Cigarette Number Seven

was always covered in a white bedsheet. I knew nothing about the outside world. My mother said that when she started to take me out, I would stand in front of streetlamps and ask their names, and that whenever she switched on the TV I would enter into long monologues with news anchors and stomp my feet when they didn’t reply. All I knew about the world came from my grandfather’s laughing face and the songs of his beloved Umm Kulthum.

He talked

And I talked

Until we finished all the words

2

I absorbed details. I remember my mother, sitting with her sister in my grandfather’s room, and me in the middle, as if I weren’t there. They were discussing things—people; maybe relatives. Were they talking about the men in their lives, their marriages? Maybe. They talked, and sometimes they cried. Then Grandma came in and silently, gently, led me to the other room. She dressed me in going-out clothes—a nice pink and blue summer shirt and blue cotton shorts. My hair was long and dark. She combed it, somewhat roughly, and put two flower hair clips in it, one on each side. I sensed drops of water on my head and looked up at my grandmother, but her face was unchanged except for the tears she quickly wiped away.

She took me by the hand to the photographer’s studio and told me to smile: he was going to take my picture but first he had to see my teeth in a wide smile. I tried and tried. Finally my features cracked into a tight little smile that more than anything conveyed suspicion. I didn’t show my teeth.

3

Umm Kulthum sang again, after months of Quran on the radio, months in which the only color I saw was black. My grandmother moved with her big rice tray to the kitchen, abandoning her wooden couch, and naturally I moved with her. I watched her and hardly spoke. Everything she did was slow and deliberate.

Coffee brewed on the small stove. She brought onions and garlic cloves in from the small kitchen balcony, and slowly and skillfully peeled the garlic and sliced the onions. When my eyes started to water, she ordered me out of the kitchen, but I stubbornly refused. She layered the onion and garlic along with sliced potatoes in an elegant oven dish, whose colors fascinated me, and placed it in the oven. Then she coated the chicken with flour, vinegar, and salt, and placed a saucepan filled with water on the stove. When bubbles started to appear on the surface, I told her the water was boiling. She smiled—the world’s tightest smile—and dropped the chicken into the water, just for a few minutes, before taking it out and placing it on top of the potatoes in the oven. To do that she took out the oven dish with her bare hands, without using a towel. My grandmother’s fingers were old and crinkled, so maybe her nerves had died, or maybe she enjoyed the pain of heat on her aged fingers.

When she was done with the potato dish, now a chicken-and-potato dish, she placed the copper pad, which prevented food from scorching, on the burner. She put a saucepan on top of it, put in some ghee and semolina, and sprinkled in a few drops of mastic. She added wet rice to the mix, which sizzled and immediately released its delicious aroma.

I sat on a chair, resting my cheek on my hand and looking at the ceiling, ready for the awaited moment. My grandmother looked at me, her tight smile slowly spreading across her face. “You’re dying for a coffee, aren’t you?” she said, and I turned to her eagerly. She got up and placed the coffeepot on the burner. When it was ready, she poured most of it into a big white cup for herself and a few drops into a tiny porcelain cup—which must have been part of a toy set—for me. Yes, I was a child who drank coffee. A five-year-old in a big kitchen in front of a red tray full of rice, sipping coffee and waiting for the moment that always came and made everything look wonderful: I would look up and see that all the colors had deepened. The potato dish was reddish gold now, the chicken on top almost done. The rice was in the pot and the plates were set before us.

4

I held on to my father’s hand. We were in a vast, beautiful park that had a big pond, in which snow-white birds swam. I wasn’t interested in jumping around like the other children. My sole ambition was to get as close as possible to the ducks and geese in the pond. I pulled at his hand and he laughed. “What is it you want, my girl? You want to feed the geese? OK, OK, easy now!” We went to the park caretaker, who gave me some breadcrumbs to throw to the birds in the pond. But I wanted to put the bread in the geese’s mouths. My father laughed. He held my waist so that my upper half was dangling toward a goose, who snatched the piece of bread out of my small fingers. I frowned for a moment, and then threw myself into my father’s arms.

Then he took me to get ice cream. We sat together at a metal table. I smeared my face with ice cream while my father read the newspaper, occasionally peering at me from behind its pages and his glasses. “Having fun?” he asked with a big smile. I nodded, content, then climbed off my chair and went over to dirty his face with an ice cream kiss.

5

Life in our apartment in Madinat Nasr started when I was barely seven. I had only been a few months old when my mother left me with my grandmother and went to the Gulf. We didn’t own a house and my father