Glass Collector (29 page)

Youssa, Lijah, and Suzan greeted everyone and behaved like the family Aaron had always hoped for, but one person—Mahir, Shareen’s father—failed to appear at the wedding and no one has seen him for quite a while.

By the time dusk dawns on the sixteenth day of their married life, Aaron decides to visit Mahir. But he must take him a gift after all this time.

Aaron opens the food box and screws up his face with disappointment to see that most of their wedding presents have gone. They eat their meals with his stepfamily and have shared everything with them and their close neighbors.

All that’s left is a bag of sugar and half a packet of dried tamarinds. Aaron knows Rachel won’t mind if he takes them. No one has a sweeter, kinder nature than her.

Tucking them under his arm, Aaron races down the stairs and he’s off along the alley, jumping over rotting food and leaking bags, all the while shaking away the remembered smell of medical waste as he makes for the tenement where Mahir now lives with his sister. But the person in the doorway isn’t old man Mahir. It’s Jacob and he’s fiddling with a white spray can that has lost its squirter.

“Hey, friend.” Jacob slaps him on the back and flashes his big yellow teeth.

“How’s it going?” Aaron asks, glad to see the whites of Jacob’s eyes are clear today. He looks well for a change.

“I’ve gone back to medical-wasting.” Jacob glances at the can for a second. “But Mom only lets me sit on the cart now. I’m not allowed to collect or touch any of the stuff. Karim my cousin does it and watches me all the time. They seem to think I’m into drugs or something. You should tell them, Aaron. I’d never do that.”

Aaron doesn’t want to get into this. “By the looks of it, your skin’s cleared up.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Jacob’s eyes light up. “Do you know anyone who might want to marry me?”

Aaron grins. This feels more like the old Jacob. “What about Constance, Shareen’s old friend?”

“She’s nice, but I think she likes Malik. He’s much better-looking than me. Did I tell you Constance said her dad saw Shareen with a man nearly as old as Daniel, selling knockoffs near the museum?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Anyway, do you think I stand a chance with

Constance?” Jacob looks hopefully at him.

“Only if you look after yourself,” Aaron says firmly. Jacob stares at him, knowing what he says is true. “Fancy sitting on the wall?” he asks.

“I’m going to see Shareen’s dad. I’ll see you later.” Aaron smiles warmly. “You’re still my best friend.”

With that, he heads up the stairs to Mahir’s sister’s home feeling about a million years older than Jacob.

The door to number twelve is wide open. There’s the usual smell of decaying food and rotting garbage from the rubbish bags that fill every inch of the room, apart from the cooking area and small space left in the middle for sitting. Scrawny Mahir is on the floor, cutting lengths of twine with a blunt knife from a ball in his lap. At first he doesn’t notice Aaron, but then he turns around sharply.

Aaron nervously greets the old man by smiling and nodding several times before approaching him slowly with the bag of sugar in one hand and half a packet of dried tamarinds in the other.

“It’s good to see you, Mahir. I hope you are well.”

“Put them there.” Mahir gestures to the sink, which is crammed with damp washing.

Aaron looks around for somewhere safe to put the food and spots the metal box underneath the clothes hanging over the sink. There’s so much rice and flour in there that he has trouble closing the lid. He wipes his forehead with a wrist, worried that rats will slip through the tiny gap he’s left.

Quickly, he rearranges a flour bag until it’s flat enough to allow him to slam the lid down, all the while feeling slightly angry with himself. He should have kept the sugar and dried tamarinds, because this family clearly has tons of food to last until the merchant comes in a few days’ time, while his family has nothing left. On the other hand it’s important to show respect by bringing a small gift when you visit an older member of the community.

Mahir sniffs and bores into the ball of twine with the blunt knife, a pained expression on his face. Aaron doesn’t know what to do now. Mahir clearly has nothing to say to him. Not even a thank-you. Well, at least he tried. He’s about to leave when Mahir drops the knife and looks him up and down.

“Don’t have children. They bring you nothing but misery.” His dark eyes reveal a sadness that stabs Aaron through the heart. What can he say to that?

“I got a message from her,” Mahir says, pulling a piece of lined yellow paper from his pocket. He carefully unfolds each crumpled square before reading it out in a cracked, chesty voice: “I’m never coming back. I hate Mokattam. I hate you for making me marry Daniel. I hate him. Hate him. Hate him. Make sure you tell him.”

“She doesn’t mean it,” Aaron tries. “She wrote it when she was angry. You know how she is when she loses her temper. She yells, but then she forgets all about it. Shareen’s like that. You know she is. She hasn’t changed. Anyway, she only hates you for making her marry Daniel. Nothing else.”

Mahir sniffs and his eyes brighten for a second.

“I hadn’t thought of it like that. It’s true there are some fires that not even marriage can put out, son.”

Son?
Mahir called him son.

Like a son, Aaron makes his way to the door with Mahir’s eyes still on him. The throbbing warmth of that word stays with Aaron as he makes his way down the filthy tenement stairs and into the lane. Jacob has gone. Another day is almost over and he has lovely Rachel to go home to.

Calm, peaceful Rachel. Shareen is out there somewhere and Aaron hopes she’s happy, because he is, and in a way he has Shareen to thank for that.

How Aaron feels is full-up, sitting with his back to the rubbish bags in the downstairs room with his feet in the lane.

“What are you thinking?” Rachel asks.

“I’m just remembering how lucky I am.” Aaron turns to smile at her.

“Me too,” she says.

“We like it here, don’t we?” he says.

“We do!” Rachel giggles. “I really like saying ‘we this’—‘we that’ …”

At that moment, Ishaq, the icon seller, and Sulayman, the metal worker, walk past and nod to them with huge smiles. Ishaq’s wife, Parvin, is becoming a close friend of Rachel’s. Then Hafeez, a neighbor, coughs long and hard and waves as he tosses burned coffee from a tin mug into the lane.

They watch the brown liquid trickle between a squashed cigarette carton and a moth-eaten green lampshade.

These are his people.

Finally, a feeling of absolute, overwhelming, complete love that Aaron never thought he’d feel is amazingly, truly, and wildly his.

After being sent an article about the Zabbaleen—a community of mostly Coptic Christians living in Cairo who collect and recycle eighty percent of the city’s trash—I decided to visit the city.

My sister happily agreed to come with me, and I hired a translator to take us to Mokattam, the abandoned- quarry home of the Zabbaleen. The translator kindly brought us black galabeyas to wear as a mark of respect and to help us gain better access to this fairly closed community. I loved wearing the galabeya. Until then, I had no idea how comfortable and freeing the flowing black dress was, and, from the quiet acknowledgements of the local people we passed, how thrilling it would feel to be accepted by them.

The surprises continued when the sheer horror of living among thousands of tons of stinking, decaying garbage sank in, as did the poverty, hard work, and continual threat of disease that accompany the Zabbaleen’s every breath. I tried to feel my way into their lives while noting the surroundings and it was both a shocking and a liberating experience, because this despised and hidden society does more to help their world than most people realize. But where was the story I hoped to write?

An elder met us at the magical, stunning church of St. Sama’an—a pristine oasis surrounded by filth. He kindly answered my endless questions and, later on, as I stood beside the nearby low wall and looked out over hundreds and hundreds of roofless tenements, I picked this as the location for my story, even though the main character didn’t yet exist in my mind.

It’s a common sight to see the Zabbaleen going about their business in the streets of Cairo, but Aaron sprang to life only after I noticed a boy of about fifteen, his hair, face, hands, and old sweatshirt and jeans covered with quarry dust, coming down the middle of four lanes of beeping cars, buses, and taxis in a pony cart piled with trash. What struck me about this particular Zabbaleen teenager was that despite the manic traffic crashing past, he wore a look of complete bliss on his round face that I’ll never forget. He was absolutely still inside, in a way that’s rare to witness these days, and it was this luminous peace that inspired the creation of Aaron and his love of glass.

The Zabbaleen are under extreme pressure from problems caused by misapprehension about the spread of swine flu, the expansion of Cairo’s fleet of rubbish trucks, and the fact that they are beholden to unscrupulous merchants who make a killing out of the glass, metal, rags, and paper that they recycle.

I set
The Glass Collector
around the time President Obama made his first presidential speech on the Middle East in Cairo, June 2009. The title of his speech was “A New Beginning,” and the irony of those words was something I wanted to explore by providing a glimpse of Aaron’s life as a waste-collector. The Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarrak, had been in power since 1981, and all sections of Egyptian society had suffered under his rule. The Arab Spring revolution ousted him in February 2011, just two weeks before
The Glass Collector
was released in England.

The revolution brought Muslims and Coptic Christians together in Tahrir Square to demonstrate against the abuse and corruption of Mubarak’s presidency. Sadly, in the months that have followed, there have been a few violent divisions between the two communities and the situation remains volatile.

Despite the pressures and tensions, there exists a vibrant, united, and useful society among the Zabbaleen people, and many in the West could learn a great deal from them.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Anna Perera

Published in 2013 by Albert Whitman & Company

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