Authors: Pauls Toutonghi
“Quiet, all of you,” Kebi Merit said. “I need silence to concentrate.”
She’d approached my bed and taken the poultice out of its sack. The thing itself was bright red and carefully smeared over a wide cloth bandage. Kebi Merit pulled down the neck of my hospital gown. She plastered the bandage to my skin, just above the collarbone.
It took a moment for the odor to reach my sinuses. To say that it smelled like damp, rotting intestinal reek—damp, rotting intestinal reek with an undercurrent of spice—doesn’t do it justice. The mustard
burned my skin and gave off a powerful odor. Though the rosemary did add a few gentle agricultural notes, the chicken heart must have been in an advanced state of decay. It smelled very clearly like a plate of roadkill. Like the basement of a funeral home. Like the devil’s favorite hot dog.
The smell was so foul that I opened my eyes and raised my right arm, placing it squarely on my cloth-covered chest. “Help,” I whispered. “Take it off.”
“It’s a miracle!” one of the cousins shouted.
“He is cured,” Kebi Merit said, leaning down over me.
“Take it off,” I whispered again in English. “It’s disgusting.”
“He loves it!” she exclaimed, turning to everyone else. “It worked even faster than I thought it would.”
Just then my mother returned to the room, another doctor in tow. “Dear God,” she said. “What’s going on? Akram? What did you let them do?”
My father cringed and stepped back into the assembled family. He slipped in among them and nearly disappeared.
The doctor whom my mother brought with her—an actual paid staff member—looked horrified. “I’m certain that’s not sterile,” he said. “You must remove that immediately.”
“But it worked,” Kebi Merit protested. “Look, look. He’s talking. He’s awake.” And then my mother was at my bedside, and my father, and they were coming into focus, and I was staring up at them, and my headache was gone. Hallelujah, my headache was gone. Nobody pointed out to Kebi Merit that her poultice was probably not responsible. I didn’t; I can’t tell you how incredible it felt at that moment to be free of pain. I felt like I’d been bleached and wrung out
and possibly rolled through the dryer. I was alive. I was alive. It was a little miraculous just to be breathing.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “How long have I been out?”
The ensuing celebration bubbled out of my room and into the rest of the ICU, encompassing even the families of the other seriously ill patients, who, more than likely, didn’t have very much to celebrate. It was difficult to restrain anyone from my hospital bed. Newly returned from the land of fever dreams—I didn’t mind the commotion in the actual world, in the world of Dar Al Fouad Hospital, of Sixth of October City, Egypt, of the Cairene suburbs. The doctors advised us that I needed as much rest as possible.
“That’s okay,” my father said. “We will celebrate quietly.”
As soon as it was clear that my fever had broken, Banafrit produced a large earthenware pan from somewhere. “We weren’t going to mention it yet,” she said in Arabic. “But we brought our mother’s famous baklava.” In a stage whisper, she added, “The secret ingredient is rosewater.”
I smiled wanly and was about to thank her. Before I could, Fatima pushed her sister aside. “No, no, no,” Fatima said. “It’s orange blossom water.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Fatima,” Banafrit said. “Orange blossom water makes the baklava
common
.”
“Ladies,” my father said. “Remember: Keep your voices down.”
“What are they saying?” my mother asked me. She was standing at my bedside. Her face had relaxed a little. Her worry lines had all but disappeared.
I sighed and closed my eyes. “Dad will translate,” I said.
“Akram,” Fatima said, “rosewater makes the baklava taste like a
garden.” Then she pointed to my mother. “Tell her—tell her who’s right. Tell her what the secret ingredient is.”
My father frowned. “Because that’s what she wants to know right now?”
“Yes,” Fatima said.
“Because the thing she is concerned about most is this pastry?”
“Yes,” Banafrit said.
My father turned to my mother. “They brought baklava,” he said, “and they both think it’s delicious.”
Banafrit smiled, recognizing the English word. “Delicious,” she said.
“Delicious!” her sister agreed.
In the years since that day, I’ve watched my aunts make the baklava many times. They can never agree, will never agree, whether it’s orange blossom water or rosewater that makes it taste so good. As a result, they add a little of both. The result is a unique baklava, a baklava quite unlike any other I’ve ever had. More important than that—more important than the strange citric and roseate flavor of this particular pastry—is the process that goes into making it. When my aunts make the baklava, they make it together. Fatima chops the walnuts and Banafrit prepares the simple syrup. Fatima lays out the phyllo dough and Banafrit uses a brush to moisten it with butter. Their bickering comes to a halt. They work toward a single common goal.
Culture lives in cooking. People live in recipes, too. The hands that have shaped a dish continue to live as long as it continues to live. Food is an unbroken bridge, a direct bridge to the past—to the old technologies, to the old ways of eating and of harnessing fire.
A flavor repeats itself in generation after generation. It becomes part of our blood. It becomes our most elemental joy. It becomes the language of our desire. It becomes the vocabulary of our satisfaction.
Six days later, I’d recovered enough to be off the IVs and to be transferred out of the ICU. Total days in the hospital? Seventeen. I was conscious that luck actually
had
been with me. At least half of the patients who develop the acute form of yellow fever suffer organ failure and death. It’s such a heinous cliché:
Life is fragile
. But in America, our entire lives seem to be set up around denying this fact, this utterly undeniable thing. We are breaking, decaying bodies; we are fallible, imperfect machines. We cannot order our lives; order fails. Order always fails. It is undone by something as tiny as
Aedes aegypti
, a creature whose body weighs a fraction of a gram.
By day seventeen, the day of my discharge, I’d postponed my flight indefinitely. The plan was for me to move into a wing of my father’s house until I was well enough to go home. The plan had been developed after extensive consultation between my parents. While the United Nations hadn’t appointed a diplomatic envoy to broker the negotiations, it could have. I’d spent many hours in the company of my aunts and Kebi Merit over my last week at Dar Al Fouad Hospital. During these hours, my parents had sat in the little cafeteria downstairs and eaten the cafeteria food, which was uniformly terrible (all hospitals worldwide must contract with the same lousy catering firm). They sat there and ate and drank tea and argued.
I can’t speculate too much on that time, because no one has ever
described it to me, unlike the time that I was unconscious, which has been mythologized by both my father and my mother, separately, as the time of their own truest heroism—and possibly, only possibly, a time of decent behavior by their former spouse. But I do know this: My mother was grateful for my father’s steady presence over that terrible first week. She was grateful for the hours he spent on the cot, running the rosary beads through his fingers, translating and double-checking every medicine that arrived. She was embarrassed that she’d driven him away from the room; she felt like she’d done him a disservice that he’d only partly deserved.
This is why, upon my discharge, she made the most unusual request I could’ve imagined.
But more on that in a second.
On that last morning, my mother stepped out for a few hours. She’d rented a room at a bed-and-breakfast near the hospital, and she would go back there during the days to take a shower and do her laundry. Day seventeen was no exception. “I want to look good in the discharge photographs,” she told me. “Maybe I’ll get my hair done in an alley somewhere.” She meant in one of the many alleyway hairdressers that filled the city of Cairo, though somehow it sounded wrong.
The rest of the family had retreated to the compound at Talaat Harb. They were preparing a room for me. There was a bit of argument about where the room would be, however.
“He will sleep in the room on our hallway,” Banafrit said. “We have the higher ceilings.”
“He will sleep in the room on our hallway,” Fatima said. “We have the newer bed.”
“There are no roaches in the room on my hallway,” my father said. “I had them poisoned last month.”
“Roaches, no roaches,” Banafrit said. “You decide.”
“Yes, yes,” Fatima said. “You decide.”
I waited for my paperwork to come through. Without my father there to streamline things, it had reverted to the usual speed at which paperwork moves, which is slightly above the speed at which moss grows but slightly below the speed of, say, a tree sloth.
For the first time since I’d been in the hospital, the phone rang. It took me a moment to locate it. It was about ten feet from the bed. I looked at the ringing phone, feeling the residue of the illness in my legs, too weak to get up and walk across to answer. It rang again. It rang and rang and wouldn’t stop ringing.
I gave in. I answered in Arabic. The voice on the other end responded in English. “Khosi? Hello? Is that you? Can you hear me?”
“Natasha,” I said.
“Yes!” Natasha said. Her elation at hearing my voice was unmistakable. “I’m in Montana. But—I mean—you know that. How are you? I mean, are you okay?”
“I have to admit,” I said, “I’ve been better.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. It was strangely intoxicating to hear her voice. She sounded immediate and clear and familiar. After the hospital and the new extended family and the impending, roach-free stay in the heart of the heart of Cairo, I was longing for just this thing: a reminder of the hills of Montana, which I could close my eyes and imagine, which filled me with nostalgia. City as heart. People as the blood, as platelets, moving life from the center to the
peripheries. But more important than that, Natasha, my lovely Natasha, my own Natasha, mine.
“You know,” I said, “you’ll never believe what I’m looking at.”
“The pyramids?” she said.
“That
would
be spectacular,” I said. “No, it’s not the pyramids.”
“The Sphinx?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not any kind of Egyptian antiquity at all.”
“Then I give up,” she said. “Jesus, the line is so clear. It’s like you’re here with me.”
I cradled the phone in the curve of my shoulder. “You didn’t guess what I’m looking at,” I said. “It’s an unmade bed.
My
hospital bed. And I just got out of it. And I didn’t even tuck the covers in.”
“You’re joking,” Natasha said without missing a beat.
“No,” I said. “The covers are completely disorganized. I can even see the sheet. And the wrinkles. You wouldn’t believe the wrinkles.”
“Wrinkles!” Natasha marveled. “Maybe you should straighten it a little.”
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. I will straighten nothing. Nothing at all. My bed is unmade. My bed is unmade and I’m fine with it.”
She laughed. “You’re a maniac,” she said.
And so we talked. And it was the old familiarity, the tenderness, that had disappeared from my life, the thing among other things that I’d left behind in Montana. Outside my window, the eaves of the nearby apartment buildings sloped into each other. A few crows moved from rooftop to rooftop, floating through the air with an obsidian ease, a dark and scruffy beauty.
“Sounds like you’ve got something going over there, then,” Natasha said.
“Now that my bed’s unmade, maybe I’ll start that treasure-diving business. Maybe I’ll just hit the open road. Mali, Burkina Faso, Lesotho. After yellow fever, what else could possibly go wrong?”
“Yes,” she said, “your luck is spectacular.”
“Or maybe I’ll find the exact opposite point on the globe—you know, halfway around the world from Butte. I could open a Berkeley Pit Yacht Club there.”
“The pioneer spirit really is in you,” Natasha said. “You know, I mailed you something today.”
“I’m leaving the hospital,” I said.
“I sent it to your dad’s house. He gave me the address.” She paused. “It’s a jar of dirt from the parking lot of that very Yacht Club.”
I laughed. “Good thing you didn’t mail it to the ICU. I don’t know if it would have been allowed past the nurses’ station.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I mailed it?”
“Why did you mail it, Natasha?”
“So you don’t forget Butte. There’s so much waiting for you here.”
“Like a jar of dirt?” I said.
“That, too,” she said.
“There’s very little left for me in Butte,” I said.
“Your family.”
“There’s my mom and Wada,” I said. “That’s all.”
“It’s your city,” Natasha said. “You inhabit the city more than anyone else I know.”
“We inhabited it together,” I said.
“Oh, Khosi,” she said, “I wish I could see you. I’m not sorry for what happened.”
“There must have been complications,” I said.
She laughed. “You can’t even imagine.”
“I’m sure I can’t,” I said. “I guess I’m not sorry, either. I’ve been in love with you for a very long time, and that’s just how it is.” I waited a moment. “You know when all of this matters? When we’re sitting in the car and driving eighty-five down the highway and listening to Al Hopkins’s Original Hill Billies. But now, over a transcontinental phone line …” I trailed off. “Goddammit.”
“God bless it,” she corrected me.
Natasha laughed, a small soft low laugh, and I loved the sound of it, that soft laugh. I could have listened to it ceaselessly, in perpetuity, with no other sound, nothing besides its certain and precise music. She was there, on the line, and I was happy with that. She’d mailed me a jar of dirt. For now, anyway, that would have to be enough.
I recently read about a company that produces albums of ambient noise. They go to highways and parks and downtown city streets and record the sounds of life as it’s being lived. They also do interior spaces: the office, the home, and surprisingly, the hospital. One particular album contains over an hour of sounds from an ICU: intercom pages, the distinctive sound of mechanical breathing machines, the susurration of fluorescent overhead lighting, rubber-soled footsteps moving near and far, near and far. After I talked with Natasha,
I closed my eyes and listened to the noises that I’d come to accept as a regular part of my life.