Remember Hanan, one day you and I walking in our school uniforms to get milk from the store. There was no school because of the rain. We went in the morning, found it closed and came back. But we stayed with our uniforms on all day.
Remember Sammar, how Tarig used to ride his bicycle through the puddles on purpose, every puddle from here to Airport Road.
Remember Hanan, the day we went to the Blue Nile cinema and it started to rain on top of our heads and Tarig just sat there watching the screen.
Remember the day, remember the time. Remember Tarig. Hassan looked like him, his uncle who had never seen him. Only Hassan not Hussein, they were not identical twins. Even Amir did not look like his father as much as Hassan did. Isn’t that strange? she said to Hanan, as they folded the washing together, so much washing, hills of clean clothes to sort out and smooth into neat piles.
Week after week. Stroking Hassan’s hair, watering the garden, removing seeds from slices of watermelon. Watching Hanan’s baby grow, the first day he ate beans, the first day he tasted mangoes and how his nappy looked after that. The door bell and rushing from indoors, down the steps of the porch to drag open the black metal gate. Miranda for guests, ice cubes, a dish of sweets to pass around. ‘Water,’ some would say. ‘Just get me a glass of water, Sammar, nothing else.’ She fell in love with Amir again. She carried him around the house, like Hanan carried her baby. They played a game, they pretended Amir was a baby again and she had to carry him. Only in this game could he be sweet and clinging. At all other times, he was aloof, independent, never afraid. He neither remembered nor missed his father. He had lived quite content without his mother. There was something unendearing about her son: a strength, an inner privacy she knew nothing about, shut out by guilt and her years away. Only in this game of baby and mother were they close. Carrying him around the house, not minding that he was heavy. Do you know, baby, that you were born in a cold country and you wore white wool. Baby, do you want to go outside to the garden? Look, this is a tree, this is the grass. What’s that? in his pretend baby voice, pointing up. What’s that? An airplane. It takes people away, far away from here.
The new job. Different people, classes held in different locations. Some of the ‘Erasing Illiteracy’ classes were in the evening at the university. Palm trees and a campus shabby with crumbling walls, undergraduate students not so well dressed or healthy looking as the ones she used to see in Aberdeen. Like all the other evening classes, her class took a break for the sunset prayers. They would leave the room where the fan whirled overhead blowing sheets of paper off the desks, and step into the heat of outside. She never knew who spread out the palm-fibre mats on the grass. They were always there when she came out. Beige and a little rough on the forehead and the palms. When she stood her shoulders brushed against the women at each side of her, straight lines, then bending down together but not precisely at the same time, not slick, not synchronised, but rippled and the rustle of clothes until their foreheads rested on the mats. Under the sky, the grass underneath, it was a different feeling from praying indoors, a different glow. She remembered having to hide in Aberdeen, being alone. She remembered wanting him to pray like she prayed, hoping for it. The memory made her say, Lord, keep sadness away from me.
She kept busy so that there would not be pauses in the day to dwell. She tired herself so that there would not be dreams at night. Toilet training the twins, watching videos with everyone: thrilling American films, loud Egyptian soaps. Taking her aunt to the doctor, listening to her aunt on the way back, ‘My son would have been a great doctor like him…’
Listening to Nahla for hours at a time, Nahla angry because her wedding must be indefinitely postponed, the reasons — a catalogue of problems — her fiance’s work, his lack of work, his frustrated desire to get a job abroad, the fact that they had nowhere to live, the fact that his father was loaded and yet too mean to help out.
She was rarely alone. Almost never alone. At night her aunt would turn over, sit up, pour herself a glass of water from the thermos she kept under her bed. Amir would mumble in his sleep, kick off the covers, dream children’s dreams. First thing in the morning, Dalia would come down, trailing ribbons and comb, a smudged tube of Wellaform. ‘Braid my hair, hurry, I’ll be late for school.’
The Wellaform made Dalia’s hair gleam and stuck on Sammar’s fingers. She wiped them on her own hair and covered it before Dalia’s father came down to bid his mother-in-law good morning, on his way to work. He worked in his family’s ice factory. Every morning he said the same thing, ‘Do you need anything?’ and every morning her aunt replied, ‘Only your well-being.’ Though at any other time of the day she would want him to do this and that, bring this and that, sending messages through Hanan. Sometimes, if there was time, he had coffee with her aunt, Sammar stirring the sugar, offering biscuits. Most often the morning was a rush and he did not have time to sit down. He would hold Dalia by the hand, pretty in her school uniform and braids, greet his mother-in-law and say, ‘Do you need anything, Aunt?’
What was life like? Deprivation and abundance, side by side like a miracle. Surrender to them both. Poverty and sunshine, poverty and jewels in the sky. Drought and the gushing Nile. Disease and clean hearts. Stories from neighbours, relations.
A twenty-year-old smitten with polio, look at him now overweight and ungainly, walking with a crutch.
On the operating table, before they knocked me out with the anaesthetic, I saw flies buzzing above my head…
No this and no that. No water. In this land where the Nile flooded, no water. No water to have a shower with, flush the toilets with, cook, drink. Driving in the car across town to fill big Jerry cans with water from someone else’s garden tap. Tipping buckets of water down the toilet, scooping water from a pail to bathe.
Tempers were short during a water cut. Even shorter than during a power cut. When the water came back, it spluttered and spat out of the taps, dark brown with sediment, poisonous black. Gradually it would lighten. Even then they had to filter it before they drank it or cooked with it. A challenge just to live from day to day, a struggle just to get by. But there were jokes. Jokes about the cuts, rationing and the government. Laughter on hot evenings in the garden, her aunt smiling like in the past, grasshoppers and frogs as loud as the children.
And everyday Amir in his school uniform, white shirt streaked with sweat and dust, scruffy shoes. ‘Why did you lose your pencil?’… ‘No, you’re not allowed to buy candy floss from the man at the gate. It’s full of germs.’
This was her life. Fighting malaria, penicillin powder on the children’s cuts. The curfew at eleven. Immersing herself, losing herself so that there would not be pauses in the day to dwell, no time for fantasies at night.
19
But she dreamt of him. Dreams in which he brushed past her, would not look at her, would not speak to her. Dreams in which he was busy talking to others. When she sought his attention he frowned and it was a cold look that she received, no fondness. She would wake after such dreams with raw eyes, mumbling and clumsy, dropping things, mislaying things. When asked what was wrong with her, she would say that it was the time of month.