Guapa Page 6

  A few weeks after school began that September, the president’s father died suddenly of a heart attack. A blanket of despair was foisted upon all citizens. For ten days the country shut down in mourning. Music was banned as the funeral was broadcast on all the television stations and the radio stations played recordings of his old speeches. When we returned to school after the designated days of mourning, every assembly for the next week began with a moment of silence to honor the old man, which often descended into collective weeping that was encouraged by the teachers. To question the tears was to be a heartless traitor, so I joined along. I wept and bawled with everyone else, although I was perhaps the only one thinking not of the president’s father but of my own.

  “Your car is straight out of the fifties,” Laura says as she gets in. She pushes aside the yellowed newspapers piled on the passenger seat. It is just past ten and the thick layer of dust on the dashboard is baking in the midmorning sun. The stench it is giving off is overwhelming. It’s what I imagine a long-abandoned dream might smell like. A plastic Oum Kalthoum bobblehead stands in front of the steering wheel. Her head bobs as the engine sputters to life.

  I tell Laura it is Nawaf’s car and she chuckles.

  “Of course it is,” she pushes her black-framed glasses up the bridge of her nose. “It’s all Nasserite and full of promise.”

  I met Laura when she had just moved here as a stringer for The New York Times. She often quoted me during the early days of the protests, back when she was new to the country and looking for any old “voice from the Arab Street.” If you search for me online you’ll find my name pop up in one or two articles. To be completely honest, she made me sound much smarter than I really am. But as she got accustomed to the city and worked her way up, developing contacts with opposition leaders, presidential advisers, and other guys way more important than me, she interviewed me less and less, and then not at all.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, reversing out of her driveway and onto the road.

  “I got clearance to meet with this guy, Ahmed Baraka, who is high up with the opposition,” she says. “He lives in the eastern side of the city. Do you know your way around that area?”

  “You mean al-Sharqiyeh?”

  “Yeah.” She passes me a piece of paper with a number on it. “If you call this number they’ll tell you where to meet.”

  “I’m not sure it’s safe to go there today. Did you not hear the news?”

  Laura laughs. “I am the news. We’ll be fine, I’ve got a good source.”

  Although my gut instinct is to walk away, even if she’s paying double, I grab the piece of paper and punch in the number on my phone. The deep voice of a man picks up on the first ring. I explain who I am and he says to meet at the clock tower in the center of al-Sharqiyeh.

  “Park there and give me a missed call. Don’t get out of the car, and if anyone asks, tell them you’re with Baraka,” he orders.

  I close the phone and hand Laura the piece of paper.

  “We should get there as soon as possible,” she says, folding it and tucking it into her bag. “It’s a busy news day and I have three big stories to cover. There’s this one … then after lunch I’ve got a meeting with the head of intelligence about last night’s takeover. And I also want to write about the arrest of the gay men in the cinema.”

  “What arrest?” I ask.

  “You didn’t hear? Last night, maybe an hour or so before the militias took over al-Sharqiyeh, police stormed one of those cinemas downtown and arrested a bunch of gay guys who were cruising there.”

  Laura is still talking as my thoughts return to Maj. A sense of dread gnaws at the edges of my stomach like a corrosive acid. While trying to concentrate on the road, I pull out my phone and give him another call. His phone is still off. It is not like him to be out of touch this long, with not even a text or status update all morning.

  “What do you know about the arrests in the cinema?” I ask Laura.

  “Not much,” she says, flipping through her notes. “I’m trying to find out where they’re holding them. There are a couple of human rights groups on that.” She looks up at me. “Why are you interested?”

  “No reason.” I shrug. He’s definitely involved in that gay cinema thing somehow, if not reporting on the arrests then maybe as one of the victims. If I hear nothing by this afternoon I’ll have to tell his mother what little I know. I turn to Laura. “So the guy on the phone said to meet them at some old clock tower.”

  “Okay.”

  We are silent for a few minutes, and then Laura speaks.

  “You know,” she begins. “I’ve known you a few months now but I feel like I know nothing about your life.”

  “What do you want to know?” I ask.

  “You don’t live with your parents, right?”

  “I live with my grandmother.”

  “Oh. Where are your parents?”

  I hesitate. My hands clutch the steering wheel tighter.

  “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

  “It’s fine.” I smile. She must have noticed my discomfort because she abruptly changes the conversation to point out the extra security guards at the entrance of a shopping mall, then returns to her notes.

  I take the road that leads us out of the affluent quarter where the rich neighborhoods merge into a crescent of prosperity along the western side of the city. Empty land awaiting further construction frames the outer edge of this part of town. The land is divided into plots to fit a three-story villa with a pool, a garden, and a maid’s room. Everything outside this area is, as Taymour once put it, “traffic jams and hepatitis.”

  We drive past the American embassy at the southern edge of the suburbs. The compound is fortified by tanks, armed guards, and large concrete roadblocks that have annexed the sidewalks around it, blocking passages, impeding traffic, and forcing citizens to walk in the street.

  “Look at this,” Laura scoffs. “Twenty-first-century diplomacy … if it were up to the American government every city in the Arab world would have an archipelago of green zones.” She sits back, looking pleased with herself for saying this. On the dashboard, Oum Kalthoum’s head bobs as I drive over a pothole.

  On both sides of the road there are pictures of the president. There are pictures of him with his family, his elegant wife dressed in an emerald green evening gown, a sparkling tiara on her head. There are posters of him in the dishdasha worn by the northern tribes, photos of him dressed in a suit and tie, some of him with a beard and others of him clean-shaven. Like a Barbie doll, the president comes in different costumes: Tribal President, Business President, Islamic President, Secular President — collect them all.

  We stop at a government checkpoint plastered with photos of the president. The flag hangs limply on the barrier blocking the road.

  “Where to?” The soldier at the checkpoint leans into the car as I roll down the window.

  “We have a meeting,” I tell him. He looks about nineteen, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a helmet too big for his head.

  “Road’s closed,” the soldier says, shifting his weight as he struggles to carry his weapon. His eyes scan our faces, moving from mine to Laura’s and back again.

  “We have authorization,” I say. Laura shoves the paper she is clutching into my hand. I give it to the soldier.

  “What business do you have there?” he asks, his eyes inching down the page.

  “She is a journalist for an American newspaper. She’s arranged interviews.”

  The soldier is quiet for a while, the silence uneasily settling between the three of us.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” he asks, finally, breaking the silence.

  “For you, three,” I say, pulling out a handful of cigarettes. I drop them in the palm of his hand and he nods and waves us forward.

  Laura takes out a scarf from her bag and begins to wrap it over her hair. I don’t know what this Ahmed guy will be like. How would he react to seeing me, a T-shirt-
and-fashionable-jeans-wearing guy from the western suburbs, speaking English with an American accent? Would my haircut offend his sensibilities? Would he smell injustice in the brand-new soles of my Converse shoes? But of the other thing — would he know I was in bed with another man last night? Would he be able to smell Taymour’s sweat on my skin?

  Taking a turn off the main road I drive across the bridge that separates the suburbs from al-Sharqiyeh. The familiar signs of McDonald’s and Starbucks make way for tattered billboards that crowd over each other, fighting for attention, some advertising Fair and Lovely skin-lightening cream and baladi yogurt, others demanding that citizens support the reform process. Tiny shops selling dusty water bottles and kaak and mashawi line the ramshackle road.

  We used to drive over this bridge a lot when my mother and father were still around. Back then, on some Fridays when Baba wasn’t too tired from work, he would put on a pair of jeans and stand by the door, smiling and jingling the car keys in the air. The sound of those keys made my mother and me so happy, and on cue we would jump off the couch and get in the car. Baba would drive across the bridge toward the hills on the outskirts of the city. My mother always asked Baba to drive through al-Sharqiyeh, and on the days Teta would join us, she would insist we keep the windows rolled up.

  “But if we’re going to live in this country then we really have to live in this country,” my mother would say, pushing her Mike and the Mechanics tape into the cassette player. Her favorite song on that album was about an unhappy woman who drank a lot of coffee.

  I would watch my mother sing along, so beautiful and full of melancholy, and I would feel helpless that she loved such a sad song, and wondered if I was to blame somehow for her unhappiness. Once the song was over she’d rewind the tape and play it again. And after that song played three or four times it was like my mother had found a companion to her sadness, and we’d stop and eat at a food stall in the center of al-Sharqiyeh, a feast of roast chicken so tender the meat dripped off the bone.

  “You’ll get diarrhea,” Teta would say, sulking in the car while the three of us stood on the side of the road, licking our fingers from the juices seeping from the meat. Afterward we would jump back in the car. Baba wouldn’t stop driving until we were far out into the mountains, away from society.

  Before Mama’s sadness overwhelmed her, she would wake up every morning, put on her paint-stained jeans, take the public buses (much to Teta’s disdain), and get off in al-Sharqiyeh to walk around, paint, chat with the kids and show them her art supplies. No matter how much Teta told her that “people will talk” if her daughter-in-law kept visiting the slums, and regardless of how hard she tried to introduce Mama to other high-society women (“This is so-and-so, she just graduated from a university in London, and this is her sister so-and-so, she is best friends with that famous actress I pointed out to you on TV last night. And this is so-and-so, she lives just down the road and has set up a wonderful jewelry business …”), Mama still woke up every morning and made her way down to al-Sharqiyeh.

  As for me, I don’t go to al-Sharqiyeh anymore. It is mostly journalists who roam these parts, like ants on a piece of rotting fruit.

  After we’ve driven about one hundred meters from the bridge, we stop at another checkpoint. This one is not government-run. The idea that something could be free of the president’s control should fill me with excitement, yet the two men standing guard at the checkpoint, their faces wrapped with an olive green cloth so that only their eyes are visible, bring out in me the same old fear. I stop the car and roll down the window.

  “Assalamu aleykum,” I greet them. They say nothing. One of them bends down and looks at Laura, then back at me. I tell him she’s a journalist and give him the paper. He reads it over and makes a call on his phone. I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, trying to steady my nerves. Beside me Laura shifts in her seat.

  The man is on the phone for a few minutes. When he finishes he puts the phone in his pocket and strolls back to the car. He walks to the back of the car and slams his fist on the trunk. I press the button and the trunk springs open. He rummages inside. I think of what might be in there, what mess Nawaf might have left behind. Dammit, I should have checked this beforehand. I rub my mouth and look straight ahead. Finally the man closes the trunk and walks over to where the other man is standing, right by my window. He whispers something in the man’s ear and the man bends over.

  “Keep going straight along this road,” he says. His breath is sour. “You’ll get to a traffic light. Make a right and go up a hill. The clock tower is at the top. Wait there.”

  “Thank you.” Relieved, I want to get out of the car and hug them. Instead I offer them the most grateful smile I can muster as they wave us on.

  The road, smaller now, is lined with palm trees. Laura is silent as she rotates between editing her list of questions and updating her Twitter feed, and my thoughts return to Maj. If he is among those who have been arrested, and by now it is probably wishful thinking to believe otherwise, God knows what they will do to him. He’s mouthy enough to say something that might piss off a policeman. And if they find out what sort of information he collects, that would be even worse.

  I don’t feel comfortable sharing these concerns with Laura. I don’t want Maj to be just another decontextualized story, another headline on the bottom of the fourth page of some foreign newspaper. Besides, there won’t be any protests demanding Maj’s release, no opposition groups to fight in his corner. It’ll just be me, and what use am I when I can’t even voice my worries to an American journalist. Whenever I think things could not get any worse, the universe exposes another layer of darkness.

  There’s no point thinking of this now. I need all my focus on making sure we get in and out of here alive. The man on the phone instructed us not to get out of the car. It didn’t sound like a trap. Why would it be a trap, anyway? What point would killing us make? Would my death advance their political interests somehow? I turn to Laura.

  “I will actually have to charge you double for this, you know.”

  Laura laughs, and although I can hear a nervousness in there, her laughter calms me.

  “Are you optimistic about my country?” I ask, trying to take my mind off our situation. I’ve learned to listen to the good foreign journalists, the ones who speak to everyone and get a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening. The bad ones, those who spend their time in the Four Seasons speaking to people like me, they are useless. But the good ones can be fortune-tellers.

  Laura looks up from her mobile phone and peers out the window as we drive by a poster of the president. In this one he is dressed in military uniform. The words “Together we will save our nation” parade across the bottom of the poster in intimidating black lettering. Someone has ripped the president’s head off.

  “I’m not sure anymore.” She sighs.

  She asks me for my thoughts about what’s happening in the country. I tell her that the political situation is very bad, that we are stuck between terrorism and authoritarianism. She says that most people outside the cities don’t have the luxury for such politics, all they think about is how they will feed their children. I tell her that may be the case, but economics is political. She narrows her eyes. She can see my international schooling on my face and hear it in the way I speak English with ease. Although she judges me for it, she also recognizes that she needs me. I am her bridge, her reliable Oriental guide. I speak both Arabic and English and understand how Americans see us.

  We continue driving in silence. As we make our way through al-Sharqiyeh, steaming garbage and discarded tires lie on either side of the potholed roads. Everything feels like it is covered in a thick layer of soot. Two barefoot girls push a scrawny donkey along the road.

  “Wretched of the earth,” I say as we drive past the girls, catching the eye of the taller one.

  Laura looks up from her notes and smiles at me. “Welcome to the other half of your city, Rasa.”

  “Do you think we will
have an Islamic government?” I ask her.

  “So long as it’s the will of the people, does it matter whether or not it’s Islamic?” she asks me.

  “I left college believing that so long as the government was the will of the people then that would be okay.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I believe that religion is the last refuge of the poor … praying five times a day, all that hand-washing and strict rules … gives people some structure and purpose. So long as they believe that life has an ultimate meaning, it keeps them from true despair.”

  “But you have to respect the beliefs of other people,” she says.

  “Yeah, yeah, respect. Give respect by giving education, a job, a glimpse of a future without everyone breathing down your neck.”

  The air stinks of diesel fuel and heat. Finally we see the main clock tower perched on the hilltop, red, white, and blue plastic bags dancing in the air around it. I park at the top of a hill. The car slides backward before coming to a tired stop.

  “Stay in the car,” I tell Laura as I open the car door and step outside. They told us not to get out of the car but I need some air. The heat of the midday sun beats down on me. Sweat is already beginning to form on my back and armpits, darkening my white shirt and making it stick to me like an extra layer of skin. I have the distinct feeling I am being watched. I look toward a small collection of houses that stand on the edge of the hill. A wooden crate of figs lies on the ground. The crate is broken and a few figs have rolled down the hill while the others are baking in the sun. The sound of the noontime athaan cuts across the city, the muezzin’s voice soothes my nerves. Yes, God is greater than all of this.

  I call the number Laura gave me and let it ring a few times before shutting the phone. I turn around and glance at Laura, who is busy looking at her phone. I quickly give Guapa’s manager, Nora, a call.

  “Have you heard from Maj today?” I ask.

  “No, why?” A slight worry creeps into her voice.