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Ghost Flowers
for Shaima Al Sabbagh
My dearest
A now familiar sound of gunfire has just escalated the day. I sit quietly at my writing desk. The police are firing on students over at the university – the students are being killed within their own campus or being disappeared. This is how the city is now. I was dreaming of a warm, blue ocean, sitting in the shallows with you. The water was luminescent; as if lit from within; a stunning bright blue. You said you wanted to get 'fruit babies' from a machine so I went swimming but as I swam I realised the water had come in further and now there was no land. I sensed sharks may be near so I called your name and swam back; you were sitting putting the mounds of fruit into plastic trays. I tried to help but you were too precise on what top went on what container. However within the dream; within the ocean of luminescent blue; we kissed – and I woke with this feeling of magic; of innocence; of something beautiful and precious retained.
I stare at the tree. Always my saviour. The community of birds living amongst the complex web of branches. The sky behind. The hope it emits even in its most dusty times; half choked by pollution and scatterings of rubbish thrown down onto it from the apartments above. It is enough to sit on the balcony and just be, the peeling shutters of the French windows pushed out of sight, and have one's heart lifted when one of the doves comes to say hello. The balcony has been the scene of various crimes; it has seen the beginning of love affairs, the endings, the chatter and companionship of good friends, the ideas and hopes for much.
Perhaps it's true that sometimes the chains that weigh so heavy are the easiest to break. After nine years of feeling a link to him I finally said goodbye. It was a midwinter epiphany that finally gave me the clarity; the morning moon shining bright upon me from above the tree – it said, 'Don't go, let it go.' After I wrote to say I would not be coming, that it was over, I realised how it was like having said goodbye to an apparition. He was not even there. A cover over a mirror, a stone thrown into a reflection upon a lake, a hand clap in the corner of a room to exorcise the ghost. The idea of him finally left and there was nothing of substance that remained.
Later the flowers and the trees urged me to contact him. I awoke with the stirring lush of that fauna, white petals as feathers, purples and greens of whispering leaves and the image of his face, his eyes. I will myself not to contact him but now I wonder if and when he will contact me. Which one of us will break this fast? I cut the bonds. I lie quietly and cut the air with scissors. I have done this before. These rituals to free myself. To let the heart rise. A great poet said that the noose of Love draws tighter the more one struggles – yet I have done everything I can think of to loosen this rope and still he is in my mind. Why? Perhaps because there is no other and it seems impossible to find or be found by another. The open prison of my body continues; solitary and untouched.
I know why you left, you left because the city herself has left. She has been persecuted and cut into and as those defending her burned fires into the night she finally took what she could of herself – though she has given us her tears for the blood of the martyrs, the Nile, with all her troubled eloquence.
And you my sukkar, are you able to enjoy the stirring spring breeze upon your cheek as I walk along the haphazard broken streets of what used to be your home too? Ah, such a long time, it seems, since we drank hearty amounts of Stella beer in that bar called Freedom, ha.. what a sorrowful paradox. Now our loneliness pushes us forward with its bittersweet fingers.
There's a fight outside, various herds of men, self-tugging their own tshirts, taking off shoes to shake in the face of others. How pathetic they are, yet how dominant, taxing money off anyone parking their car, watching over the comings and goings of the residents, ready to use the information for gain at any point.
What now? Either a day at home trying to organise many things via the computer, being irritated by the doorbell that will certainly ring maybe three times today by some inept delivery man lost between floors - or gather the impetus to go out – into the madness of the streets, walk with my gaze straight ahead but slightly down, seal off all response, be dressed in a way as to invite the least attention, look like I know exactly where I'm going. Don't look at anything, don't relax, don't. It hasn't always been like this. When I first moved here in 2009 there was still a year to be had of high spirited fun. Parties, lovers, outings, galleries, bars. I'd moved my one suitcase into the five bedroom apartment by the Giza pyramids and spent my days marketing the arts residency I was setting up or otherwise reading and dreaming up on the roof. The huge roof terrace overlooked the Sphinx and two of the pyramids and most of the windows in the flat also shared that view. We sat there once, watching the evening light show beam coloured rays onto the historic structures. He was troubled by the view; saying it made him feel claustrophobic and he felt that the presence of these ancient emblems were possibly a curse that he could never escape.
How you used to hold me with that look
Hungry
Your eyes
Other worldly
Your alchemy spellbinding with every touch
I saw one of the djinns again today. As I came out of the bathroom one of them ran across the hallway, a quick black flash, yet something in that dark dash was humorous, carrying an irony. It's been a while since the very first time I saw those women. It was a dream; the three of them all wearing black veils and abeya had come to the door and upon my opening it they had pushed forward as one being. I hadn't allowed them in, in that dream, yet for months now I've been seeing them in my waking moments and I wonder what the message is they're trying to get through. But is it really necessary to wait for a message? Isn't this reality enough? Here I am in this stricken city, in a country broken from near civil war, in a place where I have no softness, no embrace, where noone has my back. Why on earth am I staying for even one day longer?
I know why. Because it seems to be like a betrayal of those that have gone, or been taken, or who have been forced to stay. And because hope is such a strange entity that can continue to live even when all circumstances for its survival have long since died. He is never coming back. There will be no fairytale and no miracle.
'Elee shooftou, able ma tshoufak eineya, omri dayea, yehsebooh ezay alaya' - What I’ve seen before my eyes ever saw you, my life had been wasted, how did it ever count. Yes, the ghosts, they still live inside me, their hands still upon my heart and I see them, their beings, here in my apartment, sitting in the chair, smiling from the balcony, embracing me in bed. They even watch now as I write, as I cook, as I exist in this aloneness.
That last time I saw you I knew it was the end. Such a tragic end. That hotel room. I'd bought wine and snacks, the room was dimly lit - decorated with the fairy lights I'd brought, I was wearing a beautiful black satin dress and a silver pendant, Enta Omri playing from my phone. We hadn't seen each other for four years. You text me: Are you there? I gave you the room number and keypad codes.
Ah, the doorbell is ringing. A wrong address to be sure. That damn doorbell. The sound of it always incites a rise of panic. A flurried high sound settling to a lower stutter of the last few notes – as if the battery is failing. It's the standard Cairo doorbell, so even in others' homes I'm subjected to it. Whoever rang the bell has gone now as I can hear the sound of the lift door banging shut. In a moment I will go to the balcony and look over to see who it was.
My cleaner, Om Mohamed, will be here soon, but she has her own key, so I have to make sure I'm dressed modestly enough for when she arrives. Om Mohamed is lovely but it's exhausting – listening to the endless dramas of her and her family's life. She always subjects me to many opinions: how it would be good for me to take a husband - but only if he has a round face not a thin face and that he must buy enough gold and other requirements. I know if I tell her I'm thinking I might have to leave here there will be hysterics and daily phone calls about how and why I should stay.
People always ask why I came here and I rarely tell the truth, or rather the full truth. That I had been in love, that I thought I would no longer see him or know him, that I had no addresses, no phone numbers, and that he was in another country – not this one – but that I chose to come to the country of his birth, to walk the streets he had known, to find a semblance of him everywhere so I could understand more of his soul even in absence. Even he hadn't known that. I told him last time we met and he didn't believe me.
And now there have been so many 'hims'. And I have loved so many of them. Yet he is the enduring love, the only one I fail to completely let go of. Until now.
I don't go downtown that much anymore; after the murder of Shaima Al Sabbagh on the corner by Air France in Medan Talat Harb it is depressing. On that very corner some years back I'd purchased my happy, pink Chinese mobile with flashing hearts and then a few years later Shaimaa was shot dead by the security forces at that same place. Shaimaa, a poet, holding flowers and going to a peaceful commemoration for those that had died in the uprisings.
These last years the city has ravaged and torn at every living thing within it. Things have happened that seemed impossible – as one walks across the bridge one recalls the tear gas, the high sound of canisters flying past and the effect of the silent bullets: eyes shot out, flesh cut open, blood smeared everywhere, flattened heads from the tanks, shouts and screams. The many fires in the streets, the makeshift bullet shields and hideaways, the huge canons and rock propellers, the machine guns. Whenever I enter downtown I always remember the body of a teenager held high and paraded through the nighttime streets, his face drained of blood – a white mirror to the moon.
Those hours before dawn I watched you sleeping
You were the most beautiful sight I have ever seen
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