Okay! So this is a little one-shot that accompanies Chapter 24 of "The Archaeologist's Assistant", in which a young Beni Gabor meets a young Pyrrah Ananka.
Hope you enjoy it!
Translations:
Haraami- Thief
Ya temshy ya temoot- Leave this place (or die) [roughly]
Khamistaashar daqiqa- Fifteen minutes
STREET URCHINS
Cairo. 1912.
Egypt was different from Hungary.
Sand dunes instead of mountains. Muslims instead of Jews. Mosques instead of synagogues.
Yet, for all of its oddities in the eyes of a boy from Budapest, Beni Gabor couldn't bring himself to dislike the country.
He was seventeen, enticed by acquiring the title of an adult but not quite rid of his stance as a boy. Potential may not have shone from him in the eyes of the upper-class, but to the underbelly of society within which he lurked, he reeked of it.
Unlike the other mongrels and peasants that struggled with their situations so much that it resulted in bloated stomachs and xylophonic ribcages, Beni was very good at keeping himself alive.
Knowledge was one advantage he held. Having recently travelled across entire continents with the Legion and dealt with every sort of shady character under the sun, he had quite the sum of experience and wisdom under his belt. An interesting story— or at least the ability to spontaneously compose one— could save your life from time to time.
Manipulation was another trait that worked in his favour. Since he was a very young boy, he had taken great delight in watching people's emotions become so easily twisted with just a few words. Often using it to his advantage, he noticed that the other street-dwellers didn't possess the same talents as he.
Perhaps it was Beni Gabor's own largely inflated ego that led him to slipping up on that warm night during Shawwāl.
August, as the countries that used the Gregorian calendar knew it, left the Egyptian days with chilled nights that didn't quite reach freezing. The moon was powerful on this particular evening, and the deserts and pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza were all still under its silver watch.
But Beni would not be found anywhere near the landmarks that made Egypt famous. No, he was far Northwest of Giza, past al-Helmiya and the Citadel, past the district of Abdeen and the great gate of Bab Zuweila; Beni was in the City of the Dead.
Not the fabled City of the Dead, of course. Hamunaptra, as he had heard the name whispered, was a myth with which Caireen children spooked themselves for a laugh.
Beni was in the real City of the Dead tonight. And it wasn't one that gold-diggers came to.
El-Arafa was a graveyard. The only difference it held from any other graveyard in Cairo was that it was home to the dead and the living.
It had confused him at first. This slum at the foot of the Mokattam Hills had seemed perfectly normal when he arrived there two days ago. Boring, even.
Why its name meant 'graveyard', he had no idea. And so he inquired about it, to a resident boy about his age, who had explained that the houses were built around graves.
Entire homes— an entire functioning town— were built on top of the dead.
Beni's confusion had quickly been replaced with horror, then, and he had decided this afternoon that he would be leaving after dark. There wasn't much to be found here, anyway.
But he would need sustenance for his trip to whatever location he'd next cheat out of valuables, and so he had decided to quietly 'borrow' a loaf of bread from a small family home in the neighbourhood's centre.
What he hadn't counted on was getting caught by the family's dog. Nor had he expected the cemetery guard to round the corner at that very moment.
The chase that followed made Beni question whether that warm loaf of bread under his arm was worth it or not, yet he didn't let go of it as he sped through the desolate streets.
El-Arafa was a four-mile-long crescent, packed tight with elaborate mausoleums: there were plenty of places for the Hungarian to evade capture by the prison guard.
But the guard— a big, hulking brute with arms twice the width of Beni's legs— was surprisingly quick for a man of his size. When Beni leapt atop a stack of overflowing, garbage-filled boxes in an attempt to climb onto the rooftops, the guard closed the distance between them and grabbed his ankle.
He tripped. Fright coursed through his skinny body as his legs were yanked from beneath him, his hands shooting out to find something to grab onto.
The guard grunted as he heaved Beni off the mound of trash he was scrambling to stay clung to, while little winces and whines emanated from his prey.
"Let go of me!" Beni shouted. His tone feigned innocence. "I am just a boy!"
The cemetery guard slowed his movements, then, and finally yanked the teenager to his feet by the shirt collar.
"Haraami!" he spat into the boy's face.
Beni shook his head in alarm. This man could snap him in half like a twig.
"No, no, it is a misunderstanding, I swear," he assured him, voice breaking at the end of the sentence.
Wide, icy blue eyes stared into the depths of the guard's beady black ones with nothing but petrification.
After a while, he growled something in Arabic that Beni couldn't hear over the sound of his pulse in his ears.
"Ya temshy ya temoot," it sounded like.
The guard released the vice grip on his collar. The boy sprung away from him, landing clumsily in the pile of garbage as if it would make him invincible to the guard's advances.
"Khamistaashar daqiqa!" he bellowed.
Beni didn't know what that meant. He was too panicked to translate it.
Instead, he just nodded again and hoped it wasn't a question. Terror made his movements jumpy, which seemed to satisfy the guard, who eyed him for a bit and then lumbered off.
Beni let out a breath.
He supposed that the man had just instructed him to leave.
Fingers melting into the soggy cardboard beneath his body, he pushed himself up and brushed the scraps of garbage off of his clothes.
Not that his clothes were particularly clean in the first place. Or well-fitted. His trousers looked like they'd an argument with his shoes and were shrinking away from them.
A strong breeze passed over him and covered him in goosebumps, the chill starting at the top of his greasy head and spreading down his spine. It was then that Beni realised his fez hat was missing.
Eyes scoping the vicinity, he found it nowhere. The guard hadn't taken it. It wasn't in the trash pile.
And where was his loaf of bread?
Just when he was starting to think the items had been carried off on the backs of giant mutant rats, he heard a faint tapping noise, like a dying woodpecker was trying to get his attention.
"Are you looking for this?"
Beni turned every which way, and yet this new voice belonged to nobody he could see.
It was a girl's voice, whispered and husky. Horror seized him when the idea that it was one of the cemetery's ghosts speaking to him crept into his mind. He froze.
Calmly, he reached a trembling hand to the chains that hung on his chest. Christ's crucifix, the Star of David, the Sikh khanda, the little golden Buddha; he had been raised Jewish, but didn't give a shit what deity protected him as long as it did its job.
"Are you calling me from the afterlife?" he whispered, voice shaky. This graveyard city was playing tricks on his mind.
"I'm up here, stupid."
The voice was clearer now, and he could pinpoint its direction. Up above the pile of trash, crouched on the first layer of roofing, was a figure silhouetted against the moon.
And this figure was wearing a fez hat.
Beni let his hands fall to his sides in relief. He squinted at the shadow, which was small and slight. It could have been a girl. Whatever or whoever it was, they were obviously among the living, not the dead.
"That's my hat," he told it.
The figure raised its blackened arm, revealing an extension of its hand that was shaped exactly like his loaf of bread. It gave the stolen food a wave, mocking him.
"But this is not your bread," it said.
Beni sighed.
Taking a step towards the garbage heap, he placed a foot on the mound and carefully crawled upwards towards the rooftop. Reaching the eye-line of the figure, he paused to see if it would scramble away.
It didn't: in fact, it appeared to be studying him with an amused curiosity that was even visible through the darkness that shrouded it.
Moving gingerly so as not to frighten the shadow away, he stepped onto the rooftop and moved towards it. Eventually, when he was close enough, he knelt.
The person fell out of silhouette at this angle. With the moon no longer behind it, Beni could see that his new friend was, as suspected, a girl.
"Can I have my hat back, young lady?" he asked her.
The girl scoffed.
She was an Arab— perhaps an el-Arafa local— although she wore no veil. Her hair was knotted and her clothes as ill-fitting and dirty as his own. His fez hat sat unevenly atop her frizzed black locks, tightly pressed into her curls like a cookie-cutter into dough.
"Young lady?" she sneered. "You are my age, are you not?"
Beni repressed the urge to run his fingers along the moustache he was trying to grow above his top lip. He was a man, God damn it, even if only a few hairs were just sprouting there at age seventeen.
"I am a man," he told her, snivelly voice not doing well to back up his thoughts-turned-words.
She giggled.
"You do not look like much of a man to me. You are... very skinny."
Beni stared at her with dull contempt.
She was smirking, lips pressed together thinly to hold back cheeky laughter. As if he wasn't already aware of his physical stature. He didn't need a snarky little bitch mocking him.
"Well, you don't look like much of a woman," he retorted, smiling vilely to add further insult. "Even in the dark I can see that your chest is incredibly flat."
The girl kept her smirk steady, but he knew that he had annoyed her. She looked away from him, head high, to gaze over at the distant hills.
"I do not claim to be a woman. Perhaps I've not finished growing..." she paused, and then added, "How old do you think I look?"
At the last question, Beni ran his eyes over her petite figure at his side. Her cheeks were hollow from starvation, her eyes a little sunken like his own. He could have snapped her bony ankles with ease, or so he imagined.
Now, he realised, she wasn't a resident of el-Arafa, because she obviously wasn't a resident of anywhere. She was a street-dweller, like himself.
And by the sounds of things, she genuinely didn't know how old she was.
He gave an honest answer.
"Fourteen, I would say. Give or take a year."
The girl let out a sigh, and then reached up and took the fez hat off of her head with skeletally thin fingers. The suffocated hair beneath it puffed up upon its removal. She handed it to him, and he took it back gratefully.
"I suppose you are not from around here?" she asked him.
Beni dusted the top of his fez off, and turned it around in his fingers to inspect any damage.
"I am Hungarian."
She nodded, like he had just confirmed it for her.
"I thought your accent was funny."
Placing the fez back on his head, he narrowed his eyes into the darkness. Everybody thought his accent was funny. When was somebody going to realise that they were the ones with accents, not he?
"Well, where are you from, little girl?" he muttered.
It took her a moment to reply, in which time Beni remembered she still had his stolen bread. She was chewing thoughtfully on a bite of it.
"Alexandria."
"Ah."
He thought about taking the bread off her and legging it, but something prevented him from doing so. The girl looked as if she hadn't eaten in a week, and he had stolen and consumed three whole baskets of dates and berries just this morning. She probably needed it more than him.
"Where did you get your hat?" she asked him, pointing to the fez.
His eyes moved upwards in his skull as if to look at it, although in actuality he could only barely see his frowning eyebrows.
"It was my grandfather's," he said, wearily. "He was in the Turkish army. They give everyone in the Turkish army one."
Satisfied with the answer, she glanced down at her bread, tore a chunk off, and gave it to him. It was like he was a dog, each question he answered like a trick for which he would receive a treat.
He picked at it rather than immediately cramming it into his mouth.
"If you're from Hungary, how did you end up here?"
Beni turned away from her, and shifted on the metal roof ridges. He crossed his legs and stared at the stars dotting the horizon.
"I am a part of the French Foreign Legion," he said. "I'm just on leave for now."
She didn't respond to that. Perhaps she didn't know what the French Foreign Legion was. Or she didn't care.
They must have sat in silence for five minutes, then.
"Have you been anywhere interesting? With this lee-djon?" she asked.
Beni ran a finger along his moustache.
"Meh," he shrugged. "Nowhere outstanding. But it has kept me out of prison so far. And I made a friend recently."
"Who?"
"Some American. His name is Richard."
"Oh."
It was half an hour or so, and then every savoured bite of the bread was finished, and every question about the French Foreign Legion answered.
"I tend to judge a city by its whores," he ended up telling her. "Amsterdam, Pattaya and Rio de Janeiro are my favourites."
The girl shook her head at him. She probably didn't know where any of those places were, but she certainly knew what a prostitute was.
"You are disgusting."
He grinned.
"You won't be saying that a few years from now when I am paying you for twenty minutes of your time."
She gagged, and punched him on the arm. Beni laughed wheezily at her repulsion, but then winced when he realised she had deadened his shoulder. If only he had some fat or muscle on his bones.
"I will not be a whore!" she hissed. "I am going to be an archaeologist."
He thought she was joking.
Proudly, the girl straightened her back and adjusted the flaps of the tattered men's jacket she wore.
Beni waited, and then burst into a fit of cackles when he realised she was serious.
Across the graveyard city of el-Arafa, the jerky laughter of a high-pitched Hungarian boy could be heard crowing into the night.
The girl stared at him, blankly.
"What?!"
Eventually, he calmed down and got to his feet, wobbling a little on the ridges of the roof.
"Ah," he sighed, wiping a mirthful tear from his eye. "Thank you. I have not laughed like that in quite some time."
She glared up at him with not the least amusement.
"Why is that so funny?"
Shaking his head at her in pity, he glanced at the floor far below. The cemetery guard had clearly lost interest in him; nonetheless, he was leaving this dreadful place now.
"Because you will never, ever be successful, little girl," he told her.
She got to her feet with angry determination, fists balled at her sides.
"Why? Because I am a woman?"
To objective eyes from elsewhere, they would have looked quite the odd pair, up there on the rooftop.
Beni, with his stringy figure, dirty, pyjama-like clothes, braces and sandals and fez hat; the Arab girl, with her massive, messy hair, bare feet and mismatched men's clothing that hung too loosely on her tiny frame.
Beni smirked, and placed a dusty hand on her shoulder. He leaned forward, so much so that his breath was in her face as he spoke. She didn't flinch at his whispers.
"No. Because you aren't white," he told her, words low and condescending. "And you are too much like me."
Her shoulders dropped in defeat.
Beni straightened up again and shrugged. He took a step back, and then another, walking backwards on the roof until he sensed the garbage mound at its edge.
"Where are you going?" she spat, anger unnecessarily lacing her words.
Beni grinned.
"I have a month before my leave ends," he replied. "I am sure as hell not spending it here."
And with that, he hopped all the way down to the street below, a tin canister rattling as he kicked it loose from its hold in the heap.
The girl stood tall at the roof's edge, glaring down at him with anger and confusion. Perhaps she was annoyed that she was being left alone once more.
Beni knew what that was like. Maybe she hadn't grown used to loneliness yet. After a while she would, and then she would be a lone wolf, like him.
"What do you mean," she asked, calling one last question out to him as he turned and began to stroll away. "That I am too much like you?"
Beni stopped. He turned to look up at the odd girl who had stolen his hat and his bread.
Silhouetted in the moonlight, he realised that he hadn't even learned her name.
And he didn't know why, but he felt compelled to answer her.
Half of him simply wanted to squash the dreams of a nameless stranger; the other half, it seemed, saw a little of himself in her dirty, starving body, the way he had looked a few years ago.
So, he gave her a last grin, and surprised himself by supplying her silhouette with a rather profound answer.
"Little girl, we are both no more than street urchins."