Mohamed Talks

He crawls out of his bed like a beetle fleeing the morning sunlight, lets his feet rest on the cold ceramic floor as he tries to find his breath. Behind him, her sleeping body lies twisted among the sheets, her long black curls reaching the small of her back.

He knows this without looking.

This image has been in his head from the moment she fell willingly into his bed last month. He carries it throughout the day, from the office to the construction site in the desert outskirts of Cairo. Through the 5pm traffic jam on the Circle Bridge to his empty appartment in Mohandeseen, he remembers her with a mixture of longing and apprehension.

He had been so excited at first, so full of joy that after twenty years of wanting and waiting, he finally had her in his arms.

And now?
Now, he wakes up every day with a hangover that won’t escape him, no matter how much black coffee he drinks. Perhaps this tension in his stomach, this relentless headache, this insomnia, perhaps they are all symptoms of dread. But what is he dreading?

He quietly shuts the bedroom door behind him, switches on the TV in the living room, lights a Marlboro Red and sits on the faded couch.

His phone rings; it’s a client calling on an early Friday morning, but still he answers. Mohamed is a workaholic: he takes business calls on vacation, works on reports and releases till the early hours of the morning, checks his Blackberry religiously.

Leyla frets about him working too hard, which he finds endearing but ignorant. She does not understand displacement activity; that he’s keeping himself busy and has done so obsessively since the divorce last summer. He takes on extra shifts, volunteers for projects that keep him working throughout the weekend, because he can’t sleep easily, at least not until he’s had a few shots of whiskey and a really strong joint.

And even then he’ll stare at the ceiling in the quiet darkness for hours, listening to his irregular breath and wondering about Mariam. Then he starts worrying about how he’ll ever pay off the debts she created. He would rather starve than ask his parents for help: it’s a question of pride, a matter of integrity, especially in this country. He got himself into that mess of a marriage and he wanted to leave it honorably.

He had tried to reach Mariam on her birthday; he’d asked her friends for her new phone number to say hi, but they just looked at him in silent pity.

He drags the last breath out of his cigarette, kills the stub in the overflowing elephant ashtray that Leyla bought him from a market during their trip to Beirut last month.
He had a work trip and she had a valid visa, and for the first time in his mundane, systematic life, Mohamed had spontaneously asked her to join him and she had spontaneously said yes.

Leyla was the type of girl you marry, not sleep with. Somehow it had happened, caught up in the thrill of their three-day adventure in Beirut; both of them recently single with his corporate credit card to spend on.

There was wine, laughter and many stories retold as they moved from the hotel bar to the balcony of his room, and somehow they had ended up on the bamboo couch. His fingers had rested on the crook of her arm, pinching the flesh around her elbow gently as she snuggled her nose against his throat and slipped a hand under his shirt. They had held each other almost all their lives as friends, but this time, the chemistry/ the timing /the wine /the stars colliding, they all fit.

And now she lies in his bed, black hair tumbling down her sleeping spine, as he hides behind his cigarette.

Leyla is the type you marry, the type he sees himself growing old with. It has always been that way, ever since they were four and he had pushed her into a roadside ditch outside her family's farm in Marioteya. She had picked herself up slowly, dusted down her pink flowered shorts and stared at him with her big black eyes.

Leyla has a stare that can melt mountains and grown men. He has watched her work wonders on the Cairo traffic policemen, the airport security, the cranky taxi drivers: one stare and they all seem to wilt like flowers under the heavy August sun.

Now back in the familiar dust of Cairo, the adventure of hidden kisses and hands held on the streets of Beirut can no longer be repeated.
Here, their families know each other, here the doorman stands at the building as the hawk-like guardian of everything sacred and pure, watching them with blatant disapproval as they walk up to his apartment.

Here, her reputation as a good Egyptian girl is at stake if anyone even suspects that they are sleeping together.
No harm can come to her, this he knows with absolute certainty. She is his family, his best friend, someone who needs to be protected and loved unconditionally. This he cannot do. Not in this mess.

Yesterday, he held her in the shower as she washed her hair with Mariam’s shampoo. He had wanted to stop her, tell her to use his instead, but he didn’t want her to suspect or question.

Mariam’s skin was always rough and dry, no matter how often she moisturized, yet his hands ran down Leyla's legs like water.
She smiled at him through the shower, kissed his nose lightly and wrapped her arms around his neck as her hair smelt of his ex-wife’s shampoo. Leyla made him very happy, but the sense of dread only deepened.

Outside, the call to Friday prayers rings out from the mosque, but Mohamed doesn’t feel like praying. He’d usually try to attend the Friday sermon as a once-weekly attempt at regaining the faith he’d gradually lost over the years. Now, he tunes out the man’s voice by raising the TV volume. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in God, he just doesn’t think that God believes in him right now.

Throughout the years, he had been there for her; waiting to pick her up after yet another boyfriend broke her naiive and trusting heart. Leyla had an uncanny ability to attract destructive natures. Two things were constant in her life- serial disappointment and Mohamed to run to.

They had walked into his building on Oraby Street last night, and when no one was looking, he had slipped his hand into hers for one brief moment.
Her thumb had curled into his palm and drew a circle into his flesh. It was heartbreaking.
He saw the trust in her eyes, her willingness to be saved, and it maddened him that the possible love of his life was right there to have and he could not.

Mariam had driven him to the breaking point of madness, twisted him into a place of fury so far in he couldn’t remember if he had struck out and slapped her or if it was just in his head.
There was a line that she made him cross, and since then he can’t trust himself to not snap again. And if he does, it cannot be Leyla. Not her.

He knows, with a sickening sense in his stomach, what needs to happen now. He must distance himself from her. Throw himself into work again. Reject her calls. Take a page out of her ex-boyfriends' books and make her angry enough to toss him aside as yet another asshole in her life.

Eventually, he would learn to sleep alone in his bed again, without the memory of her cool back pressing against his stomach as she lay engulfed in his arms.

Mohamed talks for a living, it’s what he does best- he can spin the worst, cruelest situation into something completely reasonable. Yet now, for the first time in his life, in this moment, he’s dumbstruck.