished he weren’t there.
—
Months later I called Baba spontaneously, exhilarated after the first day of protests, wanting to share my excitement. There was no cell reception those days, the government had shut it off, and Baba began to call early every morning on the landline, just after dawn, and then again late at night, past two a.m., when he knew I came home. Our relationship found a grounding in politics, and then towards the end of that first year, when Baba came to terms with the reality that he couldn’t slip back into the life he had left behind, he talked about finding himself a wife. He would speak to me about the cycles of history, how we were reliving a past, almost like déjà vu, then he would trail off about companionship. Baba was lonely. He was also deeply skeptical. He repeated himself, as Grandmama used to, telling me about his generation, their experience, the losses and disappointments of his youth. We have lived it all before, he said, we already tried it. He didn’t want my hopes to be too high.
At first I thought it was just the emotional lesions of life, Baba’s weariness. He seemed to have become a pessimist, not the Baba I had remembered or imagined him to be. I kept a journal every day of that first year he was back. I wrote down everything he said, everything I remembered of our conversations, our days, his expressions, what he was wearing, what he would order to eat. I wrote down how I felt, the vacillating emotions, the realizations, the chasms between the memories and stories I had imagined, pieced together, held close, and the truth of who Baba was, who he had become. Now I pick up the notebook chronicling that time, starting in the summer of 2010. On every page I take note of the question marks. The word truth seems to repeat itself multiple times on each page. My handwriting is barely legible.
—
I became less and less reactionary to Baba’s pessimism when I fully digested all that he had been through. Then day by day, as the months drew on, I saw intimations of change. His group of friends got larger. Those who had once pursued him through government and legal cases now sat side by side, also victims of this cyclical history I was just beginning to grasp in the aftermath of uprising. They would sit around rusted tables pulled together, piles of newspapers between them, peanuts in brown bags, sometimes sandwiches of ful and taamiya, debating the news. The army will do this. The Islamists will do that. My source tells me the Americans forced the army to let Morsi win. It was forged. I have documents proving it. Impossible. I swear. They all had theories, sources, certainty. Once an outer mourning had left and marked their faces, they all began to laugh, about the old days, how they used to live. One man: Remember when I was a Basha. He would then throw his head back and growl with laughter. Another: At this time one year ago I would be sitting down to drink tea with Mubarak and briefing him. And look at me now, practically in my boxers, being served stale bread. Roaring laughter. Baba pointed to one man one morning. He looks at least ninety, doesn’t he? I nodded. But you will never believe that he is actually my age. We did business together. He ran the most successful cement business. He supplied me the raw materials for the factory. They put him in jail. They couldn’t benefit in any way because he was so straight. They forged papers. Ten years, look at what they did to him. There was a time when either you stayed and lost your life, or you fled. Baba pushed his glasses up his nose. He pointed to another man. Then a woman. Then a couple in the distance. Those two, he would begin, and then tell me their story. Here is the former state security agent. He used to be the most successful currency trader. This man used to be the minister of foreign affairs. This man was Mubarak’s adviser on Israel. This man was his photographer. This good-looking man is the son of the most glamorous couple in show business. This woman used to be Miss Egypt. Once the most important newspaper columnist in the Arab world. This man used to own a bank until they nationalized and confiscated it. He lost everything. If you had heard this woman’s voice when she was young…Age hasn’t been so kind to this lady here.