Nekropolis Read Online Free PDF Page B

between romance and life, and the conversations seem obvious and adolescent, but then it seemed adult to talk about marriage this way. It was like something sacred, and I was being initiated into mysteries. I dyed my hair white.
    My sister, Rashida, hated her. Nabil made eyes at her all the time, but he was only thirteen. Fhassin was seventeen and he laughed at Nabil. Fhassin laughed at all sorts of things. He looked at the world from under his long eyelashes, girlish in his hard sharp-chinned face with his monkey grin. That was the year Fhassin, who had always been shorter than everybody, grew tall. He was visited by giggling girls, but he never took any of them seriously.
    But Nouzha and Aziz and everything on our street really was outside, not inside the family where everything mattered. In the evenings we sat on the floor in the middle of our three death houses and made paper flowers. We lived in a house filled with perfume. I was twenty, Rashida was nineteen. Nobody had left my mother’s house, and we never thought that was strange. But it was, the way we were held there.
    So when did Fhassin stop seeing her as silly and begin to see Nouzha as a person? I didn’t suspect it. The giggling girls still came by the house, and Fhassin still grinned and didn’t really pay much attention. He and Nouzha were careful, meeting in the afternoon when her husband was building houses outside the Nekropolis in the city and the rest of us were sleeping.
    I think Fhassin did it because he was always a daredevil, like walking on the roofs of the death houses, or the time when he was ten that he took money out of our mother’s money pot so he could sneak out and ride the train. He was lost in the city for hours, finally sneaking back onto the train and risking getting caught as a free-farer.
    No, that isn’t true, The truth must be that he fell in love with her. I was never really in love with Aziz; maybe I’ve never been in love with anyone. How could I understand? I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the family to marry Aziz. How could Fhassin turn his back on the family for Nouzha? But some alchemy must have transformed him, made him see her as something other than a silly girl-yes, it’s a cliché to call her a vain and silly girl, but that’s what she was. For her it was probably like this. She was married, and it wasn’t very exciting anymore, not nearly as interesting as when her husband was courting her. Fhassin made her feel important-look at the risk he was taking-for her. For her!
    But what was going on inside Fhassin? Fhassin despised romantic love, sentimentality.
    Her husband suspected, came home, and caught them. The neighborhood swarmed out into the street to see my brother, shirtless, protecting Nouzha, whose hair was all unbound around her shoulders. Fhassin had a razor, and was holding off her screaming husband. The heat poured all over his brown adolescent shoulders and chest. We stood in the street, sweating. And Fhassin was laughing, deadly serious, but laughing. He was alive. Was it the intensity? Was that the lure for Fhassin? This was my brother, who I had known all my life, and he was a stranger.
    I realized then that the Nekropolis had become a foreign place, and I didn’t know anyone behind the skinmask of their face.
    They took my brother and Nouzha, divorced her from her husband for the adultery trial, flogged them both, then dumped them in prison for thirteen years. I didn’t wait for Aziz to ask me to marry him-not that he would have now. I let my hair go black. I became a dutiful daughter. I hated my life, but I didn’t know how to escape. When I was twenty-one, I was jessed, impressed to feel duty and affection to whoever would pay the fee of my impression.
    I try to explain, but Akhmim doesn’t understand. He has to go. I cry when he’s gone.
     
    * * *
     
    Finally, after twenty-eight days, I emerge from my room, white and trembling like Iqurth from the tomb, to face the world and my