Authors: Pauls Toutonghi
I paused. “The truth is a powerful thing,” I said. “It is very liberating.”
At this, Kebi Merit smiled. “Or dangerous,” she said. “Sometimes it is very dangerous.”
I was about to confess. I was about to appeal to her maternal side and tell her who I was, and to ask for her assistance in knowing—truly knowing—the person my father was, the people who were my family, here on this side of the world. But then I got scared. Instead of answering, I fled from her. I fled from her and scurried back into the kitchen.
“Khosi,” my father said as soon as I was back in the room. “I need to talk to you for a moment in private.”
Kitchen, hallway. Kitchen, hallway. Kebi Merit had disappeared. Where she’d gone, I didn’t know.
“What were you doing in there?” he said, leaning toward me. “You were torturing me—and enjoying it.”
What could I say? “Yes,” I said. “I was enjoying it.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” he said.
Oh, no
, I thought.
Now what?
With that, he turned on his heel and charged into the kitchen, a soldier dashing back into a battle from which he’d emerged only briefly.
I stayed out there. I walked down along the corridor and took a closer look at the place. Every doorway had elaborate crown moldings with ornamented flourishes that had been carved by hand probably close to a hundred years ago. Cobwebs draped the tops of these moldings, hanging there like celebratory ribbons. I knew a bit about grand interior spaces. Five years earlier, when I’d started at the Copper King Mansion, there had been a wing of the house that the new owners hadn’t yet restored. I liked to loiter in the shabby grandeur of it, in the big dusty rooms with their ceilings that I couldn’t leap and touch. Occasionally, I’d find some detail—a single screw, or a strip of flooring, or a patch of wallpaper—that was perfectly intact, that had survived the decades with its full original appearance. These were tiny relics of the past to me, a direct connection between my time and the long-ago carpenter.
The Copper King Mansion: It was such a part of my psyche, my self, my sense of who I was. The encyclopedic way I’d learned its statistics. Anything you know, that you know well, becomes an
intimacy. The knowledge of it is private. It is something that you take with you wherever you go. What happens to it when you’re gone—now, that’s a different mystery. But while I looked at the peeling wallpaper of my father’s home in Cairo, I remembered every detail of my former workplace, comparing its elements to the elements of the house at 37 Talaat Harb.
A commotion from the direction of the kitchen disturbed this reflection. My father appeared at the end of the hallway. He was being trailed by Kebi Merit and Aunt Banafrit and Aunt Fatima, still holding her onion-chopping knife. It was disconcerting to watch her wave the nine-inch blade to illustrate her points.
My father was protesting loudly. “It’s just a change of plans,” he called out in Arabic. “It’s nothing.”
“You hate our cooking,” Fatima said. She pointed to me with the knife. “He hates our cooking, that’s why he’s leaving.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my father said. “He’s never tasted your cooking.”
“He hates the idea of our cooking,” Fatima insisted.
“At least let us give you a little something,” Banafrit said, “to take with you. Maybe half a chicken. You shared that beautiful story with us, Wael, about your mother, and we feel like we need to at least feed you.”
They’d all gathered around me in the corridor. My dad inched us toward the front door. “We’ll buy food on the street,” he said. “You all have a lot of work to do. We’re just getting in your way.”
“But I want to stay,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” Kebi Merit said. “Stay. Stay a while. Just think, Akram: He has so much to tell us.”
My dad shook his head. “Say goodbye to my sisters,” he said, “and we’ll go on a tour of the city.”
My aunts said their desultory goodbyes. “Go with the grace of God,” Fatima said, and then we were back on the street and the dust was kicking up around our feet.
“That was close,” my father said as soon as we were alone. “I told you: Follow my lead.” He paused. “You know, you seem to be constantly making the most terrible errors in judgment.”
“That’s hilarious,” I said, “coming from you.”
“I’m not the one who’s traveling around the world,” he said, “wrecking marriages.”
“You’re not?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’m traveling around the world and resolving failed marriages in order to start new ones.” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, you can tell there’s a difference.”
I was about to deny this, but just then a car swerved toward us. It missed my father by inches and let out a vociferous blast of its horn.
Honking and cats.
These were the most prominent features of the Cairene street, and I noticed both as soon as we stepped out of the alleyway behind Talaat Harb. It happened fast: We took our leave of Aunt Fatima and Aunt Banafrit and Kebi Merit. There were a number of stray cats hanging around the end to the alley. Lanky and inscrutable, they took ballerina steps through the grime. And a chorus of honking accompanied our arrival at the main thoroughfare. Drivers in Cairo, it seemed, honked to warn you that you were in their way, they honked to tell you that they were merging, they honked as a
means of greeting, they honked to express their feelings toward the world, they honked when they were bored. I think they also honked to announce the rain or the sunset; like an inky swath of geese scattered across an inverted sky, they filled the air with the sound of their life. They honked to affirm themselves.
Out in that horn-filled, cat-filled street, we’d walked fifteen or twenty feet before I said, “Where are we going?”
“I have an errand to do,” he said. “You can help your father get something accomplished.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but it was a bright, hot day, hotter than the last. At close to noon, it must have been well over a hundred degrees. We were in the center of the city. The buildings around us seemed to be sorted into two broad categories: 1) hulks of abandoned concrete buildings that had been stripped of everything and had not been demolished; 2) renovated nineteenth-century apartment houses with ornamented facades and shops at street level. There seemed to be no pattern to this method of urban preservation. And sometimes, sometimes people were living in the abandoned, unfinished, crumbling towers, lots of people, enough people that you could see their colorful plastic tents blooming there like moss on the bones of a skeleton.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“Oh, no,” my father said. “Let’s not stop here. It’s too hot. Let’s at least have this argument in the shade.”
“I’m not on the family tree,” I said.
“There you go,” he said. “Just like I thought. I knew it was a mistake. One thing always leads to another.” He switched to English. “Let you into the house, and soon you’ll be living there.”
“Is that an Egyptian proverb?” I said.
“No,” he said. “It’s the truth.”
“I’m your son,” I said. “I should live in your house at least once in my life.”
“Khosi, my love, my dearest. The sun is burning a hole in my head. I can feel it cutting through my hair and down into my brain. It is cooking my brain.”
“You’re on the tree,” I said. “I saw an Akram.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I’m on there. It just hasn’t been updated in a few years.”
“No,” I said, a sick feeling rising out of my stomach. “That boy on roller skates, Banafrit’s son Victor. I looked for him. He was there. The newest ink.”
My father walked away from me. He walked away and leaned against a building, beneath the shade of another building. He adjusted his spectacles and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. He shrugged. “A tragic omission,” he said. “But really—your grandfather’s fault.”
“God rest his soul?” I said.
“Precisely,” he said.
“You never told them a thing about us,” I said.
He put his glasses back on. He frowned. “
Habibi
, calm down. Stop yelling.”
“I’m not yelling,” I yelled.
“Hush,” he said. “Or we’ll attract the attention of the police.”
It was true. There were unusual numbers of police everywhere. They wore bright white uniforms, uniforms that were the brightest thing for miles. The amount of starch that the Egyptian police had to use, it was dizzying to think about. Their chalk-colored
uniforms came with rakish black berets and matching obsidian leather belts.
I lowered my voice a little. “It’s pathological,” I said. “You abandoned your wife—and your son.”
“First of all,” my father said. “I didn’t abandon you. And second: I had to leave. I had no choice. The people I’d borrowed money from—they would have hurt you both without hesitation. They were criminals. They were thugs.” He sighed and took out his packet of cigarettes. Again he offered me one. Again I declined. “I put you both in danger. It took me years to understand that,
habibi
.” He inhaled deeply, then exhaled through his nostrils. “You don’t understand how hard it is for me to say that. I’ve made big mistakes in my life. Huge errors. But that’s changing. Can you understand that?”
“I guess I can’t,” I said.
“Khosi, listen. The omission was intentional. Amy—your mother—and I, we wanted to be gradual about it. If you think her family was bad, imagine mine. Their only son marrying an American. This was Egypt in the early eighties, just years after the 1973 war. In my father’s mind, if she was an American, then she was a Zionist.”
“Oh, dear God in heaven,” I said, my voice wry and sardonic. “Please, anything but that.”
They say that living a day in Cairo is like smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes. The smog hangs over the city, a dense blanket of smog, one that dissipates only part of the way into the desert or across either sea. How many cigarettes a day was my father smoking? Presently, he lit another.
“Can you smoke in the subway?” I said.
“No,” he said, “not at all.” He sprang into action anyway, leading me down the steps and into the subterranean depths of the metro. At the guard booth, he slipped a bill to the attendant along with a couple of cigarettes. He did it so fast that I had to watch him carefully to see it. The guard nodded and, without making eye contact, waved us both through.
“That,” my father said, “is a lesson for life.”
“Bribe anyone you can?” I said. “So you can get emphysema?”
He scowled at me and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “You can get what you desire,” he said, “if you simply apply yourself.”
“Is
that
an Egyptian proverb?” I said.
“No,” he said. “But it should be.”
We made our way into the metro.
As I got down there, I wondered what people saw when they scrutinized me, when I passed before their eyes. Was I a momentary apparition, a face in the station of the metro, there and then not there, like a petal on a wet black bough? I noticed that only the men seemed to watch me. The women, for the most part, didn’t pay me any attention. Though the center cars of the subway were reserved for women, there was mixing on the platforms and in the hallways of the station. That was when I really noticed the head scarves. It was true. Nearly every woman wore one. What must it be like to wrap your head in cloth every time you go outside? To never feel the sensation of wind against the skin of your neck?
“Where are we going?” I said. “I just realized I have no idea.”
“This is a tour of the city,” my father said. “I’m taking you on a tour of the place that means the most to me in Cairo.”
“Maybe I don’t want to go on a tour,” I said.
The train station filled with the usual sound of the arriving and departing trains. The tunnels were lit with strange orange lights that gave everything the vague look of a jack-o’-lantern. I listened to the roar of train wheels along steel tracks. I felt the quick whoosh of air when a subway line arrived at the station. I felt the vibration of it all in my body, felt it viscerally in the bones of my legs, which seemed to rattle at the knees.
“Of course you want to go on a tour,” he said. “I love you, Khosi,” he added. “I’m your father, and I’m here now.”
Where were we going? The Gezira Sporting Club. Looking back on it now, I realize I should have sensed that something was wrong. I should have sensed that nothing good was going to come of this trip.
We rode the train two stops. Not far, considering the world we emerged into, a world so unlike the rest of Cairo. Suddenly, instead of crowds, there were broad, sedate, palm-lined streets, streets with big palatial houses behind wrought-iron fences. And strangely pruned Popsicle trees. Everywhere, the bright green Popsicle trees, looking like something cut from the pages of
Alice in Wonderland
. Cairo was covered in a miasma of taupe dust. To be free of it seemed almost like teleportation.
It’s strange that on an island in the center of the city, in the center of the Nile, in the midst of this seventeen-million-person sprawl, is a bucolic garden paradise of large estates and lush, verdant vegetation. And this is tropical vegetation. Acacia trees, jasmine bushes, eucalyptus, cypress, salt cedar. Grass of every shade of green, each
lawn slightly different from the next, most of them groomed exhaustively. Gezira shares an island with the neighborhood of Zemalek, the most exclusive neighborhood in Cairo. The club rises from the southern part of the island, offering its acres of gardens and sports fields and outdoor spaces, outdoor spaces utterly lacking in honking or cats. And: a racetrack.
“I play polo here,” my dad said. “Have you ever seen a polo match?”
I said no, I’d never seen a polo match. But I had seen the American Motordrome Wall of Death—and he could see it, too, if he decided to accompany me back to the United States next June for Evel Knievel Days.
He didn’t seem overly impressed. “There is a festival named after whom?” he said.
“You really weren’t meant to stay in Montana,” I said. “Evel Knievel was a famous motorcycle daredevil.”
My father looked imperious and haughty. “Evel Knievel is nothing compared to Guillermo Gracida,” he said.
“Never heard of him,” I said.