Glass Collector (26 page)

It takes an hour and a half to cover a distance that should have taken twenty minutes, so many roads are barred by men with sniffer dogs. When Aaron finally walks down the road leading to the hospital, he’s covered in sweat and is shocked to the core when a beggar at the gate holds out a hand for a coin.

The beggar bows eagerly, but Aaron knows for sure he’s richer than him by the gold tooth he reveals when he grins.

In a flurry of excitement at being mistaken for someone worth begging from, Aaron rushes past the man, into the hospital, and up in the elevator, as if he’s used to making this journey every day. For all he knows Rachel could be back home in Mokattam by now, but a burning feeling inside tells him she’s still here. Still here.

Aaron pinches himself to calm down from the speedy, breathless way he arrives at her slightly open door.

A sound of light coughing comes from inside the room. He pauses to listen and holds his breath in case she can hear him standing there—being stupid. Wiping his clammy hands on the side of his jeans, he feels as if he’s about to fall off a raft, crash on a rock, and drown.

Aaron gently touches the door, which remains firmly in its place. He tries again. Nothing happens. Then he spots a wooden wedge jammed firmly underneath the door, keeping it ajar to allow air to travel freely from the window to the dank corridor.

He can make a big entrance by kicking the wedge out of the way or pitching himself through the narrow space. Either way, he’ll surprise Rachel, which he doesn’t want to do. That leaves only one option. He raps his knuckles on the door.

“Rachel …”

The slight coughing noise stops. “It’s me, Aaron.”

There’s a rustling sound.

“I wanted to see you, Rachel.”

Formalities over, Aaron breathes deeply and, clutching the door, pushes sideways into the room, where his jaw drops. A pale, middle-aged Western woman is sitting on the bed in a blue gown. Beyond her, dead flies dot the dirty window and a hazy sky blots out the sun. The beautiful light from last time is gone and this cold, hard vision shows up the threadbare sheet on the bed and the gray, bumpy linoleum on the floor.

“Sorry. I was looking for … someone,” Aaron says.

The woman smiles, answering in fluent Arabic. “I know what you mean, love! That’s what we’re all doing, eh? Some find it easier than others, don’t they?”

Frustrated and sad, Aaron nods and backs out of the room, sneaking down the corridor to peer into every room he passes. Rooms that reveal several beds with desperately sick patients attached to blood bags, many of whom are being washed and fed by members of their families.

Where’s Rachel?

Confusion takes over when he reaches the lift and begins to wonder how Rachel got a room of her own here. Someone said a doctor from this hospital was visiting the health clinic in Mokattam when she was run over. In that case someone at the Mokattam clinic must know where she’s been taken. He must go home and find out.

The sticky heat and hazy sky add to Aaron’s despair as he reaches the hospital gates. A roar of dust from a passing truck points the way to the center of town. As he trundles down the busy road, his knee begins to ache at the thought of all that walking down the hot, shimmering, noisy road that stretches out forever in front of him.

He regrets not going to the perfume shop first, before heading to the hospital.

At the mercy of his own misery at not seeing Rachel, Aaron remembers another dream he had about his mother. A dream where she came to him on the night she died. In that dream, he saw her smiling, standing in the lane facing him, surrounded by a golden light. When he woke up in the morning he ran into the lane expecting to see her. He was shocked when she wasn’t there. Only a child with a runny nose returned his gaze. Then he remembered his mother was dead and the joy of seeing her in the dream made it feel as if she’d died twice. He’d lost her again and the effect was a splintering of reality. A devastating howl in every cell of his body. Even now that feeling makes him recoil from himself.

The pain of her death runs away with him until he reaches the third road so far that’s barred from pedestrians and traffic with police and dogs.

“What’s going on?” someone asks.

“The American president, Barack Obama, is coming to the university to give a speech,” the police officer answers.

“Really? What time?” Beaming wildly, the onlooker can’t hide her excitement. “Is he coming this way? When? When?”

The police officer shrugs. Aaron doesn’t wait to hear the answer. What’s an American president’s speech got to do with him? His life isn’t going to change because of that. What’s the use in him coming to Cairo? What’s the use in speeches? The Egyptian president didn’t do anything for the Zabbaleen, so why should the American one be any different? Politicians make no sense to him.

Sometime later, when he reaches the entrance to the underpass beneath another barricaded road, Aaron touches the familiar bottle in his pocket. The smooth glass feels like a warm hand. Something real to hold on to. Because of the closed road, the peeling ochre-painted tunnel is swarming with people and neither side wants to give way, bumping into one another, mingling scents of sweat, tobacco, perfume, and the odd sharp smell of mint tea. Squeezing the glass bottle, Aaron elbows past a man carrying bread on his head. Then a large family.

Two police in navy garb, guns held high, force Aaron to slow down until he reaches the exit to the street and, without thinking, pushes through the crowd. As he steps into the blast of sunshine, gasoline fumes and rushing people, a young, dainty woman in a green galabeya brushes past him. It’s Shareen.

Stunned, Aaron races down the pavement to the traffic lights to catch up with her, but a moment later he sees her getting into a gray car to sit beside an older man with a bushy beard. The car shoots off in a puff of exhaust, leaving him standing there, bewildered. Shareen had golden sandals on her dainty feet. A silver chain on her wrist. Where did she get them from? Who was that man? Where’s Daniel?

Still amazed, Aaron hurries toward Omar’s perfume shop, bracing himself for answers he doesn’t want to hear when he gets back to Mokattam. He hopes that Shareen will be home by then and that there’s an innocent reason for her being out alone in Cairo with a man who clearly isn’t a Zabbaleen. Maybe it wasn’t her after all.

On he races past windows packed with patterned galabeyas, shawls, and scarves, then stalls selling painted papyrus and King Tut souvenirs. But Aaron senses something isn’t quite right before he reaches the shop. He suddenly stops in his tracks. What he sees fills him with panic and disbelief.

With the constant sound of traffic behind him, Aaron gazes at the empty, sun-speckled shop windows and the hummocks of dust on the smudged glass shelves and then the huge, dark, closed doors with a half-alive fly buzzing by a sign which reads “Closed for Remodeling.”

Grabbing the window, Aaron presses his face to the glass and peers inside at a rolling expanse of space. Empty but for a stained red carpet, a strip of metal on the floor, and what looks like the corner of an oil lamp on the far wall.

Distraught, he swallows back hot tears. The window mists from his breathing. He wipes the glass with the back of his hand and the full force of the emptiness of the room hurts his eyes and freezes his mind. Turning to slump against the window, his shoulders make a grinding noise on the glass that he can feel in his stomach. Not now. He needed this.

Aaron blunders to the alley in search of glass. Anything that can feed his desire for beauty. Squinting away from the sun, the first thing he notices is that the side window is partly open. Below is a cardboard box and the firm shape proves it’s packed with rejected bottles. With the swish of cars in his ear, Aaron fills his pockets with as many small bottles as possible. Pale bottles without stoppers. A slender pink one with a twisted rim. A miniature blue bottle decorated with a broken leaf. And cheap, plain, oddly shaped bottles that rub together like marbles and land on the rose-colored bottle of perfume that he’s kept forever in his pocket. All of them rolling and clunking as he runs.

Soon he’s part of the pack. Part of the streets, the people, traffic, noise, heat. The madness of the city. A glass collector again.

“What happened to you? You look different. Older,” Luke Mebaj says.

“Dunno. Dunno,” Aaron gasps as he climbs on the cart.

Slumped in the back, an overpowering weakness takes over and all Aaron can do is clutch his chest, close his eyes, and be thankful he caught up with the Mebaj cart after putting his life at risk by leaping in front of a bus and racing across the street.

Soon—the second he can speak—he’ll ask them the question that’s on the tip of his tongue. Right now the stem of a bottle is digging into his thigh. Aaron twists around, rubs the spot, and rearranges the empty reject bottles in his pockets until the full and perfect bottle that he’s carefully hung on to slips into the corner of the denim, protected from harm.

Joseph Mebaj glances at Aaron before clicking the reins, then says, “Something up?”

“Nah!” Aaron mutters.

He’s used to Michael and Inga not saying much, so he shuts down and lets the question drift. It feels strange to be on a cart again, surrounded by bags of oozing trash. He gazes at the traffic like someone who belongs in a wide, empty desert, not this stinking heap of junk. The cars, buses, and taxis are crowded with people whose faces reflect his and behind their eyes is the same yearning for something better, something good. Something more meaningful than getting through the day swinging from crisis to crisis and then sorting out the debris.

Aaron’s mind travels back to Omar’s shop and the customers who went there to buy more than perfumes. More than a pretty bottle with luscious scents. Some went to buy oils to heal their souls, to bring back a feeling of connection to their bodies in the hope it would turn their lives around.

“He brought my missing soul back to me!” Aaron once heard a customer say.

“Omar is an ancient shaman!” his assistant would boast. “He’s as mysterious as this city.”

Who knows when the shop will open again? Aaron can’t quite believe it is closed. His mind turns to the city’s extraordinary past; to the fact that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus passed this way once. Did they stop in front of the pyramids of Giza and wonder if they were used as star maps and a means to communicate with other life forms, as Omar said?

Or did they believe they were a way to help the pharaohs to the afterlife, as they were taught in school?

“Nothing can satisfy our minds like the kinds of journeys we are capable of when we use our imaginations. Only then can we discover the truth,” Omar also said.

As the cart slows to a snail’s pace, the sun blinks fiercely at Aaron from behind the shopping complex. He holds up an arm to blot it out, then ducks behind the nearest bag, which cracks like a whip. Stuck there with the smell of rotting fish and an old water pipe in his face, it dawns on Aaron that he can revisit the shop whenever he wants.

All he has to do is use his imagination.

Now when Aaron remembers the shop, he sees it through his mother’s eyes. He almost smiles her smile as the huge wooden doors judder open. Sprinkled with sunshine, the bottles glimmer on the shelves and the interior glints like a sultana’s boudoir with rich velvet cushions and brass lamps. Soon soft, padding footsteps cross the polished floor to greet the woman with a rag held to her weeping eyes. Omar takes her hand, Aaron’s mother’s hand, and tells her not to worry.

Not to cry.

Then Omar leads her to the corner to sit down and says she doesn’t have to pay him. He’s happy to give her his time. Whether she’s a Zabbaleen or not is nothing to him. He asks about her life. About her son. About her pains. He listens. He offers her kindness and good wishes. Then he lifts a stick from a black ceramic vase and soaks it in Rose of the Nile perfume, offering it to her with the promise that the scent will bring her the peace she seeks.

The cart suddenly jerks. The water pipe smacks Aaron on the head as the traffic comes to a stop, forcing his mind to snap back to the busy Cairo street. He throws the pipe at a passing truck at the very moment a fighter plane screams across the sky. As the vapor trail fades, Aaron’s heart softens. Softens when he remembers the peaceful expression on his mother’s face when it was all over. The half-smile. The tilted head.

Aaron lowers his eyes. He wishes he could fly over the streets, over the nearby bazaar and tall buildings. Over the citadel to the slums of Mokattam and a time when everything felt possible. A time before she died.

As the cart follows the curve in the road leading to the entrance to the village, Aaron grasps a smooth knot of wood on the side of the cart, realizing he is suddenly nervous to be back. The nearer they come to the high arch, the louder the tapping and thudding ring out from the foundry. The moment they leave the arch and dusty pillars behind, he flinches, burying his nose in his hands, and when the brothers halt the pony to deliver a broken TV to Sami, Aaron swings his legs over the side and leaps off. He glances briefly at the stool beside the counter but Rachel’s not there.

The sun sinks and the dark cavelike shops and stalls crawl with half-human shapes.

He’d forgotten how badly Mokattam smells. As he weaves through the endless trash lining the walls of the shops and stalls, Ishaq, the icon seller, gives him a welcoming nod. Habi flings an orange at Aaron with an understanding smile and, though no one asks what happened, it seems everyone knows he’s been staying at Michael’s and that he’s sorry. Each step brings another nod, a silent message to say,
So you’re back?
It may not be the greatest of welcomes, but at least they know who he is, unlike the people who live in Michael’s apartment building. They give Aaron the courage to stand on top of a mound of garbage bags and steady himself before cupping his mouth in his hands.

“SORRRRRY!” he yells.

The Mebaj brothers turn round and laugh. Everyone in the lane laughs. Their attention puts a spring in Aaron’s step as he hurries toward his stepfamily’s home. But the spring in his step dies suddenly when he sees Jacob up ahead with a bunch of men who are counting out white pills in the palms of their hands. Empty brown medicine bottles lie at their feet.