I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops Read Free

off relations with her for many years following her decision to go on the stage, and then made it up with her when she became famous. There they were, sipping their fruit juice proudly and reveling in their status. They tried to approach me and I avoided their eyes, afraid that they would invite me back to their homes after the ceremony.
    I had no desire to hear them telling me how uneasy they were at the kind of life I was living. I was among friends, people my mother had been on stage with and all her ex-husbands; the traffic in the surrounding streets and curious children, who wanted to drink the juice but had no idea what was going on, provided a protective blanket of sound. But I felt the sting of their sidelong glances, and my conversation faltered as I wondered whether to pretend to look overwhelmed by the event or cheerful and relaxed, and wavered uneasily between the two. Although the idea horrified me, I couldn’t help scanning the mostly familiar faces, then raising my eyes to the windows and balconies searching for my husband. He was out of my mind only briefly when the audience burst into enthusiastic applause.
    The government representative fixed the sign to the wall. “Amina Salim Street,” it said. A woman standing beside Tante Samia let out a trill of joy and tears came into my eyes. Tante Samia herself clapped her hands as vigorously as a young woman. The government deputy climbed down off the chair he had been standing on with some difficulty, almost losing his balance, and Tante Samia rushed to take advantage of his discomfiture, seizing his hand and then whipping off her spectacles to show him her eyes. I heard snatches of what she was saying to him: “… cataract … operation … times are difficult … the country ought to remember its old artists.”
    They were certainly old. All those who were able to travel had attended the ceremony. Public transportation was bad enough for the healthy, so what must it be like for the old and sick and poor? They were happy to be there, although some of them were unable to express it because they were ill or wretched or caught up in remembering the past and their youth. They looked like a troupe of wandering players without a stage or an audience or even the price of a ticket to go from one place to the next. They weren’t the same as the rest of the guests: their faces looked different and they wore strange clothes that, although they were old and shabby, still had an air of nobility and a touch of the fantastic about them. Perhaps they were clothes they had worn on stage, Amm Badir’s in particular: he wore a baggy white suit, spotted with rust, and a straw hat without a brim.
    When darkness had fallen and the guests were leaving. Tante Samia put her arm around me and said. “Come on! Let’s go to your place. We must tell Amina what’s been happening. It’ll cheer her up a bit.”
    I turned to look at her in alarm. Had she too begun to mix up people and events? Recently I had grown used to hearing the strangest and most wretched talk from friends of my mother’s whom I met by chance. They would take my hand and ask me if Amina was getting better, even though they had been at her funeral, or when I introduced myself to them they wouldn’t know who my mother was. Tante Samia refused to let go of me, and in the end I found myself welcoming her persistence because members of my family were pressing me to be with them that evening and I was able to assure them that I had to stay with her. They looked at me reproachfully, unable to believe that I preferred her company to theirs, and she must have seemed a pathetic creature to them: she wore a fox fur draped around her shoulders, whose face and ears were eaten away, and whose hairs were molting all over her clothes. One had come to rest on her lower lip, and most of her front teeth were missing. Then their accusing eyes shifted to Tante Samia’s friend, Nazik, who was having difficulty staying upright,