Wanderlust (5 page)

Of course, everyone has roots. If I trolled back a few generations, I'd find Slovaks and Scots, along with Europeans who had landed in New England hundreds of years back. And like many citizens of immigrant nations, I had a smorgasbord of identities from which to pick. I could make the story up.

chapter four

P
assing like ships in the night”:
That's what my mother said about Graham and me, before I knew anything about actual ships passing in the actual night. We thought we had much more to go on. When I returned from Spain, we overlapped by a couple of weeks in Vancouver and were able to spend entire evenings together. In any case, who said that time spent together was some sort of barometer of love? Love didn't demand endless hours; that only proved tolerance. It demanded respect for the self-fulfillment of the other.

He left for London. I went to Seattle. His first weeks in England, where it was damp, cold, and expensive, left him daunted and depressed. A quick epiphany, at least partly weather-related, showed him the way: He bought a ticket to Thailand with a stop in Greece. In the late fall he mailed me a bag of pebbles collected on a beach on Crete, with instructions to put them in water so that they would shine like they had when he found them. I did so, placing the jar on my dresser near a photograph of him. I exalted him above all other boys. The bond between us seemed elastic, the distance between us a testament to its strength. He told me he would come to me, wherever I went.

I spent much of my sophomore year plotting to get away from Seattle again. I had to go beyond Europe, because I needed more stimulus than that. I needed something that would sear me, something that might hurt. I discovered that my university sent one or two juniors to the American University in Cairo each year, and immediately I resolved to apply. My closest college friends were also trying to get away; both Kim and Katerina hoped to study in Germany.

I marched determinedly around campus in the drizzle to solicit transcripts and recommendations. I wrote an essay. I petitioned the dean responsible for exchange programs, visiting a concrete-andglass block called Schmitz Hall to knock on his door. I argued my case, pointing to my thick application packet. I found it in myself to be pushy and had insomnia for the first time in my life. If I'd fallen in love with someone local, I might have seen things differently. But beyond the utilitarian getting of an education, I felt no attachment to Seattle. The idea of going away sustained me like nothing else. I waited by the telephone.

Finally, he called, and after an agonizing moment of niceties, gave me the good news.

I'd by now taken a year and a half of Arabic, as well as courses on the literature and history of the Middle East. I was a student of the faraway, the alien East, like Pyle in Graham Greene's
The Quiet American
. Fowler, the old Saigon hand, foreshadowing the problems Pyle will cause, says of him, “Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn't even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West.”

I was as ready as Pyle, which is to say not ready at all but brimming with enthusiasm.

chapter five

T
ahrir Square: Liberation Square.
Michelle and I didn't know whom had been liberated from what, any more than we knew why the October 6th Bridge or the May 15th Bridge bore their names. Our hotel was on one side of the square, the American University in Cairo on the other. We wanted to go see our new campus. As we stepped out of our hotel door, three cries of “You want taxi?” went up; since we could see our destination, this seemed unnecessary. Ten paces on, a young mustachioed man fell into step beside us.

“Excuse me, would you like to buy some perfume?” he asked. “Where are you from? Ohhhhhh, Amreekan girls. George Bush,” he went on. We kept moving. “You come to my shop.”

We crossed through a minibus rendezvous point and were further queried. “You go pyramids?” Michelle was practicing saying no in Arabic—
la
—which made it sound like she was singing: “la-la-la la-la.” Then we came upon multiple lanes of traffic, a median, and many more lanes. I looked left and right; there was no traffic light in sight. The cars, many of them black and white taxis, were barreling, careening, disrespecting any notion of order. Stymied, we stood on the edge of the river of traffic for a minute. We saw some Egyptian boys cross; inspired, we decided
to go for it. We ran, zigging and zagging, and finally jumped onto the median just as a car whooshed by inches behind us, horn wailing like a siren.

We reached the far sidewalk giddy with victory, and highfived. “Hellooo,” called a newspaper vendor. We would later learn that you didn't just cross Tahrir Square like that. You went around or took a taxi. Our achievement seemed worthy of celebration, and so we bought Coca-Colas from the
shwarma
stand on the corner. In my head I proudly sounded out the Arabic lettering on the bottles, the lips of which were rough and translucent from a million uses. We toasted each other and swigged. With our backs to the wall, we paused and looked around. The square seemed to be a solar system, obeying physical rules of its own, the whining taxis sucked to and fro like comets. A hulking government building, the
mogama,
dominated the south end of the square, the Cairo Museum was far away on the north side, and opposite us, between the square and the Nile, was a row of luxury hotels. The foot traffic was dense where we stood: young men in Western clothes that seemed too shiny and loose, old men in
galabiyas
and turbans, brassy-looking women in lipstick and bright head scarves, hugging books and purses in a way that made me think of 1950s secretaries. Vast billboards rose over the far side of the square, one for a pesticide almost certainly banned in the United States, with a silhouette of a cockroach in its death throes. Smoke from Cleopatra cigarettes wafted around the
shwarma
stand, mingling with the tang of cooking meat. I'd already heard the Cairo joke: You had to smoke, because the filter on your cigarette sieved out the pollution in the air.

A minute later we tried to walk away with our drinks, which caused an eruption from the
shwarma
vendor. He wanted his bottles back.

Since the university had selected Michelle and me to go, we'd made a point of meeting several times over the summer. We went through the motions of early friendship even as we groped for connection, like soldiers thrown together in war, compensating with shared interests for what we lacked in mutual attraction. I found her suspiciously cheerful and well-organized. She was twenty-one, but her determined optimism belonged to someone younger, and her love of planning to someone older. To my mystification, she seemed bent on emphasizing her own mousiness, rolling her shoulders forward and padding around in Birkenstocks.

We found the apartment advertised on a bulletin board in the student lounge. The landlady told us she'd previously rented it to a foreigner, a Christian missionary, a nice man. It was a ten-minute walk south of the university and had two bedrooms, both facing the street and sharing a long balcony where Michelle and I could hang our laundry. The street filled up with passing vendors in the early morning, each shouting his wares—bananas, water—from a donkey cart. We bought robust cockroach poison. The gas man rolled in a new tank every month, and rolled out the old one. We never found a place to buy a shower curtain—that kind of project never seemed like a priority—and so instead used an enormous cotton sheet. It did a surprisingly good job of keeping water off the floor, and dried quickly in the desiccated air.

Every mundane task was a challenge, but each one was eventually surmountable, and so most days ended in satisfaction. It felt good in the way that the body does after physical exertion. Something as simple as figuring out where and how to buy ibuprofen could be a two-hour project, of wandering Qasr al Aini Street, checking stores,
asking for directions, and finally finding a pharmacy and learning that you didn't just pick things off the shelf, you waited your turn and then pointed, and the team of shopkeepers—everything was overstaffed—retrieved your items from the shelves and packaged them more than necessary, wrapping them in brown paper before placing them in a plastic bag and tying it with a flourish in a knot.

There's a photograph I took during my first week in Cairo. I'm not exactly sure where it was, only that it was in a poor neighborhood somewhere west of the Nile. A group of American students, seven or eight of us, had gone walking: Aleem from Emory, Riva from Columbia, Rob from Kalamazoo, Fred, Patricia, Paul, Michelle, me. We had no ringleader, though someone occasionally consulted a guidebook for the location of a mosque or museum. Really we were just walking, and we didn't much care where we ended up. We carried bottled water and day packs and cameras, except for Fred, who said he didn't believe in taking photographs; he planned to store his memories in his head, an idea I found incomprehensibly radical. My impulse to record was almost on par with my impulse to travel.

We wandered into a dead-end alley, and as the rest of the group was turning around to leave, I stayed. Though it was lined with homes, there was no one in the alley, which ended in a slope of rubble, as though a house had once stood there and been demolished, or just fallen apart. Bathed in the hot afternoon sun, the street, the walls, and the pile of rubble were all, like much of Cairo, the color of bleached sand. A laundry line was strung from the dark window of one of the homes to a metal pole, stretching across the rubble, and bright articles of clothing, squares of rose and blue and green, hung still over the dust. That was the picture I took: the glassless window, the rubble, the
vivid laundry signaling life. It wasn't a picture I would have taken after ten months in Cairo or even one; it could only have been taken in my first week, after which, as I was confronted with poverty every day, the way it looked to me would no longer be so striking.