20

“As though his absence were not enough, he coaxed the moon from my skies as well.”—Nadia

If love doesn’t yank you from one extreme to the other and toss you from the fog of doubt to the bedrock of certainty, then it’s like a stagnant pond: it needs a stone. Omar Seif Eddin was that stone. It sent ripples of love through my veins and restored me to life.

Before he asked me to marry him, I learned that Maysa was a close friend of his family. That triggered sharply conflicting feelings. At first I was overjoyed. Armed with my love for Omar and my affection for Maysa, I could march confidently toward my dream for happiness. But then my aunt’s incomprehensible hatred for Maysa drove me to despair. It was the nightmare that burst into my sleep, flung my dream aside, and jolted me awake in terror of a force bent on destroying my life with Omar. As usual, my father beat a retreat when my aunt launched her campaign, which was fiercer than ever. She railed, cajoled, threatened. She’d expel me from home, cut off all money, deprive me of any number of rights if I married Omar Seif Eddin.

I couldn’t imagine how my aunt had gotten wind of my nascent love so quickly. Was I such an open book that she could scan the news of my heart on my forehead? I denied her suspicions. In any case, my feelings toward him were still vacillating at the time. But she pursed her lips and twitched them back and forth like a mouse, which meant that she didn’t believe a word I said. “As your granny said, may God rest her soul, there are three things that can’t be hidden: love, a pregnant belly, and a mountain!”

Maybe I didn’t have the courage to say I loved Omar, but I’m sure my eyes had a way of laughing that proclaimed my feelings toward him loudly enough for the heavens to hear. He was kind and gentle, a lover with a tender embrace. His family welcomed me when he took me to meet them, but I could sense their aversion to the marriage. At the time, I thought it was because he’d been married twice before and I was a divorcée. I later learned it was because they didn’t like my father and my aunt. If their names cropped up in a conversation, Omar’s parents’ faces turned sour. I felt I was missing some connection between the dots.

What surprised me was Maysa’s enthusiasm in favor of the marriage. She tried to win over my father to the idea, but he ceded to his sister’s view. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep trying,” Maysa said. “But why don’t you pass by the club this afternoon so we can talk.”

I wasn’t very optimistic when I hung up, but I went to the club anyway, to meet her at the golf course. She was so chic and svelte despite her age, which she was willing to let the silver streaks in her bobbed hair reveal. She refused to dye it, which was quite unusual. After she’d finished with the last of the nine golf balls, she told me she had to get back home for something important but that we could continue our conversation there. We left the club on foot, since she generally preferred to walk, but after about a hundred yards she stopped to complain how difficult it had become for pedestrians because there was no proper sidewalk. After a few more steps, she gave up and we hailed a taxi. It was pointless to continue walking when most of the sidewalk had been eaten up to make way for parking spaces.

In the taxi, she wrinkled her nose as she pointed to the dust on the backs of the seats and the litter on the floor. The driver turned up the volume of the radio so Ahmed Adawiya’s grating voice could blare: “It’s packed in the city without pity!” Maysa switched to French: “That’s not singing, it’s braying!” The driver peeked at us through his rearview mirror. I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. How could I tell Maysa that Adawiya was my aunt’s favorite singer? Along the way, she pointed to three shoe stores in a row. Formerly they had been, respectively, a bookstore selling foreign-language books, an antique store, and a flower shop. Before turning off the main road in the direction of her home, we passed by Zamalek Ful and Falafel. She shook her head mournfully. “Mon Dieu! Our beautiful island has become synonymous with beans.” She gasped. “Look, Nadia!” she said, switching back to Arabic. “They’re eating their sandwiches wrapped in newspaper!”

The driver, eyeing us through his mirror, emitted a muffled snort, perhaps from the effort of remaining silent all this time. “Stop fretting, lady. We’re all created equal.”

Back in her small apartment, Maysa brewed some tea, arranged some slices of coffee cake on a plate, and turned on the record player. With Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade softly playing in the background, she tried to reassure me. “You and Omar will have a long and happy marriage. Don’t worry about your aunt and father. They’ll come around in time, especially if you have children.”

She paused for a moment to study my face, as though preparing to impart some disturbing news. “You’re not like them at all, believe me. You’re educated and well brought up. You should marry the man you love. It’s your life. You have to choose the partner who suits you. If Paula were alive, none of all this would have happened. They’ve done enough already.”

I was overcome by a strange emotion. I felt as close to Maysa as though she were my real mother, though I was perplexed by that last remark. At first I’d feared that she would oppose my marriage to the son of one of her closest friends and that she’d invent excuses to prevent it. She certainly hated my aunt and distrusted my father enough to do that. She could never forgive them for what they’d done to her and to her brother Amr, who emigrated as soon as he could. That day, though, she dispelled all my misgivings. Before I had the opportunity to respond, Omar did so on my behalf, and in a very practical way. He sent me a letter that I’ve kept till today. It concluded with the sentence: “So, let us each go our own way: me toward you, and you toward me.”

Whether those were actually his words or a line quoted from a poem, that sweet and tender letter settled all my doubts. I married Omar despite the opposition of some members of his family and all the members of mine. I left everything for his sake. I was his third wife, although he was the same age as I. I took a suitcase full of clothes, as I had when I married Murad, and left the Heart of Palm uncertain if I would ever return. My aunt cut me off after sending me away with curses. My father kept in touch with me secretly, but listlessly, as though performing an onerous duty. For my part, I had nothing to lose. At least this time I was at the gambling table of my own volition, not my aunt’s. I left Zamalek to live with Omar in his small apartment in Garden City. After less than a year there, he decided to move to Sharm El Sheikh. He wanted to join his friends, who had moved there some months earlier, which was just after Israel restored Sinai to Egypt.

Omar’s life was a series of stops on a train journey called adventure. He never stayed in one for long. He’d hop off if his attention was caught by a beautiful scene. He’d spend some time there, until he got bored and left. He vowed that I was his last stop, and I believed him. Maybe I wanted to believe him so I could detach Tarek from my heart and shake Murad’s dust off my body and his image from my mind. We lived for a couple of months shy of two years in Sharm El Sheikh, a virgin resort town where everything was beautiful. Omar launched a scuba-diving center and opened a small hotel together with a friend. He invested his whole inheritance in the project. Our days were divided between the surface of the water and the face of the moon. We’d set sail in the morning, dive into the watery depths, and spend our nights beneath the starlight as the moon watched us listen to music, dance, and drink. How we laughed and laughed, as though tasked with conserving Sharm’s fun-loving nature.

Omar was mad about life. It was a spring of effervescent waters he drank with eager gulps, insatiably, living every day to the fullest. He never left me for a moment. Near dawn, his eyes would close near my face. He slept in my embrace and awoke to my whispers in his ear. He’d nibble my lips slowly and tenderly, then we’d submerge ourselves in a long kiss, and make love to start a new day. I had never dreamed I could have all this. But then, when you go to sleep at night, you can never know whether your somnial visitor will be a sweet dream or a nightmare. The happiest days of my life were with Omar. When he drew close, the smell of his body permeated my every pore, as though I lay beneath his skin.

The clock stopped for months. Or maybe the hands of the clock were humoring us, performing a coquettish dance to celebrate our joy: moving forward slowly then swinging back in order to prolong our happiness. I rest my head on his shoulder. He wraps his arm around my waist, and with his other hand he strokes my hair. His nearness conjures up images of a waltz. We spin together across a ballroom that we have painted in our minds, never missing a step. I can hear his music. I feel it in me as my feet fall in with it and I draw closer, letting my fingernails brush the tips of his fingers as he turns slowly in place.

I’ll never forget how, one night, after a long luxurious kiss, we threw ourselves onto our favorite couch, bodies still clinging together. He grabbed his Walkman’s headphones and held one pad over my ear and the other over his, linking our heads as Fairuz’s melodic voice called for the flute and song. We were extensions of the same soul, making the moment live longer before it waned and only the lament of the ney remained.

At the end of the first verse, he pulled off his earphone and gently removed mine. He picked me up in his arms as though I were his child and started to run. The childish mischief in his eyes gave him away, but I was still ready to be surprised. And my astonished smiles told him he’d succeeded.

What a thrill I felt as he set me gently in my seat in the car, drove us to the dock, and helped me into his small motorboat. It cleaved the placid sea, waking it from its slumber and telling it to make ready for our lovemaking with the prerequisite gentle breezes. The lapping waves bowed to us like maids of honor and the moon peeked out shyly from behind a small passing cloud and glowed. Omar’s eyes sparkled and his smile lit his face. He stopped the motor, letting the boat rock in its aquatic cradle and fan our ardor. He pulled off his white T-shirt. His broad bronze chest gleamed in the thread of silver light that streamed down from above like a celestial gift to two lovers joined together at a crucial moment.

“You’re crazy!” I whispered, still smiling. “You know it’s forbidden to go out on the boat at night.”

He responded with a confident smile and didn’t give my lips a chance to utter another word.

We awoke one morning to the news that Omar’s diving center had been shut down because its license wasn’t in order. He did all he could to remedy the problem, but was bounced from one government office to the next, from the municipal to the governorate level. By the time I realized who was behind this, it was too late. I phoned my father. He promised to see what he could do, but he did nothing. When I phoned again, he said he wasn’t working for the government anymore. “Once you’re out, you’re like an orphan. My membership in parliament makes no difference, because I’m just an honorary member. An MP without teeth,” he said. I had no choice but to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

Aunt Zeinab’s shrill voice assailed me over the phone for the first time in a year, rebuking me as though I’d just seen her the previous day. She didn’t even bother to play innocent. She vowed to do worse unless I came back to her. Then she slammed down the receiver and refused to pick up again. Two days later, the governor closed down the hotel Omar had started with his friend. The pretext was complaints about out-of-date food. I could tell he was fed up and was casting about for his next stop. But we couldn’t board the next train yet, due an imminent arrival. I was pregnant.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a stable pregnancy. I had to spend the last six months lying down and, for the first time since my marriage, in a cold bed on my own. Meanwhile, Omar continued to chase his first and dearest love: life.

Maysa’s phone calls were the only things that picked up my spirits a bit during those lonely six months. She tried to persuade Omar to return to me, but to no avail. He was desperate to team up to start a new venture and move on. That venture would involve a Frenchwoman he had met. He helped her open a hotel through a subcontracting arrangement and she helped him back to life. I made do with an allowance my father sent every month to help me out after Omar fell into the pit my aunt had created.

It took Omar two days to visit me after I gave birth to my baby daughter, Yasmine. “That’s a nice name,” he said as he held her in his arms and kissed her affectionately. He turned to the doctor to ask how I was doing. Once reassured, he made ready to leave as though he weren’t the father of our daughter, or my husband, let alone the hero of a love story that entwined us for a year and a half and lifted us heavenward on a towering wave of happiness and fantasy. That wave was now preparing to break on the shores of reality. Omar, who’d appeared in my life like flicker of light, was about to evaporate like drops of sea spray that drank from each other until they dried up. For Omar it was easy. An ending that fit the beginning with me, as well as his way of life, though I realized this too late.

If I’d married Tarek and had this beautiful child with him, it would have been impossible for him to leave me this way. Why did Tarek have to spring to mind just then? It bothered me that my thoughts turned to him whenever I had a problem with another man. I took hold of Omar’s hand and wrapped my pride in a gentle plea. “Why don’t you stay with us?” He slowly withdrew his hand from mine, and with it my dignity crumbled and fell at his feet. He had to survive, he said, and survival meant he had to go to France. He had to look out for his future, which he’d almost lost thanks to “Madame Zeinab Mahalawi.” Acid dripped from each syllable. Anyway, he said, he was doing this for my sake and the sake of our daughter. It was obvious how he now felt about me, my family, and his decision to marry me. How could his feelings for me have changed so completely? I asked him this question, reminding him of some of the things he used to say. He responded with an enigmatic smile that I couldn’t interpret. Then he placed a sum of money next to my ear, planted a distracted kiss on my forehead, and turned to leave. At the door, he paused and said, as though it were an afterthought, “Listen. I don’t want to hurt you. I had a great time with you. If you want a divorce, I’m okay with that. . . .”

What could I say to that? When a man isn’t clear in his priorities between me and another woman, it is no great honor if he chooses me. So how should I feel when he chooses the other?

For the remaining time he was in Sharm, he was like a body without a soul, at once present and absent. I grew tired of the game of fisherman and fish: the fisherman who plays with his catch by testing its ability to endure deprivation and pain. He dangles it close to the sea to let it dance ecstatically, lowers it until its skin barely touches the water, then yanks it up to watch it flip-flop in convulsions until it nearly utters its last breath; then he dips it back into the water again, and so on. I prayed for him to get it over with, to either be true to my life or true to my death. I couldn’t take any more.

When he sprang on me his decision to go to Paris, I insisted on keeping Yasmine. He didn’t try to argue or set conditions. It was as though she meant nothing to him. He’d turned over the page of affection so quickly, he destroyed the whole book. I called up Maysa to ask her advice about whether I should get a divorce. I was getting ready to return to Cairo to live in one of the apartments my father owned in Zamalek, since I knew my aunt wouldn’t let me set foot again in the Heart of Palm. Omar was a step ahead. He sent me the divorce certificate, left me some money, and paid the bill for the hotel room we’d lived in since coming to Sharm El Sheikh. He paid a full month extra, in order to give me time to collect my things. What magnanimity! He would never understand that it would take me years to gather up the scattered fragments of myself. After Tarek, who took the lion’s share; Murad, who devoured my flesh raw; and Omar, who crushed the remaining bones, I had only my daughter left to steer me back to life.

Could it be that Omar’s flight was my avenue back to dignity? I’d surrendered my pride in my haste to dedicate my love and devotion to someone who proved unworthy of both. Unless I’d been deceiving myself. Maybe I’d wanted him to love me but didn’t want to keep him. What I knew was that sadness had woven a net around my heart and squeezed out what little happiness was left. If only Omar had picked up stakes before this. If only I’d never taken that ride with him to begin with!

I found it odd, as I contemplated my little Yasmine’s tiny features, that she resembled me quite a bit, whereas I looked like no one else in my family. I wasn’t short, like my aunt, and I didn’t have her light-brown complexion or her fleshy features. But nor did I have my father’s complexion, which was as white as the British, and I certainly didn’t have his height or eye color. I could see some resemblance between me and my mother, but it was still distant. We shared the same svelteness, wide eyes, and delicate nose, but nothing else. As I placed my mother’s picture in my purse, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and spotted a white hair in the parting. I hadn’t noticed it before. Had it sprouted overnight to proclaim the advent of old age? Why should I care about old age, when my feelings were already moribund?

I twisted the hair around my finger and tore it out. If only Tarek had Omar’s daring and love for life. If only he had some of Murad’s confidence and force of character. My eyes welled up. A tear raced down my cheek and landed near my baby’s lips. She opened her tiny mouth, thinking it was something to drink. She gurgled softly, either to show she was happy or to comfort me. Her eyes giggled, her hands waved in involuntary jerky movements, she kicked her tiny feet and pressed them into my lap, and smiled. I smiled back. I caught sight of myself in the mirror again and thought, “How much longer will my eyes betray me when I smile?”

The phone shook me out of my gloomy thoughts. I barely had the strength to get up, but I pushed myself to my feet with a grunt and reached for the phone. It was the receptionist. “There’s a lady here who’s been waiting in the reception area for a while. She wants to see you.” I perked up. It must be Maysa who’d come to visit me as she’d promised recently. I threw on some clothes, picked up Yasmine, and left the room. The last time I’d seen Maysa was about a week before I came to Sharm El Sheikh. I bumped into her by accident in front of a well-known record store in Zamalek. She had moved into a new apartment without knowing that my aunt owned the building. I kept that a secret from Maysa because I didn’t want her to leave Zamalek and move too far away from me. For the past two years, she’d been complaining about the water cutoffs, the elevator malfunctions, and the poor services in the building in general. I don’t know how many times I begged my father to get my aunt to stop playing her childish games, but to no avail.

I skipped down the stairs to the lobby, smiling in anticipation of the hug. As I reached the middle of the lobby, my feet slowed, my smile vanished, and a veil of darkness fell before my eyes. The “lady” was Aunt Zeinab. Her driver called her attention to me. She struggled to her feet using her cane, and tottered slowly toward me, her expression as rigid and stony as always. But when she drew up and scanned my face, her lips parted in an affectionate smile, which was so unusual. With a gentle tone of reproach, almost like a loving mother, she said, “I just saw your face turn inside out. Of course, you thought it was Maysa coming to visit. You’ll always be like the tendrils of a pumpkin vine reaching out to others. But if you can’t turn to family, you’ll have nobody to turn to.”

Her Cadillac was waiting for us outside. Amazingly, it had withstood the 350 mile trip after twenty years in service. My aunt smiled proudly, “She’s a sturdy one, like everything they made in the old days. But that didn’t keep your father from sending along two cars behind us for fear she’d give up on us.”

I turned and saw the two Mercedes-Benzes the People’s Assembly had assigned to my father. I turned back to my aunt with a questioning look.

She reached out and rested a hand on my arm. “I’ve forgiven you, my dear. Now, that you’re divorced from that Omar character, you should move back in with me in Zamalek. Family’s best in times like these.”

I didn’t resist. There was nothing to keep me in Sharm. After I had packed, I accompanied her out to the car as though under sedation. They put my suitcases in the trunk and I climbed into the back with her. Her critical eye shifted down to my cotton skirt. Pursing her lips, she took the fabric between thumb and forefinger and pulled it away from my thigh.

“It’s a tad tight on you, wouldn’t you say?”

She wanted me to move to the foldout seat behind the driver, where I used sit when I was a child. Didn’t she realize that everything had changed? That the seat of fairytales and dreams had lost its magic? My dreams were now worse than my waking life: one nightmare after another. But at least now I wouldn’t face the risk of plummeting from the skies of hopes and expectations. Seeing my reluctance to shift over, she insisted. She said that she wanted to look at my face the whole way home because she’d missed me. As we set off, she pressed the button to raise the glass partition between us and the driver. I stared blankly out the window at the desert expanses and the scattered mountains in the distance as her voice droned on. Suddenly the word “sheikh” yanked me back into the car. Yes, she said, she’d been so worried about my condition that she consulted Sheikh Bahrawi and he gave her the solution. I could feel a weight pressing in from all sides as I waited for her to say it.

“The veil, Nadia.” she said excitedly. “Sheikh Bahrawi says you should take the veil and let faith purify your heart.”

She said nothing more. Eventually she nodded off, and her rhythmic snoring increased in volume. I was so stunned that I couldn’t collect my thoughts. As I began to picture myself in a head covering, a violent headache throbbed at my temples and I too fell asleep.

After what seemed like ages, we arrived home. The moment I stepped inside I was struck by the change. My aunt had had all the Persian carpets removed and a bright-green wall-to-wall carpeting installed. The paintings on the wall had been replaced by Quranic verses about the ills of envy and the virtues of thanksgiving, all in wide ornate gilt frames. I looked at her, eyebrows raised. As she removed her shoes and stroked the pile of the carpet with her feet, she said with almost childlike spontaneity, “It’s softer and more comfortable than the rugs, and it reminds me of the fields from long ago.”

I put off visiting Maysa for over a week. I wasn’t in the mood, not even for her sympathy. I wanted total isolation in my room, away from everything and everyone but my daughter. One day that isolation would become complete. I awoke that morning to find Father, extremely tense, phoning one official after the other. My aunt was on the couch, pitched forward with one foot tucked under her, chain-smoking furiously. Every now and then, she’d come up with a name for my father to call, and would tell him what to say. Fahim stood by his side, with a grimness that added a dark gray to his dark complexion. It was the first time I’d seen him without his tarboosh on his head. I’d never imagined him to be bald. I went up to my aunt and asked her what was going on. She waved me away several times, until my persistence finally made her turn to me with a glare that meant “clear out.” So I glued myself to a seat and listened. Then I gasped in horror. One of the apartment blocks my aunt owned in Zamalek—the Taqwa Building—had collapsed at dawn that morning. I rushed to embrace my aunt. She patted me on my shoulder in a way meant to reassure me she was all right and push me away at the same time.

Suddenly I wailed. Maysa’s little apartment was in that building. Was Maysa all right? My aunt didn’t answer. I looked at my father, but he was too busy with his phone calls. I turned to Fahim. He bowed his head and said, “May God rest her soul. Everyone in the building died.”

I ran back to my room. The kind and gentle Maysa, my teacher and my second mother, was gone, and with her went my last support.

The following day, my aunt burst into my room carrying a package that appeared to contain fabrics. Her face was glowing.

“Now, heed my advice and you’ll bounce back in no time. Just pray to the Lord to have mercy on her soul. That’s the best thing you can do for her. As He said, ‘Everyone has his destined time.’ You’re not going to deny God’s truth, are you?”

I wordlessly watched her unwrap the package, pull out a lot of colored head coverings, and place them on the edge of my bed. Then she left, shutting the door behind her with that beatific smile still on her face. When I awoke the following day around noon, the scarves still lay at the edge of my bed where my aunt had left them. They were only a few feet away, but miles away from what I felt inside. After about half an hour, I tentatively reached over and picked one out. The red one. I put it on and stood in front of the mirror looking at myself from within: shackled. I forced my face into a happier expressions, thinking the face muscles might persuade my mind to follow suit and accept that covering on my head. A wisp of hair slipped down over my eye. Then a long strand fell to the right side of my face, followed by another that escaped with a coquettish bounce. Then several others popped out next to my ear, as though they wanted to whisper, “No!” into it. I returned to the pile on the bed and chose another color to match what I was wearing, though it matched neither my femininity nor my soul. I studied my face. It had suddenly aged several years. Now I looked like Aunt Zeinab. I could almost be her daughter.

My mood turned fouler as I heard her footsteps approach behind me. Through my large mirror, I contemplated her in her capacious abaya. “Allahu akbar!” she exclaimed approvingly as she drew closer like a black scorpion about to swallow me. She reached up to press down on the top of my head while she shoved my hair more securely beneath the scarf. Then she tugged the ends of the scarf tighter as though afraid my thoughts might escape, and tied a firm knot at the nape of my neck. She stepped back and smiled, satisfied at her work.

“The hijab lights up the face,” she said. “Tomorrow you’ll appreciate its value when the grooms line up at your doorstep. As they say, a veiled woman is a hidden jewel, like a gooseberry behind its lantern.”

I gave her a sharp look out of resentment for her prying into my innermost thoughts and fears. I wore that thing for months and rejected all suitors who tried to approached me via my aunt. They were paraded before me blindfolded, shoved forward by my aunt to present themselves. They were difficult to tell apart. Most of them were recommended by her women friends, with the blessing of that sheikh of hers. They all reduced me to my head covering, to the loose-fitting dress with long sleeves and, above all, to my father’s and my aunt’s wealth.

As time passed, I realized that my hijab and I were mismatched. Nine months after I first put it on, I took it off for the last time, and I was reborn. At last I could breathe deeply again. As the autumn breezes played with my hair, I rejoiced at rediscovering a dear friend.

Every morning, I was greeted with a barrage of my aunt’s rebukes and admonitions, like a sticky spray. “You’re going to regret this! You look prettier with the hijab. That’s right, stay stubborn until you’re too old to marry! No man these days wants to marry an unveiled girl!”

But the words of my dear friend and mentor Maysa, who died beneath the ruins of my aunt’s building, still rang in my ear. They have remained as clearly engraved in my mind as the image of her face when she wrote them in my small diary, which I always keep with me.

“My dearest Nadia, be yourself. Don’t try to be like anyone else but you. Don’t be like those two. You don’t belong to them.”

Now I resemble myself and no one else. If only Maysa had lived. If only she had remained with us longer.