Another excerpt from my
work-in-process,
untitled novel:
Om-Hassan sat on a bench in the
Ramses station. She watched as passengers dragged their bags or their children or a combination of both across the tracks. She heard sighs of exasperation: “It’s late again!”, “
Wilad el kalb, can’t they do anything right?”
She felt ambivalent to the happenings around her; she knew today was the day she would experience transcendence. Like the hundreds of thousands who had flocked to Zeitoun from all over Egypt to witness the 'miracle' of the Marion apparition in May of '68, she yearned for contact with divinity.
Om-Hassan stared blankly into the horizon, as if she could see the train approaching, miles away. That was Hassan’s favorite childhood past-time activity, she pondered. She recalled how her smiling child ceremoniously announcing the arrival of the train, describing it with such vivid detail: its navy blue color that distinguishes it from the red cargo trains, the golden eagle, the official emblem of the state painted on its side, its erratic whistle sounds and the smell of burning coal. Passengers on the platform within ear shot would stare in the direction he was pointing, and then dismissingly brush him aside. “Don’t lie, child. That is wrong” they would say. But he wasn’t lying, Om-Hassan thought. She envied him the world he lived in: a world where reality was enhanced by sparks of a flamboyant imagination, a world where history teachers and unicorns, bus conductors and talking crocodiles, fairies and shape-shifting cars, all inhabited the same world he did. She envied him his absolute control over the reality he experienced. In his world, there were no needs, wants or sorrows yet, only fascination.
Her life started the day he was born, she would inform people: neighbors, friends, the grocer, the butcher, anyone willing to listen. People knew her as Om-Hassan, but no one knew her real name, or at least, they thought they didn’t.
In truth, she was born Om-Hassan. Her father, as customary in villages in Upper Egypt, chose her name as a self-fulfilling prophecy. God willing, they reasoned, she would grow-up, marry and bear a (male) child named Hassan. Her nascent life would thus be defined by her future role as bearer of a first-born male child. When she did eventually grow-up (just barely), marry and bear a child, it was not Hassan, but a beautiful girl, whom she subsequently named Zahra. Zahra’s arrival to this world was met with pats on the shoulder and encouraging words, the way an athlete who finishes a race last is told: there’s always next year. Next year you will win gold, next year you will bear a boy. She was the only one happy to see Zahra, the only one who held her in her arms, who looked into her round brown eyes. Her young husband – who is also her cousin - came into her room after labor and told her it would be all right. As if she was a helpless child who broke her doll or scrapped her knee. As if Zahra was stillborn. And when Zahra died a few days later of sudden infant death syndrome, she was the only one to mourn her loss.
She cried herself to sleep for the death of her first-born, to no one’s sympathy. While she slept, her husband took the infant and buried her in the fields. It was harvest season and there was no need to inconvenience the villagers – he reasoned - with a funeral and a proper burial. It was for this reason, Om-Hassan believed, that when Hassan was born less than a year later, he was born with both his spirit and Zahra’s. It was the only way for baby Zahra to live in a place where everyone wanted her to die. Hassan was born with the same round brown eyes that smiled at her the way she thought Zahra’s eyes smiled at her. The baby was received like the prodigy son they believed he was. They held a “Sebou3” ceremony on his 7th day, a pagan Egyptian ritual conducted for thousands of years, where the village women and children orbit the child in his cradle, holding candles and chanting hymns to ward off the evil spirits and ensure the blessings of the gods.
It was the spring of 1947 and the Cholera epidemic ravaged through Upper Egypt. By fall season, more than 10,000 villagers would be dead, the worst Cholera outbreak in the 20th century. It would wipe entire villages in mere weeks. The virus, which came on cargo ships from India, found fertile ground in the densely-crowded, un-sanitary living conditions in rural communities. The disease was incurable, and patients developed high fever for 5 days. On the 6th day, the person either recovered fully or died. When her husband Ali developed fever, the government came and took him away. In an effort to curb the propagation of the disease, the government had created quarantine zones in the desert, akin to concentration camps, where the ill were presumably treated, but were effectively deposited and left to die. Ali never came back. When Hassan developed fever, Om-Hassan, fearing the government would take him too, fled in the darkness of the night, on a train to Cairo. She arrived penniless, with a sick child, and spent the night sleeping on the platform at the central station. When she woke-up, Hassan’s fever was gone and she rejoiced in the certainty that everything else would fall into place. She walked to the affluent neighborhood of Garden City, asking at every palace or mansion if they needed a cook, a maid, a gardener, a nanny. She was turned away on every doorstep, until the reached the bustling palace of Hillali Pacha. Like a bee hive, dozens of servants were racing in and out of the palace gates, presumably on errands in preparation for an evening of festivities. She offered her services and was immediately whisked into the kitchen, to help the chef and sous-chefs prepare a feast for a hundred guests. She labored for hours on end: stirring, simmering, baking, boiling and slicing. When dinner was served, she packed behind the curtains and watched the fair ladies and gentlemen of high society, in lavish gowns and tuxedos, waltzing to the music of an entire orchestra. She had never seen anything like it, the sights, sounds and scents were exotic and almost intoxicating. She left a good impression on the kitchen staff, and they decided to keep her. She would stay in the servants’ quarters, where everyone took an immediate liking to the smiling 5-year old Hassan. Om-Hassan gradually came to know of her patrons. Hillali was an established Cairene upper crust family of Turku-Syrian descent. Hillali Pacha owned a textile company in the delta and some of the most fertile cotton fields in the Nile valley. Madame Hillali was a Portsaid-born French woman. Her father was an engineer for the Suez company. Despite her relatively modest background (daughter of a provincial technocrat) she effortlessly morphed to a lady of high society, one that hosts lavish balls, organizes charity events, the tall fair blonde of delicate features and perfectly fluent French (it was after all, her native tongue) was paradoxically, the very definition of a post-war Egyptian femme moderne, the way Grace Kelly, an American actress, became the face of post-war European royalty. It was as if Matilde Hillali (she preferred to go by the name Vivienne, as Matilde betrayed her family’s provincial French origins) was rehearsing for that role her entire life. Their children, Emile, Adi and Farida inherited their mother’s delicate features, French tongue and all the trappings of an affluent lifestyle. Excessive wealth can take its toll on the emotional development of an offspring: absent workaholic entrepreneur father, absent alcoholic socialite mother and a troop of nannies that revere you like a totem can result in debilitating emotional detachment. Om-Hassan observed in wonderment the children’s morning ritual: dressed by their nannies in school uniforms, marching sullenly down the stairs and cobbling on the marble landing, like kittens separated from their mother, who draw in each other’s bodies for warmth and a sense of safety. Except their faces did not convey any of those emotions, their faces conveyed nothing.
Posts
