Chapter 3 Yasmina Mansour El Nozha, Cairo Three Weeks Ago
I held out my American passport to the man at the border control desk and answered his questions in perfect Arabic.
Short sentences were the key to hiding my accent.
They made it easier to obscure my hesitation over the correct plural of a word or a particular present tense form. I’d spent both flights practicing.
He glanced at my ID picture and then at me. “Welcome to Masr.” The stamp pressed into the first page in my passport and released. His attention switched to the next person in line as he handed it back to me.
“Thank you so much” was one of those phrases without a direct translation into Arabic, so I offered the next best equivalent of a thousand thanks and skipped to baggage claim.
I tried to resist opening my passport to marvel at the stamp.
My first ever stamp. Plus, he hadn’t charged me for a visa.
All the websites said I’d be charged for one if I had an American passport.
I grabbed my bag off the belt and hurried out of the arrivals terminal. As soon as I set foot past the sliding doors, the air enveloped me, heavy and thick.
Whoa. I’d been warned about the smog, but it still took a second to adjust.
Bright fluorescent light washed over the street, where cabs and buses maneuvered around a crush of pedestrians headed to the sprawling parking lot below.
My stomach roiled with nerves. What if my aunt had forgotten my arrival date?
I didn’t even know what she looked like.
She could be any of the people milling behind the barricades across the closed-off street in front of the terminal.
I squeezed past jubilant families reuniting and tried to squash my uncertainty. Surely Khalto Safa hadn’t forgotten to pick me up. She’d bought the tickets herself.
A hand fastened to my shoulder as a woman materialized from the crowd.
I jerked away instinctively. After a second, my jaw dropped, and I nearly blurted, Mama?
The same clever green eyes. Same tight curls pinned away from her round cheeks and angular jaw.
But this woman was flesh and bone. Living.
“Yasmina,” Khalto Safa said. She studied my face, and I wondered if she saw pieces of my mother, too. “You’re real. Huh.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I settled for beaming. “I’m so glad to meet you.”
She raised a thick black brow, switching to Arabic. “Are you certain you’re Nadine’s daughter?”
I blinked, trying to brush away my hurt. Everyone said I looked more like Baba than Mama, but I hadn’t realized the difference was so noticeable. “Of course.”
Khalto Safa started walking, presumably leading me toward the car. I dodged errant pieces of luggage, struggling to keep up with her. “Where are we going?”
Pyramids, pyramids, pyra—
“To eat,” my aunt said. “How do you feel about duck?”