Sonallah Ibrahim - Stealth

Abdel Wahab’s voice wafts in from Um Zakiya’s radio. He sings: “In the sea I did not desert you/ On land, you abandoned me/ For gold I could never sell you/ You sold me for straw.” Father sings along: “I was a flower in a garden/ You plucked me/I was a candle burning in a hearth/ You smothered me.” He shakes his head sadly and says: “Once you were ‘Mr. Khalil,’ like a flower in people’s hands that they’d sniff, then you turned into something else, like the old rotten leftovers to be tossed out.” Fatima says: “Please don’t talk that way, Sidi. Look at you, fresh as a rose.”

He gets up and walks across the room. His eyes are on her bare thighs. Abbas’s voice is calling her. She covers her legs quickly and jumps up. She says: “Good night, all.” He goes with me to the bathroom to get ready for bed. He turns off the light. He lies down beside me. He leaves the door to the balcony open. I say to him: “Aren’t you scared a robber will come in?” He says: “Whosoever depends on God, He protects.” He recites the verse of the throne. I think about the angels protecting us, flapping their wings around us. I fall asleep.

Suddenly, I am awakened by moving around next to me. Father’s scratching between his legs. I sleep. I wake up again. He’s still scratching. His hand’s moving faster. He’s panting. He turns toward me. I close my eyes and fall deep into sleep.

The strike starts right after the first class. We repeat the chant of a student, wearing a fez, from fifth grade. “Long live Egypt, Free and Independent!” We call for more armed opposition to Zionism and for the English to quit Egypt and for the unification of Egypt and Sudan. We leave the school grounds. Some suggest that we go to the university to join up with the students there, others that we go the other way towards Fuad the First School and Al-Husseiniya School. I remember father’s instructions. I pull myself out of the group and steal away, across the side streets that lead towards our house.

He opens the door for me wearing his flannel gallabiya. His white skull cap covers his head. A frown. The leftovers from breakfast are on the table in the hall. I tell him the story of what happened. He says: “Put down your satchel, sit down, and study.” Our room is all gloomy and the bed has not been made. I ask: “Did Fatima not show up or something?” He gives a short answer: “No. Put the satchel down on the desk.” I take out the history textbook. I open to the chapter about the Islamic Empire in the age of Othman. I read the story of his dispute with Ali Ibn Abi Talib and the way it ended in tragedy for both.

The doorbell rings. I run to open it. Fatima is carrying a bundle of clothes. She is wearing flimsy plastic sandals. Tears stream down her cheeks. She says Abbas beat her and kicked her out, and that she is heading back to her village. Father says to her: “Calm down. Have a seat.” She says she cannot spend another night with Abbas. Father says our house is her house and that she can stay on with us until Hajj Abdel ’Alim gets out of jail. “Come on, don’t cry so much. Get up and get to work.”

She cleans the table, the room, and the kitchen. He tells her to get a bath ready for herself. She brings the stove into the living room. She lights it and puts a pot of water over the flame. She fills the zinc basin about half way up with water. She puts it in the middle of the room. We follow her in. He tells her to wash her hair well and asks: “Do you have a comb?”

“Yes, why?”

“For lice.”

She says her hair is clean.

“Do you have a loofah or should I bring you ours?”

She says: “No. I have one.”

“Do you have clean clothes?”

“I have some.”

He tells her to put her dirty clothes to the side to be washed later. We leave the room and she closes the door behind us.

We go into our room. I sit at my desk and start studying again. Father lights a cigarette. He leaves the room. I follow.

“Papa, why do they say about our master Ali, ‘God be generous to his face’?”

“Because he never looked upon the nakedness of any human. . even himself.”

I ask: “Is that a sin?”

“Yeah.” Selma bares her legs. There is a dark space between them. Mama Tahiya moves to her other underarm. She turns her head to study it. She feels it with her fingers. She stands up. She tells me as she gently takes hold of my ear: “Get to your room. Sit there and don’t leave.”I take her hand pleading, “Please, I’m begging you Mama, not by myself.” She studies me with a smile. “Okay. You can sit in the living room, but only on the condition that you don’t spy on me.”

I go into our room and then come back out. He walks around the living room, going back and forth with his hands clutched behind his back. He tells me she is a simpleton who could burn herself. Or she could trick us and not really take a bath: “Take a look and see what she’s doing.” I peek through the keyhole. My glasses knock against the door. I press them back up on my nose. I start looking again. I see her sitting down in the tub without anything appearing but her bare shoulders. Steam comes up from the pan of water. Mother grabs hold of the metal jar. She fills it half way with hot water. She forgets to mix in a little bit of cold.

I tell him she is naked and sitting in the tub. He says: “Let’s see,” and he bends over to look through the keyhole. He stands back up and walks around the dining table. He rubs his moustache with his finger. I notice that his eyes are shiny. He tells me to offer to help her rub her back. I do it without wanting to. She turns me down. She walks out after a while wearing a colored gallabiya and combing her hair. Water drips off it. He asks her if she boiled her clothes and she says: “Yes.”

She changes the water in the basin. She brings in the washtub for laundry from the kitchen. She puts it next to the basin. Father paces in the living room while he watches her. I get out my history textbook and I sit at the table, facing the guest room. She sits down on top of the low, wooden kitchen stool. She gathers up her gallabiya between her legs and her knees are bared and even part of her thighs. She is bending over her folded right leg. She puts a piece of the halva putty on top of her foot. She lifts it off and then rubs on it. She puts it on the middle of her leg. She does the same thing over again up closer to her thigh.

She moves clothes from the basin to the tub and rubs them. She dunks them in the water in the basin. She rubs them some more then wrings them out and hangs them to dry on the clothesline hanging in the skylight. She uses up all the water in the basin and the sink and then dries the floor. She takes the burner back to the kitchen. He tells her to soak the tablecloth for a while in the tub. We can see that the top of our wooden table has a large grease stain on it.

He tells her to light the stove to heat up the food for lunch. He throws himself into cooking the piece of meat. He adds bits of charcoal to it. He gets the green salad ready. He calls me and tells me to bring in a pack of salt from on top of the sideboard. I run over to it. I stretch out my hand to take the salt. Fatima beats me to it and I pull my hand back. She calls out: “Yes, Sidi. Right away.” She brings him the salt. I follow, feeling mad.

He finishes browning the meat and starts to heat up the bread over the fire. She puts two plates on the table. He says that the table is so dirty that he doesn’t feel like eating. She rushes to clean it with the kitchen loofah. He asks her to wait until we have finished eating. He takes the pan of meat into our room. He puts it on the round table. She brings in the two plates and the bread. She hangs on to her own plate. He sits on the edge of the bed. I drag the desk chair over and sit in front of him. He dishes out our food first. She holds her plate out to him. He serves her. She goes to sit on the floor, so he says to her: “Sit up on the bed. You’re just like my daughter.” She sits next to me. I lose my appetite.