I remember sitting with her sometimes in the intervals between the nurses’ shifts. She’d usually be sleeping, half-dead. Her death had a smell: a sweet smell like rotting roses. I thought seriously more than once about the possibility of suffocating her with the pillow. I didn’t feel sorry for her. Yolly wasn’t the kind of person anyone could feel sorry for; I doubt she’d have let them. I was so angry about the way she was determined to stay alive. I thought she was being unspeakably selfish, which wasn’t in itself surprising—Yolly was selfish, even in the way she loved us. Her tenacious grip on life was simply incomprehensible and unjustified as far as I was concerned. Why did she want to stay alive? What did this life of hers consist of? She woke up so as to go to sleep so as to wake up again. Death was the only thing left to aspire to at the age of ninety-two. Life isn’t beautiful at all at the age of ninety-two.
In a rare moment of calm between her sorties in and out of consciousness, she asked me to fetch the picture of her that was hanging on the wall, and to sit down next to her on the bed. The rotten flower stench was fit to kill, but I put up with it. It was a dazzling picture: my grandmother aged thirty-something, looking as beautiful as a Hollywood starlet in a photo from the 1940s. She took it and stared at it for a long time. I think she touched it a couple of times, as if she was checking something. She glanced at me with a look somewhere between confusion and madness, and whispered in genuine amazement, “Look how long my neck was!” I looked: her neck really was long. I watched my grandmother looking at the Yolly of sixty years ago with deep concentration. It was a pleasant ceasefire in our rivalry of lonelinesses. For her, it wasn’t just some bitter nostalgia; it was a crisis of identity. She was the woman in the photo, not the one in the bed, and she couldn’t fathom how she’d woken up one day and found herself trapped in the dying body of a ninety-two-year-old. In the picture she was the same age as I was then, sitting next to her on the bed waiting for her to die.
Until that moment I’d never thought of her as a person. To me she was always the annoying grandmother. I’d never thought of her as a woman, though she was full of tales of a mythical past that revolved around her fabled beauty. Her bedroom was a source of great entertainment when I was very young. The dressing table was stuffed with accessories, makeup, powders, and perfumes. I think the powder was the thing I found most thrilling, for some reason. There was something magical about the sight of my grandmother sitting at the mirror, powdering her face from a pink china pot with tiny roses painted on it. It was a physical embodiment of the classical ideal of femininity that my mother had rebelled against. Generally speaking, most of my mother’s disagreements with Yolly revolved around femininity as it pertained to me. Yolly was always horrified that I was so different from “the daughters of people who are comme il faut,” which meant proper, respectable people. I was a sight: my hair was short and curly—meaning unkempt—I never put bows in it, and I didn’t wear dresses. The matter regularly assumed dramatic dimensions, leading inevitably to the familiar refrain that it was all my father’s fault for allowing my mother to let me go around in such a state. I looked like a beggar child!
Whenever I slept over at Yolly’s she’d try to straighten my hair against my will. She tried a cap of bobby pins, the hairdryer, the iron, straightening cream, ammonia shampoo, the lot. I remember the feel of cold porcelain on the side of my face as she held my neck firmly against the sink while the mission to rescue my hair was underway. I remember the singed smell and the burning feeling on my scalp. I remember the parts where she cried over the black luck that had given her a granddaughter as scruffy as a n****o whore. Yes, she used to say “n****o whore”—but in French, like chic people do. I think Yolly was my first introduction to the concept of repression. It was all very complicated. My mother’s own grandmother was Ethiopian, and Italian Yolly’s worst nightmare was that her grandchildren would turn out like “black monkeys,” as she put it. By some stroke of luck we turned out white, with blue and green eyes, and my brother was even luckier because his hair was blond and straight. My hair turned out curly like my mother’s, and this was a source of shame that Yolly was determined to blot out. But Yolly and her uncompromising stance toward curly hair suddenly did an about-face halfway through the nineties, when my father bought her a satellite dish and she started watching European TV channels. Her favorite program was a variety show on one of the Italian channels, presented by a gorgeous, svelte blond, who—lo and behold—had a headful of curls. Suddenly my hair was the dernier cri of white people’s fashion, and Yolly’s concern shifted from straightening my curls to making me lose weight. To be fair, though, that was a joint project involving all the women of the family—though they each took different approaches—the aim of which was to rescue my self-esteem by destroying it completely.
I couldn’t suffocate you with the pillow. I just couldn’t. Maybe because of the sound of your breath. You were breathing through your mouth and it was like your soul was escaping with every whistle but you just managed to catch it by the coat-tails and suck it back in with the next gasp. Between each whistle and gasp there was a gentle snapping in your nose like the sound of bubble gum popping. That, I thought, was the sound of your soul trying to get out before you dragged it back inside. But the truth is it wasn’t your breathing that stopped me. I think the main thing was the pattern on your nightie. Roses and hearts. Pink, yellow, red, and pale blue. The contrast of those delicate miniature roses on your sleeve, against your crinkled skin, just paralyzed my head.
When I think about what I chose for you—for us—instead, I realize just what a mess I got us into. I should have gritted my teeth and not let a few pink and blue roses on cotton leno weave stand in my way. I was going to suffocate you in your sleep. You wouldn’t have felt it. You wouldn’t even have known you’d died. But instead, out of cowardice or the illusion of mercy, I announced your expiry date and washed my hands of you.
On the last day, when we were in the car, pulling away from the house you’d lived in for sixty years, the house you’d never go back to, you turned to look at me and said, simply, “Salma, j’ai peur.” Salma, I’m scared. You said it quietly. In resignation. And, what was even more painful, without any trace of blame. Finally, after thirty years, I’d broken you, and it was looking like I’d broken my own heart along with you.
I sat you down on the side of the metal-framed bed and opened the bag to unpack your things. Your new room is grey. Everything in the convent is grey, even the nuns’ habits. The room is about three meters square. There’s a tall window with iron bars facing the door. The window looks out over the bell tower of the church. The bed is by the window, perpendicular to the wall where the door is. Next to the door is a small wardrobe. The wall right opposite the bed is empty, except for a large cross bearing the crucified Christ, whose distorted features might be an expression of the unimaginable torment He suffered for our sins, or the handiwork of a fairly terrible sculptor. Right below the cross is a small table and a metal chair. The table has an oilcloth covering, white with a tiny rose print. Roses again. Red roses. I’m being chased by roses.
Above the door is a long neon strip that buzzes, the only source of light in the room. Since the window doesn’t get direct sun, even the daylight resembles the cold glow of neon. The bag contains nighties, some changes of underwear, a dressing gown, socks, towels, and a pair of slippers. There aren’t any going-out clothes. You’re never going anywhere ever again. Whatever is left of your life, you’re going to spend it in this grey room, lying on your back and staring at the ceiling. There’s a ceiling fan, by the way.
I wonder how many times you watched it go round.
To bring some joy to the wretched remainder of your existence, or (let’s face it) to make sure you remember why you’re here, the nun will take you out into the convent garden every few days to sit with the others—the others who are condemned to wait—and wait for death in company. The old people’s home is an evil place, like a scrapyard, a warehouse for human beings who are no longer fit for use. The nuns, with their low murmuring and their floating-like movements, wear benevolent smiles on their faces. Their serene forbearance is the apogee of sadism and moral superiority, reminding a person constantly what a piece of shit they are: so selfish you can’t even take care of your grandmother in the last few days she has left to live. You have shirked your responsibility, you are spoiled, you are base, you are weak; but they understand, and they forgive you your weakness.
The convent garden isn’t really a garden, it’s a paved courtyard with a few potted plants. There are wheelchairs scattered all over the place. The residents sitting on the chairs are deliberately “placed” facing in wildly different directions. There is no need for the wheelchairs to face each other because their occupants don’t talk, presumably because after living their whole lives they’ve said everything there is to say and there’s no point making new friends. They are all silent. They stare into the middle distance or fall asleep with their heads nodding forward onto their chests. Facing the courtyard is a large wall bearing probably the most convincing piece of evidence that this convent is in fact a front for a clandestine, evil-worshipping organization. Set into it is an enormous glass display case containing a vast collection of preserved butterflies.
Hundreds and hundreds of butterflies, of all sizes and colors, arranged with painstaking geometric precision in rows that take up the entire wall. Hundreds of colorful corpses on baize—green baize—held in place by a pin through the thorax.
On my first visit, when the Mother Superior took me on an introductory tour of the convent, she stopped me proudly before the butterfly massacre so I could express my admiration of their collection de papillons rares. (At that stage in my life, the French language and insufferable affectation were best friends.) Instead, I started trying to imagine what possible means could have been used to kill all these butterflies while leaving their bodies and their fragile wings intact. There’s something terrible about the idea of killing so gently.
*
During one of the many futile battles of Mohammed Mahmoud, we were standing on Fahmy Street, a couple of meters away from the battle that was raging at the corner where it met Mohammed Mahmoud Street. It was completely dark. We were all standing in silence. There was no sound apart from the sound of the tear gas canisters and rocks that were being hurled back and forth between the two sides. The sound of the rocks was magical, like the sound of rain. Sometimes I imagine that if we could have heard each other’s heartbeats, those rocks are what they would have sounded like. The sound of the rocks made us feel safe. I can’t imagine anything that would have been more terrifying than the sound of the rocks stopping suddenly, like it was our hearts that had stopped. The sound of the rocks was punctuated at more or less regular intervals by the sound of tear gas canisters being fired. A broad, dry sound followed by a sharp whistling. There was something fateful about it, like it was the sound of the end of the world.
There were about six or seven hundred of us. For us, the world outside those two streets didn’t exist. Us and them. At moments like that the enemy was closer to us than anyone on our side who happened to be somewhere else, away from the battleground. Closer even than the thousands who were chanting in Tahrir Square just one hundred meters away. We and the enemies were one being, one vast body breathing slowly and rhythmically. Time didn’t exist either, as if we’d always been there and would stay there forever. We were bewitched, airborne, hovering just a few millimeters above the ground. We moved together in the attack and retreat as smoothly and delicately as seaweed in the waves, one wave pushing us away and the next wave pulling us back in. Every so often I felt bodies jostling my shoulders on their way past me to the front lines. Groups of three or four people in single file and a human corridor opening in front of them, every footstep swift and silent as they repeated the shahada before disappearing into the depths of the scene. The faces that we couldn’t see in the darkness, we would probably remember for the rest of our lives. The fishing rods of the martyrs. People would hang banners bearing those faces on fishing rods, where they would flutter high in the air.
Although I don’t think they were seeking death, and although the shahada I heard them repeating was probably only a precaution—the difference between me and them being only that they were more romantic (or just unlucky) than me—I did find out that day that I don’t want to die, that I’ll always stand a few steps away from death; I’ll put myself in its way only to run when it comes too close. My victory is to stay alive. I wasn’t alone; there were thousands of us standing a few meters from it in a state of euphoria induced by the concentrated dose of life that was that moment. We weren’t suicidal, we were gamblers addicted to the game. Death for us would have been like losing. We risked it, but it wasn’t what we were aiming for, and it didn’t stop us playing, in fact the possibility of it was what made us play again and again and again. No compulsive gambler stops playing when they win.
One day I told my doctor that I knew and understood that death was the most obvious next step for me, and that I didn’t know what was stopping me from killing myself. (This was before I arrived at a logical impasse: life ends with death; life is a fundamental precondition for any sensation; peace is a sensation; ergo it cannot be possible to feel “at peace” by ending one’s life, at least not for people like me who think death is the end of everything.)
You mean you can’t see anything stopping you from killing yourself, she asked, Or there’s something stopping you and you don’t know what it is? That’s the one, I said. There’s something stopping me but I don’t know what it is. I don’t know exactly what it is either, she said, but what I do know for sure is that it’s round and transparent. For some reason I found her answer very convincing, and I started to imagine this round-and-transparent thing accompanying me everywhere I went. It’s like a big soap bubble, roughly the size of a basketball, and it floats along beside me just above head height. It never touches me but it’s always there. Sometimes it strays a little further and sometimes it comes closer, like it’s tied to me with an invisible string. Maybe all of us have one floating beside us but we can’t see it because we don’t know it’s there.
I imagine how we must have looked in the darkness of Fahmy Street, standing in silence, with each person’s round-and-transparent bobbing above their heads. Perhaps some of them would have glinted in the lights that shone in the distance. Perhaps all of them would have suddenly become visible when a bomb went off, scattering sparks that reflected off them in a flash of rainbow color, before disappearing into the dark again. Perhaps when one of us died, their round-and-transparent would have burst with the simple finality of a soap bubble. We are as fragile as bubbles. Maybe we were just soap foam in Fahmy Street. Foam on Mohammed Mahmoud Street, foam on Qasr al-Nil bridge. Foam that looked like a huge solid mass from a distance, but turned out, if you looked closely, to be nothing but fragile bubbles.
A friend once told me that when he’s walking down Mohammed Mahmoud Street, his heart contracts. He feels like the street’s inhabited by the souls of the people who died there. I thought I felt the same way—my heart does the same thing when I walk down Mohammed Mahmoud—but it’s not because I feel like it’s inhabited by the souls of the people who died there. It’s because I feel like it’s inhabited by our souls, ghosts of us when we were at our most alive. Sometimes I think that if humans are allotted a fixed amount of life that’s distributed out over the course of their years, then maybe we used up our share in those moments of concentrated life that we imbibed so hungrily and so madly. We inhaled them. We smoked them. We drank them. We injected them. We ate them. We got down on the ground and rolled around in them until we’d finished them up. All that’s left now is a few puffs of vapor that’ll have to last for what remains of our lives.
In the legend of the Pied Piper, he plays his magical melodies and the children of the city follow him into the river and drown. We were like those children, enthralled by the sound of the battle. We followed it without thought, without logic, without consideration of gains and losses. We met there without agreeing to. We hugged each other with the gratitude and pride of those who were firm in their convictions, as if we had a choice. We went into the street with bared chests and a confident swagger, like action movie heroes on our way to the front lines. With every step, the sound of the battle got louder, bewitching us. With every step we lost our sense of the world and dissolved into each other. We became a single mass in a state of collective intoxication, heading sure-footedly toward an impossible battle. A losing battle—that was its magic. A romantic battle. A battle of idealisms. An ecstatic face-off between absolute power and absolute nothing. A sure-footed procession toward an almost-certain death, and a smart jump out of the way at the very last moment. A deep gulping-down of a dose of concentrated life.
