Father appears in the doorway of the guest room in shirt and trousers. Uncle Fahmi comes out of the master bedroom in his gallabiya. Nabila follows him in a blue dress. Khadra brings in some green tea. Uncle Fahmi says: “We have Lipton too.” He snatches a powdered sugar cookie. We drink the tea then move to the veranda.
Khadra brings the coffee. Uncle Fahmi asks father if he is up to a new backgammon match. Nabila insists we should play a game of gin rummy instead. She shuffles and deals the cards. When I say I want to play, father scolds me. I move away to the end of the couch. I stick my finger up my nose. Nabila wins the hand. Happily, she gathers up the cards and the piastres that she has won. Her husband hides his anger by pretending to smile.
Her voice rises suddenly: “Shame on you! Get up and go wash your hands.” I jump up right away without looking at anyone. I follow her to the French-style bathroom. She points to the plastic cover of the toilet. There’s two footprints on it. “Are you the one that climbed up on it and left these?” I tell her I peed in the other toilet. She doesn’t believe me. I wash my hands with soap. She asks me: “Does papa have money in the bank?” I say I don’t know. She keeps asking questions: “Doesn’t he have a checkbook?” I repeat that I don’t know anything.
I follow her back to the veranda. I stop at its door. A gentle breeze is swaying the light fitting on the ceiling. In the distance, a small, weak spot of light trembles. The dining room is dark. Its window is open. Light from the street lamp shines down on the dinner table.
I go over to my sister’s husband. I stretch out my arms holding the workbook. He takes it but puts it to the side until the hand is finished. He reviews my answers and gives it back to me. He pats my shoulder in encouragement. Father gets up. We go to the hall. I bring him his jacket and fez. My sister disappears. She comes back with a shoebox wrapped in string. She puts it on the table. We head toward the door. Nabila says: “The cookies.” Father pokes me with his elbow. I go over to the box and pick it up by the string. A large, round spot from the shortening has stained its side.
~ ~ ~
We gather in the afternoon on the five steps that lead up to the house on the corner. Samir, Safwat, and a fat boy all live in the last house at the end of the alley. We play cards. Selma, Samir’s sister, joins us. About my age or a bit older. She wears a sleeveless dress. Her arms are small. She sits on the landing in front of their apartment. We are down below her. She is staring with a serious look. I raise my head. She parts her legs. I notice her thighs. Her mother’s voice comes out from inside the apartment. She’s yelling at her husband. I wait for my father’s voice to call me, as he does every night at just the time when it starts to grow dark. I make out strange noises coming out of our house. Leaving my playmates, I run to the entrance of the house and push on the iron door. The light is on in the stairwell. I go up two steps. The apartment’s door is open. My father is fully dressed and sitting in a chair under the window that faces the skylight. He is holding his fez upside down in his lap. He is frowning. Mother is going back and forth with her hair all messed up. She shouts and yells and swears. She attacks him, snatching the fez from his hand, throwing it on the ground, and stomping it hard with her feet. She snatches the reading glasses from the breast pocket of his coat. She crushes them on the tiles. My father is frozen in place. He says firm words to her: “That’s enough now, Rowhaya. Don’t cause a scene.” She runs to the window to the skylight. She opens her arms up as wide as they’ll go and starts saying strange words over and over. After a while, she calms down. My father takes up the fez from the ground. He puffs out its sides again. He sets its border straight again and presses on it a couple of times. He rubs it with his hands, then puts it on. He stands up and he takes me outside.
Siham, Selma’s older sister, appears at the doorway to their apartment. She’s wearing an indoor gallabiya without sleeves. There is a basket full of laundry on top of her head. She goes up the stairs. I watch the sway of her hips until she disappears.
Selma points to the top story of our house. She asks us if we know what happened early that morning. The police broke into the house and arrested Wadie.
I ask her: “Wadie who?”
“The son of Um Wadie.”
“Why? Is he a crook?”
“No. A communist.”
“What’s that?”
She says she doesn’t know.
“What does he look like?”
I can’t remember ever seeing him. She says he is a university student who was going around to all the houses last year telling people how to prevent cholera.
The wind blows up her dress and she reaches down and pulls it over her knees. She leaves her legs far enough apart, though, that we can still see something. There is a dark space that goes up between them. I notice she is not wearing panties. Mother stretches her hand under her gallabiya. She pulls out a big piece of cloth that is soaked in blood. She goes to the bathroom. She comes out after a little bit. I call her but she doesn’t answer. She looks like she is annoyed. She tilts her head and listens, like some kind of voice has come into her head. She heads to the window. I go over to her carefully. I lie down on the ground and look up her dress, even though I know she is going to be mad. She is not wearing underwear. She pushes me aside.
I put my cards together. I look at Selma. She is looking at the ground, with a serious face. When she raises her head, our eyes meet. She turns her eyes away. My gaze falls back on her legs. You can see even more. I go up to the landlord’s apartment to borrow a pinch of salt. His two girls pass me on the stairs. They ask me in a whisper what my mother was talking about last night when she was screaming at my father. I don’t understand which time they mean. One of them asks me with a smile: “What is this about strands of hair?”I tell her. Their faces go red and they break into muffled laughter.
The ululations ring out from Hakmet’s house. Selma raises her eyes to the balcony up above Safwat’s house. Abdel Hamid, our landlord’s crazy son, is standing there, fully dressed and squeezing a newspaper in his right hand. He looks over at us.
She shows all of her legs, then lets the dress fall again. She stands straight up. She disappears into her apartment. Samir’s mother yells out his name. The voice of Safwat’s mother rings out, calling for him. They leave and the fat boy follows them. I wait there for a second, then I sneak up the stairs to the roof. Its door is shut. I push on it and it opens. A basket of laundry is in the middle. Some of what was in it is hanging on the line. There is no sign of Siham. I go over towards the room of the engineering student. My heart is pounding. The door is shut. I listen but I don’t hear a thing. I put my eye to the keyhole. All I can see is an empty desk, but I hear movement behind the door. I run back to the door to the stairs and I go down in a hurry.
More ululating pours out of the bride’s house. I go up to our apartment. Father sits in the living room. Fatima complains to him about her husband. She says he is always getting drunk on homemade liquor. After that he gets violent and beats her up. Father tells her not to make a big deal of it. He asks her to bring one of the empty cans that the aged cheese comes in. He tells her to wash it well with soap and water, then let it dry. He adds bread crumbs to water to soak them. He adds more water. He sends her to buy beer yeast from the baker. She wraps herself in her black coat and goes out. I stand on the balcony. She comes back with the yeast. Her husband Abbas meets her at our doorway. “Where’ve you been, bitch?” She answers back, confidently: “My boss Sidi Khalil sent me to the souq.”