Authors: Mona Simpson
A voice rippled over the public address system, first in fluid, lush-voweled Arabic, then in accented English, and finally in French, saying we must prepare for landing in Cairo and fasten seat belts.
I closed my eyes and did what I was told. The plane all of a sudden
seemed old, the round of the wing a dull cleft silver, the plaid seats made long ago, and I felt again how no one knew I was here, no one, and if the worst happened now, I would have gone as my grandmother did leaving none of the ones I’d loved anything in my own handwriting. I didn’t even have a will and I should have. I for sure had no money now, but I’d want certain people to have certain things. People like Emory, whom no one would remember.
The plane shuddered and fired and buckled like the last writhing moments of a birth. I squeezed the armrests of the seat and then we were there on the ground, still bouncing, the engine’s roar louder, the wings outside beating up and down hard but all of a sudden we were slow and even, going forward on land. Planes seem the same everywhere but they aren’t. This one had a smell like an animal, something alive.
I unbuckled the seat belt, took my backpack down from the overhead. This was the least I’d ever packed for any trip. I had just these clothes I was wearing, another white shirt and black pants, the two heavy books and my money. All the money I had left at all. This was not a trip or even a vacation, but a mission. Or an errand. I wanted to go to that one house in Alexandria, that was all, and then come home.
In the close line pressing out of the plane, a foreign smell rose up, like intensified paprika or cumin. We climbed down the silver metal staircase and onto a tarmac. The air tasted warm, with a thread of eucalyptus. In the distance, flat yellow and brown land ended with a line of cypress. The green of the palms seemed darker here, older, tinged with gold. They seemed to vibrate in the trembling air. And the sky was a different blue. It was light but not pale, a dense, sunshot blue, clear with a few far clouds. It was good.
I walked into the airport, plain signs etched in calligraphy, white on black. Hundreds of people moved on the ground. There were black veils, white veils like billowing curtains. Some veils went halfway down the back like nuns’ habits, others were light little things, barely covering the face. Some women looked hidden and foreign and unrecognizable, but others wore it like an adornment, another accessory of fashion, the way the truly stylish use glasses—something to be accommodated and sighed over in the temporal glissening effort to be beautiful just now, here, on this modern, crossed, still man-run earth.
I put my pack down a second on the hard cement and just stood there. A scarved woman in white brushed by, her feet articulate in sandals. There were soldiers around, young boys in dusty black uniforms and cracked boots, carrying long guns. The cypress in the distance looked solemn and old. I knew, right away yes, this was a place. It was good. Outside the glass doors, chances smiled everywhere out of signs, many in English. I could see the desert on a two-day camel excursion, the Norman ruins, mosques. I could tour Cairo. The Pyramids. The Suez Canal. Antiquities. The Nile. One sign claimed Egypt owned four of the seven Wonders of the World. My pack leaning on my knee, I yearned for a moment to just go to the university. I imagined domed towers and minarets, Ottoman caliphs and formal Alhambra gardens all with the timeless lazy bookish peace of a university anywhere. That hurt to even think. All of a sudden, I missed home. Home for me was abstract, but it still existed. There was no house full of things anymore—there wasn’t even room for me to stay in my mother’s apartment. Home for a single person living in a city was different. It was two friends, my same pizza place, the faces at school and work. You were less independent really than a settled person in one house with a family, who could leave and go anywhere and with one phone call, get it all back.
For me, the real shrine of France was the living, cafe-noised, kid-ridden Sorbonne.
Still, this was different, this wasn’t a foreign place to see like that. This was a place I was from. My mother told me I had been conceived in a resort hill town in Lebanon. And I had my mission or errand, whatever it was. The nine teen-hundred-dollar errand. I could bear to think that here. Here I could even bear it to be nothing. The way the air tasted and the sky went back and back, I could look at the good chance I was a fool and laugh. Maybe that was what Egypt was for: to give me back my sense of humor. That’s what I would have if, at the end of all this search, I saw nothing. But how would I know it was the end?
Some kinds of confidence I did have. For example, backpacks. I believed I started leather backpacks. First I had had one and people stopped me on the street asking about it and now everywhere you looked, people had them, even here, by the counter, a woman in purdah.
I picked up mine and went to look for a driver, guidebook open in
one hand, like any tourist. I didn’t care how out of it I seemed. I was. And I wanted to make it to Alexandria tonight and get myself in a hotel there so I could find Shahira Miramar Street the first proper thing in the morning.
“Wel-comb in Egypt,” a large man said.
Egypt, that first brass afternoon in spring, may have been the most stylish place I ever saw on the earth. Nobody had ever told me about the cars. The cars were old German and American cars from the 1950s and ’60s, black and rounded. They honked, shined everywhere and I found a driver to Alexandria with my guidebook propped like a piece of music between two pronged fingers, a rabba lad aal budAlexandria. Alexandria was a long way—two guys turned me down before this one. He was handsome and young, with many teeth, and he had a dry grassy smell the closer I stood to him. We bargained a price in dollars, I had to get pounds still. He knew almost no English. He had a book. I sat in the back of the old Mercedes on deep leather seats made soft with time and watched out the rolled-down windows as we left Cairo in a circle like a maze and drove north into the horizon of cypress, eucalyptus and olive trees. It was good.
“I know no many words,” he said.
I pointed to his head and said, “Head,” then to his hair and said, “Hair.”
“I know, I know,” he said.
There was so much sky. All the ground and trees, people and even buildings rose about an inch and the rest was sky. It was February 24. I wanted to remember the day. I lay my head back on the seat and the smell of earth rolled over me. This wasn’t desert like I’d expected. It was dirt, not light sand, but the vegetation was different, scarce and somber. Ragged trees moved slightly in what there was of wind, and they seemed to whine and creak,
we don’t have to us what we once did
. There were date palm and eucalyptus, sycamore. Closer in, there were acacia, juniper, jacaranda and grass.
I felt looser in my clothes when I couldn’t see Cairo behind us anymore. We were on an old road. The structures you saw in the distance here looked small, made of concrete and mud. A rich weedy taste came in from the air. I thought of my father and how, even though he was a boy who grew up here in this old, slow country, he’d moved in suits and silk ties all over the world, it sounded like. This was a place with its own smell where you’d take the city off and put your real
clothes on, loose and cotton. The States, Italy and Paris and Greece on the way back from the Cairo Caper, and who knew where else how many times. And I’d traveled, too. I’d driven cross-country a lot of times, I had my college summer in Europe, all of us now, even my grandmother’s friends in Racine had been around the world, but do we, any of us, love more?
Maybe that was the first mistake: leaving. I’d always followed the career of Yasir Arafat. I read an interview in
Playboy
magazine once where he was laughing and saying he almost came to America. “I was accepted into the University of Texas—I think it was the University of Texas,” he said. “Anyways, I didn’t go.”
Seeing out the windows, shacks and stands of trees, camels became horses, familiar already, made one piece settle in place right like something lost from a puzzle. If this was Egypt, maybe that explained Wisconsin. His existence there. On the road ahead of us I saw a small wet lake and then a brown mountain, which disappeared when we came close. I’d been told about mirages, in school, when I learned the word, but I’d never seen one. This landscape made mirages. Maybe it took a desert, I thought, to produce them. Once in a while the driver turned to me and we’d try to talk but it was too hard so he’d fall back to his driving, which he did with an evenness and a happy hum that seemed odd and discordant as si tar music and with a vague smile meaning I didn’t know what but which seemed to move through a sort of plot sequence and I’d rest back on the seat, thinking how I’d like to sleep with this boy just once just tonight in my hotel room and wondering if I could, how this worked and whether I should give him money and how if I did, this was so foreign no one would know. No one ever. The rest of my life no one would know.
I stared at the back of his neck. His hair was cut short there but it still curled. Right below where the hair ended were two lines of sweat, tiny drops balanced on the dark taut skin. I thought that moment how hard it was to be a man. Because this was all just in me. And the distance between imagining and placing a hand in the world on someone’s skin—I didn’t know how that happened. That seemed enormous. Even when there were two cultures and no language and you had the money.
But no. That wasn’t good. Being bought with money could harm anyone. Whether he knew it or not. I shuddered then, thinking how much it attracted. There is a real temptation of, you are alone and
you can get this and no one is watching from anywhere, no eyes, you are absolutely alone and you have some way to make this person yours. And no one will ever know. I could take what I wanted for American dollars and no one would see. Isn’t that what Kenneth Klicka thought, I have her alone, she has nothing, no one, there is only this basement room and nothing else.
I tapped his shoulder—his skin through the cotton was warm—and pointed for him to stop at a market, a bazaar of some kind by the side of the road. It looked like a farm food stand anywhere in the country at home, except the trees were high date palms. I was hungry. He pulled over the Mercedes, its bulk calming smoothly on the dirt gravel pass. We got out. The canvas and tin-roofed tents shaded jars of oil, dates still on the branch, almonds, pine nuts, diamond-cut pastries in tin pans—running with honey and hazed by close thick black flies—pomegranates, olives; figs lay open and red, dusty purple on the outside. A thin man, dark-skinned with almost no hair on his legs and arms and head, sat cross-legged on a striped rug uneven on the ground. His eyes were mostly closed. A clear glass jar, like something you would buy jam in, sat full by his knee. I kept trying to get close enough to see. I browsed by a table with nothing recognizable on it: some kind of cheese in water, I thought. I saw then in his jar; it was a coiled snake, I couldn’t tell dead or alive.
I wanted figs and dates and almonds and started to gather them, they had brown paper bags, but then my driver came up and with elaborate arm motions pointed to his chest establishing, I’ll do this, without words, and the thin man’s flat sunken mouth smiled a big smile like, I was caught, okay, she’s an American, it’s all game.
Walking back to the car with my bag of fruit, I heard a familiar monotonous sound. I walked across the sand and looked behind the tent. A rickety Ping-Pong table was set up on the ground and two boys were playing.
And then we were driving again, he conducting a long speech to me in Arabic, probably about how much money he’d saved me, and I murmured in ways that I hoped made it seem I understood. “Is no good for you, is better for you,” was all I understood. His one arm sometimes lifted off the wheel articulate and graceful but I wished I could settle it back to driving and I ate the fresh dates, the skins crumbling like sugar and the fruit inside melting like honey. I could eat like this for a hundred years. In the backseat there was a long soft
breeze and sun on the left side, so I took off my shoes and my long shirt and just lay down in my tank top and skirt, legs bare, feet on the leather, feeling it almost like another skin. I was sort of asleep but not really. The breeze played on my belly, my upper arms, the bones of my neck. It was good. The smell of the fruit in the footspace swelled up in shells of air.
A long time later he made some punctuating noise in the front and I sat up and in the distance we began to see Alexandria like a series of half staircases on a hill. This was the place my father grew up. It was early evening now, seven o’clock and not much light kept, and what was came oranging around the white buildings, at corners and window wells as he drove through the winding streets. The roads looked older than the Ottoman Empire, some of them, but still used, not kept for antique. There were geraniums in windows like Paris. Close up, the stone and plaster were crumbling and dirty. A lot of the houses had a clay pot on the roof, I wondered what for. Some of the buildings had a white sheen, with mosaic. The streets felt quieter than Cairo, neighborhoods lower, the old sun like a bucket full of water spilled on the bricks. This was a smaller city, I guessed, and it was supposed to be holy too, I knew that. Not just for me.
“Mumkin ahgiz ohda ghur-fa min hi-na?”
I tried to read to him from the guidebook but he didn’t understand. Then I just gave up and moved to right behind his shoulder and showed him where it was printed in Arabic calligraphy, pointing with my fingernail while the car moved unevenly over the bricks. I wanted a hotel. He put his hand to his forehead thinking, I guess, and then exploded with the head-nod ecstasy of yes. He was so young. His shirt was striped, yellow and green. Just then I noticed a Band-Aid on his right arm, near the elbow, a Band-Aid printed with circus animals, the kind we always wanted as children. Is that what became of circus Band-Aids? The surplus shipped to the third world. That would be like American business.
Then we turned a corner and beyond us was the Mediterranean, blue and green and moving with unrest, like a sea of barking dogs. He drove me to an ugly hotel, modern and rundown, and he stopped the car. I said no, crossed my arms, and found the word for old in the guidebook. This set him wondering awhile and then he got it, and the next place was right: white and Persian-looking, with small cracks snaking down the towers. He just parked the Mercedes, pulled the
keys out and came inside with me, carrying the pack. It seemed too hard to argue. He wanted to deal with the desk for me, so I stood next to him, holding out my credit card. The man behind the desk took it, produced a key and that was the end of it. An old cage elevator, with script I could never read, lyrical cursives strewn in fancy metal painted white, stopped at the ninth floor where the smell of old geraniums came profuse and dusty and breath-stopping almost, but I followed and he opened the door of my room and it was good.