Evel Knievel Days (17 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I
JETTISONED
the Egyptian clothes, choosing instead a second sweatshirt and a second pair of jeans. I had a coffee-and-pastry breakfast and made my way out into the street, through the security gauntlet and through the subsequent gauntlet of vendors. Though it was punishingly hot, I walked all the way to 37 Talaat Harb. I didn’t know how I’d handle the lie, but I knew that I’d be faithful to my own interests.

A few minutes from the address, I stopped to buy a bottle of mineral water from a street vendor. The vendor opened the ice-cold bottle for me, and when I turned back toward the street, I saw a familiar sight: cowboy boots and the cuffs of a charcoal, pin-striped business suit.

“Howdy, Junior,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “I thought you’d never summon me again.”

“I didn’t,” I said. I was whispering. I looked back at the vendor. “Shouldn’t you be more discreet?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Only the dogs can see me. Well, technically, almost any animal. And the pathologically insane.”

“That’s comforting,” I said.

“It’s been a while, Khosi,” he said.

“It’s been three days,” I said. “And I’m furious. My father’s fiancée?”

“Ah,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “I thought that would be a rough one.”

“I need you to leave me alone,” I said. “To disappear.” I started walking. The hand-to-ear, yes-I-am-talking-on-a-cell-phone trick was starting to annoy me.

“Aren’t you at all interested in what I can do?” he said.

“You’ve got to realize,” I said, “that I’ve been having a rough time of it recently.”

“Just watch this, pardner,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. He picked up a handful of dirt and threw it into the air. The dirt blazed momentarily—golden, shimmering and golden—hanging in the air, refusing to fall, suspended and gleaming in a beam of sunlight. Then the Ghost of William Andrews Clark moved his hands as though conducting an orchestra. The flecks followed, moving to the left and the right, swooping like a bird, enveloping a passing pedestrian, and then falling to the ground. It was a wondrous sight. I watched it happen right there in front of me.

“Magic,” the ghost said, “plain and simple.”

“I need some whiskey,” I said.

“Me, too, padre!” he exclaimed. “But I’m in a rush. And I’ve got another message for you. This’ll be quicker than greased lightning, then it’s back to the compound.”

“Wait,” I said. “The compound? Where do ghosts live, anyway, when they’re not haunting the earth?”

The Ghost of William Andrews Clark shook his head. “You know, I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s sort of like if I asked you where you live. You live where you live, and that’s all. It’s reality. We live in our own reality.” He paused. “Are you ready for the warning?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

“Things aren’t good in Montana,” he said.

“Things aren’t good in Montana?” I repeated. “When
have
they been good? Now,
that
would have been a surprise: ‘Things are great in Montana!’ ”

“No need to get cheeky, pardner,” he said.

“I’m not getting cheeky,” I said. “When you said you had a warning for me, my heart started pounding. I mean, I thought you were going to warn me about my father.”

“I was,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “But I changed my mind.”

I stopped walking. “What about him?” I said.

“Take your pick,” he said. “There’s any number of warnings I could give you. But Montana’s more pressing. A bit of a calamity.”

“That sounds awful,” I said.

“Don’t get discouraged,” he said. “Keep your head up, hoss. Remember that I love you.”

A gust of wind blew along the street, throwing dust in the air and momentarily blinding me. By the time I opened my eyes again, I was alone. There was only the crush of pedestrian traffic on the scoured Cairo street.

“You love me?” I said. “Wait. Is everybody healthy? Is it my
mom? Or Natasha? Or the Copper King Mansion? Did the mansion burn down? Is something wrong with Ms. Vogel? Hello?”

There was no response, just silence. A few folks edged away from me but continued on toward their destinations. The city closed ranks around me. I was devoured.

37 Talaat Harb was close to the center of Cairo, a nice neighborhood not far from the Nile. Though it wasn’t as stately and elegant as Zemalek, it wasn’t the informal settlement district, either, with its courtyard pigs and decrepit overcrowding. And it was nothing like the medina. The building was built in the regal French style, with every crenellation softened by ornamental beauty. Ornamental beauty. Broad mouths of windows one floor above the street, rising out toward decorated cornices. None of the apartments was accessible from the main street, from Talaat Harb. So I had to loop around to a long trash-strewn alley and go through a wrought-iron gate that had rusted permanently ajar. The space between the gate and the crumbling stucco of the wall wasn’t big. Flakes of rust stained the fabric of my new white shirt.

Halfway down the alley, I heard the sound of running water. By the time I got to the courtyard that housed the entry staircase, I could no longer hear the sounds of the city; there was only the gentle bubbling of the little fountain, in the center of which was a beautiful stone leaf, a curved stone leaf that had been overrun by moss and had crumbled slightly around the edges. The water came from a single tarnished copper pipe. Despite the fact that it was a trickle, the sound of it somehow expanded to fill the entire alcove. It rose up
along the four stories of the apartment building, the four stories with their inward-facing balconies.

These are the adjectives that come to mind when I think about that building: velvety, threadbare, sooty, crumbling, cracked, expansive, lush, mango-colored, lacquered, formal. At some point, one of the inhabitants had painted the walls of the courtyard a bright mango color. That had faded over the years, and now the paint was blanched and chipping, irregular in its concealment of the stucco walls.

I rang the bell. After a few moments, a pillowy middle-aged woman answered. She was wearing acid-washed Levi’s and a mustard-colored blouse. She looked me up and down, trying to decipher exactly what type of individual I was. Then, suddenly, she spat on the ground between us.

“Ha!” she said. And that was all.

The spitting was unusual.
That’s a dangerous habit
, I considered telling her,
one responsible for the spread of communicable disease
.

“Akram!” she called. “He’s here.”

Almost immediately, I heard my father’s baritone voice saying in English: “Coming! Coming! One moment.” As soon as I heard him, all memory of the ghostly warning evaporated. I heard an accompanying female voice saying in Arabic, “You let him sleep at a hotel? What kind of man are you? I knew you were rotten, but this—this is terrible, even by your standards.”

The old woman pushed the door open a little farther and stood aside. I saw two people making their way down the hallway toward me: my father and a crowlike woman with a black muslin scarf wrapped loosely around her head. They walked together but apart;
my father was grimacing and his posture seemed harried and harassed.

“I told you to wait in the kitchen,” he said. He turned to me and opened his hands in supplication. “Wael happens to love his hotel,” he said. “It’s the best in the city.” He paused and sighed. “This is my sister Fatima,” he said.

“
Eldest
sister,” Fatima said, bowing at the waist as soon as my father made the introduction. “And you must be Wael,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. “The son of my brother’s friend Malik. My brother has told me all about you.”

“He has?” I said.

“Yes,” Fatima said. “How you are traveling to our country to discover the roots of your father, Malik. I think it is a beautiful story—and you can’t stay in a hotel, no matter how much you like it.”

My father reached for me and took me in his arms. He grabbed both of my shoulders. “No, no,” he said. “See how rested he looks.”

“I do?” I said, genuinely surprised. Then I had an idea. “You know,” I said, “I
could
use a nice, comfortable bed in a nice, comfortable house.”

“See?” Fatima said. “He’d love to stay. What a scoundrel you are, Akram Saqr.”

My father went pale. “I think that’s not a good idea,” he said, scrambling. “Because of his search for his roots.”

“Nonsense!” another female voice boomed. “He can stay with us! There’s room in our part of the house.” Then there were five people in the hallway, which was starting to feel a little crowded.

“My younger sister Banafrit,” my father said, rubbing his forehead as if he had a headache.

“
Youngest
sister,” my aunt Banafrit said. She was not wearing a head scarf of any kind. “
Enchanté
,” she said, extending the back of her hand for me to kiss.

They stood next to each other then, my two aunts. Fatima looked so much like a crow that I almost expected her to have feathery wings tucked somewhere, perhaps beneath her
hijab
. Her nose had glossy, clean, scrubbed skin—skin like the coating of a beak—and her eyes had a mischievous avian glimmer. Would she shake your hand? Or would she peck it?

Banafrit didn’t look like a bird. Banafrit looked like a plate of mashed potatoes. She was large and exuberant and perfumed and lathered with every kind of buttery makeup imaginable. She wore cords of gold jewelry. They draped around her neck by the dozens. My two aunts were opposites in nearly every physical characteristic. And yet both of them had the same nose, the nose that also graced my father’s countenance—and my own. When I looked at them, I saw myself. Did they see themselves in me?

Each aunt protested that I should stay with her. They fought over me for at least five minutes. I fueled the conflict, enjoying the coloration of my father’s cheeks, which progressed from ashen to yellowy ashen to greenish ashen to pure sea-foam green. Even though I was enjoying myself, I longed for my desk with its carefully aligned pencils, with its artfully sharpened graphite tips and scrupulously clean erasers. I longed for Natasha and her conspiratorial presence; she would help me make my father squirm.

The hotel issue was not settled, but all at once my father was waving me deeper into the house and the big double doors were clicking shut behind me and he was saying, “Welcome, welcome!
Ahlan wa sahlan
.”

Somehow my father was holding a lit cigarette. I didn’t even see him light it. It just appeared in his hand, trailing a plume of smoke like the tail of a rooster.

“Nervous?” I said.

My aunts swept ahead of us and into the main living room.

“God has guided you here,” my father whispered, “and now we will pick up the pieces.”

As I progressed through the house, I named the things I passed, silently ticking off their Arabic designations in my head as if they were my college dorm room flashcards:
bab
, doorway.
Kitabi
, books. My father flicked on the light switch.
Noor
, I thought, and stepped into the illuminated living room. It, too, had a parquet floor. I thought of the Copper King Mansion, where the floor had been lovingly maintained and waxed and scrubbed with Murphy’s Oil Soap once a week. This floor had not been maintained at all. The inlaid woods were chipped and cracked and, in some cases, entirely missing. I could see the bare stonework beneath the thin layer of the parquet.

It looked like the kind of thing I imagined from one of the art districts of East Berlin, the home of an ideologically successful East German playwright, perhaps, room after room overflowing with shabby antique furniture and books. There appeared to be two levels to the apartment. The main floor had a big empty ballroom that we presently walked through, my dad smoking a Dunhill and narrating a tour in Arabic.

If my aunts thought it was strange for my father to narrate a tour of the family home, neither of them said a thing. They walked on ahead into the kitchen.

“Here is the rosary of my great-uncle Michael,” he said in Arabic, but retaining the French word for uncle,
oncle
, with its deep
o
and resounding flourish at the end. Indeed, his Arabic was peppered with French and English phrases. The object to which he was pointing, however, was one that didn’t need translation. It was a massive set of beads with a silvery replica of the crucifix at its end. Each bead was the size of a chickpea.

“Coptic archbishop,” my father said. “The higher the rank, the bigger the beads.”

“Is that true?” I said.

“I don’t really know,” he said.

“How’s Agnes?” I whispered to him as we walked along.

My father sighed. “It’s truly terrible,” he said. “Even my
newest
lies aren’t working.”

“Have you considered the truth?” I said. Wait. “Why am I giving
you
life lessons?”

“I do appreciate it,” he said. That was all he said on the topic. We continued walking in silence. Finally, he stopped in front of a large framed black-and-white photograph of a cheerful-looking old man. “And here, here is my father,” he said softly to me, “God rest his soul.”