The Oasis

I was fourteen years old when I was told that I would be married. 1

I remember sitting on a palm tree stump in the open sun in the heat of summer, my warm, sticky face turned a burnt reddish brown from years of hard labor on the goat farm. My muddy feet slid around inside the gray plastic sandals that were too big for me, and my eyes shifted fleetingly from the mud brick hut my family shared towards the highway where freight trucks and tourist buses passed along on their way to Alexandria Desert Road. 2

Married. 3

At first, I hated the word. Of course, it was a very good word. It made me think of the countless weddings I had seen in the village, with festive dancing and tasty spiced meats and celebrating that lasted from the night clear into the morning. My whole life I had known I would marry Fahmi.4

"Al bint li ibin amiha," my mother and aunts would often say with buck-toothed smiles, meaning, "The girl is for her cousin." 5

As children, Fahmi and I had played together. Whenever a spell of scarce rain landed on the palm grove in Egypt's Western Desert where our village lay under the dryness of sun, Fahmi and I would play in the mud and get very dirty. This was when I was six, and he was eleven, I guess. As we grew older we often ate together during family gatherings when as many relatives as we could cram inside the mud brick hut would sit cross-legged on the floor and dip freshly baked flatbread straight out of the iron kilns into beans and thick, slimy green soup made of roots and herbs. At night we ate by kerosene lamps. The men would discuss politics and religion. Sometimes Fahmi joined them. 6

In the distance, I could see my father with his donkey harvesting the date orchard. He loaded sacks of dates on the poor, flea-bitten beast with a tired, swaying back. He would send them off to the man who owned the land who would take them to the factory where they would be shipped to Cairo to be sold in plastic packages at all the grocers. Fahmi worked the farm, too. My father treated him like a son, because he had no sons, only me – the only child my parents had been able to have. My father could have divorced my mother or taken a second wife and tried to have more children and especially sons, but for some reason he never had. I didn't know why. 7

"Ya Haaaanu!!"8

I heard my name coming from somewhere across the clustering of mud brick huts and palm orchards. I figured it was my mother or one of my sisters and I stood. But I didn't see anyone. A moment later I saw an old woman I had never seen before in my life coming towards me. 9

"Who are you?" I shook my head when she was close enough to hear. She was small, with shriveled skin burnt a crisp mahogany. She might have been a Bedouin, with such black skin. She dressed all in black and a blue glass amulet hung around her neck to ward off the evil eye. When she smiled she had no teeth – not a one. 10

"I have come all the way from Cairo for your wedding!" she smiled.11

When she said that something felt like it fell clear down my throat to my stomach. 12

"You don’t remember me," she said. 13

I nodded. 14

"I am your and Fahmi's grandmother … but you never knew me because I was disowned from the family years ago."15

"Why?" I asked. 16

"I ran away to be a dancer at a fancy hotel in Cairo. But that was years and years ago."17

For a moment I imagined myself running away and being a belly dancer at a fancy hotel. I imagined the men watching me – Egyptian, Saudi, and foreign – watching me and thinking that I was beautiful. But then I reminded myself that I was not beautiful. I had very dark and ruddy skin. 18

"Come sit down and have tea." She urged me. 19

I followed her to my mother and father's mud brick hut. We ducked under the shade of the cool unbaked bricks and we made tea over an open fire and talked about my wedding. Did I love Fahmi? She asked. I loved him as a brother, I told her. That was good enough, she said. Did I think he was handsome? No, I said. He was short and skinny and had crooked teeth. She slapped me. Never call anyone ugly, she warned me. How would I like it if someone called me ugly?20

A while later she left, saying she was going to go lie down and sleep for awhile in Fahmi's family's hut. I went back out to help my father harvest the dates. I told him what had happened.21

"No," he shook his head. He wiped sweat from his deep bronze skin that shone in the open sun of summer. "Your and Fahmi's grandmother died years ago. There's no way you could have seen her."22

I was confused. I never saw the old woman again. When I told Fahmi's family, they said I had seen a spirit. When I told my friend Nur she said that my father lied to me and just said that my grandmother had died because the family had disowned her. But I never knew. 23