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Title: Picture of Triumphs
Author: ebonbird (ebonbird@hotmail.com)
May 6, 2001
Work Date: November 28, 2001
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-January-

On the West Nile, just southwest of Garden City, are villas built by
opportunistic Cairenes enriched by the British protectorate at the
turn of the last century.  Their thick walls, overgrown by grape and
bougainvillea vine, keep out the dust raised by livestock and the passage 
of exhaust-belching motor vehicles.  Behind the walls are homes and 
their gardens. Despite their serenity and cleanliness, these gardens are 
not the opposite of Cairo, rather they are its hidden heart - hearts - calm 
and peaceful as love of beauty and privacy wed to elan can make them. 
The air is layered with the heady perfume of jasmine, the penetrating 
sweetness of henna, and the fair assault of roses in bloom; carefully 
guided water passes through pipes and fountains in basins, spills over 
gravel, and pools beneath rocks.  The air of prosperity surrounds even 
the villa belonging to Saeed al-Wardi, a merchant, for all that it wants 
painting and the inner doors are rotting off their hinges. Saeed al-Wardi 
is something of a miser, you see.

The clay-stained dress of the beggar girl - called Ororo - lying on the 
roof, is in better condition than the roof's mismatched tiles.  In the
past, Saeed al-Wardi has pronounced the roof beneath the tiles sound, and it
only ever rains in winter if at all.  In the past, when the conversations about
the state of the roof had taxed his patience, his pitch never approached the
stridency that pushes his words up out of the wind traps and into the beggar
girl's ears.

There is a violent, violet-white thundercrack in the hazy heavens.  The 
aftershocks shake the dust out of the air.  The sky is a brief blue.  Then 
darkness, which is rain, weeps out of the sky, scrubbing it clean.
Startled, Ororo scuttles for cover, dislodging a tile with her arm.  She
grabs it before it clatters to the garden grounds.  Setting the tile back
into its place, she pouts and twists her lips into a wavery line.  Rain.
She's lucky for the overhang that gives her shelter.  Mud flows in the
streets.  Nothing can be seen except cars and lost donkeys standing here and
there in places where they are protected from the torrents gushing out of
the sky.

The house of Saeed al-Wardi is in an uproar.  Worthless Wulib dared to 
send Anbar, Saeed al-Wardi's firstborn, a letter - one with misspellings.
Saeed al-Wardi is not pleased.  It is not only that Wulib the Insolent
praised Anbar's honey-colored eyes -- eyes that Wulib should not have 
known were honey-colored, because of the burqa she wears in public -- but 
that not only did Wulib the Incompetent misconjugate 'eyes', he misspelled 
Anbar's full name.

His voice rises and falls, louder than that of the wind and rain of the
storm.  His voice penetrates with the stressed and formal cadence of a man
given to great oral expression but unfamiliar with true anger.  He shouts
and groans, cursing as he would only among men, but mostly he is wordless 
as he grabs at the air and at his person.  His white silk galabiya is rumpled
from where he has pulled at it.  His silver-embroidered, blue skullcap sits
awry on his head.  Fingers stained yellow by honey-soaked pipe tobacco and
bearing a silver-looking ring each, crumple and twist the letter from Wulib
the Ignorant.  He shakes the letter at the ceiling.  He wrings it open,
holding it before the veiled eyes of his wife who he knows does not read.
She, Wadiaa, huddles in the corner, the abaya he requires his female
relations to wear when out of their quarters -- he imports the silk from
Pakistan - is skimming over the lush curves of her hidden body.

"DO YOU SEE THIS!" he is so unused to screaming that his voice is 
hoarse and thin.  He coughs.  Clears his throat.  Saeed al-Wardi intones, 
"How did this come into the house?"

When her eyes meet his in helplessness from the slit of her satin-edged
burqa, he screams for his children, daughters all, to attend.  They flutter
in from the arched hallway where they were crouched, listening.  Their
slippered feet whisper over the cool, sugar-brown, white-edged octagonal
tiles as they enter in order of their birth.  Like their mother, they are
dressed in last year's fabrics.  Anbar leads.  Her eyes, glimpsed between the
khlalah-green borders of her veil, are indeed like honey - Wulib the
Shameless knew that much.  All the women of the family have eyes of that
color, only Anbar's are like honey enriched by palm wine and her eyelashes
are shamefully long.  Fatima follows Anbar, as graceful as a twenty yards of
watered silk dropped over a high balcony into a jasmine-scented garden at
dawn.  Guileless Onul follows closely behind.   Her eyes glimmer.  It is to be
expected that she is about to cry.  Mahtoub has been taking his measure
while he fixed his glared at Onul.  When he looks at Mahtoub, his fourth
child, the one that should have been a boy, of course her eyes are demurely
cast down and she is the picture of girlish modesty.  Saeed al-Wardi
must look down and down and down before he can see little Basimah, who 
comes in last.  Like her name, Basimah is always smiling.  Fatima and Onul 
hide Basimah and her smiles behind them while their father rages at Anbar
specifically and them in general.  They are fixing Basimah, who is allowed to
go about in only a long tunic, pants and the filmiest of dark blue hijabs.
The veil is worked in delicate embroidery of darker blue, little bees sewn
by Fatima's quick fingers, and is falling off her head.  Her hair is a
deeply burnished brown, going blonde at the tips.  She is eight.

While Fatima rearranges Basimah's veil properly behind the weeping Onul,
Mahtoub, is debating whether or not to inform her father that Wulib's letter
came to the house by way of the little beggar girl Basimah has disobeyed him
by playing with.

Little Ororo, the beggar girl that is Basimah's dearest playmate, who found
shelter from the storm beneath two overhangs on Saeed al-Wadir's roof.
Hearing the commotion, she rolls on the mismatched tiles of Saeed
al-Wadir's roof, giddy with laughter.  The discomfort caused by the falling
rain is nothing to her in her hilarity.

Wulib ibn-Sweilem, a taxi-driver like no other, sent the letter through her.

"Mahtoub?" Saeed al-Wardi asks, of his daughter who never appears to be
spying on her siblings, but knows almost everything regarding everyone in
the family.

Ororo takes this as her cue to leave.  She scampers across the tiled roof, on
feet and hands.  Her rough, bare feet find brief purchase on the slick tiles as
she scampers soundlessly over the tiles.  The roof is watertight but old.
Many of the tiles upon it are loose, but Ororo's reflexes are as good as a
rat's.  She slips her way to the ledge, launches herself into the rain
washed air and fastens herself to the slippery, tri-color peeling bark of
the sycamore tree that rises higher than the villa.  Rain being so rare in
Cairo, she is unprepared for the involuntary speed of her descent.  The
breath escapes her lungs with a woof, and she kicks and flails as she slides
down the length of the branch.  At the branch's origin she stops hard. It is
a painful shock, but training overcomes instinct and she maintains her hold.
She swings, reaching for the trunk with her feet, then, thinking otherwise,
slaps off the trunk with her feet.  She swings back, and at the proper
moment she releases her hold of the branch.  Executing a neat flip, she
lands in a muddy puddle.  Clots of stinking mud rag up her legs.   She
smiles and holds out her arms for the admiration of no one.  She is eight.

The rain vanishes.  The clouds clear.  Humidity soaks everything, adding to
the wet-heat rolling landward from the Nile.

Ororo takes the long way out of al-Wadir's guardian.  She smells the roses,
and makes faces at the insects living beneath their petals.  Tucked in the
rope that serves as Ororo's belt, in a scrap of brown paper, is half of
Basimah's morning taamiya.  As she walks, Ororo eats it so rapidly, she ends
up chewing on paper for a bit before realizing that it's not food.  Once it
is done, she is still hungry.  Passing the kitchen window, she takes a
pumpkin turnover from the counter near the window, and crams half into her
mouth.  She tucks the other into the top portion of her ragged
tunic, and skims up the wall and into the streets.

There is a beat-up Fiat, once red, popping and chuckling as it farts immense
greasy clouds of exhaust.  Ororo frowns at it, and trots down the street.
The driver of the taxi, a full-faced, beardless man, with immense teeth and a
quizzical brow, shows surprise when Ororo passes him. Hunching over the
wheel of the car, he takes hold of the sticky gearshift and wrestles the
transmission out of park. The car stalls.

"Tell me," he yells out of his car window. "Did Anbar get my letter?"

"Yes, and her father did, too!" Ororo yells back, and she breaks into a run.
She pelts over a bridge onto the mainland and into the exhilarating traffic. 
People, livestock and machines jostle for progress along the muddy road. 
Most little girls would be pushed about by the traffic, but as hard as the
crowd jostles her, Ororo juke-steps around obstacles and darts through the
slimmest allowance. At times she crouches on hand and foot, climbing her
way nimbly through the empty undercurrents of the river of traffic. Her
deft little hands are feeling and squeezing purses and moneybelts as she 
goes. She hardly thinks of it, what she's doing, as she makes her way to
the airport.

She hitches a ride on a truck carrying pigeons into the city. Once she's
climbed a swaying bank of crates, she latches on with fingers and toes and 
talks down into the crates, hailing the pigeons nearest her and asking
after their relations. She listens to the coos and gurgles with polite
attention. Because they are only pigeons, she listens only so long before
offering news of her family. The pigeons gurgle and coo as they listen, and 
Ororo amuses herself by telling them stories about made-up relations.
When that becomes boring, Ororo latches her hand on either side of the high
wooden guard rail and leans forward. Her hair streams out from beneath her
head-wrap. It is filthy, like tarnished silver, black and dull in some parts,
but mostly the color is uneven. It isn't until she gets off at the airport that 
she notices that some of the pigeons are dead.

At the airport, Ororo hops from foot to foot amongst the other urchins, her 
hands held out to the pale foreigners. She is only one of dozens of beggar
children with the right to beg in front of the airport.

All the foreigners know how to say 'Imshi imshi' as they hurry off, but
often they toss money at the children anyway.

"Look, Tony," says a harshly perfumed woman staring at Ororo though she is
pressed against her male companion. The woman wears a veiled hat, but her shirt
is sleeveless, and her skirt is brief. "Tony, this one is blind." 

The effect of her words is instantaneous, suddenly no less than four children 
have inserted themselves in the narrow lip of space between Ororo and the 
perfumed woman. Ororo applies knees and elbows to good effect, better than
that of the four children, and she is faster. Ororo forces a grubby paw
open and up before the woman, who blinked and thus missed the scuffle that
brought Ororo closer to her.

"Two guineas, Tony, two guineas." She turns her face into Tony's shoulder.
Who also stares at Ororo's face. He removes a two guinay note from his back
pocket. Handing it to Ororo, he smiles broadly, tensely. "Here you go, you
little thief." Turning his back on her, he wonders aloud, "blue eyes, Doris, 
not blind ones."

The children at her back have gathered themselves and in unison shove Ororo
into the British couple. In seconds it is done.

Ororo yells curses at the other beggars as she hops clear of Tony's steadying 
hand. She dashes out into traffic, heedless of oncoming taxis and trucks. Tony's 
wallet swings from side to side inside her tunic, jostling with the others she 
picked up that day. The music of Cairo buoys her on her journey. Omm 
Kolthoum wails of love and religious ecstasy from apartment windows, cafe 
doorways and taxicabs.  In a shadowed doorway near a superior taamiya stand, 
Ororo counts her winnings. The vendor is a wiry man who, Ororo knows from 
experience, is not much for running. Ororo removes her head covering and plaits 
her knotted hair. She swirls the plat by the tail end, winding it about her head, and 
secures that by wrapping the head wrap tightly around that. She brushes her hand 
along the ground, and rubs her hand on her face, shading her chin and mouth.
Her walk changes as she approaches the taamiya stand. The hot oil in the
vat bubbles and froths audibly. The chick-pea patties bob among golden
bubbles. The vendor toasts bread, shammys, on a grill made from half an oil
drum. His blade flies as he slices onion and tomato. Ororo's mouth
salivates. The chick pea batter is faintly pink.

"One, taamiya please," says Ororo, holding up two coins. In a blink, the vendor 
has grabbed her wrist.

"Thief, now you come with money?!"

Heads perk up at the sound of thief. "Whose money?"

Ororo begins to cry. "My mother sent me," she sobs.

Calls of 'let her go', 'she's but a child'.

"This motherless dog stole from my cart not two weeks ago!"

Regretting the taamiya, Ororo bites the vendor on the thumb. Yelping, he
releases her. She reaches for a bread but his hand is atop it blocking her.
She grabs a whole cucumber and takes the vendor's cutting knife. Dodging
grasping arms, she escapes. She vanishes among the other denizens. Like
many children, she runs. There is a wedding in progress in the alley. Red
tents cover the alley-way. Red hangings hang from the wall. The alley is
narrow. Wooden chairs are lined up alongside the walls. They are handing
out meat, ghost most likely, to the less fortunate. Ororo scales the wall
of the apartment building nearest her and lays out on the roof. There is no
shade. It is very hot, but there is no moisture on the roof. The sun has
already baked it off. Ororo eats her cucumber and watches the unmarried
girls moving to the tabla beat. Their hands are clasped above their heads, 
and their hips move - gyrate, thrust and sway.  Possible grooms watch 
humbly from the walls. One particular girl, too slim for beauty, moves
with a grace that reminds Ororo of Fatima al-Wadir, Basimah's sister. 
The men watching her twirl their mustaches and stroke their beards.

Someone will be married soon, Ororo judges.

When she climbs back down to street-level, and presents herself for some
food, she is turned away. All that was set aside for the poor has been
given away already, and there is no more food for a beggar to eat.

"At least give her a drop of milk," says an old Nubian, nearly blind. He
had hauled water and built up fires the last two days in preparation of the
wedding. The Nubian sees that she wears a dirt colored shirt that once
belonged to a very thin man, but on her the shoulders come halfway down
to her elbows. The sleeves had been ripped off, so the double-basting has
begun to unravel. The shirt is belted with a tie. A filthy rag, multi-grease
colored, is wrapped around her head. A colorful, woven ribbon, almost
spotless, of blues and reds and yellows hangs from the makeshift turban.
Ororo's callused feet, of course, are bare.

"Sit next to me, my child," he tells her. "Eat from my plate."

Ororo sits next to him. Ororo sits in his shadow, her legs drawn up to her
chest. Her booty lies heavy against her stomach. She remembers her half
of pumpkin turnover, and brings it out to share with him.

"Bless you child," he says. "I am Solomon abd-Farouk."

End Part One
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May 23, 2001

Afternoon in Islamic, Cairo.  Narrow streets curve, rise and wind around buildings nearly a thousand years 
old.  These narrow streets are as crowded with people as the big thoroughfares Ororo traversed earlier that 
day, but this close to meal-time, the pedestrian traffic moves faster and jostles harder. Every smell, from the 
cart of green beans to her right,  the tea, honey and hash laced steam threading from the narrow doorway of 
the coffeeshop to her left, and the milk-sweat musk of the nursing mother swaddled up in her burqah and 
herding three children into Ororo's path, is more pungent than the last.  Inshalla, there are no gasoline 
engines in this particular street because she'd choke.

With her stomach full, her shirt full of loot, and a new friend to her credit Ororo is a rich girl.  Having made 
a new friend in the slave of  Farouk, who so graciously shared his meal with her, she goes looking for old 
friends.  But first, she must get gifts.

Ororo stops for fruit juices.  She could steal them, and the vendor eyes her through the blue lenses of his 
cracked eye-glasses because she's done it before, but she smiles, revealing blackened teeth and pipes, 
"Assir, please, banana, mango, strawberry and peach!"  She holds up her hands, rubbing her thumbs against 
the coins.

"And where are my cups from the last time?" He asks her, filling one cup after the other with juice.  

Pushing out her lower lip and twisting her mouth to her side, Ororo shrugs. 

He peers down his long nose at her, he holds two glasses in each hand.  She places the coin on the ledge of 
the cart and reaches for the cups, he lifts them out of reach.  "You have no idea what you have done with 
the glasses, do you, little one?"

"I've never bought juice from you before!" Ororo protests.

He chuckles, "That much at least, is true."  He hands the glasses over to her.  She clutches them to her 
chest.  She makes to leave but he grabs the collar of her shift, "Bring me back ALL my glasses, little one." 

"I'll bring back your glasses!" Ororo says.



A road, wider and steeper than most in Islamic Cairo leads up to a narrow  wall with a red door.  A metal 
unlit lamp is on either side.  The cobblestones are slick with thrown garbage and skuzzy water.  Ororo kicks 
the door.  "WARDA!" she screens.  There is a cord, with a bell, but with her arms full, Ororo doesn't dare 
try and pull it.  Though she considers leaning against the corner and reaching up with her foot. Some of the 
peach juice sloshes onto her shirt, and Ororo hammers at the door with her knee.

Ororo kicks at the door for a long time.

It opens for a harried man, so plump he must lead an indolent life.  His fingers are clotted with gold rings.  
One of them bears a particularly fine ruby, one that is true red.

"You little whore, I told you never to come back here!" he gasps.  He clutches his heart.  A slender arm,  
twined over with bracelets led by a hennaed, long-fingered hand, langorously extends past his round 
shoulder.

"Ororo, child," says the arms owner.  "come in. I sent for her Muneer," she says.  Her name is Warda, she 
is a dancer at *********.  Her eyes are like great dark lamps set in a delicately molded face.  Her lips are a 
gate, and her teeth like pearl.  She smells of roses. 

She smiles, "I was so thirsty for asiir," she says leading Ororo through the gate and the courtyard.  The 
courtyard was tiled long ago, but now traffic has beaten it grey.  Shallow steps lead up to a narrow gate.
Through it's cross hatching can be glimpsed movement servants and lackeys on errands dart up and down 
and through a narrow hall.  On either side are ranged doorways.  Far ahead, where light can be seen at the 
head.  Women are bathing.  Ororo is in an elaborae bathhouse.

"Filthy whores," Warda sniffs at two young women, they have very great quanity of fair and gleaming skin 
and even more fair hair, 

Warda grips Ororo's chin in her hand, forcing