Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa Jarrar

      This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

      For my son, Angelo

       CONTENTS

       1

      The Lunatics’ Eclipse

      Building Girls

      Lost in Freakin’ Yonkers

      How Can I Be of Use to You?

       2

      A Sailor

      Grace

      Testimony of Malik, Prisoner #287690

      Accidental Transients

      Asmahan

       3

      Him, Me, Muhammad Ali

      The Story of My Building

      A Frame for the Sky

      The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie

       Acknowledgments

       1

       THE LUNATICS’ ECLIPSE

      The neighborhood got its first dose of Qamar the summer of her ninth birthday, when she sat on the rooftop of her Alexandria apartment building for ten days and waited for the moon to come down. She did it for her neighbor Metwalli; he promised he’d be hers forever if she only brought him the moon. Metwalli was twenty-four and had no idea that Qamar would take his pledge to heart.

      The first night on the roof, Qamar sat on a long chair with a rope in her hands. The People began to wonder, and when midnight came and she was still there, they informed the bawab—the super—and asked him to go check on her. Too lazy to climb the nine stories, he shouted up from his post at the front entrance of the building, “What’s with you, Qamar?”

      “I want the moon,” she yelled.

      A collective sigh was broadcast from the audience that now gathered in the street. “The moon’s expensive,” the People yelled back at her. “It costs ten nights, ten whole wakeful nights . . . and you can’t nod off, not even for a second.”

      Qamar stayed up the ten whole nights, and the moon was descending, everyone agreed that it was. Qamar developed dark crescents under her eyes and her hair was dreading. On the tenth night, the moon vanished, but the People never agreed on how. Some said that Qamar nodded off and the moon shot back up into the vastness of sky, so high no one could see it anymore. Qamar said she only fell asleep for an instant and when she opened her eyes, the moon was gone, and she insisted that Zeinab, the evil neighbor girl who had had her eye on Metwalli for weeks, filched the moon during that short instant. How else could one explain what happened next? Metwalli fell in love with Zeinab, and ten years later, they lived in a flat on San Stefano Street with six children. Metwalli was Zeinab’s forever, and Qamar was a stranger.

      It made a small sidebar in all the papers: Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and even Al-Sharq al-Awsat. That was how Hilal knew of Qamar; he’d read the story in Al-Ahram ten years before. Hilal himself had appeared in the paper twice. The first time for placing number one nationwide in the secondary-school final exams and the second for turning down the president’s offer of sending him to London for free medical training as a cardiologist. Hilal wrote to the President: “Sir, I have no interest in hearts or in how to mend them. Can you send me to Houston?” You see, Hilal had been trying to figure out a way to get to the moon since he was four years old. His father, a fisherman in Alexandria’s east quay, once caught Hilal dangling his feet outside the boat and casting a net over the moon’s reflection. Much later, Hilal heard that men could walk on the moon’s surface and when he looked into it (he took the tram to the American embassy, the Russian embassy, and the visa office), he realized that jumping to the moon would be more realistic than obtaining a visa and traveling to Houston for astronaut training. Here’s what the President had to say about NASA instruction: “Son, our country has no interest in reaching the moon. However, we do need a bright young man like you in our nuclear-weapons development facility.”

      You might wonder why Qamar’s parents let their child sit on the roof for ten nights in a row, and for a boy. You might think Egyptian parents don’t let their little girls get away with things like that, and you’d be right. But Qamar’s parents were different; they were actors in the Theatre d’Alexandrie. Her mother was Sophia, and her father was Farid Hafez. You may have heard of their summertime performances at the Corniche Theatre—the pink, hieroglyphed, open-air venue resembling a conch shell. Sophia and Farid performed musical comedies on that stage, their only child watching from behind the velvet curtain every night. When she was five, she told them she wanted to dance, but she needed credibility as a performer, so they enrolled her at the Conservatoire for ballet lessons. By her thirteenth birthday, she was one of Egypt’s top ballerinas, the Russian-allied government sending her to St. Petersburg for exclusive performances.

      When Qamar was fifteen, her parents were run over by a van in St. Petersburg as they were crossing the street to watch her dance at the theater. The van’s passengers, sticking their heads out of the windows and peering into monoculars, distracted the heavy-footed driver. Looking up into the sky, he saw the cause of their excitement: a lunar eclipse. Her parents were killed instantly.

      Now, if she hadn’t been a ballerina, she wouldn’t have gone to St. Petersburg. If she hadn’t gone to St. Petersburg, her parents would have never crossed that cursed street. If her performance had been on a different night, the driver would not have been distracted. If, many years ago, Dulles hadn’t thought Nasser was bluffing, Egypt would never have found an ally in Russia, and her performance may have been held in Washington, where van drivers rarely hold romantic sentiments about the moon or any other heavenly object.

      Ever heard of anyone dying of a split? She hadn’t and so immediately began working as a tightrope walker for the Cirque de la Lune, a French circus based in Alexandria. Their tent was attached to the St. Mark School for Boys. You could see her walking the big brown bears in the early mornings, berating them for laziness. They always moved a bit faster for her. She wore her tightrope-walking suit: a shiny green leotard and a lime-green tutu speckled with tiny silver stars. Her tights were sheer gray, her feet bound in pink ballet slippers. On leashes, she would walk all nine bears in circles around the circus courtyard, en pointe.

      The first time Hilal glimpsed Qamar,