At that moment Doaa finally began to soften toward Bassem, wondering if it was only her own stubbornness that kept her from liking him. As she accepted his apology, she found herself tongue-tied and as shy as she had been as a little girl. All she could bring herself to say was “Thank you for coming.”
A few days later, one sweltering July evening, Doaa suddenly felt faint. The next thing she knew her feet had left the ground and her head knocked against the floor. She didn’t know at first that when Hanaa found her unconscious at home alone, the first person she thought to call was Bassem. He instructed her to go to a private hospital. “Avoid a public hospital at all costs,” he warned. “I’ll cover any expenses.” The public hospitals were notorious for providing terrible care, and sometimes no care at all; patients could wait for hours without being seen. So Hanaa and her sister, Feryal, who was visiting at the time, carefully led a half-conscious Doaa to a taxi and gave the address for a private clinic. Bassem arrived shortly after. He bluffed his way inside, telling the hospital staff that he was family, and found his way into her room. He immediately took charge. He found a pharmacy and bought the medication that Doaa needed. The doctor told the family that Doaa’s health was precarious. She was too thin and frail, and in such a weakened state, she was vulnerable to any number of dangerous illnesses. When he told the family she would need to rest and be cared for, and that her health would need to be monitored carefully, Bassem insisted that he would do whatever was needed to take care of Doaa.
“I will pay for Doaa to see the best doctors in Alexandria, or even Cairo. I’ll use all my savings to make sure she’s well,” he told her mother.
Something inside Doaa shifted when she awoke and heard from her mother what Bassem had done for her. She heard from her sisters that he had been pacing nervously in the waiting room, asking a lot of concerned questions, while they waited for her diagnosis. Doaa lay in her hospital bed thinking about the young man who was willing to go to such lengths for her. His dedication convinced Doaa that his affection was genuine. She was used to being the one who took care of people, not the one being taken care of. A new feeling began to stir inside her, something she’d never felt before. For the first time since she’d been forced to flee her homeland, she felt her heart begin to open. What she was feeling though was more than compassion. Fondness, perhaps? Gratitude? It couldn’t be love. She was certain of that.
The day Doaa was released from the hospital, about an hour after she arrived home, Hanaa’s phone rang. It was Bassem. He asked to speak to Doaa. Doaa surprised herself by how eagerly she pulled the phone from her mother’s hand to her own ear. “I just want to say thank you,” she said shyly, then handed the phone back to her mother.
Not long afterward, Doaa returned to work, in spite of the doctor’s warning. She still felt responsible for taking care of her family and wanted to contribute. While she felt safe with her Syrian employer, the new anti-Syrian attitude in Egypt deeply affected her. Her father was losing clients at the barbershop he had begun working in, and with the added stress, she started feeling lethargic, sleeping a lot and, when awake, staring into space thinking of how their suffering had doubled: They had endured the war in Syria and now the Egyptian people were rejecting them. One night when she couldn’t sleep, she watched her sleeping family, all the while feeling crushed by anxiety and despair. There is no future for us, she thought. No matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t give her family a future. She felt the weight of the world on her thin shoulders and it kept her up all night.
One day, she fainted at work, and when she awoke in the public hospital, the doctor informed her that she had severe anemia and told her that she had to stay home for at least one month, eat well, and relax.
Doaa reluctantly took time off work to follow the doctor’s orders, but during that time she had no appetite. She didn’t care about getting healthy again. From her balcony, she could see Bassem leave for work at the hair salon in the morning and return in the evening. Her sisters told her stories about how when he saw them in the street, he would buy them small gifts and always ask about Doaa.