Authors: Pauls Toutonghi
“I
am
in disbelief. I’m in Egypt. My son is terribly sick. I’ve just eaten a chocolate bar, and you—you are finally apologizing. What a morning. What a conversation.”
I floated and floated and floated. The dunes of sound shaped themselves around me, grew into austere banks of texture and light. I was distant; I was a distant star; I was a supernova of ill health. The landscape of my darkness was an interstellar landscape. It depended on distance for its power.
“Then why did you lie to me in Butte? I’ve known alcoholics. Lying isn’t part of the twelve-step process.”
“I panicked,” my father said.
“That’s not like you,” she said.
“
Ja’ani
, I’m not sure. Perhaps.”
“You panicked,” she said, “and so you told me the first thing that popped into your head: ‘Amy, I’m dying, and I want to die with a clear conscience. Please sign these divorce papers to release me.’ ”
“In a way,” my father said, “it was the truth.”
“Ah,” she said. “Now, there’s the Akram I remember. There’s the man I knew and loved. Unscrupulous to the last.”
“No, no,” he said.
“It was a lie.”
“No, no,” he said. “It was a rebirth.”
“Who does that?” she said. “Even for you, it’s low. What was I going to tell our son?”
“A lie is just a truth,” my father said in Arabic, “that is inside out.”
“What did you just say?” my mother asked.
He translated.
“That makes no sense,” she said.
“It’s a proverb,” he said. “You can apply it loosely to many different things.”
“And Agnes? How did she react to this? How did she react to your sudden understanding of the unmanageability of your life?”
“Agnes?” He seemed surprised by this question. “The only reason she’s probably still talking to me after you and Khosi showed up on her doorstep is because most of this, almost all of it, was her idea. I mean: It was our idea together. That’s where we met,
habibti
. At the nine o’clock meeting.”
This was the ending, then, of
The Story of the Life and Times of Akram Saqr and Amy Clark, My One and Only Parents
, this was the juncture at which the narrative split apart, divorced like the elements of a frayed, flayed rope. But while the story of my parents’ relationship was concluding, I was having some strange and wondrous dreams, dreams wherein I rode over sand dunes on the back of a camel, over miles and miles of sand dunes with the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. We chewed plug tobacco and drank water from tin canteens, and somewhere, in the ether of the atmosphere, a piano played the first notes of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”
And that’s when my fever broke.
In the room, however, my parents didn’t notice. My mother was particularly energetic, coming over to my father and grabbing two
handfuls of his shirt. She tried to lift him. She tried, but he didn’t move. “Her idea?” my mother said.
“Yes,” my father said.
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“I am,” he said.
She pointed to the door. “Out,” she said. “I can do this alone. I can take care of Khosi on my own. I did for twenty years.”
“Amy, calm down.”
“Just leave,” she said. “I don’t trust you. Nothing you say can be trusted. It’s that simple.”
“Earlier,” he said, “you asked me why I’m here. And I’ll tell you: This is a gift from God, Khosi’s presence. Before I met Agnes, before I went to Montana, I’d given up. But now he came to Cairo—my son came back for me—so that I could set things right. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m saying the rosary. I’m saying it because I am so thankful.”
If my mother could have immolated him with her eyes, if she could have struck a match and set fire to my father’s gas-soaked body, she wouldn’t have paused for a second.
“Out of this hospital room,” she said. “You had your chance. You walked out on your chance to connect with Khosi twenty years ago.”
He stood up. “You can’t do this. Don’t forget: This is my country. This isn’t Butte, Montana. I’ll be right back in here in five minutes with hospital security. You’re a danger to my son and a danger to yourself.”
“Leave,” she said. “Now.”
He did leave, ultimately. My mother slammed the door. It was a
hospital door, though, and hospital doors don’t slam, possibly for this reason. It gently eased its way shut. Then she tried to lock it. The door was also totally unlockable. And so she hung her head. She pulled up a chair and waited. But my father didn’t return in five minutes with security. Instead, he showed up in six hours. And he brought the extended family.
After he left my room, my father later told me, he was inconsolable. He wandered out of the clinic and into Sixth of October City, unsure where he was going or what he was doing. A thought occurred to him: A little time in a casino might not be a bad thing. There’s no shortage of casinos in Cairo: the Al-Andalus, the Al-Karnak, the Panorama, the Semiramis, the Cedars, and many, many more. Gambling parlors blossom like mold spores throughout the city. They will gladly separate you from your cash, hard-earned or otherwise. I’ve even discovered over the past three years that you can find off-track betting in a number of places near the Nile. I can place bets on American horses in Egyptian pounds with my American bank account.
My father wandered into the Al-Qat casino and found the bar, which was unmarked and located at the back of the building. All of the drinks were named for poker hands. My father ordered a Royal Flush and then a Full House. He drank them quickly. He didn’t even taste them. Then he walked out onto the gaming floor. He wandered over to the blackjack table. He sat down on a plush, padded chair. “Hello, old friend,” he said softly.
It was thirty minutes before my father called Mr. Ibrahim Mohammed, Agnes Mouri’s butler and Akram’s Gamblers Anonymous sponsor. In those thirty minutes he watched hand after hand of blackjack, politely declining the dealer’s offers to join in. Eventually, the pit boss came over and suggested that my father step away from the table. My father complied. That was when he took out his cell phone.
And so it was Ibrahim—a complete stranger, a man whom I met only twice—who orchestrated my father’s return to Dar Al Fouad Hospital. He shepherded him back to the family home at Talaat Harb, and just as everyone was sitting down to dinner, they staged an intervention of sorts. A surprise intervention. A surprise reverse intervention. Akram Saqr, there to unburden himself of his past of lies. Or, as my father preferred to call them, omissions. Certain omissions.
I imagined that long dining room table awash in food, surrounded by Saqrs or variations of Saqrs. My father stood there, possibly beside Ibrahim, and nervously took out a Dunhill. He lit it. He smoked it slowly, deliberately, tapping out the ash onto the tile floor. And then he disclosed the existence of my mother and me. He told his family that my mother had not, indeed, perished like he’d made them think she had, in one of the many tragic accidents that seemed to litter his early life—cars and boats and divine strikes of lightning. He told them that they—that
we
—were in fact here in Cairo and that I was terribly ill.
“I knew it!” exclaimed Aunt Banafrit.
“I suspected it all along!” echoed Aunt Fatima.
“No, you didn’t,” said Aunt Banafrit.
“Of course I did,” said Aunt Fatima. “You’re the one who’s always being fooled.”
“Silence,” mandated Kebi Merit, and silence fell, fluttering around the mandate.
My father sat down at the table along with the rest of the family, and lit yet another Dunhill, and smoked it quietly. Everyone sat there, not speaking, the food getting cold. The minutes moved slowly by. Finally, finally, Kebi Merit stood up from the table.
“What are we waiting for?” she said. “Let’s get our coats.”
The return of Akram Saqr to Dar Al Fouad Hospital wasn’t exactly a moment of exultant triumph.
“Amy?” he said tentatively, opening the door a few inches and poking his head around it.
My mother was still sitting in her chair. She had left it only twice in the past six hours—once to check on me and once to use the restroom. She didn’t answer. Not right away. She just looked at him.
He tried a wan smile. “I bet you didn’t think I was coming back,” he said.
“You know,” she said, “it’s ten o’clock at night.”
He nodded. “Please let us come in.”
“Who’s
us
?” she said.
“A few people,” he said.
“Did you bring your fiancée?” she said.
“Not exactly,” he said. He edged more fully into the room. “
Habibti
,” he said. “I’m sorry again. I need to say this, just this: I
didn’t come on an errand for my new fiancée. I truly did not. I should have come ten years ago. Fifteen years ago, like you said. But what can I do about that now? I’m proud of my son and I brought the family and they know who he is. They want to meet him. They want to meet you. And you need my help. You need my help with the language. You can’t do this alone.”
“Okay,” my mother said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, come in. Come in. I have nothing left. Bring whoever you want.”
My father fully opened the heavy spring-loaded door. When he did, it was the destruction of the castle wall. The onslaught began. It’s not that my room was small. But fourteen people wouldn’t fit in almost any hospital room. And this is what he’d brought with him: fourteen people. Ibrahim, my aunts Banafrit and Fatima, their husbands, Ali and Yusef, Kebi Merit, Dr. Arnyat, and seven of my cousins. The cousins ranged in age from eight to twenty-eight. To this day I can’t keep all of their names straight. And here came Aunt Banafrit, her arms opening in an ample embrace.
“My sister,” she said, clasping my mother between her pillowy forearms. “My lovely ex–American sister!”
“Well, then,” my mother said, because what else could she say? “Nice to meet you.”
Banafrit turned to my father. “Ask your—your wife—ask her how her son is doing. Tell her—tell her I knew he was your child the moment I laid eyes on him.”
My father nodded. “How is Khosi?” he asked my mother.
At that moment my eyes opened. It was involuntary. I heard my
name and reacted to it. Everything came slowly into focus; light coalesced into shapes, shapes coalesced into figures; figures coalesced into my entire family, crowded into my hospital room, none of them paying me the slightest bit of attention. Even my father, who’d asked the question, wasn’t looking to me for an answer.
“Terrible,” my mother said.
Actually
, I thought,
I’m feeling a lot better
.
My father nodded and translated the answer. There was a lot of shaking of heads.
Here I am
, I thought.
Somebody look over at me
.
“I’m worried he might not make it through the night,” she added.
When my father translated, I just closed my eyes. I was tired. So very tired. Let them think what they wanted, I figured. What harm could it do?
“Don’t trust her,” Kebi Merit was saying in Arabic, pushing Banafrit aside. She stood in the middle of the hospital room, insofar as that was possible. She pointed at my mother. “Akram, I am telling you: Do not trust that American woman. I can see that she is poisoning him. I can feel it. She’s a witch.”
“What is she saying?” my mother asked.
“She’s saying that she’s happy to meet you,” my father said.
Kebi Merit spat on the ground, something that turned out to be one of her favorite gestures. “Well,” she said, taking a large paper sack out of her purse and waving it in my mother’s general direction, “tell this witch that we have our cure—our homemade cure—for yellow fever. It’s been in the family for many generations.”
“Oh God,” my father said.
“What?” my mother said.
He stared at her. “You won’t like this,” he said. “She’s brought some medicine.”
“What is it?” she said.
“What is the cure?” he asked Kebi Merit in Arabic, his countenance sinking and his shoulders slumping toward the ground.
“A mustard poultice with rosemary and chicken hearts.” She looked expectantly at my father, waiting for his translation. It was obvious that she was proud of what she’d assembled. There was a quiet pride in her posture.
“Oh dear,” my father said in English. “It’s chicken hearts.”
“Chicken hearts,” my mother exclaimed.
“Chicken hearts?” my father asked in Arabic.
“Yes, yes,” called Dr. Arnyat from the back of the assemblage. “Certainly. The medicinal properties of chicken hearts cannot be doubted.”
“It stings a little,” Banafrit said.
“It stings a lot,” Fatima said.
“Where’s the doctor?” my mother said.
“Right here!” said Dr. Arnyat from the back of the assembled crowd.
“The other doctor,” my mother said. “The real doctor. The doctor from this hospital.” She went out into the hall. “I’ll be right back,” she said, relinquishing her position as gatekeeper of the sickroom. “Akram: Watch over them. Make sure nothing unusual goes on.”
What happens to a large crowd of people when they are jammed into a small space with nothing to do but concentrate on a single,
unmoving thing? They argue. My extended Egyptian family was remarkable, I now realize, for the relative harmony with which they negotiated their shared living space. It hadn’t always been harmonious. “When Fatima married a Muslim,” my father later told me, “your grandfather nearly had a stroke.” But in he moved, and soon the family home—with its many wings and dilapidated grandeur—became a sort of experiment in religious tolerance. Icons were put up and taken down. Holy days were observed with consecration and stricture.
In the hospital, Fatima’s husband looked at his watch. “I need to pray,” he said. “Where can I pray?”
“There’s a room down the hall,” Dr. Arnyat said. “The east is marked.”
Banafrit’s husband immediately raised his voice. “What if I want to pray?” he said. “Maybe I’d like to pray, too. What about me?”
“What about you?” Fatima’s husband said.
“I have my rights,” Banafrit’s husband said.
“I think they’re going to fight,” one of the younger cousins said.