Butterfly Wings: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) Read online

  He sat still, watching the light of dawn break through the dark until daylight triumphed over darkness. Then he went down to the street. His anxiety had subsided and he was starting to feel confident.

  He headed off to meet Hagga Hikmet at the head office of the Egyptian Civil Registry. His appointment with her was at ten o’clock, but he left the house early. He could not wait. First he went to the grocer Hagg Abdel Mawla and phoned Salwa to let her know that he would not have his cell phone with him and would not be able to call her. She said, “There’s something important I want to tell you when we meet at college.”

  He replied, “I’m not going to college today. I have a very important meeting. I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”

  Ayman arrived at the Civil Registry building about an hour before the time fixed by Hagga Hikmet. He waited by the building, jittery with anticipation. He walked the nearby streets not knowing what to do with himself. After half an hour he could bear it no longer and went up to the third floor, as she had told him, and asked for Ustaza Hikmet Abdel Wahhab’s office. As soon as he went in, he apologized for being early, saying that the streets had been unusually quiet. She said, “No matter, dear. Take a seat and tell me what you’d like to drink.”

  Then she turned to her colleague in the room, who asked, “Is it him?” She nodded. Ayman’s nervous excitement increased and he began to feel anxious. He had never been in a government office in his life, and he felt as if he were in a police station not knowing what fate awaited him. The man who brought drinks came in. In a voice whose shakiness he hoped his friend’s mother had not noticed, Ayman said he did not want anything. She insisted that he drink something and asked the man to bring him a “lemonade to cool him down.” Then she spoke to her colleague, saying, “Ayman’s just like a son to me. He and Hassan are the same.” Did she feel a need to justify to her colleague why she would let him see information that he did not think was publicly available?

  Her colleague kept staring at him without uttering more than a hello. Then Hagga Hikmet said to him, “How are you, dear? And how is your family?”

  What family did she mean? Surely she knew he did not have a family? His mother was not his mother, his sister was only his half-sister from his father, his brother had his own life, and his father would not tell him the facts. He gave a brief “Hamdulillah,” then kept quiet, waiting for his friend’s mother to reveal the information he had come for.

  The minutes dragged by. An official came in to talk to Hikmet’s colleague, then left again. Ayman decided to break the silence. He apologized to his friend’s mother for any trouble his request might have caused her, being careful not to mention the subject outright. She immediately replied that it had been no trouble at all; it was his right. This encouraged him to ask the question that had kept him awake at night: “Have you found anything?” She told him to drink his lemonade, which the man who brought the drinks had put on the table in front of him.

  He fell quiet again as he drank the lemonade. He felt the juice was making him more upset and not calming him down. Or was it the scary silence, which reminded him of the hush of the dark rat-infested room at school with which they scared the children to make them do their homework? He quickly finished his glass and gathered up his courage to ask Hagga Hikmet, “Did you find my mother’s death certificate?”

  She looked at him with compassion and answered with the same courage, “Unfortunately, there is no death certificate in that name.”

  For Ayman, not finding his mother’s death certificate meant another loss. He had not just lost his mother, he had also lost the means to find her. It had been so painful to learn that he had a mother who had died, and now it seemed as if he did not have a mother at all. He suddenly felt the weight of his loss; felt he did not exist or was a foundling of unknown identity.

  He said to Hagga Hikmet, “That’s not possible. She must have a death certificate with the names of her father and mother or where she died.”

  Some of his sadness rubbed off on her and she said, “I made a very thorough search, but I didn’t come up with anything. It was really very difficult since you could not give me a date of death, which might have made it easier. Still, I did an alphabetical search of all the names beginning with the letter A until I reached Amna. There were thousands of certificates, but the name Amna Abdel Rahim al-Saadi was not among them.”

  “Perhaps she died in another governorate and it was registered there,” offered Ayman.

  “But I searched the central register, which includes all the governorates.”

  “How do you explain it?”

  “I swear, my dear, I don’t know.”

  The colleague in the office suddenly exclaimed, “Perhaps your mother isn’t dead. Maybe she’s still alive.”

  Ayman’s heart started pounding. His face went blank as though he were about to enter the unknown. As if grasping hold of the only truth he knew, he said, “But my father said that she was dead.”

  His friend’s mother said, “But he also told you that his present wife was your mother.”

  Ayman felt he might crumple and leaned back in his chair to support himself. He was silent, not knowing what to say. Where was the truth? His mother was not the only thing he had lost. He had lost the truth. He was no longer certain of anything.

  Hagga Hikmet tried to assuage his shock and with maternal kindness said, “Don’t worry. I’ll search the records of the living for you. Just give me a little time.”

  Ayman left the Civil Registry Office on legs too weak to carry him. His knees were trembling so much he almost fell over. He had to grip the edge of the staircase until he reached the street. It was a cloudy day and the sun was not shining. He felt dark clouds piling up over his heart and soul. He had gone to that depressing place imagining that he would leave having found what he was looking for. But he left more lost than ever. A taxi nearly crashed into him while he was crossing the road. The driver shouted at him, “Oy, are you drunk?” Ayman returned to the sidewalk and sat at the edge of the road.

  7 Salwa

  Salwa al-Eleimi was the tender soul who eased the cares of Ayman’s life, a life devoid of emotion and tenderness. They had a date at the Aquarium Gardens. Ayman was waiting for her at the entrance with the two tickets he had just bought. She came up a few minutes later, looking like an angel with her svelte figure and elegant walk. She had never looked so beautiful. Her auburn hair hung loose over her shoulders, framing her angelic face with velvet and accentuating her pure complexion. She was wearing a sky-blue sweater patterned with small white butterflies that rose and fell in their pure, bright sky in step with Salwa as she flitted over. Ayman took her hand and led her into the gardens.

  He looked at her clothes and said, “I see the caterpillars have all become white butterflies in your heaven.” She laughed and said nothing. Salwa liked to nurture silkworms and she often told Ayman about the larvae that turned into caterpillars, which spun delicate chrysalises from beautiful threads of silk and emerged as butterflies. Ayman would tell her that she spun the silk in his life, and that without her the chrysalis he lived inside would turn into a gloomy prison.

  Ayman often flirted with her, saying she was a white butterfly. “Why white?” she once asked him.

  “Because a white butterfly symbolizes innocence and purity. It’s the absolute truth that never changes.” Then he added, “I remember reading that white butterflies were sacred to ancient civilizations. Until the seventeenth century it was illegal to kill them in Ireland. The belief was that a child who died in innocence became a white butterfly.”

  They were standing in front of one of the fish tanks inside the hollowed-out mound in the garden. They watched the fish gliding through the water as if in a dreamlike dance, unconscious of their surroundings and of the human eyes observing them.

  Ayman had not let go of her hand since taking hold of it at the entrance. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. In a low voice she said, “My darling!”

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sp; He responded, “You are my darling, and my mother and my sister. And soon you will be my wife that I will never leave.”

  She hugged him and her thick auburn hair wrapped around him until he was totally enclosed, as if she had cast a net over him so that no one could take him from her. In her arms he felt the tenderness he so missed. He kissed her and the fish pushed to the front of the big tank as if they had come to watch Adam and Eve in their first embrace.

  They sensed other visitors coming into the mound and stepped out from the semi-darkness into the light of day, her hand still in his.

  He told her what had happened with Hassan’s mother. A cloud of sadness passed over her face and she said, “I was really hoping you’d uncover the truth, whatever it was, so you could relax and get over your feelings of being lost.”

  She spotted a glint in his eyes that might have been a tear he did not wish to shed. He said, “I often wonder what my mother looks like, what her eyes are like and her hair. She must have hugged me as a child. She must have breastfed me. They say that a mother’s milk contains her whole history, even the antibodies to the diseases she had. That history must be living inside me now, but I don’t know it. Or was I fed formula? I don’t know. I don’t even know when she left. Was it when I was still breastfeeding or after I was weaned? Whenever I think about those things, I feel lost.”

  He hugged her again as he said, “The only time in my life when I don’t feel lost is when I’m with you. You give me the strength to carry on living, because with you I feel that my life is complete and doesn’t lack anything. But as soon as I leave you, I look around and can’t find any meaning in my life. I start feeling that I’ve lost my mother and know nothing about her.”

  They started walking among the garden’s tall trees, which were older than the two of them combined. In the distance they heard a mother calling to her child, “Ahmad! Where are you, Ahmad? Am I going to spend the whole day looking for you?”

  Ayman said, “I have a feeling that my mother’s not dead, but I want the truth. It’s as if I hear her calling to me, both when I’m awake and in my sleep. Sometimes I feel I’ve gotten near the truth, that I can almost touch it. But as soon as I get close, it flits off like a butterfly that you glimpse one moment and is gone the next.”

  Salwa smiled as she looked at his tall, athletic physique, then said, “But you managed to catch your white butterfly without too much effort. And soon you’ll catch the butterfly calling out to you. You’re very skillful as a butterfly catcher.”

  “You always make me feel good about myself and give me hope for the future.”

  “I’ve got some news I want to share with you,” she said.

  He looked at her, his senses alive.

  “I’ve become a journalist,” she told him.

  He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth in surprise.

  “Yesterday I met the head of the local news section at al-Sabah, the independent newspaper. He agreed that I could work for them as a freelancer for three months, and if I proved my worth I’d get a permanent salary until they took me on officially.”

  He picked her up by the waist and spun her round in the air while she shouted at him to put her down. He knew how much she wanted to work in journalism and how she had tried a few times before without success.

  They sat down beneath one of the shady trees. Salwa leaned back against the solid old trunk. Ayman sat cross-legged in front of her and stared into her almond-shaped eyes. After a while she said, “What do you see?”

  “In your eyes I see my future. The honey-colored irises, glowing in the dark like the eyes of a cat, are a crystal ball.”

  She smiled, saying, “What can you see in the crystal ball right now?”

  “I see myself sitting in your house with your father and mother. Then I see you coming in to offer me coffee, and I hear your mother praising your skills in the kitchen.”

  She laughed. “You’ve obviously watched a lot of old movies,” she said. “The world’s changed a bit.”

  “Wouldn’t your mother say you would make an excellent housewife?”

  “No, she doesn’t like lying.”

  “And your father won’t ask me whether I own a flat and have a car and a bank account?”

  She laughed as she said, “Am I not worth all of that?”

  “Yes, and more, my darling.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a woman’s voice shouting at her husband, “Thirty years of bad times! Not a single happy day with you.”

  The husband replied, “Yes, thirty years of my life wasted with you.”

  Ayman said, “You don’t like old romantic movies in black and white? Well, here’s a realistic one in color.”

  “No way. Let’s stick to black and white.”

  8 The Fountain for Lovers

  The small hotel overlooked the Trevi Fountain, the fountain for lovers, where, if you made a wish and threw in a coin, the wish would come true, no matter how small the coin or how big the wish.

  Doha had long wished to stay at that hotel, which was so different from the five-star hotels she normally stayed at on trips with her husband. It was a challenge to find a vacant room, because the hotel drew tourists from all over the world. On her last trip to Rome with her husband, she had turned her back to the fountain and thrown a coin over her shoulder into the water. Her husband looked at her in amazement. She laughed and said, “I wished that someday I would stay at this small hotel that is always full up.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re still an adolescent who hasn’t grown up. If you want a room in the hotel, you just have to book one in advance.”

  She wanted to say that because of him she had had no adolescence and had never grown up. He had deprived her of what were supposed to be the best days of one’s life, full of happiness and personal growth, and all without responsibility. But she kept quiet. The smile faded from her lips and she said, “Well, let’s make a reservation now for next year, when I come for the Milan Spring Fashion Week.”

  “Do you think you’ll get a minute’s sleep in this hotel?” her husband replied. “The windows of all the rooms look out over the square. Tourists come to see the fountain all night long. And they never stop enjoying themselves and making lots of noise.”

  “I know all that. That’s why I want to stay at the hotel. It will make me feel like the guest of the fountain itself, not just the hotel.”

  “You’re not just an adolescent, you’re crazy too.”

  Doha told all this to Ashraf al-Zayni on the plane once they started to become friends. She explained to him, “I’m only going to spend three days in Rome, and then I fly to Milan for the fashion show. Why shouldn’t I spend a few days without all the tiresome formalities that I can’t stand any more?”

  Ashraf replied, “You’re right. But I’ll be spending a whole week in Rome. I have meetings with professors in the faculty of engineering at the University of Rome to arrange an exchange agreement for faculty and students between our universities. Once that’s done, I’ll head to Palermo, capital of Sicily, for the annual NGO conference.”

  “Which hotel are you staying at in Rome?” she asked him after a second’s hesitation. He took a printed email out of his bag and read her the name of his hotel. “Don’t you know where it is?” she asked.

  “I don’t know Rome, as I told you. The whole trip has been organized for me. You wouldn’t have found me next to you in first class otherwise. By the way, I’d like you to suggest a nice restaurant where I can invite one of the professors and his wife tonight.”

  Without hesitation, she said, “Go to the historic Trastevere neighborhood on the west bank of the Tiber. That’s where you’ll find Rome’s most beautiful restaurants.”

  “Can you tell me a specific restaurant?”

  She suggested her favorite restaurant—it was on Garibaldi Street and dated back to the seventeenth century, when it had been a simple tavern selling wine and bread to the peasants who came to Rome to pay taxes on their pr
oduce.

  They parted as soon as they left the airport, going their separate ways. She exited before him and noticed a man waiting for him holding a small sign bearing the name Professor Ashraf al-Zayni. She found it amazing that in the morning that name had meant nothing to her, but now the man it stood for was someone she was happy to have met and felt was a good person.

  When the journey started, Doha had intended to call her husband from Rome. She wanted to tell him she had arrived and complain about his officials who had not complied with her wish that the seat next to her be empty. She smiled as she imagined the shock that would hit him if he knew that her neighbor had been one of the fiercest enemies of the party and that they had not stopped talking the whole flight.

  She stepped into the hotel and went straight over to the man at the reception desk. “I booked a room with you last year,” she said, “and I confirmed the booking last week over the Internet.” She was afraid she might not get a room, but everything was as she’d hoped and the room was waiting. The coin she had thrown into the fountain the year before must have worked.

  She went up the stairs—there was no lift—to her room on the second floor. Once in her room, she opened the window overlooking the fountain. The room filled with the voices of tourists, as if they had all come in with her. She threw herself on the bed and started laughing at what she had done to herself. How would she spend the night like this? She might as well have been in the square, or even in the fountain itself!

  From the window of her room, the fountain looked completely different. Usually, one had a perspective from below, looking up at the marble figures sculpted in relief on the back wall of the fountain. From the window, however, Doha was looking down on it. She felt as if she was seeing this wonderful fountain for the very first time. In her room she found a color brochure about the hotel and the fountain. It had been sculpted by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762. There was a vast sculpture of the god of the sea in the central recess of the fountain and the waters gushed forth from under his feet. From the window of her room his face was at the same level as hers. She felt for an instant that she was the same size as him, and that, like him, she had the power to make the course of her life flow in the direction she chose.