Mama stopped talking about Nesma, but once on the phone I heard her say that she had a dream about her and woke up in tears. After a while she also stopped talking about Baba.
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Mama never woke up early. I dressed myself. My uniform was on my chair. Mama put it out at night. The socks she left out were odd. One was shorter than the other. I folded the long one inside itself to make it look the same. I went to the kitchen to make my sandwich. I opened the fridge and looked inside. The English girls at school all had apples for lunch. Green ones. Red ones. They bought them from the embassy. We only had apples when we went to Port Said, but they only had red ones. Baba used to drive us some Saturdays. He would buy shaving cream and razors. Mama would buy bars of soap in colored wrappers. The soap from Port Said was better. In Cairo it was big brown blocks cut with a knife. They sold it on the pavement. You had to wash the soap before you used it. I liked the bars from Port Said. They were smooth and pink. They smelled of perfume. They also sold chocolates in Port Said but Mama said they were too expensive. The only chocolate we had in Cairo was filled with caramel that stuck to your teeth. I couldn’t have it because Mama said it was inappropriate for a young girl to be pulling at chocolate. We ate chocolate only when Baba came from a trip and brought back Toblerone. I could have a triangle every Friday. We had been to Port Said the week before Baba left. The apples we bought were finished. Mama had cut them into eighths. She squeezed lemon over them so they wouldn’t turn brown and gave me an eighth after lunch every other day. Sometimes I asked for more but I couldn’t have any because I had to learn restraint. When I asked Mama if we could go back to Port Said when Baba returned, she told me she was busy right now. I also asked if we would go to the beach when Baba came back. She said it would be a long summer and looked away.
In the car once Baba explained that it was because of Sadat we had apples and nice soap. It was like Christmas every day after the deprivations of Nasser. Nobody could have anything then. Mama replied that it was better not to have too much from the outside. It created greed. They argued. I looked out of the window and tried not to hear them. There was nothing to look at but I imagined there was a battle in the desert like in the film they always played on TV. I take out the soft white cheese and a loaf of fino bread. Mama sends Mustafa the bawab to buy it on Saturday mornings. She gives him twenty-five piastres and he comes back with thirteen loaves. Mama mutters how he takes two for himself. She then empties the loaves from one bag to another. The bakery bag is black. They use black bags to hide the dirt. I sit at the kitchen table eating my cornfleks, watching her. I mix the cornfleks in the milk until they become soft. My favorite part is the milk at the end, after the cereal is gone. I want to ask why Mustafa takes the bread. Why doesn’t she tell him off? I want to ask many things but Mama doesn’t like me asking too many questions. I spread a piece of white cheese in my bread and put the box back in the fridge. I wrap my sandwich in newspaper. I wish I had an apple.
I am late. The school bell has already rung. I tiptoe into the hall for assembly and stand at the back. The headmaster will tell me later not to be tardy again. He puts a mark in the book by my name. Four marks then a diagonal one through it, like hangman. There are three of these now. The first time they asked I said the driver was late. Then I said the car stopped. Then my stomach hurt. Then I stood and looked at the teacher and turned my head down to my shoes. He growled through his mustache, The timing of the locals. This time the headmaster asks about Baba. He is still away. He doesn’t say anything for a long time, then pats my shoulder and asks me to set my alarm clock for earlier. I tell Mama when I get home. I had become tardier that summer. My alarm clock rang and I would get out of bed and get dressed. We had to tuck our shirts in. Girls couldn’t wear trousers. We had to wear our hair in ponytails. No jewelry. I started to spend longer looking in the mirror. Everyone said I looked like Baba. I started to go into Baba’s study. The door was kept closed but Umm Ahmed would go in once a week to dust. On those days I would come home from school and find Mama at Baba’s desk. She would be sitting, looking at nothing. I would go to my room. In the mornings I started to go and sit at the desk too. Baba had a big leather chair that swirled. It was my favorite chair in the house. I could almost see the top of the desk from it. There were piles of papers. Nothing I could understand. Most of them were in Arabic. Numbers. Some papers had the American flag. Others had the Russian flag. We learned world flags at school. Some of the papers also had the old Egyptian flag. It was green with stars and the moon. We never learned this in school, but Granny had told me.
Baba’s office was the only place that still smelled of him, but only a little and only if you opened the drawers. I would open the third drawer of his desk and put my nose to it. I opened it just a crack so that the smell wouldn’t escape. There was a picture of Grandpapa on the desk. It was black and white but his lips were painted pink. Grandpapa looked like a walrus. He was fat. Mama said businessmen liked to be fat. It was a sign of prosperity. On the wall behind the chair were pictures of Baba shaking people’s hands. I knew I was going to be late for school because I could hear the driver honking the horn of our small white car. It was an old car and the leather of the roof was falling in. The driver took a stick from the garden and put it across the roof on the inside to hold it up. He honked five times five minutes before we had to leave. For every minute I was late he would honk twice. Nobody told him to honk like this. Mama asked him to stop. He kept honking. He honked as we drove, even on empty streets. Baba said it was a product of circumstance. People like to be heard and this was the only way to assert oneself in a country like this. Mama and Baba said it was the worst thing a person could become. I started to wait longer, sitting in Baba’s chair.
We took the same route to school each day. Down our street past the Libyan embassy then right. The building on the corner was where the important journalist Hassanein Heikal lived. When Baba read the newspaper in the morning he would nod and say that Heikal knew. I didn’t know what he knew, but Baba pointed to his building each time we drove by. I wondered if he had power cuts. Baba also said once that a famous American writer used to live there too. Her name was Maya. She was black and friends with Malcolm X. She worked at a newspaper downtown. Baba said Maya was an angel. I told the American girl at school about Maya being an American angel and living on our street. She laughed and said Angelou, then skipped away. I watched. Her yellow plait bounced on her back.
My favorite part of the drive was the long street on the Nile. There were people rowing boats in the mornings. You could see them through the fence along the river. When Mama was little there were no fences. She would take her book and beach chair and walk down to the water. She would sit reading with her toes dipped in. The Nile was blue. Then it became green. Mama would never dip her toes in the water now, but Grandmama said that to have a sip of the Nile is like drinking ancient magic. If you make a wish it comes true. She said the same about the white beads around her neck. When I see her I put my fingers on them and make wishes in my head.
We drive around the island to school. I make a map in my head each Monday. Cars, signs, shops, pieces of garbage, donkeys, billboards, food carts, posters stuck to lampposts, villas. I memorize them and give them numbers, like points. If they are still there the next day I get the points. On Fridays I add them up and write them on a small paper that I keep in my shoe. There are some things that are never there the next day. There are some things that are always there. Like the billboard with the president on it. There are some things that are there for a very long time then disappear. One day they pulled down the white villa on the Nile. Mama said they did it overnight so that nobody would know. The red car that was parked on the corner by our house piled with dust was also always there. It was always on my map, for ten points. It got dirtier and dirtier. One day someone pushed their finger into the dirt and wrote a bad word on the glass. The car was still there but with the word I didn’t get the points. Then one day the police came and took it away. I didn’t see but I heard Mama on the phone. The police would come sometimes and take things. They took the cart of the peanut seller on our street. They took the kiosk by the school that sold chocolates and Cleopatra cigarettes by the one. They took the man who worked for Uncle Mohsen. They also took the boy who cleaned cars at the garage next door. In the cartoon Abla Fatiha they told us that if we were naughty they would take us too. I heard a teacher say that they took my friend’s papa. When I asked Mama she tssssked and told me it was nonsense. Uncle was in Geneva. I wondered if that was where Baba was too.