Time passed slowly then the doorbell rang again. Mama came out. Go to your room. She had a visitor. I went. My room used to be Mama’s room until she turned sixteen. After that they gave her a bigger one. It used to be blue, but Mama let me change it. I chose mustard. It was a strange choice for a young girl, Mama said. The color was different now. Darker. I wanted to change it again but Mama said I had made my choice and that it was a fact of life, things get darker. I stared at her.
I lie on the floor and stick my head under the bed. I open one of the hidden albums. The pictures are black and white but I imagine them in color. The first is of Granny at the door of the house. Her fur is slipping off her shoulders. She is standing with three women looking at the camera. Someone is kissing her. Here is Granny with her English friends. And the woman with the big pearls. Her lips look black in the picture but I know they are red. In this one, Granny is surrounded by people. Everyone is listening to her. They are frowning like Mama tells me not to. This picture, my favorite, at the dining table. Everyone is laughing. Granny is talking to them with her hands in the air. Some pictures but not many have Grandpa. He is wearing a tarboosh. In one of the pictures it is colored red. In another picture his eyes are colored green. Mama tells me that she took Grandpa’s eyes. They contained in them secrets like the sea. My eyes are different. They are dark like Baba’s and you can’t see into them. There are six pictures of me. Square ones with a white border. Three of them are from the same day. In one picture Baba is carrying me on his arm. I am holding my bear, Fluffy. In another Mama has me on her lap. Then Aunty is carrying me with both arms. These pictures are colored. I’m wearing green pajamas. Baba, Mama, and Aunty are all in black. We are in the garden. Aunty has on dark glasses. I asked Baba once to tell me what happened that day. It was the day Uncle Hussein died. He was Mama’s brother-in-law. They had just come back from burying him and were in the garden. Baba said he remembered the day like it was yesterday. It was the day Sadat made peace with Israel. He wished Uncle had lived to see.
After they killed Sadat, Baba stopped talking to his uncle, Ashraf, for a whole year because Uncle’s son was one of the killers. Baba said it was Uncle’s fault for not paying close enough attention. I heard him say that if he hadn’t spent all his time with a glass in his hand things might have been different. But nobody spends all their time with a glass in their hand. How would they sleep? I was scared Uncle Ashraf might be a killer too. Baba said I shouldn’t be silly. It was just a trend with young people who were lost. They turned to religion. When he wanted to fight in the war was he one of them? He laughed and said they were different things. Baba’s cousin was still in prison for killing Sadat. He would be there for the rest of his life. It was a different prison from the one we went to when we saw Mama’s thief. Nobody could go to this prison. They did terrible things to people there. More terrible than we could imagine. They tried to break people’s souls. Baba said sometimes there was little difference between the living and the dead. His cousin might as well have been dead.
I stand in front of my mirror. I pretend I have flowers in my hair. I smile and twirl around. I’m in a field, on a hill. I open my mouth and sing without sound. There is a small picture of Mama when she was a girl on the mirror. I also have a picture of Baba carrying me. Grandmama says my relationship with Baba is special and no matter what, I should know that he loves me. She said Baba’s situation is very common and many people were going through the same thing. I hear a loud sound. I open the window and stick my head out. There’s a truck at the corner. Men next to it are planting yellow flowers around one of the trees on the side of the road. Others are painting the pavement. One is painting black. One white. They move forward, slowly. I watch. Paint. Plant. Plant. Paint. They are the only people on the street. It’s Saturday. Nobody goes out on Saturday in the summer until the sun goes down. The streets are quiet, then at prayer the men come out. They walk to the mosque. When the prayer finishes the women and children come out too. It is cooler by then. Many people go to the club. The club also used to belong to the king. Then Nasser came and gave half of it to the people. He made it free. Half the fields and half the horse-racing track and half the golf course. The other half is for other kinds of people, like us. We have to pay. In the summer when we came back from Alexandria we would sit at the club with Baba under the eucalyptus trees and order a jug of lemonade.
I watch the truck move until it’s right outside the house. Mama comes in. What am I doing? I point. They never paint the pavement or plant flowers. It’s because the president’s wife is coming to open the library at the end of our street. It’s the most beautiful villa on the island. It used to belong to the Karassos, she says. Last time when the president was coming to the Opera House they did the same thing. Mama tells me, Come on, we are going out for a while. Where are we going? Out. Where? To buy fabric. For what? The armchair. From where? Downtown. How come?
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In the morning Uncle came. He brought the newspaper and sat plonk on the armchair without kissing anyone or saying hello. Look at this. They are floating it, but no doubt they will adopt it. He put his finger on the front page then threw it onto Mama’s coffee table. It slid and landed in the gap between the leg and the sofa. I was standing by the mashrabiyya doors that lead to the bedrooms. Mama had been in the kitchen and walked in. She had on her reading glasses and looked at Uncle from over them and down her nose. Mama didn’t like things lying on the floor. I picked it up. Uncle came every Sunday after Baba left. He wasn’t really my uncle but we called him that. What are they floating? Mama asked. He waved his finger. The flag. I stared at the flag. It didn’t look so different. You see, if they approve it we’re going to have to reprint everything. Everything, everything. It will cost the country a fortune. All this for what? Ego! He made a sound like a huff, as if he were running. Uncle was always talking about ego. Before Baba left, he told him that his problems were because of ego. They looked serious. I could tell it was an adult conversation. Uncle was at the house a lot before Baba left. They would go into the dining room and close the doors and talk. It was always night when he came and I would go to bed before they finished. Now Uncle came in the mornings. Always on Sunday.
The flag was like the old flag, with three stripes. Black on the bottom, white in the middle, red on top. It also had a golden eagle but the eagle in the new flag looked different. His wings were different. They were bigger and had feathers. Uncle asked me to read. Arab Republic of Egypt. Did I know what the old flag said? It also said Arab Republic of Egypt. But it also said Federation of Arab Republics. The coloring on the new eagle was also different. Uncle had a big belly. You would see his belly before anything else. He looked at me and leaned forward. He was frowning. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset. You can say this is a modern eagle. An eagle for the times. Do you know how many flags we have had little girl? The sweat was dripping down his head. There were puddles on his shirt. He kept looking at me. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. Don’t they teach you these things in school? Uncle laughed heavily, also like Baba. You know how many flags there have been? I’m sure even your mother doesn’t know how many flags there have been. He turned to Mama. Of course not. He laughed more heavily. Please, one of you, an ice-cold glass of water. Mama went. While she was gone he told me we had nine flags. This would be our tenth. It was testimony to how rich our history was. No other country had as many flags as we did. Mama came back with the water. She gave Uncle the glass. We watched. He drank it in one gulp then banged it on the table. Uncle never used the coasters and Mama picked it up quickly. I asked Uncle what the flags were. Mama said she would leave us to our history lesson. She went through the mashrabiyya doors to her bedroom. They were swingy doors but Mama never let them swing. She opened and closed them so that they wouldn’t make a sound. Uncle asked me for a paper and my coloring box. I sat next to him. He began to draw. These things no one will teach you. Uncle drew well. He was an architect and designed houses. I liked drawing with him better than anyone else. He lived in a big house far away, in Faiyûm, by the lake. His house was different from any other house. It had domes, like the kind in Aswan at the hotel we stayed in. Each dome had small holes, like windows, but tiny. Uncle said it was a cooling system. It was also about shadow and light. He told me that architecture was about making art as much as it was an exercise in finding practical solutions. Architects who thought like him were a dying breed. Uncle had studied with Hassan Fathy. People no longer designed and built the way Hassan Fathy did. He was eighty-four years old now and Uncle said it’s that time. And only when he died would he be celebrated in Egypt. That’s what Uncle said. I loved Uncle’s house. Mama said it was too eccentric. Baba said it was too simple and not his style. He had a courtyard in the middle with a fig tree and a wooden bench. We would sit on it together and watch the shadows move. For one hour Uncle made me draw all the different shadows on a paper until in the end I had a drawing. He called it an abstract and told me it was a replica of a famous painting in a European museum. I can’t remember which one. Everyone who had a house had a fig tree and an olive tree. They gave the house a longer life. The Quran said so. Granny planted four but we only had two now. Mama said they were our protection. I could hear her in the bedroom on the phone. She took it in with her at night and brought it out again in the afternoon. Mama never sat with Uncle and me. She would wait until we finished drawing then tell me to go to my room because they had grown-up things to discuss.