Glass Collector (21 page)

“Let’s see what’s happening at the church, yeah?”

Aaron half nods. The moment’s gone. She’s gone. He’ll have to wait for the next chance to come. He has no choice but to follow Jacob past the shops and stalls and down the winding alleys to the long path that leads to the church.

Aaron’s happy to go with Jacob, who still seems his usual self, thank heaven. Things are easy between them as they walk side by side, but something Rachel said earlier is troubling Aaron.

“Did you know that boys are going backwards?”

“Like that film?” Jacob asks. “What film?”

Aaron shakes his head as they leave the bags of garbage behind and amble toward the open walkway beside the high limestone wall.

Jacob pauses to scratch his wild hair. “I’m not sure what it was called now.”

“Me neither … hmm. Hey! What’s Noha doing here?” Aaron has never seen Jacob’s mom anywhere near the church. She doesn’t believe in Jesus. Now she’s beside the high wall, looking agitated, next to Sahira, the tallest, thinnest woman in Mokattam. As they approach they can hear Sahira muttering the latest news from behind a hand covering her mouth.

“The best doctor in Bab el Louk—he was there—he said that was it. He did. They won’t. No. Not coming home.”

“Who’s not coming home?”

Jacob has excellent hearing and his question startles Sahira into dropping her hand.

Warning him off, Noha points a finger at him and says, “Shush. Go away, Jacob. And you, Sahira, you shouldn’t have been listening. Don’t say a word to anyone.”

Whatever they’re talking about looks serious enough for Sahira to make the sign of the cross twice on her chest and beg Jesus for help with a whisper and raised eyes, even though Noha’s giving her actions a snarly look.

“Someone else died?” Aaron guesses.

“Be quiet!” Thumping the air with a fist, Noha’s face is sliced by so many lines it looks as if it will split into a hundred pieces if she gets any angrier. “They said to keep it until later.”

“Trying to get information from her is like trying to get blood from a stone,” Jacob whispers. He nudges Aaron as they walk away. “You’re right, though, and they can’t say anything because Simon and his brother and poor Fatima have recently died and anyone else now will be another bad omen for Shareen tonight.”

But rumors spread faster than quarry dust in Mokattam and news of the latest tragedy has already fallen on most people’s ears as they sort the garbage and gather up the food slop to take to the pigs that are now hidden illegally in homes all over the village.

It seems that Merry, the teenage daughter of Said and Esther, medical-wasters, died of hepatitis during the night. The deacon is going to announce it soon but everyone already knows and her cremation is taking place later today.

When Shareen hears the news, she’s furious and stomps upstairs to the small room she shares with her father and kicks her faded mat. This is a terrible omen. When she glances at the pillowcase printed with a picture of a curvy belly dancer, she almost freaks out. The last time she lay down to sleep, she was free. Tomorrow she’ll wake up as horrible Daniel’s wife.

As a special treat for breakfast, Shareen’s father paid someone to bring a McFalafel back from Cairo’s McDonald’s. The spicy smell of the fast-food treat still hangs in the air as Shareen stares at the pointy silver slippers that look like

Cleopatra’s canoes on her dainty little feet. Why did she beg Fatima to give her these stupid shoes?

It’s not easy to imagine a happy wedding when everything is falling apart.

Most of the day has been spent being waxed and plucked; her hair is set and curled but dropping out in the afternoon heat. Her make up is melting. The red lipstick is a shade too dark. Mostly polished and shiny, several nails have chipped since they were varnished an hour ago, and where’s Rachel, her bridesmaid? Her stepmother’s cremation took place this morning. She should be here by now to help and spoil her. Shareen doesn’t even like Rachel, who’s drippy and never listens when she tells her what to do. Plus she likes boring Sami, with the sagging shoulders and silly grin, who watches
Candid Camera
on TV or sits in front of that crummy computer all day long.

This is not how Shareen imagined her wedding day. She wipes sweat from her face with the damp sleeve of her gray galabeya. Where are the gold shoes she dreamed of? The white silk dress and red ribbons to braid in her hair? Where’s the excitement she hoped to feel? Her handsome husband from a Hollywood film?

Her eyes linger for a moment on the cheap dress with a threadbare hem that’s hanging from the curtain that divides the room in two. It’s a faded cream color, the waist is too low, and the material is crumpling in the afternoon heat. Shareen borrowed the dress from Marlina, a woman with eight sons, who wore it more than ten years ago. Why did she allow Daniel to talk Marlina into giving the old thing to her?

Knowing Marlina went on to have so many sons after wearing that dress scares the life out of Shareen, who guesses that’s exactly the reason Daniel wants her to wear it.

She catches sight of her face in the mottled mirror and pats a sudden outbreak of sweat away with the back of her hand. The more she puts off getting dressed, the hotter she becomes. The silver slippers slide from her feet as she moves a few steps to swing the dress from the curtain. Where is Rachel?

It’s not supposed to be like this.

The surprising stutter of a motorbike engine sounds outside the glassless window. Shareen slips across the floor to look out, taken aback to see Lijah sitting on a rusting bike, revving the engine to wake up.

“Take it away,” Hosi yells. “Help the neighbors. Sort your share of their rubbish before you go riding around on that thing, otherwise they’ll give us no rice.”

Lijah snarls. “I won it at cards. I’m keeping it for a couple of days, then I’ll sell it and buy a pony.”

“You’re getting married. You can’t pay for gasoline,” Hosi says, red-faced.

But Lijah sparks the engine to life and pretends to run his father over. Hosi jumps out of the way and trips, forcing Youssa to stumble up from the middle of a pile of bags where he’s been sleeping, to help his father to his feet.

At the same time Rachel comes racing around the corner to Shareen’s. She stops dead, shocked to come across Lijah cranking up the yowling motorbike engine while squeezing the brakes and tempting Hosi and Youssa to take him on. It’s no use. All Hosi and Youssa can do is flap the air in front of their noses to get rid of the gasoline fumes.

When Lijah senses Rachel a few feet away, hanging back, he laughs at the flicker of fear in her little smile and twists the bike around to face her. Challenging her to try and get past, he stands upright to shift the spinning wheel in the air and pumps up the power until the rickety exhaust pipe makes a coughing sound.

Rachel flinches. Then freezes and turns pale.

Help appears to come when a bag of stinking garbage is flung from an upstairs hovel. Lijah turns to elbow it out of the way as the handlebars shoot from under him and he somersaults off. The wheels whirr, thud, and bounce before the bike springs toward Rachel, rolling over her legs, then careening into a pile of bags.

Someone screams.

A child runs to look. A man with knotty skin races over to Rachel’s twisted, whimpering body. Two yelling women wave their angry arms at Lijah, while a man grabs the reeling bike from the ground and turns off the engine. Mouth open, Shareen dashes out as fast as she can in her slippy silver slippers and the bad omen she’s been dreading stares back with the clearest of warnings not to marry Daniel. In a stunned rage, she gazes at Rachel lying there for only a second before fainting clean away.

At the church, women are hurrying up and down the aisles arranging the flowers for Shareen’s wedding. They’re racing to complete the task so they can get to the farthest side of the village in time for Merry’s cremation.

Meanwhile, outside, Aaron and Jacob are sitting on the wall and squinting at the pigeons on the tenement roofs until they blur into the distance. Jacob should go to Merry’s cremation—she was from a medical-wasting family, like him—but it will be stuffed with ululating women crying their hearts out and anyway neither of them have the energy to move. It’s too hot and making an effort on an empty stomach strikes them as foolish. Just waiting for the wedding is enough to be going on with. It’s better to sit here until then and slowly make their way afterward to the area where the feast will take place.

The koftas, roast chicken, and special sweet biscuits are very much on their minds when they see Michael the artist running toward Father Peter, who’s talking to one of the women before heading to the back of the church to check that his robes will be ready in time for the wedding ceremony.

Aaron’s vaguely surprised by his quick little steps. “Maybe Shareen’s called the wedding off?” Jacob leans forward to listen. But he can’t hear.

Jacob stretches out on the wall and Aaron lies back. Their feet almost touch as the sun circles the church. With the sound of pigeons cooing in their ears, it’s an hour before anything distracts them from their silent, lazy rest. Then, eventually, they become aware of a distant procession lurching toward them along the walkway.

Aaron jerks up to rub sleep from his eyes and blink at the dark sky. Jacob springs alive with excitement at the thought of food, but instead of happy sounds coming closer to the church, he hears the distant noise of wailing starting up on the other side of the village.

“Merry’s cremation should be over by now, shouldn’t it?” Aaron’s confused.

Jacob agrees by frowning long and hard. Something isn’t quite right. Weddings are often delayed in Mokattam but never funerals. And the wedding is obviously going ahead, because lights are glowing in the open-air church and the pews are filling up.

A moment later a distant shadow morphs into the shape of Daniel striding toward the church in his secondhand black suit and crisp white shirt, his face as hard as stone. He is surrounded by his brothers and sons and they all quickly take their place at the front. A few minutes later Daniel’s cousins race down the aisles in freshly laundered galabeyas, apologizing for being late.

“Why so late?” Jacob knows those cousins. “They’re never late.”

Aaron shrugs. “No, never.”

A woman in a billowing black galabeya with a funny walk is next up the lane, soon followed by Shareen, who is holding her father’s arm.

“She looks happy!” Jacob grins. “Yeah, right!”

Aaron’s shocked by the grim determination on Shareen’s face as she tries her best to look gorgeous while staggering along in an outsize pair of silver slippers. Her cream dress hangs from her shoulders like a sack, but the saddest thing of all is the state of her hair, which is pushed back by a skimpy red band that shows off her frown.

“Where’s Rachel?” Aaron guesses she’s fallen out with Shareen in the short space of time it’s taken them to get ready. “She looks too good in her bridesmaid’s dress,” Jacob says with a knowing look. “That’s why ugly Salema’s holding the candle.”

“Weird that the pig isn’t here either!” Aaron fires back, in case Jacob thinks he’s disappointed not to see Rachel.

His distraction works and they laugh. Together, they shift along on their bottoms to the far edge of the wall, where they can see the action better.

“He who loves his own wife loves himself,” the priest reads.

Aaron leans in to hear the sentence that his mother hated …

“Wives!”

Here it comes …

“Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord.” “Submit! Hah!” His mother’s contempt rings out crystal clear in his mind. “You submit. You do it. You, husbands. Don’t be one of those men, Aaron. Let your wife breathe and she will stay beside you and share your smiles. Don’t check up on her. Trust her. She’s living her life, that’s all.”

Which reminds him. Rachel—where is she?

Aaron longs to see her. Some of Rachel’s cousins and uncles are there in the church, sitting side by side. Obviously it’s too upsetting for her father and younger sisters to come to Shareen’s wedding after the cremation this morning, but Rachel—where is she? Even if she’s no longer the bridesmaid, Shareen wouldn’t want to lose face by not having her here at all. But perhaps Rachel has gone to Merry’s cremation instead? But Rachel hardly knows Merry.

Then it occurs to Aaron that Lijah, Hosi, and Youssa are missing too. Strange.

A piercing headache tells Aaron he needs water, but he can’t leave the wall yet. The ceremony isn’t over. The community room won’t open until the bride and groom arrive. In a haze he watches the anointing of Shareen and Daniel and listens to the prayer for the crowns as the priest places them on their heads.

“Lord have mercy,” the priest intones.

The congregation joins in and a bird flies overhead. The flapping shadow makes Aaron restless. Underneath the restlessness is a reminder of his failure. His failure to win Rachel’s heart.

The wedding procession forms, with the choir singing and children clapping. As Shareen leaves the altar, arm in arm with Daniel, to walk up the aisle, the smile on her face changes second by second with a broad beam here, a short grin there and a fleeting downturned mouth when she spots a prettier hairdo than her own. Daniel seems glad the ceremony is over and tries to hurry Shareen out of the church.

Walking slowly toward the community room, the bride and groom, with their families and friends close behind, head off into the night like a procession of bobbing boats on a dark sea. Abe and a group of kids follow them for a bit but, knowing it’s rude to dash in front of the happy pair, soon give up walking at that slow pace and run around instead. Abe comes back to pass the time with Aaron and Jacob on the wall.

“I thought that was going to go on forever.” Abe jumps on the wall to kick an imaginary ball at the moon. “Shame about Rachel.”

“What?” Aaron and Jacob say at the same time.

“Rachel, you know?” Abe stops kicking and stares at their shocked, wide eyes, realizing they don’t know. “She’s in the hospital. Her leg’s crushed. Lijah lost control of his bike and it crashed into her. They said she might die, but she’s alive. I think she’s alive. She might not be.”