Who Were You, Mariam?

Mariam sat up straight, legs folded under her, and continued to fiddle with the armchair’s fraying upholstery. I waited silently as she took a second to master her tears. The marquee from the neighboring hotel provided the only light in the room. That and her phone, which kept buzzing. One call, then another. A series of texts followed by still more. Our entire conversation, the entire time we sat there, the texts, the calls, they never once stopped coming.

Finally, she relented.

§

I’m not the most serious person, and in the short time I knew her, neither was Mariam. But circumstances change people.

This was modern Egypt. An aging pharaoh sat on the throne. His eldest stood by, amassing a fortune while waiting for the crown. There were elections every so often, but everyone knew the outcome before it was announced. Occasionally, protests flared, but material and caloric poverty mostly kept people preoccupied.

I was a student. Graduate, not undergrad. Ostensibly, this meant I was a bit more mature, a bit worldlier than your average twenty-four year old.

Aside from the interminable bus rides through the traffic-clogged capital to an ostentatious new campus well beyond the city limits, school wasn’t taxing. My time was spent reading, drafting position papers full of self-assured, half-thought-through analyses, and arguing about the position papers (again, with equal self-assurance). All of which I enjoyed. That the program required only a few days a week on campus meant there was an abnormal amount of time for a man in his mid-twenties to explore, learn, socialize.

My friends were an eclectic bunch. The people in my program were mostly Americans and Europeans, plus some Gulf Arabs whose grades weren’t good enough—or parents rich enough—to go to school in the US. There were a few Egyptians, but they mostly stuck to themselves. The Egyptians friends I did make—almost exclusively men—I couldn’t tell you how. Most likely they’d been introduced to a Western girl who they had tried or were trying to sleep with. Regardless, by the end of my first year there, I’d become part of a group that included a number of young, upper-middle class Egyptians. Corporate middle management types. A pair of shop owners, a dentist, a perpetual student, each of whom spoke near flawless English and ridiculed my American-accented Arabic.

I lived in an aged walk-up brimming with faded opulence, sharing the flat with a Danish friend I’d met the year prior. French doors, wrap-around balconies, an expansive entryway with an early twentieth-century elevator long disused. The building reflected the neighborhood, a once-wealthy enclave which now housed young, upwardly mobile Egyptians, foreign students, businessmen, and the occasional diplomat. Like my walk-up, most buildings were in various states of decay, their cream facades daubed orange from years of being battered by windblown Saharan dust. On an island in the Nile, dead smack in the center of the city, the neighborhood was a good staging base for sorties into the rest of the metropolis. Amongst my friend group, nights invariably started at my place.

I can’t remember specifically when I met Mariam. Mari, as she was known. Sometime in late autumn. I remember it being chilly, if not cold. Cairo rarely got cold. Even before we’d met, I’d been warned off her by my Egyptian friends. She likes to enjoy herself, man. You’d better have protection. She’s only good for a good time. In reality, she was just the rare woman who had the audacity to behave like a man. In Cairo that was haram. Forbidden. Doubly so if she’s flagrant about it. But Mari was only half Egyptian. Her mom was Bulgarian, and that’s where she’d spent most of her childhood and, apparently, where she’d developed her social mores.

And that worked for me. I’d been struggling to acclimate to Egypt’s social conservatism. Or, more accurately, I’d been struggling with the double standards placed on women in Islamic Egypt. Well, most accurately, I’d been struggling to get laid.

Which is why I didn’t wait long to try to strike something up. And lucky for me, Mari seemed inclined. She’d been burnt on a few occasions by local guys who would happily sleep with her and just as happily shame her for sleeping with them out of wedlock. Her assumption was that I didn’t come with those hang-ups, an assumption borne from the odd circumstances that led to us first hooking up.

A pre-game at my place had turned into a scene when a friend announced he’d be moving to Berlin at the end of the year to accept a residency with a university there. Word got out and next thing, most people I knew in Cairo—and a good many I didn’t—were traipsing and toasting all around my apartment, Mari included.

We’d hung out a couple times by this point, and there was a playful insouciance to our conversation, but I was still surprised when, eyes locked on the message she was tapping out on her phone, she threw out a curveball.

“Wanna fuck with some people?”

My first instinct was, probably not.

Turns out I was wrong. Mari was glued to her phone because a set of twins, short, middle-aged, and identical, had somehow gotten her number and were feverishly trying to convince her to sleep with them. She gave a terse response to a string of texts, their English as bad as my Arabic, so the calls started coming, which she also brushed off. This prompted more texts. There was a palpable desperation in their texts and a visible frustration on Mari’s brow. “How many ways and in how many languages can I say no?” she sighed.

Ok, maybe I did wanna fuck with some people.

The idea was Mari’s. I made sure everyone at the soiree knew that as I stood on a chair explaining what exactly it was we were all about to do.

Mari carefully steered her unwelcome gentlemen callers towards the dusty parking spaces below my apartment while I passed out limes, lemons, and the rest of the cocktail fruit to the dozens of partygoers and soon-to-be stalwart defenders of consent. Some half hour later, as two exceptionally close twins exited their dated Toyota Highlander, Mari directed their attention to the balcony one story above, just in time for a fusillade of garnishes to rain down on their matching outfits and dreams of sexual conquest. They beat a quick exit and the party kicked up a gear to toast the victory. Mari, seeming to feel more than just playful, thought we made a good team and should see where else we clicked.

I’m not sure if Mari would be what you’d call conventionally attractive. She had a severe Roman nose, minor pockmarking from a tough case of adolescent acne, and a pale complexion reflecting all of her mother’s European heritage and none of her father’s Egyptian. But her oval eyes, green, expressive, and inviting, held a mischievous vitality that drew me all the way in. I was addicted from the first, and yet, somehow, knew that this wouldn’t be anything more than the two of us throwing our bodies at each other. Which we did. Repeatedly. At the end of the night, in the middle of the night. When we woke up. When she got off work. When I got back from campus.

Yet, for all of the feverish dalliances the next month or two brought, it was apparent she was holding back. Not in the bed (or sofa, or hallway, or wherever), but in every other aspect. We’d grab a coffee midday, or a drink at the Flamenco Hotel next door. As soon as conversation moved past the flirtatious, as the seed or hint or whiff of depth sprouted, she’d draw me back. A hand slowly gliding up the inside of my thigh or, leaning in, a warm caress along my ear with her tongue.

Not that I minded, of course. And I was always happy to give in. But, looking back, trying to recall what I knew about her, it was all just surface, almost humorously so. Certainly deliberately so. The facts I knew of her life—the real facts—I could count on one hand. She had a brother back in Bulgaria. He also looked nothing like their dad. Her mom had passed a few years ago, leaving her and her brother with a flat, some cash, and each other. In Cairo, she was staying with her dad at his place in Mokattam, a destitute neighborhood of grinding, unrelenting poverty. Her profile on Facebook—as these were still the days when you’d start a light background check on a potential romantic (well, sexual) interest on that platform—was equally sparse

Looking back, it was only too clear her distance had been deliberate. And maybe it saved me, but it might have condemned her.

§

Fall turned to winter. The semester ended with its typically compacted layers of stress—unnecessarily lengthy essays, cramming for finals, holiday travel. Expats, Europeans especially, went home for a long break. Mari did the same, but I stuck around, spent more time with my Egyptian friends. Most days didn’t start until the afternoon, when we’d meet at the Greek Club, an old restaurant on the second floor of a dilapidated building on Talat Harb Square. Shockingly cheap beers of questionable freshness, bummed cigarettes on the once-stately patio looking down on the square. Cleopatra cigarettes, a pack for a dollar, each and every one as stale as the dying day. From there, maybe across the river to Dokki or the Jazz Club in Mohandiseen, either way riding at a languid pace through traffic-choked streets, sipping on locally brewed Heinekens in the plush seats of my friend’s aged Peugeot.

I wouldn’t say I was waiting for Mari to get back. Yeah, we were in touch, the occasional message via Facebook, but the urgency was gone. The fire hadn’t fully extinguished, but it was down to embers. At least for her.

There’d never been any discussion of monogamy. My assumption was she’d been seeing other guys and, as wild as we’d ever been, we’d been safe in one respect, so there wasn’t anything to be worried about. Still, the way our dalliances petered out at the end of the semester, I could tell she was caught in someone else’s gravity.

Around the same time, another fire started, this one by a young street vendor in Tunisia sick of interminable hours in front of a burning pot of oil and repeated, daily humiliations from the police. Despondent at a future that held nothing but the same. A future so bleak, so drained of possibility that his only solution was to light himself on fire.

But he ignited something in those around him, and the flames soon spread beyond Tunisia, outward across the vast sands, to Algeria, to Syria and Oman.

Not long after, on a dreary, wintry January 11th, we all watched from under the shadow of the pharaoh as Tunisia’s long-standing dictator vacated the throne and fled the country before eleven million of his countrymen and women could drag him to the gallows.

For my Egyptian friends, usually as alcohol-soaked as me, it was like a switch was flipped. Talk immediately turned to the corpulent pharaoh rotting on his dais. After years of half-hearted attempts to remove him, by the ballot and in the streets, maybe, finally, now is our time. If they did it there, why can’t we do it here?

Seemingly without any coordination, a date was marked on the calendar. An upcoming holiday: Tuesday, January 25. National Police Day. The corrupt, abusive, intolerable police.

It seemed poetic. It seemed inevitable.

And then, Mari messaged.

She was coming back.

How is it there?

Nervous. Combustible, like loose tinder in the dry season. Like I’m watching a crack in a dam split open.

Great! I’ll be in next week. Before Tuesday. I’ll call you when I get settled.

The call never came, and I almost forgot it was supposed to. All talk was on the upcoming protest. It seemed, at least for my youthful, animated Egyptian crew, that nothing else existed. This cut a sharp contrast with the work-a-day drudgery going on at its usual pace, from the traffic-clogged commutes, to the drowsy vendors lounging outside their narrow fruit or cell phone or cigarette stands, to the bustling falafel shops, crowded as ever during the midday lunch rush.

I was supposed to be looking for a job or an internship for the summer, something that could springboard me into a career-trajectory role by the time I finished my degree. And I sure spent a fair amount of time sitting in front of a laptop at cafes. But the laptop was usually closed. Instead, I sat, sipping lattes and chatting feverishly about the coming days, the impending protest, what the regime would do if people really did show up, and what might happen after.

And then, the date came. January 25th.

It didn’t disappoint. It was as if the entire city showed up, in their hundreds of thousands, until Tahrir Square—Liberation Square—was bursting beyond capacity, beyond anyone’s most fervent dreams.

I stood at the far end of Tahrir, a foreign political science student, having studied this very scene. I’d read Veblen, Marx, Foucault, Orwell, about 1848 and 1989, about authority and power and ferocity. Now I was seeing it happen in real life, the excitement, bending towards jubilation, both within me and throughout the crowd, that they dared to stand against the immutable by simply standing there. Even as an outsider, I couldn’t help but get swept up in the fervor. There was a buoyancy, an exuberance that only seemed to grow with each new couple entering the square, with every Otlob driver who had to turn their scooter around and find another route to make their delivery, with each new chant that reverberated off the high-rises dominating the square. Egyptians of all stripes. Brash youth, testing how close they could get to the statuesque rows of riot police blocking the entrance to Parliament. Old men in rumpled khakis, cigarettes in hand. Frumpy mothers, hair hidden beneath their hijab, safely ensconced deep within the square.

It wasn’t until that evening that the regime made its move. The day had been long, but the crowd hadn’t thinned an inch. With the light growing dim, special police units burst out from behind orderly rows, batons in hand, like caged dogs eager to soak their teeth. At the same time, sharp pops rang out. Streaks of gray arced skyward and, pausing as if to survey the scene, raced towards the earth, clanging on the concrete. Where they landed, thick gray clouds of acrid odor plumed.

Tear gas, metal clubs, followed immediately by shrieks, panic, pandemonium. I ran, heart thumping, not from the tear gas, not from the rubber bullets pounding into the crowd, but from the human stampede surging towards me. I turned and fled, instinct taking over, becoming part of the stampede. I hurtled down the street as fast as I could, sprinting out of Tahrir Square, sprinting until the stampede thinned, until a dim, lifeless alley provided cover from the tear gas and sanctuary from the crowds.

A few people went back to the square, but most didn’t. It had been a long day, and a statement had been made.

There was a protest scheduled for the next day in front of the Journalist Syndicate, just down the road from Tahrir Square. After the square-clearing brutality that shutdown the National Police Day protests, no one knew what to expect. With hundreds injured and rumors of deaths swirling online, would anyone actually show up?

Of course they did. The journalists, sick of years of compromise, sick of years of being told what they could print, sick of working with the regime instead of telling truth to it, telling truth about it, stood on the front steps, on the roof, and in the street, blocking traffic, anger and defiance in their voices.

But the regime came in force, with the same rows of identical riot police, this time joined by the feared plainclothes cops, calmly walking into the crowd, strengthened by the fear surrounding them, dragging their targets back behind the riot police. Yet still more people arrived, filling the street in front of the syndicate, then the adjoining streets, seething from years of hunger and meager options.

And so it went. Back and forth, desperate push and despotic pull, day in and day out. Egyptians came to the square, packing it after work. The regime installed a curfew.

Protesters mobilized online, the regime cut off the internet. Youth sacked and burnt police headquarters, the regime called in the army. The regime called in the army.

And the nation held its breath.

A salesman doesn’t lower his price until he has to. A cardiologist doesn’t order heart surgery unless it’s fully necessary.

And a dictator doesn’t call in the army unless it is the absolute last, final option he has.

But the military, they’re just people. And the millions of protestors blocking every street, alley, and sidewalk that led to Tahrir Square—were their friends, their family.

Would they follow orders? Orders to shoot?

§

As this was happening, I’d dropped any pretense of the job search. School had been cancelled, postponed indefinitely. I became a full-time observer of the chaos around me. My apartment became a locus for other foreign students, each one eager to see what was happening on the ground and report it back home. Most nights, my dining area doubled as a newsroom.

On this particular night, though, my place had emptied out. My roommate was at his girlfriend’s apartment on the other side of the island, leaving me space to sip on a low-grade South African whiskey in dimly lit solitude. For all the excitement the preceding days had brought, the thrum of Black Hawk choppers racing over my apartment and the general lawlessness on the streets served as a constant reminder of the stakes of the moment. Given the surprise of having the place to myself, I’d decided to take the evening to collect myself, maybe restitch my frayed nerves in the stillness, when my phone rang.

Mari.

My heart leapt a beat. So did my libido.

She was downstairs. She sounded hesitant, and my assumption—that she was nervous because we hadn’t seen, spoken, or texted each other since she was back—would prove regrettably off the mark.

I told her to give me a second and dashed to the bedroom to find something a bit less dingy. I ransacked my drawers, sniffing sweaters until I found a passably clean pullover, and then raced downstairs with a smile on my face.

I heaved open the metallic doors of the once-stately building, the frame scraping along the entryway tile, and my breath caught in my throat. Something had happened. Mari’s already pale complexion was bleach white. Before I could ask, she fell into my arms and, burying her face in my chest, started sobbing.

After a minute, she gathered herself and we headed up the stairs, her heels clicking against the marbled floor. I reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze, trying to process the situation. This was far out of the normal bounds of our carnal relationship.

Once inside my apartment, she collapsed into the armchair where I’d been sitting. I went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. When I came back in, she was texting furiously. I turned on the lights, prompting her to look up, squinting. “No lights,” she said, shaking her head.

I quickly switched them back off. Only then, in that few seconds of luminescence, did I realize she was in a short skirt and, beneath a faded denim jacket, a revealing top.

“I . . .” she started, then, eyes flicking to her phone, she hastily tossed it onto the table. “I’m sorry for showing up like this.”

“It’s alright. I . . . I wasn’t . . . really doing much anyway.” I stammered as she received one, then two, then three texts, one right after the other.

Mari must have caught the worry on my face, lit up as it was by the hotel marquee. She offered a half-explanation. “I didn’t know where else . . . I was already in Zamalek . . . we were . . .”

We were.

It clicked. It took too long, but it clicked. She was in trouble and it was a guy. Of course it was a guy.

My face flushed as I remembered my scramble to find a presentable sweater, and I was suddenly thankful for the darkness of the room.

I recovered quickly, though, realizing this moment wasn’t about me. “It’s alright. Hey, please, don’t worry about it,” I said. I leaned forward and shifted to the edge of my seat. “Tell me what’s going on. And whatever it is, you’re safe here.”

She shook her head as if she were in a trance, so achingly slowly, conveying that I didn’t and maybe even couldn’t understand the situation she was in.

We sat in silence for some time, the only sounds the honking and hawking and commotion that drifted up from the street below. I was about to get up to get her something stronger than the water when I saw her eyes bulge.

That’s when the texts stopped and the calls started.

She reached for the phone instinctively, but she had put it down with such force that it had slid out of reach.

“Hey, Mari, hold on.” I looked her in her eyes, those sultry, mischievous, imploring eyes, and she met my gaze with the skittish, agitated fear of prey caught in a trap. “You—you can stay here. I’ll sleep on the couch, you take my bed.”

“I can’t, I know I should, but, I just . . .” She trailed off. The phone kept ringing. “I just can’t.”

“Listen, please, stay here. Just for the night. And, in the morning, maybe—”

She cut me off. “You don’t understand. He’s SCAF.”

“He’s . . . he’s SCAF? Like . . .”

“Yes, that SCAF.”

“Well, then you definitely can’t see him tonight.”

“He’s on his way here. Right now.”

“He’s . . . how?”

“I can’t say no to him.”

She took her leg out from underneath her and stretched for the phone, still ringing. Before I could protest again, she’d answered.

“Mhm. Yes, nam, ana asfa, ana asfa ya hababti. Nam, dilwati, dilwati.” I’m sorry. I’m sorry, my love. Yes, right now. Coming.

As she spoke, Mari curled up, absentmindedly covering her chest with the denim jacket like he was in the room with her. Shoulders slumping, she seemed to burrow into the chair.

She got up and started to leave. I sprang up and tried to block her way, taking her hands in mine. “Hey. Hey. You don’t have to go.”

“You know I do.”

“Please, please, call me when you get home. Or at least call me in the morning.”

She nodded, then threw her arms around me again. I could feel her shake as she started to sob again and gently pushed her off me so I could look at her.

“No, you know what? You are staying here. I’m not letting you go out there. He’s obviously dangerous.”

“You’re right. He is dangerous,” she said, sounding surprisingly steely. “He’s downstairs, and if I don’t go out there, he’s going to come up here. And if you don’t let him take me, he—they—will kill you. And then maybe me, I don’t know. It’s safer for both of us if I go down there.”

I started to protest again, but she waved it off, reached up and kissed my cheek, whispered thank you, and headed for the door.

“Mari—call me.”

“I will.”

I stayed up until four in the morning, glued to my phone, waiting for a text and making my way through the rest of the South African swill. When I finally fell asleep, it was a restless, whiskey-logged slumber. And when I woke in the morning, far too early, I immediately checked my phone.

One new text.

Got home safe. Thanks you.

I called the second I saw the text, the bad English, my heartrate spiking, but it went straight to voicemail. I tried again, and again it went straight to voicemail.

Mari—call me when you get a chance.

I struggled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. I swallowed a serving of Advil meant for a larger man and turned right back around to hide under the covers. As painful as my hangover was, it was a welcome distraction from the scenarios coursing through my mind, playing out how last night might have ended for Mari.

I woke up again in the afternoon. Not refreshed, but not dying either, and finally put on day clothes. Out in the living room, my roommate and his girlfriend had returned, along with a number of other friends, foreign and domestic. They applauded my obvious state, asked what I got into. I gave some sort of perfunctory answer, then someone pointed to the table and mentioned finding “two glasses out here.” I smiled, hoping that’d ward them off, and went to the kitchen to make food.

The day’s distractions continued as more friends piled into the apartment. It was Friday, so large demonstrations were expected midday, once Friday prayers concluded. What wasn’t expected—and what sent everyone grasping for their phones, laptops, or shoes—were the words everyone was hoping for. The words everyone had been fighting to hear.

“Today, his reign ends.”

The pharaoh, after thirty brutal years, finally, under mounting pressure from all sides of society, would, “for the good of the Egyptian people, step aside.”

I heard the news before I heard the news. Car horns blaring, pots banging, people shouting in our apartment, next to our apartment, above, below, and all around. People running to their balconies to scream in joy. My roommate immediately ran to the kitchen and came back laden with beers, doling them out as we scrambled to put shoes on and head down to Tahrir Square.

In our elation, we didn’t really think through the second part of the statement: that the military would be temporarily taking over. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

SCAF.

Instead, we joined a growing mass of people pouring onto the streets. We paraded through Zamalek, then onto the 26th of July Bridge and over the Nile, and down the Corniche, packed gill to smiling gill. It seemed like the whole of Cairo had come out to celebrate. A sea of people, singing, testifying to the years of struggle with tears in their eyes, arm and arm with friends, family. The tanks stationed in the square no longer tools of the regime. Now they belonged to the people, who stood crammed on top of turrets or swinging from the cannons, packed so tight boys kept losing their balance and tumbling to the ground. The whole of the square chanting the people and the army are one hand, one and the same.

Amidst all of this celebration, I kept checking my phone. No response from Mari. No call back.

I crashed hard that night, needing sleep like few other nights in my life. I woke the next morning still feeling off. Still no text, no missed calls. Her line went right to voice mail.

After a couple days, I mentioned something to a few of my Egyptian friends, the ones who knew her. They laughed it off. Laughed it off with an oh, c’mon man, you know Mari, but when I mentioned what she’d said, who she was meeting and who he worked for, the tone switched.

SCAF? You mean, like, the SCAF?

§

Days later, once the celebrations had settled down, my program announced it’d be starting back up in a few weeks. Not long after that, Cairo International resumed regular air traffic. Tahrir Square still had crowds, but the atmosphere was carnivalic. Vendors selling popcorn and balloons. Buskers strumming any number of Arab or American classics. Imams leading prayer. Life was getting back to normal.

But I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something was deeply wrong. As erratic as Mari was, I should have heard from her by now, so I decided to visit Mokattam, see if she’d ever gone back to her dad’s. I was able to track down the address from a friend of a friend.

The taxi came to a slow stop. The driver, a hunched man with weathered skin and a few phrases of English in his repertoire, looked over his shoulder, eyes asking if this is really where I wanted to go. The building was a shabby walk-up, maybe five stories high. The entryway lacked a door. Iron rebar stuck out of the top floor where a finished roof should have been. The mud brick construction gave it the same chalky look that made it indiscernible from every other building on the unpaved street.

The sun had just fallen below the horizon, and whoever had illegally ran electricity into the building neglected to provide light for the entrance. I fumbled my way slowly up the stairs, arms outstretched, until the third floor, where a lightbulb hung limply from the ceiling.

It only dawned on me in that moment, as I stood in front of Mari’s doorway, that her dad might answer. What would he, presumably a devout conservative Muslim, think about a Westerner—a Western man—banging on his door, asking for his daughter? Would he be furious? Confused? Could I, with my tenuous grasp of Arabic, even explain why I was there?

And what if he himself was worried about Mari, hadn’t heard from her?

My heart suddenly started pounding. Could I go through with this? If she were around, my unexplained presence would probably bring her some measure of shame in such a conservative neighborhood. And, if she hadn’t been heard from, it might bring a different type of shame and, certainly, questions I couldn’t provide answers to.

After a grueling minute, I collected myself. I’d gone this far and needed to see it through. At Mari’s door, I gave a firm knock. A faint light shone through the crack below the door. I thought I heard—could have sworn I heard—shuffling inside, but no one answered the door. I waited, then tried again.

And as I did, the door to the other unit on the floor opened. A head peaked out from inside, a woman’s, her hair uncovered. As soon as she saw me, her eyes widened and she ducked back inside, slamming the door. The next second brought heated whispers and the door cracked open again, though this time a man appeared. Flecks of gray were scattered around an otherwise dark bushy beard. He had a callous dead center of his forehead, the mark of a pious man who has spent much of his life prostrate in prayer. He left the door ajar and took a calibrated step towards me, crossing his arms and bringing his tall frame to its full height. Only then did I realize he probably had four or five inches on me.

“Hello? Umm . . . do you know if Mari’s . . . Mariam’s here?”

No response. Maybe Arabic.

“Ta fadl. Sir. Ahlen. Inta araf Mariam henna? Ana—“

Before I could finish, he started talking, talking faster than I could understand, his voice rising as he kept looking back at his apartment. I heard “kids” and “army” and “you” and “Imshi imshi dilwati.” Go and go now.

“I’ll leave, but, do you know—Mariam. Mariam henna? Is Mariam here?”

He stopped, then, weighing the right words, said, “Mariam ma’ gaish alan. She’s with the army now.”

Before I could say anything else, he took another step forward, his breath on my face, and slowly said in English, “You. Go. Now,” and then turned back into his apartment.

§

I spent the next few weeks waiting for word from Mari. School had restarted, but I struggled to focus. I kept bugging mutual friends, asking if they’d heard from her. Stalking her on Facebook for some news, any news, of her whereabouts. I spent more time thinking about her than I had at any point since the first few weeks we’d met. Questions about that night haunted me. Why had she called me? Could I have done more to prevent her from leaving? Just who the hell had she gotten caught up with, and how? And, more than anything, wherever she was, was she okay?

Her disappearance coincided with a downturn in national sentiment. It appeared that, despite dislodging the aged dictator from his throne, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, headed by the pharaoh’s old intelligence chief, wasn’t much better. Crackdowns on protests steadily rose. Disappearances, too. Whenever I brought up Mari, my Egyptian friends would get a bit quieter, change the subject.

I eventually graduated but ended up staying in the city, teaching English at Choueifat, an international school which seemed to only employ Americans who aren’t ready to leave Egypt yet. Time passed, and life got on.

Then, one day, I saw it. A post on her wall on Facebook. I didn’t recognize the name, but it only took a second to figure out who it was. Pale complexion, Roman nose. Based in Bulgaria.

Hey Mari—haven’t heard from you in a while. Mom’s birthday today—she’d have been 60. Get in touch. I miss you.