If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

His hairs are so curly they shed from his head already coiled into a ball, no strand to speak of. I find these all over the bed and in the corners of rooms, like the souls of insects who’ve died on their backs.

My world is getting smaller. He doesn’t say, Stay with me, or Hurry back, but there is always a fight when I come home.

There is the sound of metal thwacking wall: solid, intentional. Then a gape of silence. He says, Look what you made me do.

he crumpled to the floor in what my mother has been calling child’s pose ever since she took up yoga. He cried

Boy defeated.

If an Egyptian cannot speak English, who is telling his story?

I find myself measuring for the first time how far America is from Cairo, let alone Shobrakheit. How to bridge this ocean? How to explain all I left behind to get even this far?

in every country family, the son becomes the father and the grandson a husband.

She was the first of all losses. When she climbed into the stove—when she. And the smell of her—the wrong smell of her. Dinner.

What is unforgivable in English, in Arabic has no name I know.

You are trying to make me feel bad, I say like a small hiccuping girl with sand in her eyes. You are no longer safeness, I tell him. I miss myself.

We hide our finances from each other but the numbers chafe between our bodies while we sleep,

but what can I do? Who is to blame?

made criminal solely because she is afraid, made pathetic because she pities me—a poor boy though I never was.

Addicts, like grandchildren, do not fill their hours. They pull the hours apart, entertain themselves by melting the hours into new shapes: a ring, a gray braid down a bare back. Occasionally the hours fight back with passion so the addicts and grandchildren are transformed into the bleeding of a nostril or ear. Bleeding means the wasting of time, but it can also mean the loss of blood, as in: I bled from the nostrils. The nostrils are the two openings of the nose.

my laptop gone, my mother’s pearls.

The nostrils are the two holes of the nose, and the word nose suggests both curiosity and snobbiness, and what is meant by snobby is the rice remaining on a plate at the end of a meal, and what is meant by plate is one of a pair of kidneys (usually the right) in the body of a woman.

After vegetating underground for so long, a stranger to my body, I feel the need to flex a little, to stretch and be daring.

Even my inner

monologue is actively recovering its reach, catching flittering, long-forgotten classical couple...

what is the state before a man?—

the usual guilting performance directed at Chichi in the corner of the room—

My shoulders heaved. Mother nodded.

as though she were some kind of sun-eating rose,

Said not says.

petting my head, but gently, the way you’d pet a sunflower,4 whispering,

kinder, more merciful, as though I were a living creature after all, deserving of a gentle touch. But really, it isn’t me, it’s her.

some of that favor God intended for her rubs off on me by proximity.

When I bring in ful5 from a cart on the street for our breakfast, she won’t eat it from the plastic bag. Arranges it on a flat clay plate, alongside apricots that she has halved,

As his mother did in fourths

pistachios, damn-near

No one ever talks about the punishing aesthetics of being poor.

Only now, looking back, do I realize how terrible it is to subsist on just enough, without the joy of beautiful things.

My punishment for this cowardice is that when he swung the table, when he left, I was alone with my relief and its complications. Even now, when I begin to think about sharing with them where I have been all these months, I am already tired, too disheartened to try.

Then he begins to muse aloud that romance in Cairo is unlike romance elsewhere in the world.

If she tries to leave, you chase her back. It’s all life-and-death stuff, very dramatic, but also just a way of passing the time. Egyptian men—we’re fucking loyal, and you should be worried.

enjoying every moment of this soap opera monologue. It’s not over, is what I’m saying. Men love to save me. Men love to save me from other men.

Does she hear talk in the car horns? Or does she think they are all just angry drivers making angry-driver sounds?

God is funny like that, He doesn’t like me like that. I

It was a fluke, her picking up the spoon from the middle that first day we sat beside each other in Café Riche. There is nothing she intuited, no generational secrets repeating themselves through her loins.

I could have made her life unbearable and she’d have no one to blame but herself … As usual, however, nothing bad has happened to her.

She asked me to shoot her so I shot her, pretending because I wanted her to believe I could.

I RETURN TO ENGLISH as if to the arms of a lover and feel instantly safe and indigenous there.

That thrill of being who I am swirls around my belly.

It is in Arabic that lovers murder each other with side tables, and it is in English that they theorize about what it means to be murdered by side table.

Now she is effacing arabic bc of his effect. Now she embraces being american

The distinct impression that I was unveiling royalty from the ground up.

the hunger of a man returning from exile. It had been twenty years since I felt home in a woman’s arms, and the effect was one of outrage.

have always been deserving of a first-class love, A-grade, elegant, not these sloppy streetwalkers with dirt under their nails and no evidence of skeletons, just lumps and folds all over.

At once ttue but not in its cncept of frst class is misogynistic

If she knew, if she only knew how mine she is, how long I had been expecting her, she’d appear on the balcony now, put her elbows on the marble balustrade, and weep from the belly like a widow.

and I pity the missing she must be feeling today,

I was so grateful to be seen that my eyes watered.