The Girl Who Fell to Earth (19 page)

19

DELTA VIRGINIS  •  THE HOWLER  •   

If I felt like Pip being rescued from my lot in Doha, arriving in Cairo made me feel like Luke Skywalker entering into Mos Eisley—fresh off the moisture farm. The time between being plucked from my lowly lot in Doha and landing in Egypt had only been a matter of weeks, so my head was spinning. A gruff man eyed me as I came out into the parking lot of the airport. He was leaning against a flamboyantly decorated cab decaled with hearts and cartoon blood drips as though it had just hit and run. “Going somewhere?” he grunted at me through a puff of Cleopatra cigarette. I peered around for other options, but strangely, no one else was vulturing for my fare. I got into the car and was whisked across town via the Sixth of October Bridge.

The ride was improbably smooth as we hurtled through the tangled lanes, and even though he was steering with only one finger, the driver guided us as surely as if we were on a maglev track. We sped above the old Cairo, squeezing at high speed between minibuses and motorcycles like a Fiat hovercraft. Neon-lined minarets and fluorescent-lit office blocks whizzed by in my periphery, and I dug my fingers into the ripped foam of the backseat for dear life. It looked oddly futuristic for such an ancient city. But first impressions fade, and anything probably would have dazzled me coming from the gravelly backwater that Doha still was at the turn of the millennium. I rolled down my window as we crossed over the Nile. It was dotted with little colored lights, pleasure boats blasting festive party music from busted speakers as they passed under us in the snaking black current.

At seventeen, I'd never been to a real metropolis before. Tacoma, Seattle, Abu Dhabi, Doha—although they were technically cities, they were all quaint hamlets in comparison to this. Equal parts disoriented and exhilarated, I wondered what Suhail might be doing at that exact moment all the way in Boston and felt all the frustration and fears of the past months burn off as we descended into my new home.

The first order of the next day was to go to the Qatari Ladies Home, where I could stay for free. It was on a leafy street in Mohandeseen, innocuous from the outside, wretched on the inside. The officious proprietor gave me the full tour. Although she was Egyptian, she had carefully studied the details of being a fine Qatari lady, and so, similar to religious converts, she felt the need to compensate by out-Qatari-ing Qataris. She wore a
very
sleek age-inappropriate
abaya
and lots of ostentatious jewelry. She carried a very expensive Louis Vuitton wallet, gesticulating with it while she gave me her tour of the building. She listed their facilities: satellite television, a fleet of drivers, and so on. Every tenant had two maids to look after her—one to clean and one to cook. As ludicrously decadent as all this sounds, the rooms were all deeply dismal. As we made our way through the halls, she opened different apartment doors at random without knocking, surprising the wan-looking girls behind them. Disinfectant evaporated off damp cement floors as she bragged, “The maids are all live-in.” She led me to a scene of maids who were old enough to be the students' grandmothers having lunch and watching TV in a little staff room.

When we returned to her office, she seemed confident that her tour had sufficiently impressed me and took out a stack of papers for me to sign while she rattled off the rules like fine print.

“The curfew is five p.m. every night but for Thursdays, when you are allowed to go to a restaurant for dinner.”

I almost choked. Even if this place was free of charge, I couldn't move backward on the track I'd laid away from the constraints of Puyallup and Doha. I needed a place where Suhail could come and stay. I gave my excuse: “I'm unsure how this would work. You see, I have class until eight p.m. on some nights.”

She barely restrained a sneer as she eyed me up and down; to her that sounded like a
fine
excuse for getting up to no good. I would have done anything to dodge falling under this lady's matron law. “Well,
habibti
, perhaps this is
not
the home for you after all.”

The university's hostel was my next option, and I was disappointed to find that it was full of Americans and Gulf Arabs. Because the dorm was full of CIA wannabes and daughters of sheikhs, I kept to myself, knowing we'd have nothing in common to talk about. I spent my first week trying unsuccessfully to get through on the phone to Suhail and the next sulking in the computer lab. I felt trapped by my jealousy and wrote mortifying, bitter e-mails to Suhail as a way of distracting myself from the stray place I now found myself stranded in.

The American University in Cairo was the kind of place everyone in Egypt had heard of but knew nothing about. I knew nothing about it at all when I arrived, but soon found that it was elite and mysterious in the same way the American school in Doha had seemed to Faraj. And just like in Doha, I found myself having to make tiresome explanations about where I was coming from to the people I was categorized with. The demographic of AUC was split up into generalized ranks, the cracks of which I slipped through. The vast majority of the university was composed of advantaged Egyptians pursuing full four-year degrees in computer science or broadcast journalism. The next largest group was foreign exchange students on study-abroad programs. Among them were cliques of hippies from Evergreen in Washington State, poli-sci majors from Georgetown, and Muslim-American kids from all over just wanting to study Arabic. Those were the main draws for the U.S. intake. The rest of the students were wonderfully assorted: sons of Palestinian politicians, Japanese Egyptology
otaku
, Swedish human rights researchers, exiled African intellectuals, and a disproportionately large number of Bohra women from India who were nicknamed “Bo-Peeps” on campus for their frilly Muslim dress.

In 2001, the American University in Cairo still consisted of three main campuses huddled together at the southeastern lip of Tahrir Square. The most iconic of these was “Main.” It was a gorgeous stone building constructed in the 1860s for the Minister of Education, Khairy Pasha. Ornery cats roamed the maze of tiny halls, and from the roof I could stand and watch the five-story palm trees sway peacefully in the exhaust fumes wafting up from Tahrir Square. The second campus, “Greek,” was a Brutalist cement fortress consisting of the sociology and journalism departments, as well as the library. On entry there were huge double-wide steps forming the main promenade. It had a reputation as a catwalk, which everyone entering the campus was subjected to, and a meeting place, which meant there was always a big audience when you walked by. Farther afield there was “Falaki” and “Rare”—the first named after the nineteenth-century Egyptian astronomer, the second after the type of books it housed. Falaki was a modern building housing the art and computer departments, and Rare was the kind of library/lecture hall in which you could imagine Aleister Crowley fingering through the card catalogue for “Pharaonic curse.”

The walk to these outlying campuses was infamous, as schoolboys from the nearby Lycée came to ogle, grab, and generally harass the women who were bitterly assumed by the neighborhood to be the spoiled daughters of Egypt's most powerful and wealthy. Some of these kids were no more than ten, and they really didn't care who you were. As long as you had tits, they were looking for an in. And by
in
, I mean the passing chance to grab a handful of private flesh and groan grotesquely at you.

I spent the first week on campus pinging from office to office and eating for free at new-student orientations. My assumption that entering the fold as a Qatari would simplify things was a mistake. Rather than allowing me to disappear into the flock with my Arab peers as I'd hoped, it had two adverse effects. First, the university assumed that as a Gulf Arab I was wealthy and therefore ineligible for any kind of scholarship or work-study situation. Second, I was forced to sit for remedial English aptitude tests and was automatically enrolled in college-level Arabic. The first day of class we were required to write our opinions on a very complicated article about pan-Arabism, which the class had deconstructed together while I was sitting with them. I struggled to follow as the professor, a jowly man called Dr. Zaydan, rattled on about the essay and then opened the floor for discussion. I took down the best notes I could, finally piecing them with my dictionary's help into a single unreadable sentence I inferred to mean something like “The Arab personal identification she has no borders.”

After class I approached Dr. Zaydan to plead my case. There was no way I would be able to endure an entire semester being beaten with my own linguistic weaknesses. But Dr. Zaydan was suspicious from decades of lazy students trying to avoid hard work. He managed to twist my qualms in my mouth and make me feel like a dunce in a few sharp words. He leaned back in his chair and looked over the frames of his glasses at the enrollment list. He ran his finger down it, found me, tapped my name, laced his fingers, and looked up at me with a fake-patient smile.

“Explain to me, Miss Al-Dafira, why do you need to be in a different class?”

“Because my Arabic is broken.”

“This class is here to fix it. All of your peers have broken Arabic. What makes you think you are a special case?”

He said this with a mocking upswing in his voice, as though he had never heard of something so absurd. The only way out was to authenticate my inauthenticity. I began a monologue in Gulf pidgin about my origins, hoping that the combination of bad grammar, bad accent, and misused vocabulary would convince him. But it only seemed to make him angry.

“Don't try that stuttering Arabic with me. I lived in the Gulf. I know your family. You are the original Arabs! The nomads of the nomads! The Arabic language originates with your people! You should be proud.”

I felt my face getting hot. This blow was low. “I
am
proud,” I retorted, a little confused over how he knew who my family was and to hear that the language I learned in Umi Safya's house might be more than a dying dialect.

Dr. Zaydan continued, “You are more proud of your American culture, aren't you? You
must
be. You give English precedence over Arabic because it is easy.”

“Doesn't everyone speak their mother tongue first?” I stuck up for myself.

“Believe me, you are not the first to beg exemption from my course. Your generation is lazy!”

The more he ranted, the more he seemed to convince himself that I was trying to con him. I didn't even need to speak. Apparently I had touched a nerve.

“Yes. You want to migrate into English! A primitive language! And you want to forget your noble origins.”

I took the moment of silence to slip something in edgewise. “I don't know how I can prove it to you, doctor.”

He sighed, unenrolling me from the class by crossing my name off his list. “Well, Miss Al-Dafira, you can't.”

 

Two days later, just halfway through the first week, I had settled all my courses except for a replacement for Arabic. I finally tested into a modern Arabic literature in translation class instead, where the reading list included
Season of Migration to the North
by Tayeb Salih,
Adrift on the Nile
by Naguib Mahfouz, and
Zaat
by Sonallah Ibrahim. From the back of the class on the top floor of the main campus I had a good view of the square and the traffic below. Conversation at AUC was
always
political, despite the relative class-homogeneity of the students who attended. In this particular course, I had learned early on to stay out of it, as Mohamed, the wispy-bearded son of a prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure, and Magda, the outspoken daughter of a university professor, argued over whether Nawal El Saadawi was a shit-stirrer or a saint. We had just watched a documentary about the notorious Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi to augment our reading of
Woman at Point Zero
, which had thrown the class into three consecutive days of maddening circular debate. I had received tacit hints during the summer semester that certain subjects were best left for Egyptians to debate. This was one of them. Still, although the class was full of born-and-bred Egyptians, it was Magda and Mohamed who dominated the class discussions while the professor looked on with mild amusement. These two contrary young Egyptians were so fully and impressively themselves that when they spoke, no one questioned them, not even the professor. The words they used, the clothes they wore, the little signifiers like Mohamed's baby
zebiba
prayer mark and Magda's pierced nose, were all consistent with who they were. I knew one needed a strong foundation from which to argue so persuasively, and equally I knew that I shouldn't wallow over the fact that I had no base to argue from. I envied Magda's eloquence. And however often Mohamed said things that made me want to weed-whack his beard, I
did
admire his passion.