THE SCRATCHING OF THE JOURNALIST’S PEN WAS THE only sound in the room. A copy of Cinema Nuovo sat on the dresser, a picture of Bernardo Bertolucci on the cover. He had deep-set eyes. Mariam was all but promised the next cover. She just had to give good story.
‘I would like some water now,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Of course not,’ Flavia said. ‘Please, Miss Khouri.’
‘Mrs Gallo, soon,’ Mariam said.
‘Of course,’ Flavia said. Mariam smiled with pleasure. She extended her hand to the journalist. Flavia admired the new ring, that shiny stone.
‘And how does it feel to be getting married to the great Enrique Gallo?’ Flavia said.
‘We haven’t got to that part of the story yet,’ Mariam said, laughing. Flavia laughed too.
‘So you always knew you wanted to be a movie star?’ she said.
‘No, not at all,’ Mariam said. ‘It seemed unimaginable to me.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘Miracles happen,’ Mariam said.
‘You believe in miracles?’
‘We must have faith,’ Mariam said.
‘Of course, of course.’ The journalist wrote that one down. Good. They were devout people, the Italians. ‘Tits, blood and priests,’ Enrique told her. ‘That’s what the people want to see on screen. It is very hard to make a good movie, my love. It’s very hard to make any kind of movie.’ They’d just come out of a private screening for Joe D’Amato’s Convent of Sinners. ‘I want to make a great movie, Mariam!’ Enrique said. ‘And I want you to star in it.’
It was the night he proposed, with a ring that had belonged to his grandmother. Enrique was sweet, and he loved her very much. There could be worse matches, even if he never did make a good movie.
*
‘Mariam. Mariam!’
It was Fuad, come running through the mounds of trash that looked like hills set against a setting sun. Dogs yelped and sprinted away from their resting places in his wake, his beaming face turning Mokattam into an enchanted land, because he only had eyes for her. There was a gladness that came alive inside her only when she was with Fuad.
‘What is it?’ she said, laughing. He rushed to her side and then stopped, looking suddenly sheepish.
‘I got this for you,’ he said. ‘It’s from the rich people’s trash. In Zamalek.’
Zamalek was the prized jewel of the Khouris, Cairo’s wealthiest neighbourhood, a place where the very air smelled rich and perfumed, where people ate rubies and pooped out gold. Their trash was the best in all of the city, and it was the source of the Khouris’ wealth. They controlled the rubbish collection for the neighbourhood now. It took time, negotiations and bloodshed, but it was theirs at last, it was their right.
Fuad worked for Mariam’s grandfather. He was a year older than Mariam. More worldly. He was out there day after day, learning the ropes, seeing the city, sometimes even getting tips from the kindlier residents of Zamalek. He always wore the same things on his rounds, trousers too large for him, with holes in them, sandals that were coming apart, a shirt that wouldn’t have been new even back in the time of the Khedive. He smudged his face with soot. He made a sorry sight. It made the tips better.
He grinned at her expectantly. ‘Here,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it.’
She looked at the heavy package. It was gift wrapped. She said, ‘You wrapped it, Fuad?’
He beamed.
‘Found it like that,’ he said. ‘It was in the trash. I had a peek inside, though.’
Mariam saw the rip, and how he’d taped it back over.
‘Come on, what is it?’ she said again.
‘Open it!’
She put the package on the ground. She hesitated. No one had given her such a heavy gift before.
‘Come on!’
Mariam ripped the wrapping. The paper was so delicate and expensive! There was even a little bow taped to the top. People stared at them, but then people always watched everything you were doing. Mariam tore the wrappings and set them to one side to put into the paper pulp vats later for recycling.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Yes!’ Fuad said.
She stared at it in incomprehension.
‘But who would throw something like this away?’ she said.
‘It was for a lady,’ Fuad said. ‘A very fancy lady on the third floor of an apartment building on El-Malek El-Fadl, near the Supreme Council of Antiquities building. She tips me sometimes. But not recently. Recently she has been very angry.’
‘Why is she angry?’
‘It is because of a man,’ Fuad said. ‘Her boyfriend. He is a no-good man. He cheated on her, Mariam. So she threw him out. And he bought her this to say sorry, but she shouted at him on the street, and everyone heard the names she called him. And then she threw this in the trash.’
Mariam looked at the machine in wonder.
‘It’s a video player,’ she said.
‘Brand new,’ Fuad said proudly.
‘Does it work?’ Mariam said.
‘Work? Of course it works!’
‘Is it Betamax?’
‘No, VHS,’ Fuad said.
‘Oh.’
‘VHS is better!’ he said, even though they both knew it wasn’t true.
‘You should sell it,’ Mariam said. ‘It’s too expensive.’
‘I wanted to give it to you,’ he said.
‘I can’t take it, Fuad!’ she said. ‘It costs a fortune!’
‘You’re worth it, Mariam,’ he said. ‘Besides, I got these in Dr Saleh’s trash, he lives on the second floor of that building.’ And he brandished two VHS tapes at her which he materialised, magician-like, from under his jacket.
Mariam took them from him. Fuad couldn’t read, but you didn’t need to be able to read when it came to cassettes. These ones were genuine, not even pirate tapes like they sold in the Khan el-Khalili, but the real thing.
‘Lemora, Lady Dracula,’ Mariam read aloud. The cover showed the disembodied pale face of a woman grinning maniacally against a dark background. The lettering dripped red. A blue stamp on the back screamed VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT!
‘And…’ she frowned. ‘Eegah?’ The cover showed a giant caveman with a club. ‘“The crazed love of a pre… a prehistoric giant for a ravishing teen-age girl”,’ she said. She looked on the back. ‘Who is Richard Kiel?’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ Fuad said. ‘I’ll tell you what, Mariam. Let’s plug it into your grandfather’s TV. At least we can watch them before I sell it. What do you say?’
‘Deal,’ Mariam said quickly. She put her hand out and Fuad, grinning, shook it. Something like happiness, like a spark, coursed through her as their skins touched.
*
‘I don’t like you hanging with that boy, Fuad,’ her mother said. ‘People who live in trash can still keep their hands clean.’
‘Fuad is my friend!’ Mariam said.
‘A boy is nobody’s friend, Mariam. They’re selfish and hungry and if you’re not a wife you’re a used tissue that ends up in the garbage.’ Soraya brooded. ‘Even if you are a wife,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you are not marrying that boy. He is going nowhere.’
‘He works in Zamalek!’ Mariam said. Working in Zamalek was like, like… words deserted her. It was like you were already rich.
‘And this machine doesn’t belong to him to give away,’ Soraya said. ‘It belongs to your grandfather. All the trash from Zamalek belongs to the Khouris.’
‘He was just being nice,’ Mariam said. She felt the anger, never these days far below the surface, threaten to rise. She loved her mother. It was her duty to obey her mother. But every time Mariam spoke to Soraya she wanted to scream at her.
They were in the living room of the new house. No more tin shacks, not after nearly a decade in Mokattam. Hani Khouri and his sons built the house from bricks, connected it to electricity with a high wire running off the main grid, and furnished it with brand-new rugs, a shrink-wrapped sofa from the store, tables and chairs, all with the money they made on the trash. There was nothing used in the new house, all was new, and the sofa squeaked with the plastic every time Mariam sat on it.
Grandma Sandra – Umm Nader to all her acquaintances – was in the kitchen outside, making meat broth on the fire and baking bread. She distrusted modern appliances. Earlier, Uncle Nader and Uncle Farid slaughtered one of the pigs outside and, having done so, carefully separated and packaged the meat to be sold to the upmarket hotels downtown. They were gone now, along with the pig, and the blood baked into the dark dry ground. Mariam’s stomach rumbled. She was always hungry these days.
The VCR sat next to the brand-new television, which was bought from an electronics store on Sidi Abd El-Gawad Square in Bulaq only two months before. The day it was brought, carried with all pomp on the back of her uncle’s truck through the alleys of Mokattam, people came to gape, and to murmur in envy of the Khouris’ prosperity.
‘We can just watch the movie, Mama,’ Mariam said. ‘Then Uncle can sell it.’
‘Who puts such a thing in the trash?’ Soraya said, transferring the object of her outrage seamlessly onto the nameless scorned woman of Zamalek. ‘To throw away such a thing, it’s, it’s… immoral, Mariam.’
‘Maybe she just didn’t want it,’ Mariam said.
‘Then she should have sold it!’ her mother snapped. ‘The wise person throws nothing away.’
Mariam thought of the endless piles of rubbish outside.
‘There must be few wise people in Cairo, then,’ she said, and her mother gave a sudden, surprised bark of laughter.
‘Let’s watch this movie then,’ Soraya said. ‘Somehow, you always get your way.’
But she no longer sounded angry.
*
Fade in. Desert. The image revealed only lasted five seconds. The desert was not like the one outside Cairo, or perhaps it was, in that all deserts, Mariam reflected, must in some way be the same. She didn’t know. She was no Bedouin. She was a city girl. There were young Americans driving around in large cars. A giant caveman with a club in his hand. People in nice suits dining in something like a club. More desert, a helicopter. A boy played an electric guitar as a girl swam in a pool. The pool looked nice. The sort of pool only rich people ever got to swim in. Girls in bikinis and young men who had never gone hungry. Mariam wished she could lounge by a pool like that, too.
Grandfather Hani tsked disapproval at the girls in bikinis, then grinned. More desert, then the giant caveman was back. The boy with the guitar now had a gun. He fought the giant caveman. Then a pool party and a rock’n’roll band. The giant caveman disrupted the party. The caveman tried to take the girl away. He was shot by the sheriff. He floated face down in the water.
The camera lingered on the giant’s club in the pool, a dark spot that might have been the giant’s loincloth.
‘Poor devil,’ the narrator’s gravelly voice said.
Soraya cried. She was a sucker for doomed love and tragic heroes. Grandfather Hani said, ‘I’ve seen worse,’ and went off to find his wife outside.
Mariam remained in front of the television, though. It wasn’t the movie, with its strangely wooden actors, the frequent and inexplicable musical interludes or the male lead, the boyfriend with his expression of constant constipation that arrested her, but that near-final shot, of the club and the black thing floating in the water, the camera drifting across them until it finally pulled away. Somehow there was magic in it, and Mariam rewound the tape and watched the movie again, alone, as her mother wandered off, her grandmother called her in vain to come have supper, as the moon rose outside and the heaps of garbage, ever present, stood serene in the moonlight’s glare, the rats awake and sniffing for action as Cairo, asleep under the hot day sun, woke up slowly into night-time.
‘Poor devil,’ Mariam said. ‘Poor devil.’