By the end of September the figs on the trees lining the boulevards of Ma'adi were ready to harvest, and the family from the box held claim to them. Whether this right came to them from the Coptic monastery across the street from our apartment, the apartment managers along Shayre Khomsene - Fifteenth Street - or by tacit understanding remained nebulous. Mostly, the figs were to be theirs because that is the way that it had always been.
There were six of them, sometimes. Islamic law permits a man to have more than one wife and while most don't, the patriarch did, and most of his time was spent with his other family. He periodically returned, swaggering behind an enormous belly in his brilliantly white galabia. His wife - the one we knew - had been horribly burned by what my father ascertained had been a propane explosion. They had four children, three boys and a girl. One of the boys was named Hasani and he was my friend.
Their dwelling at the end of Shayre Khomsene had, as one of its sides, the limestone wall of the Coptic monastery. The other three walls and the roof were made out of an enormous shipping box with additional sheets and blankets hanging from the branches of the fig trees. They kept a small fire continuously burning out front.
At harvest time the father returned with a downtrodden donkey and sent the four kids into the trees to collect the figs. I watched as they picked the fruit until the bags hanging on the sides of the donkey were full and the father led it away. They repeated this until the trees were picked clean and the ground was covered with the remaining unusable and rotten fruit. As far as we could tell this was their only source of income.
Egypt is a nation of paradox. Since the Nile flows north from Lake Victoria, upper is lower, lower is upper and north is south. The Nile is surrounded by desert, yet the lands alongside it are among the most fertile in the world and the fruits they produce are freakishly large. The tangerines are the size of oranges, but the skins are as big as grapefruits; when shaken, the fruit can be heard rattling around inside like a tennis ball in a shoe box. The figs the family picked were enormous, the size of golf balls, and somehow in the center of the largest urban sprawl on Earth, the family coaxed an agrarian living out of the city.
Hasani lived in a box and I lived in an apartment within his sight. My bedroom had a balcony from which I could see his home. On Saturday mornings he would stand under the balcony and wave me down when he wanted a soccer game, but in two years we never once saw the insides of each other's homes.
I was likely the worst soccer player he had ever encountered, but I had a soccer ball, so my inadequacy was tolerated. On the dusty field he moved with the agility reserved for the absolute poor, those who had never had any release other than soccer. We played against his two brothers, but I held him back and offered the other two no challenge whatsoever, so we often reverted to another favorite game: the rotten fig fight. The rules were simple: Aim for the face because the stench was unbearable. We fig-fought on hot summer days, ducking between the trees and throwing the rotten fruit until our lungs burned and our arms hurt. My throat ached from yelling in my fledgling Arabic, a vocabulary that allowed me to communicate only what I needed to. We were covered with the rotten flesh of sun-macerated fruit. The sweat turned the dust into thin mud on our skin. There were no imaginary sides. We were just two kids from different lives separated only by the genetic lottery that had placed me as a middle class American living abroad and Hasani as my neighbor.
Maybe Hasani's family received help from the inhabitants of the Coptic monastery, but that seems doubtful. In two years of living there, I never once saw any sign of life inside those walls, only the family on the outside. His sister, Aza, had dreams of becoming a doctor, but was most likely married off at 13 or 14. She had been a beautiful girl, with green eyes and olive skin. She would greet me on my way to school with, "Sabbah il'xeer" - good morning - and I'd make the customary reply, "Sabbah il'noor."
That was when I was 12, before I knew anything. I thought poverty meant having no money, and even though I had it staring me in the face, it was years before I realized that it meant having no chance. Now I know that it is unlikely that all four of the children survived this long without access to basic inoculations. At 12, Hasani's smile was already riddled with cavities.
Now, I wish that I had given Hasani my soccer ball when we left. I wish that I had given him the clothes I never wore that had been so easy for me to come by. I wish that I had invited him inside the apartment and fed him different foods and exposed him to things from my life back home. I wish that I had done this, not out of pity or charity, but because he was my friend. I wish that I had been mature beyond my years and known that I would feel this regret.
I hope Hasani is well. I hope he remembers me for what I was and forgives me for what I wasn't. I hope Aza had a run of luck and became a doctor. I hope.
- Michael Grohs is a freelance writer and a graphic artist in the St. Petersburg Times ad production department.
