My father’s head peers over the couch in the dark
and whispers, ‘Are you awake?’ I don’t know,
am I? I’m lying on a mattress on the living room floor,
my hands dank and trembling, wondering if my parents
will survive their mistakes. Nothing like cold sweats
on a warm sulphur Christmas. Outside, the city spills
past the contours of reality. Each time I blink, an island
surges out of the sea: some mad oligarch’s wet dream,
or luxury villas for sun-seeking Russian gangsters …
At dusk, I stroll along the sliver of beach spared
by the quicksilver illness we call cement.
The boardwalk’s semi-deserted, but by the railings,
the lonely Natashas sink their long nails into mangoes
and sigh. ‘This is no place to live,’ a woman
says to her boyfriend as they puff on their cigarettes:
‘Not a place you call home.’ I can’t argue with that.
All I see are skyscrapers and cranes that raise
even more cranes. As a child, I imagined
those cranes were beanstalks connecting the Earth
to the heavens, but there was no golden goose or giant
in those clouds. Back at the flat, my mother sweeps
gypsum and rubble while crouched on the last
powdery bit of wall that once separated her bedroom
from her kitchen. When we wake up in the morning,
she stares at the sky and looks for rain clouds,
but there’s not a single one in sight. The storm
is in her head and her heart. It could be worse;
even flowers still bloom in graveyards …
Through the paper-thin wall an inch from my head,
I can hear Hitler ranting and raving to ‘Gangnam Style’.
Sharif, our neighbour from Cairo, works at IKEA;
he takes three buses to work and is plagued
by the burdens of bribes, permits and slave wages,
and bears it all with a smile, but why speak of it?
Happiness vanishes the moment it bursts
the levee of the lips; his shivering wife
keeps watch from her balcony like a sailor
forced to weather a storm in a crow’s nest.
Starting tomorrow, I’m off again, free as a bird
of passage. Aboard the plane, I’ll watch
the island that once looked like my home
continue to grow, swelling like a cancer
on the soft skin of the sea … Come, come, that’s
enough now: remember you chose to live in the fire.