Evel Knievel Days (20 page)

“Don’t be proud of that,” my father said. “Guillermo Gracida is the most famous polo player of the twentieth century. Sixteen U.S. Open wins. Twenty-one years as a ten-goal forward.”

“It’s just polo,” I said.

“The sport of kings,” my father objected. “It is the fastest sport you can watch. Well, the fastest sport that’s legal.”

“Is there a lot of polo in Egypt?” I said. I hesitated, armed with my secret knowledge. “Do you play?”

“Not really,” my father said. “I mean, first of all, you need grass. You can play on clay, on a dirt floor, but it’s not the same. There’s something about the scent of a grass field—it defies all description.”

If he wanted to let me further into his life, this was his opportunity. It hurt a little that he didn’t say anything. Not that I expected much. But still—that was his chance.

We’d surfaced in the center of a garden, in the shadow of a big white complex. It was the Opera House, the Opera House at the Opera subway stop. The building itself sprawled over an acre of land—a series of domes, broad flat domes that seemed to rise up, up into the bright horizon, as if they were about to take wing. It was a new building, built a few decades ago, and its white soapstone glistened with an inlaid grain. It was pristine and almost terribly beautiful. It combined the four main structures of Islamic architecture: the mosque, the palace, the tomb, and the fort. It seemed to be all of these at once. I stared. As often happened to me when I was confronted by a pretty thing, I thought of a song by Willie Nelson. This was a liability of listening to country and western. For some reason, the chorus of “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” started playing in the jukebox of my mind.

Though I’d come from a world of privilege, that privilege had always been a generation removed. It lived in the past, buried beneath a tombstone or framed behind a piece of glass. It wasn’t the kind of privilege that rode polo ponies and offered to show me Gezira and Zemalek. Here in broader Cairo, it was drastically at odds with the surroundings, which were, almost without exception, poor. Now we passed through security, through a gate that was manned by three armed police officers, all of them wearing the
same white uniform. Strangely, we didn’t have to stop at the checkpoint. The officers simply opened the gate for my father, scurrying into motion as soon as he approached. “Akram!” one of them exclaimed.

My dad smiled and nodded and waved and made his way through the opened checkpoint.

“Jamil,” he called, “how’s your wife?”

“Good, sir,
el hamdillah
. Thank you for asking, sir. Have a nice day, sir.”

I was fascinated by the guards’ deference to my father. He pulled me behind him like debris in the wake of a fast-moving ship. His stride seemed to lengthen as he walked onto the grounds of the Gezira Sporting Club.

“I have to tell you something important,” my father said as we headed deeper into the club.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m all ears.”

“What?” he said.

“It’s a colloquial expression,” I said.

“I see,” he said. He paused. “This is hard to say. Or rather, the words—I don’t know the right words.”

“Go on,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m interested in anything you want to tell me.”

“You are made of ears?” he said.

“Many,” I said.

“Well,” my father said, “you see, Khosi, my life had become unmanageable. Unimaginably unmanageable.” He stopped speaking. He was evidently struggling. Then he seemed to change tactics. I wish he’d continued with the first approach, because then maybe, just
possibly, things would have turned out differently. But he didn’t. “No,
habibi
,” he said, “let me tell you a story instead. You’ll like this story, since you like to make up stories about people getting hit by cars.”

We’d walked out onto a grassy playing field. It was long, longer than a football field, and covered with markings in phosphorescent white chalk. I bent down and pinched some of it between two fingers. It was wet, and it rolled into little clumps like sloughed skin. The sun had less power here, for some reason, in the midst of the grass. But my father was talking:

“Ford Motor Company,” he said, “Ford Motor Company. They came to Egypt in 1926. That’s when they started selling the first Fords in our country. And what were they selling? The Model T. It was the last year they made them. You understand?” He said it as if it were possible that I didn’t understand. I wondered what part I might not have understood. The Model T? The Ford Motor Company? Nineteen twenty-six?

“Anyway,” he continued, “your grandfather, my father, he was the first person in Egypt to buy one. He bought the first black Model T Ford, right out of the showroom in downtown Cairo. He was twenty-two years old and something of a playboy. There were other cars around, sure, but his was the first Ford. So he hired a driver, and he toured around the country with his friends. To Alexandria. To Siwa. To the Red Sea. You know: for a picnic.

“And then one day he was outside the city in the car, and the driver came up over a hill, and there was a cow in the middle of the road. And he hit the cow. Right in the middle. It split like a cake.”

“Dear God,” I said. “Poor thing.”

“I agree,” my father said. “Horrific, too. The creature, it had just
wandered into the road. On the roads back then, nothing moved faster than a jackal or a hyena. The cow didn’t know what hit it. My father barely survived.” We’d walked all the way across the field and were entering a long wooden structure. The smell of it rose and surrounded me. It was a smell I recognized from the state fair in Silver Bow County. It was the smell of a stable. Sure enough, there were two dozen horses, many of them in their stalls, hiding from the brutal midday heat.

“Horses,” I said. I couldn’t think of what else to say.

“Yes,” my father said. And then, in Arabic: “
Remal al-sahra
.” This meant
desert sand
. Since he was leaning into the stall of a sand-colored roan, since he was reaching across the metal bar and patting a horse on the side of its long, sloping nose, I assumed it was the horse’s name.

“He’s the fastest horse on the African continent,” my father continued. He sighed and looked at me and said, “I didn’t finish the story. You see, they didn’t know what to do. The cow was dead. It couldn’t be restored. Clearly, there was someone at fault. But it was the beginning of the automobile in Egypt. There weren’t that many of them around. And so: The authorities put the car in jail.”

“Thank God,” I said. “Keeping the public safe.”

“They took it and chained it in the main lot of the jail, chained it to a radiator, and they kept it there for a month. Finally, my grandfather showed up. He posted its bail. But he never drove it again. He was afraid to ever drive it. That’s the story of how he started breeding horses. He still rode horses, rode them through the city of Cairo, until he died last year.”

I was flooded with a peculiar drowning feeling, a feeling like I
was trying to float but failing, like the water was rising over my shoulders and pulling me toward the bottom of something, the bottom of some invisible lake.

My father shook his head. “But that story—the one I just told you—isn’t true.”

I stared at him.

“You see, that’s the way I always tell it. With the cow. But it’s not true. It’s a lie. In fact, it was a boy—a village boy. The car hit a boy and killed him. The first automotive fatality in the history of the country caused by a Ford. My father’s fault, at least indirectly. So he never drove again. But when I tell that story the real way, the way it actually happened, it gets an entirely different reaction.”

That was all that he said for a long while. He lit another Dunhill. We left Remal al-sahra and wandered down toward the paddock. I could hear my feet shuffle across the baked clay of the exercise yard.

“Listen,” my father said. “I’ve had two lives. Two lives in full. This is a strange experience, believe me. Who has two entire separate lives? It is, how do you say: bewildering. The first one started here, a mile from here, in Zemalek, in 1956. The second one started when I met your mother in 1977, when I was just twenty-one. It lasted eight years, and then this life started again.”

We walked into another stall. My father stood in front of a row of saddles. He stood there beside them, framed against them, an unlikely image. Since I turned twenty-one, I’d been drawn to off-track betting at the Yacht Club, sure. But until now I’d never considered that it might be a genetic affliction.

My father fished beneath the saddle for something. He took out a black padded neoprene laptop case. It was heavy and appeared to be stuffed with a number of small rectangular objects. He handed it to me. “Take this to the office behind the stables,” he said. “Look inside—if you’re curious.”

I unzipped the pouch. Inside it I found banknotes—stacks and stacks of banknotes—euros, actually, twenty-euro notes, little clumps of them, bound with rubber bands. I blinked. “That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“It certainly is,” he said. “Take it to the office—to Room Nine. There will be a man in there. His name is not important. Just be sure it’s Room Nine. Tell him Akram sent you. Give him the case.” He paused. “Easy. It will take you five minutes. Then we can go back to the house. And you can make any kind of trouble you want.”

I looked up at him. “You mean we’ll tell your sisters the truth?” I said.

“Sure, sure,” my father said. “And then we can go to dinner. A nice dinner, maybe in a cruise boat on the Nile.”

“It’ll take me five minutes?” I said.

“More or less,” my father said.

“Why do you owe them this money?” I said.

“Ah,” my father said. “Club dues.” He cleared his throat. “You said you wanted to see authentic Egyptian life. Here is your opportunity.”

And what an opportunity it was. I zipped the case back up. “I think I’ll just take this and leave the country,” I said.

“Khosi,” he said, “you’re a lot of things, but one of them is not dishonest. Even I can tell you that.”

I turned and started to move out into the sunlight.

“Five minutes,” my father said. “I’ll meet you back here.”

His voice lessened and dimmed into the distance. I tucked the case under my arm and walked away.

F
OR SUCH AN EXPANSIVE FACILITY
in the center of the capital of Africa’s largest country, the Gezira Sporting Club had dingy offices. Or at least the ones behind the stables. They were located in a small cinder-block add-on, a tiny building that smelled of hay and old turf and horse manure. It was not an intoxicating cocktail.

I walked through the front door to find the place deserted. There was a little unstaffed reception area. It abutted a long hallway with a linoleum floor; small rooms opened out on either side of it, evenly spaced. They were clearly numbered, the numerals centered on the surface of the doors. I walked down to Room 9. I knocked. Immediately, I heard the shuffle of someone moving around inside.

“
Allo, meen?
” said a deep male voice.

I tried the doorknob. The door swung quickly open. I stepped in. The door swung quickly closed. It must have been on a spring.

A burly man in a business suit and sunglasses sat at a desk. The desk, I saw, had some papers on it, but it was mostly bare. A computer monitor illuminated the corner of the room. My gaze careened from
left to right to left again. I noticed the man’s tie: It was thin and bright crimson, the color of fresh blood. And that was when I noticed the gun.

It was a pistol of some kind, and it was placed carefully on the desk, beside the telephone, facing the door. Facing me. The man looked up and then down at the pistol, then up at me again.

“Hello,” I said in loud precise English, too shocked to remember any words in Arabic.

“Do you maybe have wrong room?” he said, his accent thick but understandable. I wondered briefly about this question. Indeed, what was behind the other doors, one through eight? Different men with different-colored ties and perhaps different weapons? A mace, a knife, a spear, a dagger, a grenade, a land mine, an ax? A set of brass knuckles?

“Room Nine,” I said, sticking to English.

The man looked a little more concerned. He also looked a little more burly, but that could have been a trick of the lighting.

“Yes,” he said. “Room Nine.”

“I have something for you,” I said. I put the parcel on the desk, inches away from the gun. “It’s from Akram Saqr.”

At my father’s name, the man became animated. He stood up immediately. He reached across the desk and picked up the pistol, which he tucked into a holster on the side of his belt. In literature, the gun has to go off if it appears in the first act. But this was life. I was sincerely hoping that I’d at least reached the second act.

“When you see him?” the man said, coming around the desk to stand in front of me. “When he give this to you? You speak Arabic?”

I decided, based on his heightened interest, that
Yes, I speak fluent
Arabic
and
I just saw him five minutes ago
were not the most prudent answers. I merely shook my head. “I’ll be going now,” I said, backing up and putting my hand on the doorknob.