I saw where I was going when I first met Shams Ismael, have I had a little control over my yearning thief back in the day, my body wouldn’t have been sutured to my boatless share of the sea. Yet I wouldn’t have had this delightful sin running through my vessels and into my fabric, shamelessly nourishing my gasping yellow farms.
Shams buried my neck in his indigo silky scarf as if I were a stripped butterfly that couldn’t thrive off his delicate cocoons, a notorious runaway from his sandalwood castle. When I madly took it off he was right behind, hands around my waist, fingers melting. I was in a black dress with Puffy short sleeves that I found in his closet maybe we purchased it in Abu Dhabi the summer before, maybe it was his wife’s. I wouldn’t know. He was smoking a ridiculous berry-flavored cigarette and watching me through the mirror. All shades of brown were splattered across the vanity in small and very large makeup containers. I opened my drawer and pulled a red lipstick, patted a very thin layer over my lips. Shams hated it.
He made his own tie, while singing along Hamza Eldin’s skinny voice and soulful Oud, he introduced me to him along many artists who lived in the shade of mainstream media. He believed that art must be the beating heart of people's yearnings and aspirations. He would spend thousands of pounds on rare recordings of Sayed Darwish and Zakria Ahmed, art that was originally created to mock policies and circumstances that allow feudalists to behave in this exact same way. “How much you payed to get this you hypocrite bastard?” I would tease him each time he came home with one of those vinyl records with famed and obscure artist names on them, some made in Beirut, some in Germany. He would spend two night playing the recording over and over while working on his cartoons.
As we walked out, flowerpots lining our way to the Antique elevator, my sense of solitude was magnifying and fear was firing my nerves. Most of the building apartments were empty. It was only Rawia on our floor and right above an American Journalist and his family, they rented their place from a man of a Circassian descendant called Nabil who recently moved to Sheikh Zayed next to his son and grandchildren. This systematic migration to either the far west or far southern east has been going on for the last decade. Heirs of the valley’s little wonders abandoned them for larger spaces in the suburbs where new communities were designed to be immune against the unwanted guests circulating in their slums around downtown Cairo. However, I had been there few times long before accompanying Shams to fancy steak houses and Ramadan family Iftars at his uncle’s. Although people without cars were openly unwelcomed, Private transportation in Cairo is massive and invincible, microbuses reach snake burrows if there are fourteen passengers on board. It was impossible to ban them as thousands of people had to use them from all over the city to get to their work, which is mostly labor. Anwar, my high school sweetheart worked in an ice cream shop in a renowned shopping Centre in the fifth settlement. He would take me there in weekends whenever he had extra cash to buy us a fast food meal, which wasn’t always affordable to the likes of us. He would take my picture in the mall with my multi-layered hijab and cheap jeans set that Esraa, my sister, had grown out of. People would give us superior but attentive looks, disgusted but quite amused. Anwar worked there for years after we broke up and I shamefully left my old life and only quitted after his cousin Mahmoud died crossing the road to the mall.
Shams was getting more impatient with my cloudy head. He softly slapped me: “Would you give me a few minutes of your precious time, Safera Aziza?”
I slapped him back, “Shams, no!”
He backed off a little and stretched his arm caressing my head. Then he did his usual nervous tick, pressing his fingers against his eyes which moved his glasses up and caused them to slip away, he knelt down to pick them up, I had an urge to slit open his freshly-shaved head with my Talon. My heart trembled and I immediately wanted to kneel down and kiss his hair, I worshipped Shams, I still do. It was just joyful to flash-think about overpowering him, hurting him. Rawia showed up as she always did. In a burgundy dress just above her knee, hair tied up like a falling parachute, signature vanilla orangey fragrance floating the air and drowning my lungs. She nodded and made a brief comment on the beautiful weather that Shams agreed with. Her shameless big eyes were slowly dissecting my breaking shell of facial coloring and borrowed elegance. Her roman nose was so delicate; her beauty was almost painful. I constantly wondered how we look besides each other. How inferior I was next to her figure.
I walked us away from the garage. I had an unusual urge to stroll a little and perhaps get my falling fragments astray from what I am and bury my reality in fresh air and distant smell of fumes. Octobers in Cairo are striking, There’s no such thing as a typical Cairo night. Cairo has a million nights each night depending on one’s location. We did them all, from dirty tables in the alleys of AlSayada Zeinab serving all sorts of “meat accessories” along “Halal Whiskey” which is basically Salad marinade to all kinds of real alcoholic beverages in notorious villas in Cairo–Alexandria desert road. In Sham’s neighborhood of the long gone English colonialists and the long sleeping retired couples, nights were absurdly still. He followed me outside the vulnerable borders of his aristocratic trench and to the corniche. That’s where life as I know it abruptly cut its nap. Nile boats with all colors of light at once. florescence waves reflecting over the insomniac water. A boy with a cool haircut dancing with a veiled girl who seemingly left those bangs out intentionally to a Mahragan. Everybody loves a good Mahragan. Even Shams and I, we used to dance to those some sacred nights. Tens of hundreds of speedy cars were carelessly passing. I was impatient.
“I think I am leaving”, I pulled Shams’ palm around my velvet-wrapped waist.
“Excuse me!” He pulled out his hand as he just got electrified
“I love you Shams, I Just can’t, everything is getti…”
“Have you talked to your family?”
“No, I haven’t. I knew you would be asking questions like these, instead of stressing on my homelessness out of your damn territory, make some real conversations, ask me what I am freaking thinking.”
“What are you freaking thinking?”
“ If I re-applied for my scholarship you know, I don't have a detailed plan but..” I could not get myself to say it all to his face.
He stared for a minute and then stormed into the car chaos, crossing one line of cars at a time, a good old hack to pass wide streets in Cairo where you don’t usually wait for the traffic lights to go red as cars are always flooding from known and unknown directions. I followed him, almost getting hit at every hesitant stop. He disappeared into the darkness of the serene leafy streets, I tried to trace his heavy perfume, got lost on the scent of petals wafting through the soft mid-evening breeze, Abdelwahab’s neat voice was floating from a distance out of a worn out machine probably from a doorman’s basement under one of the proud concrete beauties. I remember not recognizing the song, despite the variety of music I got exposed to in Sham’s house, he wasn’t a big fan of the nation’s legendary composer, he considered him a right-wing musician with plenty of superb music of decontaminated sentiment. And though he worshipped Umm Kulthum, he despised the songs he made for her. Umm Kulthum’s Qasabgi’s era was his thing, Shams would shiver to those.
I was still circling around an old Palace garden and thinking about Sham’s obsession with connecting himself to the messy side of Cairo’s history If I was a part of it when I heard him honking right next to me. He got off took my hand, opened the left door and let me into the driving seat, a long moment of silence that Cairo streets rarely granted me in the past and is pouring over me in the last two years. His hands lingered on his forehead for a little while, I heard him weeping, I took him into my chest, his head as light as an empty can. He kissed my bare chest down my dress, and cried: “I just can’t see you leaving again. Will you go back to the scary waters I picked you from and find your way back to your troubled mates and spend the nights in rented damp mosquito-filled apartments or notorious downtown bars and never land between my arms again? you’d be murdering me, without you, I am so little, without you I am nobody”, Shams and I knew that’s not true. He kissed my left hand. Some days he had that nerve-racking inflated ego, some days he was the smallest thing in the world. That night he slept in my arms on the mattress I placed on the living room floor that one night I was losing sleep.
Sunrise was minutes away. I was at the terrace. All packed, I took most of what he gave me including a little olive that’s growing off my occupied land, Shams, the father of all soviets who unapologetically fired this bullet inside. Unlike the first time, this time I was not sure I wanted to immediately get rid of the baby. I wasn’t mad at Shams, I only wanted to feel how I felt before I was assassinated. I ran my fingers through the subtle breeze, like a fragile branch, my body was flowing. Everything felt musical. An old guy was walking his very small dog. Birds were fearlessly landing on the vast handrail. Sham’s white roses, once vigorous, had gone ashen. Burning fingers and Sore feet told me I should have some sleep but I had my mind made. I was trembling, I didn’t deserve the opening scene of the day. For two years I was more than a premium guest in a classic theatre balcony sipping the finest roasted coffee beans among many other things Shams made sure to get the best of for me to enjoy.
How many times I set fire into this house, he would get back home to find me in a dirt pit, a cigarette hanging out my mouth, half dry hair, I was washing off my sins by starving myself but never for too long. When I shouted, he shouted, sometimes threatening to leave, calling himself names apologizing for how he ruined my innocence. And though I know he was never honest about this and that my lower class body was always gonna be what it was, I would go down on him, kiss everything bare and apologize.” You ruined me, I love you, I love you when you show the animal inside, when you have nothing but the animal inside of you.”
I kept making up back and forth conversations while examining the semi-dead body on the mattress across the hallway thinking of him again, knowing nothing about myself and my motives. Shams Ismael, a pile of tough bones and body structures covered in a tanned reddish skin as he has been lying on the beach all year long, serious amount of thick hair all over the place, head, chest, legs. A microscopic necklace around his long thin neck that he never really got out of, it was visible only when he was nude and under the amber lamp of his nightstand. From the moment I opened my eyes on that absurdly white pillowcase, that for a reason or another smelled like ink, good ink, in his unfiltered den and was let to free fall. The apartment was huge, and I was clueless. I navigated like an immature burglar, in feathery steps and held back breathes. Nothing seemed unfamiliar, it wasn’t so far from art spaces that have been all over downtown Cairo within the last few years, that were all about fifties nostalgia, classic European furniture and art, hippyish misunderstood artists, who do all kinds of art or no art at all, just young people who are full of themselves and I was an active party. It was just quite larger than any place I have been into. A vast lobby where I drank and knocked myself out the night before. A hallway to another area that felt like a studio except there was no color pallets, no blank canvas, just finished art that’s either hanging on walls or put together in a row on two opposite corners, French newspaper tossed on a one-legged table that looked like a dwarf tree. And on the floor, another stack of old newspaper, tied in a brown paper ribbon, the front facing was in a romance language I could not identify, with a large monochrome photograph of a man probably in his early thirties with a jet black hair flowing down his face and up on the empty background. On a cabriole sofa another stack of newspapers and a couple of film posters, I picked that one poster of a lady in a dress and a black jacket hanging her arms in the air, obviously jumping in joy with a huge moon all around the background, on the moon someone left a note in a neat handwriting: “it’s Cosmo’s Moon” and signed under “Nariman”. Two vases and few sculptures organized in a wooden cream-colored buffet and a man of limestone tensely sitting on a seemingly handmade rug, hands extending against the floor, face turned behind, right ankle rubbing against the left. I was squatting, closely examining its featureless sad face, combing its hair with the tips of my fingers when I lifted my eyes and saw Shams, blocking the entrance of the room, and quiet looking much like a statue himself, I was compelled to say anything, explain myself but backed off as much as I can to keep a distance and tried to say the quirkiest thig that jumped to my brain but I couldn’t, I just blinked.
For two weeks after Shams would take me to the most captivating places, I’d feel like a foreigner in my own city. Exotic food, Galleries and films, we’d go to Zamalek cinema and see films that moved me for probably unintended reasons. I got that this exotic charm is probably the trap used to lure girls into his bedroom eventually and I thought I was no fool to fall for it.
It took me a fortnight to do. Our first night was intense but with zero entanglement. I walked in like a burning candle. My falling stature diminished with each step. My bounding heart almost spelled over the arrogantly centered bed. His smell was steaming the air. He lit a cigarette. I took a little tour. Digital artworks on the walls. On a shy corner desk was a music box with two golden rose ballerinas holding hands. A couple of polaroids here and there. Some children’s books with exquisite paintings. A facepalming lion, dancing baby camels, a scared astronaut, a baffled little princess with question marks all around her head.
“Thoughtful” I cooed,
“I think this female masturbation artwork is a little over the top to place right above the bed though”, “It’s not a turn on either. If a woman can please herself so well to have this look on her face, she’ll just be on her way home” he laughed without turning his head off the phone. “Human connection is kind of overrated” I followed,
“You are young and sweet, so sweet”
“And a virgin” I sighed.
“I know” he muttered while eagerly typing.
We talked all night long and had food delivered in two separate occasions. One at 11 p.m. The second at 3:30 a.m. He handed me one tiramisu box and said “that’s one thing about Cairo, you can get anything delivered to your doorstep anytime you want, “don’t take this for granted kid, I lived in other places.”. I don’t know why I too much savor this tiramisu memory the most from this night, it was tasty but that was the night I learned most of what I know about Shams’ other life.
The sun was baking the rest of my energy. Gleams of flowers of all colors swiftly painted the horizon, shortly, the noise of the students of Collège De La Mère De Dieu will be crushing the balcony walls. I was waiting for my nun, a tiny albino probably in her seventies, covered in white with a black beaded necklace ending in a large black cross. She always passed me by right after sunrise on her way to morning shopping. It was me who first tricked her into acknowledging my presence. I had pathetically become adventurous. One morning on her way back I cried “Bonjour”, my voice cracked, came out less loud than I wanted, Instant regret, my heart pounded, she heard me anyways, looked up, took a full circle before spotting the hedgehog, half-hidden behind the leaves, she smiled, and she looked entirely different when she smiled. She replied with a bonjour and a couple of other French words I didn’t get, I waved and she waved back and moved forward. For months we exchanged greetings and broken French words. I guess I just wanted to say one last Bonjour or was lingering for Shams to wake up and stop me as he did each time. All my blood rushed to my turbaned small head when I heard Shams getting up off the mattress. He came over, like always, shirtless, sweaty and irresistible. He would always turn off the AC in the middle of our sleep. He threw me a morning kiss, I kissed him back with a closed mouth. He headed to the kitchen, tied his apron behind his back over his shirtless mountains. He had dozens of these, the classic leathery black, the flowery, the colorful that he made along Amina, his daughter. I rotated my chair, fixed my gaze on the door where my three suitcases were all ready and waited for him to spot them on his way out. It did not seem like he did when he came back with his wooden tray, put it down and handed me my coffee.
“Did you get any sleep?”
“I am leaving Shams.”
“I saw your bags. Do you need a ride?”
“No, I will get an Uber.”
“She, ah. Ok, darling. You can take your jewelry if you want.”
“I did, I worked hard for those, a full time slut.”
He never said anything until my phone beeped.
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| A photograph captured in Garden city, Cairo. |
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