If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

We rose from our graves, patted the dirt off each other, looked each other in the eye. An entire population crawling out of a mass grave to hold those who’d buried us accountable, and in doing so daring to imagine another reality.

I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.

This is the dress you were wearing in the stationery shop, I would remind her on the day I finally peeled it off her body. Her answer: What shop? She had not seen me at all. Until now, she thinks we met for the first time two weeks later, at Café Riche, when she borrowed my spoon.

I’ve never seen such long eyes or such primeval bones. She looked like she had walked right out of the museum and I told her so. You are pharaonic.

After so many lifetimes of peaceful eating, a nation overturns the dinner table; there is the darling outrage, a newfound entitlement, hope, yes, hope—and then betrayal.

Over the sink, the American washes her face with brown sugar and I remember my mother sweeping salt grains off the kitchen table into her hand with the sharp edge of a store flyer, so as not to waste them.

How many fingers and toes will you sever before you’re small enough for a man to possess?

Which is more frightening—to wake up with injuries or a weapon in your hand? ________________________________

He cried. After he swung the table at my head, he crumpled to the floor in what my mother has been calling child’s pose ever since she took up yoga. He cried and I heard through the gasps, I’m not well. Can’t you see I’m not well?

If you understand why a hound is snapping at you, have you already pardoned him the meat from your leg?

She says she needs light in order to breathe, as though she were some kind of sun-eating rose, says she wants to let the sky into the rooms,

That hour we spent together beneath the heavened striations was kinder to me than ten years in Cairo had been—kinder, more merciful, as though I were a living creature after all, deserving of a gentle touch.

Arranges it on a flat clay plate, alongside apricots that she has halved, topped with ricotta, drizzled with honey, dusted in pistachios, damn-near deified before devouring. The indulgence …

Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.

The longer I wait, the greater the chance that I will see her. But the longer I wait, the longer I have been waiting on this bridge, and the higher the stakes are if I don’t see her. It also seems certain, based on God’s ironic bent, that she will appear the minute I turn to leave, and I cannot be made a fool like that.

Self-loathing bleeds out beyond his self until the idea of taking a compatriot lover feels paradoxically beneath him, a waste of his potential—he’d be selling short.

She raised me to believe that wherever I went I would be recognized, I would be rewarded, celebrated, and only now do I see. It was an accident, but she handicapped me to a lifetime of scoffing at the very things I need. There is such a thing as princely poverty.

There are calculations that precede thought, there are protective measures that one recognizes as protective only retrospectively.

Every time he speaks, even if he gets the words right, his tone outs him as a thing in pain.