Читать книгу The Girl with Braided Hair - Rasha Adly - Страница 9

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Her eyes followed him as he crossed the road to his car. He walked straight and erect, striding confidently across the street. No woman could resist him, from the soft, pleasant huskiness in his voice to his deep, piercing eyes that seemed to see into you. But for all that, he’d let the flame burn out.

Her phone rang in her coat pocket. “Grandma!”

Her grandmother’s voice was breathy and halting, but commanding as usual. “Don’t forget the cat food!”

Her grandmother was ninety and suffered from senile dementia: the only things that kept her alive were her cats and whatever fugitive scraps of memory she had left. Whenever Yasmine looked at her, her conviction increased that time was a tyrant. Could this, she wondered, be her fate? An old woman who forgot more than she remembered, whose hair had all fallen out except for two white tufts on the right and left, her face furrowed and lined with wrinkles, her eyes dulled and pale, peeing into diapers like a child? Heavens, what a fate. And yet, her grandmother was lucky: she had a loving granddaughter who cared for her and her cats. Many people that age had no one to take care of them. Yasmine had once thought of putting her into an old people’s home, especially because she traveled a lot to exhibitions and conferences, but every time it occurred to her, she pushed the thought away and hired a nurse instead. And every time, she would come back to a torrent of complaints from the nurse about her grandmother, “that old woman who’s always screaming and never stops giving orders.”

Yasmine knew that her grandmother liked to run a tight ship, and nothing was ever good enough for her; she was used to it by now, and excused her grandmother’s foibles as the failings of old age. The one thing that upset and saddened her was when she picked up the phone and entered into long one-sided conversations with people long dead, telling them about the events of her day. The doctor had told Yasmine that it was to be expected. “But she can’t remember recent events,” she’d said to him worriedly, “and these old numbers are still stuck in her memory, and things that happened all those years ago.”

“Long-term memories are easy to access,” the doctor said, “if they are bright in the mind.”

Yasmine accepted reality. It became routine to hear her grandmother dialing a number at four in the morning and launching into a long conversation with a long-departed friend, recounting the events of a day in her life that had taken place years ago, and telling her how her husband and children had loved the special meal she had cooked.

She turned left onto a long, narrow downhill street that sloped toward the Nile. Every step seemed to propel you downward, shoving you into the face of the river. On either side were beautiful old buildings and villas, most of them deserted. It was strange not to see a single modern building all down the street, as though this was a place that refused to be touched by wrecking balls. Since Zamalek was built, when Khedive Ismail had divided up its land among that era’s elite on condition that they erect structures in fine artistic taste, its buildings had remained untouched. Their opulence and history struck her anew every time she passed them: a strange feeling came over her, as if she could hear the footsteps of the people who had lived here walking through time. Even the supermarket on the street was one in name only, and was more of an old-time grocery store. Everything in it evoked a bygone era: the floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves on the walls, the sausages hanging by cords from the rafters, the incessantly rotating ceiling fan—even the goods on sale seemed on their way to extinction, brands that were hard to find anywhere else. The owner, seated on a wooden stool, tallied up your purchases with pen and paper and handed you a handwritten receipt. On the top of the paper was printed, “Abdel-Aziz Nakhla & Co., Grocers—Founded 1930.” She found it quite natural, in that place with its contents, to be transported to another time.

She needed to find a real supermarket to buy cat food. Stepping into the supermarket was like coming back into the present: the gleaming display, the shopping carts, and the register with its credit card machine.