A Pure Heart Read online

  In the pocket of her jacket, Rose carries the severance letter she found among Gameela’s unopened mail. The letter was one of several she had put in a Ziploc bag yesterday and sifted through this morning as she ate her breakfast, after Mark left for work. Now she fingers the letter and tries not to think of why Gameela quit her job and why her parents never mentioned it. She pulls her hand out of her pocket and attempts to focus on work.

  She flips through a large folio containing reproductions of various papyri as well as images of wall engravings standing half the world away, inside some of Egypt’s many pyramids, temples, and tombs. Before she took a week’s break to go to Egypt, Rose had been immersed in studying the Met’s own massive collection, figuring out ways to pull some pieces out and fit them into the new exhibit. She likes the idea of arranging pieces in new ways and listening to the stories they tell. Inanimate objects do speak, as she once told her father when he asked about her work cataloging artifacts, if they are only given a chance to do so.

  The objects now speaking to Rose are bowls engraved with letters to the dead. The twin bowls are in a museum in London, and she wonders if the Met can arrange to borrow them for the duration of the exhibit, assuming that Dr. Winkenstein will approve including them. With less than twenty such letters to the dead discovered, and at least one of them destroyed during World War II, he may not want to pay attention to that particular Egyptian ritual—the act of writing to the dead spirits of recently deceased relatives in order to ask them to intervene on the living person’s behalf. Rose herself had not thought of that until she was flying back from Egypt, when, half asleep and looking out the window just as the sun was rising and the clouds were gleaming in yellow and orange hues, she thought of the East and the West and remembered a line out of one of those letters:

  A communication by Merirtyfy to Nebetiotef:

  How are you? Is the West taking care of you as you desire?

  The West, for ancient Egyptians, was the direction of the setting sun and, by extension, the land of the dead. Rose used to tease Mark about how ancient Egyptians associated the West with death, called the dead “the Westerners,” placed their burial grounds on the west bank of the Nile and lived on the east bank. On the plane heading home, Rose had thought that she could include a couple of letters to the dead in the exhibit, demonstrating that ancient Egyptians believed in life after death and showing proof of the layperson’s attempts at communicating with the spirits of loved ones. The imploring nature of the letters (the writer always had a favor to ask of his deceased relative) would shed light on a practical side of ancient Egyptian religion and ritual. It would tie the myth to solid life. Up in the sky crossing over the Atlantic, Rose was certain this would be a good addition to the exhibit.

  Now, in the cold, crisp museum office, she is not sure anymore. Dr. Winkenstein is away at an expedition site in Upper Egypt and will not be back until mid-October. Rose emails him weekly with her progress, but she is reluctant to ask about the letters to the dead. She teeters between thinking the idea is brilliant and absurd. She imagines Dr. Winkenstein’s possible reactions: He could reach up and hold his chin in the nook between his thumb and pointer, start kneading it, and then look down, scanning the floor, perhaps, for the reason why he had agreed to hire an imbecile such as her. Or he could start nodding as he reads her email, his eyes twinkling behind his rimless glasses, his bob of gray hair bouncing in that endearing way that always tempts her to reach out and touch his curls, an indiscretion that she has repeatedly struggled to resist. It could go either way.

  In Dr. Winkenstein’s absence, the only person Rose is comfortable enough to discuss this with is Ingrid. That morning, Rose had arrived at work and walked straight into Ingrid’s open arms, staying there for as long as her friend held on to her.

  “You’re good?” Ingrid had finally asked, pushing Rose away but keeping both hands on her shoulders, looking her up and down as if in search of visible signs of affliction.

  “Yes,” Rose had lied, nodding.

  Ingrid had narrowed her eyes, paused for a moment as if about to say something, then had given Rose a quick pat on the shoulder before walking back to her desk.

  Rose looks up at Ingrid, staring at her computer screen with concentration so absolute that Rose is sure that if the statue of Amenhotep III were to walk into the room asking for directions to Egypt, Ingrid would either shush it or wave in the general direction of the East without lifting her eyes from the screen. Rose met Ingrid five years earlier at Columbia, where they were both getting their PhDs, Ingrid one year ahead of Rose. On the first day they met, Rose was sitting in the cafeteria when Ingrid, seated at the table next to her, knocked her coffee down all over her notebook and cursed, quite loudly, in German. Rose, who graduated from a German school in Egypt, had laughed out loud. They bonded over their mutual tendency to mumble Scheiße when frustrated.

  Rose considers asking Ingrid about the merit of including the letters to the dead but decides not to interrupt her friend’s work. She picks up a book instead.

  Flipping through the pages, she finds another letter, this time from a man to his dead wife, written on papyrus:

  To the able spirit Ankhiry: What have I done against you wrongfully for you to get into this evil disposition in which you are? What have I done against you? As for what you have done, it is your laying hands upon me though I committed no wrong against you. From the time that I was living with you as a husband until today, what have I done against you that I should have to conceal it?

  Rose reads the rest of the letter, brows knotted. The man is blaming his dead wife for some illness that has befallen him. Rose considers what this implies about ancient Egyptian daily life: a belief in the afterlife, of course; a way of communicating with the dead; but also a belief in the influence that loved ones, long deceased, can still have on their living relatives.

  If she focuses on how the living reach out to the dead, she could present this as a way ancient Egyptian culture held on to family relationships even after death.

  If she focuses on how some of those letters ask the deceased for help, she could present this as a way of seeing the dead person as a savior, a pathway to greater powers, an ally with divine connections.

  If she focuses on the way a letter such as this one blames the deceased for the evil that befalls the living, the deceased becomes a force to fear.

  Three different narratives. But which one is true?

  Now look, the man writes to his wife, you don’t differentiate good from evil.

  * * *

  —

  ROSE WAITS FOR lunchtime then walks out of the Met and straight to Central Park. She calls her parents.

  “Fayrouz, habibti,” her dad answers. “Back at work?”

  Rose smiles at the sound of her old name, now permanently tinged with nostalgia. “Hey, Baba. Yes. Is this a good time to talk?”

  “Of course. I’m making tea and heading over to the balcony. Your mom is already there. Just give me a minute.”

  Rose walks up to the first available bench, sits down in the shade of a tree. Around her, people are jogging, walking, or relaxing in the sun. One mother struggles with a crying toddler and, with obvious exasperation, parks her jogging stroller in front of a bench across the walkway, pulls her son out of the stroller, and sets him on the ground. Rose watches the boy sit up, look around, then start crawling while his mother hovers over him. For five years after she got married, Rose had imagined she would start a family after earning her degree; by then, she would be thirty-one—a perfect age to have two babies before she hit thirty-five. She had always liked to plan her life in advance, figure out when she will do what. She earned her PhD just over a year ago; turned thirty-two a few months later. She watches the crawling baby, thinks of Gameela, then of her parents, then looks away.

  “Rose—you’re on speakerphone now. Your mom is here.”

  “Ezzaye
k ya Rose?” her mom asks. How are you, Rose?

  “Okay, Mama. I’m on my lunch break.”

  “Good. And how’s Mark doing?” her dad asks.

  “Okay.” Rose looks at her watch—she is already ten minutes into her lunch hour. “Listen, Baba,” she swallows, “I have a question.” She regrets not having asked her father while he was alone in the kitchen, rather than wait till her mother can hear her. Too late now. “One of my colleagues wants to send out an email to the department telling them about Gameela.” She chokes on her lie, coughs. “He asked what her job title was.”

  “Engineer at the National Contractors,” her father answers.

  “Explain to them who the National Contractors are,” her mother adds. “Tell them it’s one of the largest construction companies in Egypt.”

  “Yes,” Rose says. She hesitates. “So she was still working for them?”

  “Of course!” her mom answers.

  Rose does not know how to proceed. She had thought up the question as a subtle way to inquire into Gameela’s employment status, but had not expected her parents to know nothing about her sister’s resignation.

  “I just wasn’t sure, so I thought I’d ask. I hadn’t spoken to her about her work in a long time.” She hadn’t spoken to her sister about anything in a long time. She unbuckles her water bottle from the strap of her backpack, takes a sip.

  “She was doing really well there,” her father goes on. “They even started sending her on trips out of the city, to a new construction site they had in Rasheed.”

  “Oh,” Rose says. “So she used to travel?”

  “At least once a week for the previous four or five months, yes. You didn’t know?” he asks.

  Rose counts the months backward on her fingers, starting with August. Five months lands her in April—immediately after Gameela quit her job.

  “No, Baba.” Rose contemplates the variety of things neither she nor her parents know. “I didn’t know.”

  * * *

  —

  ON HER WAY back to the office, Rose stops at a clearing, finds a shady patch of grass under a sprawling red maple, and lies down, looking up at the leaves. She knows she has skipped lunch and that her stomach will reprimand her for it by the end of the day, but she cannot fathom eating. Far above, the leaves occasionally rustle, shivering with a sudden gust of wind and then falling still again. Rose watches them: movement then stillness, movement then stillness.

  She wishes she could fall asleep right now, right here.

  Because she does not want to think about the phone call to her parents, she tries to think about work. Letters to the Dead, Bridges to the Afterlife. Perhaps she can expand on this idea and include other texts that tie the living to the dead. She thinks of magic spells engraved on the inside of coffin lids—spells to transform the dead person into a falcon; spells to open the gates to heaven.

  The forty-two negative confessions, supposedly uttered at the Weighing of the Heart ceremony—the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Judgment Day—to declare one’s heart free of malice and suitable for an eternity in the afterlife.

  I have not caused pain.

  I have not caused weeping.

  I have not killed.

  I have not commanded to kill.

  I have not made suffering for anyone.

  Forty-two declarations of innocence of different transgressions, from lying to blasphemy to murder, from mistreating orphans to defrauding people, some even proclaiming that one has not harmed cattle or birds or fish. An almost hysterical insistence on having lived a guiltless life, all leading up to the last assertion:

  I am pure, I am pure, I am pure, I am pure!

  The right words, uttered at the right time, to produce a desired effect. Rose has always found this longing to be pure fascinating, has imagined people who lived thousands of years ago uttering that last line with desperate vehemence, probably hoping that if they believed in their own goodness, the gods would believe in it, too. As if declaring one’s innocence were enough to will such innocence into existence.

  She can still get excited about the prospect of work, and her excitement, now creeping up on her—so much she can do with texts linking the living to the dead, so many applications—makes her feel guilty.

  Thinking of ancient Egyptian coffins and spells evokes her dream of the day before: the walls covered in profiles of people, including Gameela. Ancient Egyptians carved depictions of their daily lives on the walls of their tombs so that the soul of the deceased could remember how she lived in this world and continue the same lifestyle in the netherworld. Up until a few weeks ago, Rose would have thought it was easy enough to pick out a few scenes to represent each phase of Gameela’s life: Gameela the child, playing the piano; Gameela the teenager, her hair long and curly, wearing her uniform of blue jeans, a graphic T-shirt, and sneakers; Gameela the college student, with that same hair covered under a head scarf; Gameela the engineer, the aspiring botanist, the devourer of mystery novels and TV series, the lover of mangoes and guavas, the participant in revolutions, the advocate for social justice, the defender of religion.

  Gameela the idealist. The ideal. Gameela, who always played by the rules. Rose remembers the words of a cousin who visited her at her parents’ apartment to offer her condolences: Who would have thought something like this would happen to Gameela, of all people? As if dying in a terrorist attack was a choice one made, and Gameela, by making that choice, had acted out of character.

  Rose reaches into her pocket and pulls out the severance letter, reads it one more time.

  Why did Gameela quit her job? Why did she tell no one? Where was she traveling to?

  Rose holds the letter up in front of her face. The sunlight shines through it, merges the words on the front of the page with shadows of the tree above, and the distorted words evoke an ancient language, not Egyptian, but Sanskrit, perhaps, or ancient Greek.

  Rose drops her hand.

  Above her, the leaves rustle again, and she wishes they would all fall, rain gently down on her, bury her, hide her from sight for millennia, until some anthropologist finds her, digs her up, examines her bones, and, perhaps, theorizes about her life and death, publishes a narrative in a magazine where people can read her story and pretend to understand something about her.

  For now, she watches, waits, and hopes for a rainfall of leaves.

  ◆ 4 ◆

  Rose walks out of work half an hour later than usual and finds Mark sitting on the Met’s front steps, munching on a hot dog. He does not notice her until she is standing beside him, casting a cooling shadow his way.

  “The plan was to take you out to dinner,” Mark says, mouth half full.

  “How many hot dogs ago did that plan fizzle out?” Rose smiles.

  “Three, but I’m still hungry. I’m sure I’ll manage to eat some more.” He gets up, shoves the remainder of the bun into his mouth.

  “Now you’ve made me hungry for hot dogs, too.”

  She heads to the food cart parked at the foot of the steps and joins the line of three people waiting to be served. The man working the cart is new; he must have started while Rose was in Egypt. Rose takes one look at him and immediately recognizes a fellow Egyptian. She scans the cart, notices the trinkets hanging all around it: a framed verse of the Qur’an; a blue glass ornament to ward off the evil eye; a string of prayer beads; a photo of Umm Kulthum; a postcard of the pyramids. He is using disposable gloves, carefully picking up each hot dog with a pair of tongs and placing it in the opened bun. She has already made it to the front of the line when Mark joins her.

  “Rose, let me introduce you to Safwan,” Mark says, a palm extended toward the vendor. “Guess where he’s from?”

  Rose glares at Mark, but he doesn’t get the hint. “Egypt!” he says, excited, joyful.

  Rose looks at Safwan and nods.

&n
bsp; He nods back at her, smiling. “So you’re Egyptian, too?” he asks Rose.

  “Aywah,” Rose replies.

  The man nods again but does not make eye contact with her. His face is flushed, but it could be the effect of the heat. Rose watches him turn the hot dogs around on the warmer, pick one up and place it carefully in a fresh bun.

  “Safwan kept me company while I was waiting for you,” Mark says. “Do you know he just arrived here from Egypt?”

  Rose smiles, takes the hot dog Safwan hands her. “That’s great. Thank you. Good luck,” she tells Safwan, pulling Mark away.

  For a couple of blocks, they remain silent, Rose eating as she walks next to Mark, who keeps his hands in his pockets and his eyes focused on the ground in front of his feet. The afternoon is not too hot, yet Rose starts to sweat. The light jacket that was barely keeping her warm at the office smothers her.

  She stops. “Hold this for a second, will you?” She hands Mark her hot dog.

  She takes her jacket off. Gameela’s letter of severance is zipped up in the inside pocket. Carefully, Rose folds the fabric around it, making sure it does not get bent, then puts the jacket in her backpack.

  “How come you didn’t want to chat with Safwan?” Mark asks.

  She takes her hot dog back, bites into it, and feels a dot of ketchup on the side of her mouth. She wipes it off with a napkin. “I didn’t want to embarrass him.”

  “Why on earth would he have been embarrassed to talk to you?”