Nekropolis (13 page)

“Mama,” she sobs, and coughs, choking on her own sorrow.

“It’s okay,” I soothe. “Mama’s here now. Hush, my girl, hush.” Words, meaningless words, like petting a dog. To her little brother I say, “Get her in! Get her in! She doesn’t need to be out in the street like this!” It takes the two of us supporting her under her thin arms to get her inside.

“Mama,” she says, “Akhmim needs to come see me.”

“Shhhh,” I say. “Come lie down. You need to lie down.”

We help her into the cool darkness of my sister’s house and help her lie down on the bed we’ve made for her in the back.

My sister is making cheese. Her daughter is diapering a baby. The house has the ammonia smell of diapers. Hariba is crying silently, tears coming unheeded. Hariba was always proud. The others were always complaining, “Mama, Hariba is bossing me around.” “Mama, Hariba is telling me what to do.” The oldest child always grows up too fast, has too much responsibility and too little fun. I would come home from selling flowers and find her, her dark eyebrows knit into a terrible line, willing them to behave. I was always telling her, “You watch them, Hariba. You have to be the little mother.” They weren’t allowed to go outside while I was gone, and I was afraid she would let them. She was only six. I remember frightening her, telling her if she let them go out, men would take her sister and sell her.

“Don’t be angry when you turn your face to her,” my sister Zehra would say. I was always afraid and it made me fierce with Hariba. Zehra puts the press on her cheese and comes to crouch beside my daughter with me.

I pet Hariba and hush her.

I had to work. We had to eat. There was nothing to be done for it. A child needs a mother, but a child also needs food, a roof. When they could go to school, it was better, it wasn’t all on her. What else could I do? It was what had to be, and there’s no sense crying over it. Nothing would change if I did it again. Our children are hostages to the world.

“Little one,” I say.

She falls asleep.

“Is she going to die?” Nabil asks.

“No,” I say and my sister Zehra hisses at my son through her teeth. I’m not sure, though. It’s instinct to tell your children it will all be okay, and my youngest boy has never become a man. Fhassin I could have told. Fhassin had a thread of metal running through him when he was fourteen.

“She looks sick,” Nabil whispers.

“We’ll find a doctor,” I say.

It’s just words to push away the darkness. When you are a mother, though, you do things you don’t know you can do. When I had four children and no husband, I did things I never would have thought I could do. And now I will again.

“Will you watch her?” I ask my sister.

“As if she were my own,” my Zehra says.

Once Hariba said that she wished Zehra were her mother. I cried for nights.

Walking out into the sunlight makes me blink. It’s the heat of the day and people are closing up until evening. Nabil follows me, hopeful and hesitant. “We’re going to look for a doctor,” I say.

“What if they call the authorities?” Nabil says.

“We’ll find one that won’t,” I say.

My house is still cool and smells of rose perfume. For most people it’s the smell of death, but for me it’s the everyday smell of coin. I have a little money, some saved and some for the rent. I keep it in the wall, in a crack of a burial niche. People are too squeamish to reach inside and rob me. It doesn’t bother me to reach inside-nothing there but dust and bone.

It’s a pitiful amount of coin, but I have it tied up in a rag. Who would I ask to tell me about a doctor who would do something illegal? Not my neighbors. I don’t know anyone who would know such a doctor, even if I could ask.

Fhassin would know, but not Nabil.

“We are going to talk to the dead,” I say to Nabil.

He looks around him. We who live in the Nekropolis are always surrounded by the dead, and if we know anything, it’s that they don’t talk.

  SPECIAL_IMAGE-clip_image002.jpg-REPLACE_ME

I’ve never been to prison. Never gone to see my son. I’ve sent money, if you don’t send money to prisoners, they’ll starve, but it felt as if I dropped it into the hand of someone outside the Moussin of the White Falcon. We take the underground outside of town, to where it comes above ground and the tracks have to be swept clear of sand. There isn’t much sand to see. Most of the desert is bare, just rocky places and dead land. There are a couple of villages, marked by the green of a well or the fence of a military installation. I was born in a village by a well. I know what life is like out here. The train comes by, but the city is far away, as far away as heaven or hell.

Eventually we pass kilometers of fence. A single wire, that’s all, just what is needed to disrupt a prisoner’s brain. No people, no buildings, just the single wire swooping between each post.

The prison itself is more than one building and except for its size it could be one of the government buildings we’d passed on the train. It’s the color of the soil, the color of emptiness under a blue sky. Three large buildings and then a dozen smaller ones. Men in army uniforms with guns, standing in the train station, apparently bored. Thank the heavens a lot of people get off the train.

I follow Nabil out onto the platform, and the hot dry wind tangles my robe around my legs, strong enough to push me forward. Is it the will of Allah? I balk anyway, pulling my headscarf around my face to keep the grit out of my eyes. I pretend to be looking for a sign to tell me where to go, but I want to get back on the train.

“This way, Mama,” Nabil says.

I follow him through the turnstile. Most of the people coming to the prison are women. Young women, old women. A river of women whose men are in this place. Nabil stops at a stall that sells fruit and candy. “What?” I say.

“We need something to take him,” Nabil says.

He’s been here before. I didn’t know. Nabil is short, like Rashida, but stocky. A bulldog, a turtle, with curly hair tight against his head and a flattened nose. He is a man when he’s not with me, I suppose. Do I turn him into a child? Just by being his mother? He is bigger than me. What is this that we do to our children, to make them always children until we are so old we become children?

I think about putting my hand on his arm and telling him that I see he’s grown up. But I don’t know how to tell him, so I just watch him buy oranges and chocolate. As if we’re visiting the sick.

I give myself over to him, to his expertise in this place, and it’s as if I’ve been holding my breath. For years I have been holding my breath. Since Samil died, I have been doing all these things myself, with no man to do for me.

We walk a few meters from the railway station and we’re at the prison gate. More army men in uniform. They check Nabil’s string bag of oranges and chocolate and wave him through. Nabil is wearing a shirt and trousers and already the heat has made half moons under his arms. Anything he puts on is wrinkled as soon as he touches it. It’s been that way all his life.

We walk up a long, rutted dirt road toward the big buildings. Women are chattering, holding on to their children. What is worse, a husband killed in an accident like Samil or a husband in a place like this? At least I am an honorable widow and I get to wear black. I feel the protection of my black chador now. My husband is dead, he is not here. I’ve always had a kind of secret pleasure in being a widow. When Samil died, it marked me as someone outside of life and it answered questions. Then, later, it let me be a man when I wanted to be.

This place is the end of the world. Or the rest of the world is gone. Only the train tracks go back across the desert, an insect line rising and falling across the rocky hills until finally they disappear. Nabil waits while I look back, but his hand on my elbow is a subtle pressure to go on.

We go through another gate, this one in a low wall, and a guard with a clipboard takes our names. And then in twos and threes we pass through a doorway. When Nabil and I go through the door, it closes behind us and we are in a place with high walls and no windows and a closed door in front of us. Above us, men with rifles stand on the high walls.

Nabil murmurs, “This is the dead man’s gate.”

I cannot bring myself to open my mouth. I wait mute for the gate in front of us to be opened.

Then we’re in a courtyard, where families are talking to their men, and other men squat, waiting, their eyes on us. I look for Fhassin. Will I know him?

“He’s not here,” Nabil says. “We didn’t let them know we were coming. I’ll have them go get him.”

The desert-colored walls of the prison rise before me. The windows are long grates, broken a bit in some places, but too shadowed to see into. In the places where the breaks are large enough, a hand reaches out into the sunlight. I look away from the hands, perched in the windows like birds.

The men are frightening, broken-toothed, raw. They crouch and smoke, or eat oranges. Some of them don’t have shirts. A few have fantastical mustaches and some have shaved their heads, as if they were holy men. One man’s shaved head has writing tattooed all over it and he is talking to a thin-faced young woman whose veil is skimpy and whose hair is dyed red. I’m afraid. There are guards, and I don’t know why any of these men would pay any attention to an old widow, but I feel like a rabbit.

I glance up at the wall, wondering if one of those hands belongs to Fhassin, if he can see me here. One of those hands is moving, cutting the air, birdlike but decisive. Swoops and chops. Is it Fhassin? I raise my hand, tentatively, but the bird-hand just continues its strange flight.

Nabil comes back. “Fhassin will be here in a few moments.” He glances up. “That’s one of the men who are sentenced to die.”

“What’s he doing?” I ask.

“Talking to her,” Nabil says.

A young woman stands in the yard. Her hand is flickering, too, in the same birdlike movements.

“Condemned men aren’t allowed to have visitors,” Nabil says. “That’s the only way they can talk.”

“Who is she?”

“His girlfriend. His wife. I don’t know.”

She’s a pretty thing. She looks like anyone-not cheap like some of the women here. I feel as if I should look away, but if she’s embarrassed, I can’t tell. She seems intent. A stubborn flame.

“Is it a code?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “She is shaping letters in the air.”

I don’t know how to read, but all my children do.

I watch her hands dance in this strange place.

Will I know Fhassin?

And I do know him, the moment I see him. I know from his smile he is being brave. I know that this matters to him and he would like to pretend that it doesn’t.

“Don’t cry, Mama,” he says.

I hide my face in my veil.

Nabil and Fhassin stand awkwardly when I have composed myself. Nabil starts and remembers the bags in his hands. “Here,” he says, and hands Fhassin the oranges and sweets. They’re embarrassed.

Fhassin is wearing a tight shirt, stained and yellowed with age. He’s older, harder-looking, but he’s still Fhassin. I had imagined him in a dark place, alone, but here he is, surrounded by all these men. One of them.

“Are you well?” I say.

“Sure, yes,” he says. “You look well, too.”

“I am.”

Fhassin looks at the bag of oranges and sweets. “This is great. Really good.”

He needs a shave. “At least you haven’t grown a beard here,” I say.

He looks around. “Those men are fundamentalists. They band together. It helps to have someone stand with you here.”

“You have friends here?” I ask.

He shrugs and glances away. “I’m not by myself.”

Secret Fhassin, who never ever told me things. When he was a boy, he would answer in just the same evasive way. “Where were you after school?” “Where I could hear Hariba call.”

He’s the one I always worried about. The one who was always thinking.

“Hariba is home,” I say.

“Hariba?” he says. “But she was jessed. Did she buy her way out?”

“She ran away,” I say. The bitter taste in my mouth makes my lips purse, like lemon on my tongue.

“Good for her,” Fhassin says. “Getting jessed was stupid.”

“Not good,” I say.

“Mama!” Fhassin says, “Going by the rules isn’t always the best thing, you know?”

“You should talk,” I say. “Look at you.”

“Look at me,” he says. “I made a mistake. But you always went by the rules and look at you.”

“I sleep in my own bed every night.”

He laughs, a short hard sound. “So your prison is the Nekropolis. So it’s bigger than this prison. How much bigger?”

“Hariba is sick,” I say. “She is dying. From the jessing. I need to find a doctor for her. I thought you might know one.”

His jaw clenches with anger, but he laughs again. “That’s why you came. Not because of me, because of Hariba.”

“Fhassin,” Nabil says.

“That’s right, isn’t it, Mama,” Fhassin says. “You came for Hariba.”

“I did,” I say, because what else is there to say? It’s true. And the Mashahana says that truth may be the longer way, but it is the way out of the labyrinth. So much truth I can’t say, though. Fhassin, you were my favorite. And you were the one I lost.

“You wouldn’t come for me,” Fhassin says.

“I was afraid to look at you,” I say.

He frowns.

“Don’t fight!” Nabil says. “Mama, just once would you be fair to Fhassin!”

Fair! To Fhassin! I who have never been fair to Fhassin, who has always secretly favored him! I gape at Nabil.

“Fhassin,” Nabil says, “listen to me. She can’t eat, she can’t sleep. She ran away with a
harni
.”

“A
harni
?” Fhassin shakes his head. “No, not Hariba.”

“Yes, Hariba.”

“Nabil, a
harni
is something grown in a machine, it’s not just a servant. You mean Hariba ran away with a servant?”

“No, a
harni
. The wife of the man she worked for had one. Then they sold Hariba’s contract to someone else and she went back and got the
harni
and ran away to the Nekropolis. She was living in a death house down where Ibrahim has his shoe place. We didn’t even know where she was.”