I was moved. “No, I don’t want to leave you at all. Moving out doesn’t mean leaving you. I’ll come visit every day, and you will come and stay over, two or three times a week. I won’t leave you. And please don’t pressure me.”
“I’m not pressuring you. I know I can’t. When I was little, I was always first out the door for school. I would stop in front of the train station and look at the trains, and think to myself that as soon as I had money I’d run away and go to Cairo. I felt suffocated by the village where we lived, not because it was a bad place but because I hadn’t chosen to live in it. I know you don’t hate our home, but you need to do your own thing.”
I got up and hugged him. “So do I have your blessing?”
“Because not having it would have stopped you?”
“Yes. If you said to me honestly and directly that you didn’t want me to go, I’d stay.”
That annoyed him a bit. “Because you know I’d never do that!”
“All’s good then,” I said. “How much will you contribute?”
He gave me a tight smile. “You’re in charge of the household money, Nadia. See how much you need and work it out. When are you planning to move out? Have you found a place yet?”
“I haven’t started looking. I wanted to talk to you first. So I’m thinking that maybe in, like, three months I will have sorted something out.”
I could see a trace of sadness in his face. I didn’t want to be the cause of that sadness, but I had made up my mind. I would pack up my stuff and have a new place, a new start, and I’d create on my own all that came with it.
My father couldn’t live alone for long, so he moved in with my aunts in Heliopolis. They were widows who lived together and didn’t mind him joining them. He didn’t know how to live alone. I continued to manage his monthly expenses even after I moved out. I found my small studio and bought my beloved sofa, which became my cocoon. I would lie within it like a tortoise in her shell. I only worked when I ran out of money and had to pay the rent. I didn’t have many needs. I bought things I didn’t need when my wallet was full, and when it was empty I stayed at home, in the cocoon of my sofa. I watched old movies on TV, and smiled childishly when Zaynat Sedky cornered Ismail Yassin in the kitchen of Ibn Hamido.
17
When I was twelve, two years before my mother’s sudden death, Radwa and I decided one day that we wouldn’t take the school bus and would walk back home instead. I told her that was madness; that it would be a long walk and it was very hot, and then there would be a fight with our mothers at home when they found out about what we’d done. She laughed carelessly and said, “But they fight with us anyway. Don’t worry, we’ll walk fast and won’t be that late.” Deep down I wanted to go with her so I didn’t resist much, just mumbled some objections.
We walked for over two hours, holding hands and crossing streets, jumping on and off sidewalks, laughing loudly. Out of breath, with our heavy schoolbags on our backs, we stopped every once in a while for a few minutes’ break, then kept on walking. It was my first time to walk independently in the street.
“You know what I want us to do?” I asked Radwa. “I want us, one day, to walk and walk, at night, and stay out all night until the sun comes out.”
She laughed. “One day we will. But when we grow up, so that we’re allowed out at night. But I promise you we’ll do it one day—you remember that.”
“And we’ll walk to the other side of the big bridge and go to the midnight cinema,” I said.
That was the height of my ambition—to stay up till morning in the streets of Downtown, walking with Radwa until our feet hurt, with not a care in the world, no fight at the end of the adventure and no calculations needed to avoid it.
Years later, when I went to visit her during a snowy winter where she lived and worked on the other side of the globe, we thought back to that day. We sat together on a sidewalk in a large square and watched all sorts of people walking in hurried steps around us. No one noticed that we sat on the ground. No one harassed us with any annoying pseudo-flirty remarks like we would have heard back home.
“Men here are certainly not like men in Egypt,” I joked. “I mean, there’s no one harassing us or accosting us or making our lives hell.”
“Yep. Everyone ignores each other here.”
Surprised, I asked, “Does it bother you?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “But sometimes I just wish someone, anyone, would talk to me. Sometimes I go for days without talking at all.”
I saw bitterness in her eyes, which hadn’t been there when we were younger. She was outgoing and sardonic and had an ability to cope with anything. It must have been the loneliness.
In this strange country, Radwa and I went out and danced in bars we didn’t know and where no one knew our names. We made fun of everyone. We remembered our teenage years, her little gerbil, the headphones of my red Walkman. We remembered how we hated school. We drank everything we could afford. When men chatted us up, we frowned and consulted with each
