Guapa Page 12

  “Four years university in America,” he says. “Did you do anything in America?”

  “I studied.”

  “Did America send you to protest?”

  “No.” I can’t help but chuckle. I do not add that we could only be so lucky as to have America on our side.

  “But you speak good English, you travel around with foreigners all the time.”

  “I’m an interpreter.”

  “What are you interpreting for them? What are you saying?”

  “I can assure you, everything that comes out of my mouth are the words of others.” I smile as I say this, though I don’t know why.

  The officer pushes the folder away and looks me in the eye.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asks. His cold eyes bore into me, demanding a frank answer.

  I swallow, shrug, and hold his gaze. “I’ll believe in what you want me to believe in.”

  Suddenly the mood in the room changes. The air feels lighter somehow, and I know I am safe. The officer sighs, looks at his papers, and shoos me away with his arms, as if I am a waste of his time. The other officer opens the door. I walk out into the waiting room, not sure if I have ever felt so relieved to be deemed pathetic. The Filipina woman is no longer there. The other two people look at me curiously, as if to glimpse their fate in my eyes. I sit back down in one of the blue chairs and wait.

  I close my eyes and try to focus on my breathing, in and out. In and out. Sounds drift to my ears: the voice of someone shouting in a room down the hall, the scurrying of cockroaches on the floor by my feet. After what seems like an eternity I open my eyes again and nothing has changed. My thoughts drift to Taymour and being in bed with him, but this gives me no comfort. Today thoughts of Taymour bring to mind Teta’s screams, Ahmed’s unflinching gaze, the threats of the police officers, and the fear and shame return.

  Taymour was right. We have to get out of here. With the brutish thugs of the regime or the head-banging fundamentalism of the opposition, Taymour and I would always be forced to wear masks, to bend and mold ourselves to their image. Teta is only the first of many. Here, Taymour and I will never be anything more than a dirty secret waiting to be uncovered. The only option we have is to get as far away from this damn place as possible.

  As soon as the thought enters my mind I push it out again, hide it away in case the hope that thought carries shows on my face. But my mind is working against me now, and as I thrust the thought away more thoughts come. I want to kill the president. I want to plant a bomb and blow up this entire city, watch it burn to the ground. Trying to get rid of these thoughts is pointless, the more I try to avoid thinking them, the more they come to me, each thought more destructive than the last. I can’t pollute my mind with these thoughts here. I half expect the security officers, having read my thoughts, to barge in to take me to a dark cell in the basement. I’m going crazy. Really crazy. I close my eyes. When I open them again my eyes fall on the portrait of the president and his son. I quickly shift my gaze. Perhaps someone might not like the way I am looking at them.

  The next time the officer comes out of the room he has Maj with him. I stand up as they walk in, but neither the officer nor Maj makes eye contact with me. Maj shuffles to the desk and the officer makes him sign a release form, which Maj signs without reading. When he turns around I notice one of his eyes is swollen shut. His hair clings to his forehead in matted clumps. He has a bruise on his cheek and his bottom lip is puffed up to twice its size. His mascara is streaked down his sunken cheeks. I think of Maj last night, dancing with his arms in the air, triumphant. Now he makes brief eye contact with me before looking back down at his shoes.

  The officer shoves Maj toward me and I catch him. The officer wipes his hands on the back of his trousers, as if he has been handling a dirty rag. Looking at Maj up close I can see a crust of blood has formed around one nostril. Holding him by the arm, I walk him outside. Maj winces as we emerge into the midafternoon sun. I give him a bottle of water and he drinks it thirstily. We walk down the road for a few minutes, not saying a word. When we are far enough that it feels secure to speak, I ask Maj if he’s okay. He nods and grabs a cigarette from me, which he places in between his chapped and bloodied lips.

  “What happened?” I ask, once we have put the police station at a safe enough distance. I try to lighten the mood. “The last time I saw you, you were grinding against two skinny boys in a Princess Jasmine costume. Was it the cinema?”

  “Is it on the news?” he takes a drag of the cigarette and coughs.

  “I’m not sure. I heard it through Laura.”

  “So it will be news.” He sighs and runs a hand through his hair.

  We walk to where Maj parked his car. People are staring at us, Maj stumbling like a zombie. On our way we pass the cinema where he was arrested. The doors are now boarded up and sealed with red wax, a sign that an immoral crime has been committed. A notice stuck to the red wax reads:

  To whom it may concern,

  This door has been stamped with red wax enforced from a decision issued by the presence of a judge dealing with urgent matters in the city. The claim was submitted by Fawzi Basha and founded under claim number 080537 and is enforced for a period of one month from the date above, open to extension. It is prohibited for anyone to remove the red wax from the door without prior review by the court that authorized this decision.

  I tell him to go to the hospital but he shakes his head. He hands me his keys and I unlock the car and help him in.

  “Is there someone we can tell about this?” I ask.

  “Who can we tell? The police?”

  “What about documenting your injuries and reporting them to the human rights group you freelance with?”

  Maj puts his sunglasses on and lets out a bitter chuckle. “The only purpose those reports serve is to make the West feel better about themselves for selling our regime weapons.”

  We sit in the car smoking our cigarettes, neither of us in a rush to go anywhere. I am smoking a lot today, but it is only in the act of smoking that the worries subside. My problems take on the form of smoke escaping from inside me and dissipating in the air. But when I stub the cigarette out they are inevitably back, like an endless well of shame and fear, so I must light another one. I am slowly killing myself like this. I have already smoked a pack of cigarettes today.

  An angry knock on the car window jolts me back to reality. A clean-shaven man in sunglasses is staring at us. I lower the window.

  “Yalla,” the man grunts. “You can’t stay here.”

  “What do you mean we can’t stay here?” I ask him. There is a rudeness in my voice, an attempt to reclaim some of the dignity I lost in the interrogation room.

  “I mean,” the man huffs, “for security reasons you can’t sit in a parked car. Either get out of the car or start driving.”

  “What kind of security threat do we pose, sitting in a car?” I ask. “We’re just having a cigarette before we drive. Do you want me to drive and smoke?”

  “Get out of the car if you want a cigarette. You can’t stay in a car that isn’t moving. New regulations.”

  “That’s okay, we’re just about to leave,” Maj tells the man.

  “Donkey,” I mutter, starting the engine. The clock on the dashboard says it’s almost four-thirty. Taymour should be getting ready for tonight, with no idea of how my day has gone. Maj leans back into the passenger seat and sighs.

  Neither of us wants to go home so we stop at a supermarket and buy an ice pack and some tomato and mortadella. I put the ice pack on Maj’s eye, and we eat the tomato and mortadella in the car while drinking Turkish coffee. I watch as Maj slowly wraps a slice of tomato in a piece of mortadella. He winces as the acidity of the tomato touches his lips.

  “What did they do to you in there?” I ask.

  He shrugs and says nothing. I bite into a slice of mortadella and wash it down with a sip of coffee. I look at Maj’s face, trying to read his bruises. A punch in the mouth, definitel
y. Maybe also another one below his eye. The scrape on his cheek looks like an abrasion, as if he was shoved up against a rough wall or else pushed to the floor. Did they do anything else to him? Was there something else that did not leave a physical mark?

  “Did they rape you?” I blurt out.

  Maj pauses, then shakes his head, then shrugs. “They roughed us up. Called us names. Satan worshippers. They pulled out my file and showed me the records they had on me … what I did for a living. I couldn’t tell if they were more angry about my day job or my night job. Anyway, they pushed me around some more. They put us in this concrete room and hosed us down with freezing water. They told us we were dirty perverts and needed cleaning.”

  I close my eyes as I try to process this. I want to drive back to the station and stab both the officers with the rusty leg of that blue chair they made me sit in. And then I’ll kick them really hard. In their kidneys or their balls. Then I remember I have never been in a fight and I feel helpless all over again.

  “The water was so cold,” Maj says, shaking now. “They stripped us down. They lined us against the wall. Then these men come behind us. Their hands were so cold. They pulled apart my legs and put something in there.” As he speaks I notice something has happened to him. Something I’ve never seen before. For the first time, I hear shame in his voice and can see it settling in his features. “It felt like an egg. They had such cold hands. And rough hands too, like sandpaper.”

  I think of the taxi driver from many years ago. Your mouth is like sandpaper. I look at Maj but he does not say any more, his eyes drawn to his fingers as they fold and refold a piece of mortadella.

  “Do I have ugly hair?” I ask him suddenly, trying to lighten the mood. “The officer said I had ugly hair.”

  Maj laughs so hard he chokes on his food. “It’s true. I’m sorry, Rasa, but you really have to stop getting haircuts from your grandmother.” His black eye, bruised shut, begins to secrete a liquid that looks like a single teardrop.

  II. Imperial Dreams

  I return home at five p.m., gloomy and terribly tired. The door to Teta’s bedroom is still shut. By this time she should be lying on the sofa, the remote control resting on her stomach as her faint snores accompany the string of afternoon news programs. But the cushions are pristinely fluffed, the TV is off and cool to the touch. Teta’s purse rests on the coffee table. I’ve grown up thinking of that purse as a treasure chest containing a bounty of gifts — sticks of gum, hard-boiled sweets, thin brown mint-flavored cigarettes — all hidden among tissue papers so old they disintegrate in your hands. She has never slept this late. Perhaps I have humiliated her to death.

  Doris makes me a Nescafé and puts lots of ice in it. Usually I would drink this in front of the television, watching Oprah tell me to live the most honest version of myself. That’s how I usually spend these long, hot, boring afternoons with nothing to do but dream of Taymour. But today I take my iced Nescafé to the bathroom. I take off my clothes and hang my underwear on the doorknob to block the view. I’ve learned my lesson. Let them peer through the keyhole. I call Taymour but he does not pick up, so I send him another message: We will find a way. We’ll find a country where we don’t need visas and we can live our lives away from all this ihbat, all this depression. I don’t expect a response, but I send it anyway. I’ll plant the idea in his mind, and then tonight I’ll give him the letter. It will remind him of everything we are fighting for and will convince him to run away with me. Once he sees me, he won’t be able to forget what we have. He’ll leave it all in a heartbeat.

  I sit naked in the empty bathtub and sip my iced Nescafé, smoke Marlboros, and play Candy Crush Saga on my phone. If I win with one star it means that Taymour loves me, and if I win with two it means he will never leave me. If I win with three stars then it means that we will find a way to be together.

  I play Candy Crush and dream of America, of a world where no one asks what you’re doing and you are free to do what you like, kiss and love whomever you want and be the person you were meant to be. Before I went to America I had thought of it as a place where it didn’t matter who you were or where you were from, all that mattered were the ideas in your head.

  I was wrong.

  “Dreamers from all over the world go to America,” Teta had warned. “But the dream is simply bait. America is like a fisherman’s hook that can catch you and either cut you up and eat you or, if you are not to its taste, toss you back in the water with a hook-shaped hole in your cheek.”

  I chose not to listen to her warnings. Even now, as I sit in the empty bathtub with a hook-shaped hole in my cheek, the memory of America’s possibilities remains strong.

  The decision for me to study in America was made before Baba got sick. With the money he had saved up, Baba made Teta promise that I would get an education abroad. When he died, Teta and I had no source of income. Despite that, she refused to touch the money Baba had saved for my education. She stashed his money in the bank and became a hairdresser for the neighborhood women. Soon enough on every street within a twenty-kilometer radius from our house women began to sport Teta’s golden bob. To top off her wages, on Fridays Teta wore her hijab and black abaya and went to the mosque down the road to collect donations, and on Sundays she wore a crucifix and drove to the nearest town. She hid among the churchgoers, stood up and sat down when they did. She knew when to say “Kyrie Eleison,” and she even took communion. Then, as the charity box was handed out, she reached in and took her weekly stipend.

  Our income was dwindling but our social standing remained the same. We were saved by pity and a sense of obligation. We held our heads high as we watched a new elite emerge, a fresh breed that discussed “construction projects” and “real estate investments” and “import-export initiatives.” We were an aging Chevrolet surrounded by brand-new Ferraris racing around the city.

  My desire to go to America was compounded by the mythology that surrounded the place. Beyond the television, movies, and books, America was the place where my father and mother fell in love. My father was completing his final year of medical school. Mama was an art history student at the community college. She spent her mornings in class and her afternoons in galleries, sketching in her notepad. In the evenings she went with friends to a French café in the city. That was where she met my father.

  He fell in love with her instantly. She was beautiful, with long charcoal hair, large green eyes, and olive skin. Even later, at her worst — sobbing into a pool of blood and broken glass on the living room floor — I could see why my father fought so hard for her.

  After six months of stalking and pleading, my mother agreed to meet my father for a coffee. He won her over on that first date. Six months later, Baba found the courage to bring her home to meet Teta. When my father first came back, with my mother at his side, Teta could not have been happier that he had found an Arab woman in America.

  “What was she doing in America?” Teta asked her son, eyeing my mother with a forced smile on her face.

  Baba explained that Mama’s family moved there when the president took power.

  “My father did not even wait for the president to come to power,” Mama corrected him. “At the first sign of disturbance he packed up the house and left.”

  Teta narrowed her eyes disapprovingly. “Why are you so proud that your family ran away so quickly? And so you grew up in America, yes? That’s not the right environment to raise a girl. In any case, you get married here. You live here.”

  Mama’s parents did not take kindly to this news.

  “After all the mess we went through to leave, you want to go back?” her father screamed on the phone from thousands of miles away.

  “But I love him,” Mama said defiantly.

  “You love him more than you love your own freedom?”

  But my young parents were of the idealistic generation that saw potential wherever they looked, and they returned hand in hand to build a new pan-Arab nation.

  It rained the ni
ght Teta dropped me off at the airport. I hugged her and sensed that she was holding back tears. We had never been apart for longer than a few hours, and the prospect of not seeing each other for a year felt like the end of the world. We both knew that once I boarded that plane something was going to change inside of me, the boy who hugged her goodbye would be gone forever, and neither of us had any idea of the man who would take his place.

  “Call me as soon you arrive” was all she could say. I tried to ignore the tears that hung behind her every word, knowing that if I thought too much about them they would trigger my own, and I wanted to be a man, a real zalameh with no emotions. As I walked through the terminal Teta waved until she was just a speck in an ocean of people. When I could no longer see her I ran to the bathroom and burst into uncontrollable sobs. I did not stop crying until I fell asleep on the plane, when I was exhausted and felt there were no more tears left to come out.

  The immigration queue was long. I stood in line with my papers in hand, letters from the university, bank account statements, visas, and immigration forms that Teta and I had neatly filed in a color-coded folder. I made it through after the sun had set, and took the airport shuttle bus downtown, followed by the train to my new home, a student residence on the west side of the campus, a high-rise brown brick tower with curved façades and vaulted archways.

  In the winding halls, students were laughing and talking in strange accents I had only ever heard on television, the walls so thin it was as if they were in my room. I had nothing with me except a suitcase of clothes, mental images of American college campuses that I gleaned from movies, and my expansive collection of Now That’s What I Call Music! CDs. Having grown up on its television and books, America was a part of who I was before I even set foot there, but the reality of America was grittier and more alien than I had imagined it to be. My boxlike room on the ninth floor was empty except for a hard bed, a wooden desk, and a lightbulb that hung from a sad-looking plastic cord. I pulled up the blinds to take in the view. The glowing lights of the city extended far out to the horizon, and just below I could see the leafy courtyard, the freshly watered grass shimmering under the light of the streetlamps.