Yasmine Rashidi - Chronicle of a Last Summer

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Dido is outside the gate after school. He is wearing a black T-shirt with splashes of blood. Colored string bracelets fill his wrist, the kind Mama calls scruffy. He came back from the beach for a football match. Everyone says he will be famous. I hug his waist and he kisses my head. He says we can go to the shop before we go home. All the older children from school go to the shop. They used to go to the kiosk to buy a cigarette until the police took it away. Now they go to the shop. The shop isn’t really a shop. It’s a hole in a wall with a wooden counter and shelves in the back. Only one person fits in it. When it’s closed it looks like a garage. The shop isn’t allowed to sell cigarettes by the one but they do. You have to buy something else too if you want a cigarette. Most of the boys and girls buy Chipsy or a can of juice. The man uses black bags like the kind the bread comes in. Dido asks me what I want. An ice cream cone. I have to get something else. A red packet of Chipsy. He tells the man to add two to it . The man tells him the price. Dido tells him to do him a favor. Impossible . Come on, be a man. They talk more. Dido puts the money in the man’s hand and slaps his shoulder. He owes him. I want to sit on the brick and eat my ice cream. Dido stands over me. I see him take two cigarettes from the bag and put them in his back pocket. I watch the English girl whose father is ambassador choose four packets of chips and two juices. She gives the man one pound. Her money is always new. He puts it in the drawer and looks past her. She stares at him. Another boy comes from behind. The man nods at him. A chocolate . He gives him the coins. He sits on the pavement near me and unwraps it. It’s the inappropriate kind. The English girl is still there. The man turns his back to her. I watch. She waits longer. After a while she walks away. Once I gave the man ten piastres for a sweet that cost five. I put the money in his hand. He didn’t say anything. Someone came after me and asked for a Chipsy. I waited like the English girl, then walked back to find the driver.

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Dido and I walk home. Mama took the driver on an errand and will be back later. When? Later. But we can do anything I want until then. He asks about my day. The teacher caught me saying a word in Arabic and made me do lines. I had to write a hundred times, I will not speak Arabic. He shakes his head. The teacher is mean because she has never been married. Grandmama says that only when a woman is married is she fulfilled. He shakes his head more. I ask him to tell me a story. He holds my hand. We turn the corner onto the long street that goes from one side of the island to the other. Dido tells me it was named after the revolution. Have I learned about the Free Officers? I shake my head. They launched the revolution that saved Egypt from the British. They got rid of the king. They made Egypt independent. Baba’s uncle was a Free Officer. He was the most principled man in the revolution. He resigned as vice president when the revolution goals were forgotten. He went and hid at Grandpapa’s house. He put his diaries under the mattress. He stayed there for five days. When they came looking for him, they found him watching TV. Baba was on his lap. Then what happened? He shrugs. But the children of the men who made the revolution are corrupt, he says. I look at him. To be corrupt means to steal. My friend’s grandfather was the president and great, but his children…

We walk past the key shop. The key man came to our house three times after Baba left when Mama forgot her keychain inside. He put a flat piece of metal like a knife in the side of the door and opened it. Mama thanked him and asked God to protect him. Afterwards she said she didn’t trust him. He made her uncomfortable. It was too easy to steal a house. She would start locking the door from the inside at night.

There are piles of newspapers on the pavement outside the juice shop. Dido takes one and puts a coin in the man’s hand. He wants to read the interview with the supreme guide who is the ruler of the Muslim Brotherhood. The president banned them from running in elections for parliament and now there is a long interview about it. The journalist who conducted it is courageous, or he might be a Brotherhood member too. How does he know if someone is Muslim Brotherhood? He squeezes my hand. It’s complicated . I hold his hand tighter. We are quiet, then Dido tells me the elections were two months ago. Why did the president ban them? What does it mean? They tried to kill two presidents before. They tried to kill Nasser, and then they tried to kill Sadat. They did kill Sadat. People like them killed Sadat. Mubarak is scared they will kill him too, so he is being iron-fisted now that he’s president. Iron-fisted means strict. I nod my head. The Brotherhood hate the president. They are violent and want Egypt to be like Iran. I ask about Iran. It’s a dark place with no freedom. The number of women now wearing the veil is a red flag. Mama is also scared of the women with scarves on their heads. Dido nods. Egypt never used to be like this. But Baba told me before that nothing would change because Egyptians like to have a good time. Dido laughs. It’s possible, he says. He tells me that next year the president will be reelected for his second term and he wants to make sure the Brotherhood can’t challenge him. I look at him. It’s like a race, and the president is cheating in his own way so that he can win. Who does he want to win? Neither. He thought Mubarak might be different but already he is proving he is just an old scrooge. I tell him Baba called the president a pharaoh. And he also said the pharaohs invented dictatorship. Dido laughs loudly.

Dido is a communist. It means he keeps to the left. He goes to meetings downtown and they talk about books. Baba said it’s dangerous to be a communist. The government doesn’t like them. It takes them away like all the other people we know. One of Baba’s friends from school was in prison for five years because he was a communist. He wrote in a newspaper and the president didn’t like what he said. He was twenty-three. When Baba told us the story we were at the beach in Alexandria sitting outside Granny’s cabin. He was laughing and said nothing would ever change. Look. He pointed across the bay to where Nasser’s and Sadat’s cabins were and shook his head. Don’t forget we had two revolutions, he told Dido. Nineteen fifty-two but also 1919. They came and went and all their hopes were shattered. Dido wore a communist-colored necklace and read books that Baba said could get him in trouble. He said he wasn’t scared and that the revolution would come one day. I heard the word revolution all the time but didn’t know exactly what it meant. Nobody answered me when I asked.

We cross the street. Dido points to a small square in the newspaper and tells me that our first president is sick. He has been living in isolation for thirty years. Why? Because life is unfair. We walk past the fruit shop where Mama buys our fruits. She calls by phone. They bring the fruit home in brown paper bags that tear at the bottom. The price is on the bag written with Biro. Today there are bananas, tangerines, watermelons, and melons, the green kind that Baba likes. They are piled like pyramids on the pavement. The fruit man holds up one side of his galabia. In the same hand he has a black bag with his money. He smiles and gives me a banana. He asks if Baba is back. He calls him Bey. I shake my head. He points to Dido’s newspaper. Anything new? There is a picture of the president on the front page at the top. It is the same picture every day. On the front page at the bottom there is a picture of the president’s wife. Everyone calls her Mama Suzanne. It’s what they tell us on television. A girl in school said she wanted to be like Mama Suzanne. I told Mama. She told me to wash my mouth with soap. I got up. I started to walk slowly towards the bathroom. Mama shouted that she never wanted to hear me say Mama Suzanne again. All my cousins call her Mama Suzanne. Nobody tells them anything. Every morning at assembly they sing the national anthem and then say, We love Baba and Mama Suzanne . At our assembly we only sing hymns. Dido is the only one who doesn’t call her Mama Suzanne. Uncle says he is rebellious and doesn’t understand how he turned out that way. Dido looks at the paper. He whispers but I hear him. He says a bad word. I eat my banana.