Alexandria
Tahia Abdel Nasser
One day my cousins and I squirreled down to the beach and cooed. The prettiest natural pools shimmered in the sun. Pools dotted the beach like natural springs. The waves broke on the shore. Overnight they had spilled into the pools. We giggled, plopped down into the pools, and lay in water as deep as our shoulders. Some pools were shallow, barely covering our ankles. We hopped from pool to pool, splashed and bathed in the water, and squealed.
The first pool was the largest and choicest. I crouched in the pool, plopped down and stretched out my legs. The pools were sweet and warm and sheer, the sand was silky, I sank and wiggled my toes. I played awhile and came out of the pool and held the sandwich Nargis brought me. White cheese and tomatoes in a sliced baguette, full and fresh.
Then the pools seemed to disappear just as suddenly as they had appeared overnight. They became a sweet memory or mirage. They faded so quickly like our footprints in the sand.
Some mornings I rode my bike in the garden. I came upon empty crab shells in the derelict fountains. I mulled over the slow progress of snails near the flower beds. I pedaled to a deck with a roof of grape vine leaves. I climbed steps. I leaned against a door with metal bars in the garden’s wall. I peered through the bars at overgrown, unkempt foliage. The forest was empty.
Each day, we drove to Al-Montazah for ice cream. It was a treat. We bought soft ice cream and watched the large clock strike nine o’clock. If you leaned over the bridge in Al-Montazah, you could spot our house in Al-Maamoura. The trip was a quarter of an hour, past Al-Montazah summer palace, but both beaches were separated by a gate on land and a bridge at sea. In Ramadan, my father bought us mastic ice cream from Ibrahimiyya for suhur. I swirled spoonfuls of ice cream and slivered pistachios in a plastic cup. The ice cream seller in Al-Montazah swirled delicious soft strawberry and vanilla ice cream in sturdy golden cones. We leaned against the car with Nargis and licked away our ice-cream. I tugged at Nargis’s dress to buy my sisters and me fluffy necklaces of Arabian jasmine for 1 pound apiece. The scent was so lovely. I wore my necklace, twirled the Arabian jasmine like rosary beads. At bedtime I hung the necklace on the mirror on my dresser. It curled and yellowed and withered over the summer.
The family—uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandmother—flocked to Alexandria in the summertime. When we arrived, I wore a summer frock and strolled on the beach. It was sprinkled with shells and crabs’ little burrows. Seagulls swooped down and squawked and soared. Tiny crabs scurried to the sea and burrowed in the sand. I stooped to collect shells, pressed them in my palms. They looked like a fan, chrysalis, sarcophagus, harp, horn, cone, and rose petal. I waded out into the shallow sea at low tide. The translucent water lapped at my ankles so far out I was as tiny as a shell. I held a pretty shell to my ear to listen to the sound of the sea. The susurration of waves in a shell. Conches, cowries, and cockles jangled in my pockets.
A long, sturdy bridge in the sea sliced the beach in half. The bridge was weathered and looked like the skeleton of a beached whale. The neighbor’s house had a twin bridge that from afar appeared to be in the same state of disrepair. I climbed the bridge, tiptoed on the wooden boards, skipped over the missing planks. It had been a year. I inched further along and clutched the rickety railings until there were no planks, there was nothing, and the sea yawned before me, roiling and frothy, spraying the steel poles jutting out of the sea. I leaned over the bridge. The water was deep and blue-black. There were some planks, the extension of the bridge, and then one or two poles where the bridge had been. The bridge was long. It was built to carry swimmers halfway through the sea. It was impossible to hop over to the remains of the bridge. I backed away to the complete planks towards the shore.
This was where my uncle went fishing. Where my uncle cast his fishing rod. Where my cousins and I fished tiny shrimp from a plastic bag and nimbly jabbed them on the hooks. Where the fishing line tugged, the bubble float bobbed up and down. Where my uncle reeled in fish. Where he pulled the fish from the hook and plunked them in an empty bucket. Where the fish sputtered and flapped, where gills bled. Where fish lay in the bucket. Where I felt sad. Where a heap of fresh fish and pearly scales shimmered in the sun. Where Mama liked to cast the line into the sea and stand patiently. Where my uncle caught large sea eels. Where two sacks of freshly bagged sea eels trembled. Where we tiptoed on tenterhooks. Where we had no wish to peep into sacks.
The kitchen was a hive of activity. There were boxes of cheese and fruit on the floor. The kitchen counter was bare. Khamis the cook was ready in his buttoned cotton shirt and striped pants. Tomorrow we would bake bread, he promised. All we needed was flour, water, and an oven. He waved us in. He had a surprise. We tiptoed up to peer at the kitchen counter. There was a hedgehog, curled up like a ball of yarn on the counter, and his quills looked prickly and spiky. He won’t hurt, he said. Saucer-eyed, we goggled at the hedgehog in our kitchen.
One day we came upon skeletons of wild dogs on the beach. Two skeletons jutted out of the sand like tents. “Stray dogs on the beach,” said Mohamed the lifeguard. They had died on the beach. They barked, ran, died, and decomposed. He strolled with us around skeletons like funeral pyres. But we had never seen dogs on the beach. There would have been carcasses and paw prints like flowers on the sand. I tucked a windswept strand of hair around the shell of my ear, brows furrowed at the beach. I never heard dogs barking along the beach. They could have been washed ashore. Or buried on our beach. Our feet sank into the sand along the beach. Crabs scurried out of burrows and into the waves.
That day we were to have a family lunch on a nearby island. We had never had a picnic there before. The island was on the other bank, a pea-sized island we regularly went to by boat to swim. I woke up early and scurried upstairs to my grandmother’s small table looking out on the sea. My father was the first one at breakfast, a large newspaper spread out in front of him. A large pool of skin peeled on his sunburnt back. Afterward, I squirreled down to the large kitchen. There was a sitting room nearby for Osman and Nargis, where my cousins and I often had breakfast, a hearty bowl of fava beans and tomatoes and loaves of warm flatbread. Nargis stirred Nido powdered milk in cups. I sipped Tang orange juice in a glass. Nadim poured the powdered milk down the sink and bawled as Nargis wrestled the cup from him.
My father ferried us to the island. It was to be a family picnic. The inflatable boat nosed into a lagoon—what was called the ‘Princesses’ Bath’, where real princesses once bathed in a little natural pool—and pulled up on the sand. We spilled out and ran on the beach and into the pool. We dove into the princesses’ bath like mermaids and fished for shells in the sand at the bottom of the sea.
We came out of the pool and strolled barefoot to an elegant summer rest house that belonged to King Farouk. It was deserted and padlocked. Soldiers in pale summer uniforms patrolled the small rest house and disappeared behind the walls. We skirted the rest house, peered inside. We happened upon a set of steps that led into the open sea but a door with iron grating rose from the water. We contented ourselves with looking down into the water pooling at the bottom of the steps. We raced to a small wooden cabin on the other side. This is where we were to have the family picnic. The family hauled dishes for the summer lunch from the house. Large platters of grilled fish, rice, shrimps, salads, and my grandmother’s spiced eggplants. Famished, we crowded into the cabin, heaped plastic plates with food, and sprawled on the beach. The family picnic was so lovely.
My father swam around the island in flippers and pried sea urchins off the rocks with his dive knife. He prised them open and scooped the orange meat out of the shells. “Sprinkle some lemon and eat it like so,” he said. The sea urchin tasted like seawater. He passed around handfuls of fresh sea urchins at the family lunch. His flippers and goggles were plopped beside him like upturned slippers.
After lunch, we had mangoes. We helped ourselves to mangoes from a bowl on the table in the cabin, wandered out, perched on makeshift chairs, plates balanced on our knees, and turned towards the sea. In summertime my grandmother had crates of mangoes brought from our orchard in Cairo. Osman lugged cases of mangoes from the car and plopped them on the kitchen counter. Mangoes in sweet-scented boxes. While we spent summer in Alexandria, the mango trees ripened in our orchard in the sweltering heat. We knew no fruit vendors. Mangoes came from our orchard. We heaped mangoes on our plates. Hindi, Alphonso. Round, oval, green, fragrant, and fleshy.
At sundown, after a hearty meal, we would clamber up to my grandmother’s parlor and help ourselves to fresh mangoes. Our plates were heaped with mangoes as we gathered in her parlor around the television. Sometimes I sampled mangoes from my grandmother’s kitchen and hitched them downstairs in the hem of my dress. Osman chewed mouthfuls of mango in the kitchen. He wrapped a handful of mangoes in newspapers and tucked them under his arm when he walked to the servants’ quarters at night.
We had mastered the art of eating mangoes. At the picnic, Mama cut a mango in half—a cap and a boat—and scooped out the flesh with a spoon. I sliced a mango lengthways, each slice like a canoe, and savored the sweet yellow flesh. Nadim bit into a mango like a sandwich, savoring flesh and skin. Sarah sank her teeth into the large seed. Adam crosshatched a piece and pushed the skin. The mango looked like the quills of a hedgehog. He cut the upturned mango cubes.
Tiny crabs scurried on the beach. Mohamed caught a crab and snapped its claws. “It won’t sting,” he plopped the tiny crab in a plastic cup. I tilted the cup on the sand. I felt so sorry for the crab scurrying into the sea.
In the late afternoon, the cabin was cleared, scrubbed clean, and shuttered. We went to the pier to go home in droves. I loitered on the pier. I spotted the rocks where my father dove for sea urchins, peered into the water at shoals of fish. I went back to the cabin. Turned the handle. The door was locked. I rubbed the glass window, peered inside. It was bare—furnished only by the ungainly wooden table. The cozy, bustling cabin, spread, and family had disappeared like the natural pools. I strolled lackadaisically on the sand, scanned the stormy sea for the boat and our house on the other shore.
A swirl of aunts, uncles, and cousins trudged in single file to the house. To take showers. There was only one bathroom in our wing. It was cavernous.
At suppertime, a large wave—my father, mother, aunts, uncles—spilled out of the entrance and trickled into the garden. Down the steps we skipped down at Eid with gold purses clasped onto crispy 1-pond notes from our grandmother. They called out and squeaked feebly. Bicycles lay scattered at the entrance. It was light, the sky blazed lilac and tangerine. Crickets chirped. They looked half-heartedly at the house. It was too large, so many rooms, three floors, empty wings. The garden sprawled. There were the front gates. But they would have known. The gatekeeper would have called. My father trudged towards the beach, brows furrowed, shoulders hunched.
When I lay in bed looking out onto the sea, the waves sounded as if they were lapping into the bedroom and lulled me to sleep. The moon shone brightly on the waves. Face and shoulders sunburnt, but the waves were a balm to the searing pain. The rolling, crashing waves. I slept soundly.
Have you ever been to Alexandria in winter? The sound of the waves was deafening, the house was quieter. When I went out on my grandmother’s terrace overlooking the sea, I felt the waves would swallow me. I unlatched the French doors, the wind blew, the waves thundered, a black-and-white movie playing in my grandmother’s parlor in the afternoon. Waves crashed into frothy plumes. The soft drapes billowed in my grandmother’s wing. We were cooped up in the parlor, me with a dog-eared fairy tale. I was in my shell. The waves seemed so high they could swallow the house.
One day, the sea heaved me out, tossed me ashore. I rolled in rumpled sheets of waves and burrowed in the sand like a shell. An empty shell. My tousled hair was wreathed in seaweed.
My cousins would wake up and scurry down to the beach.
