Wanderlust (8 page)

I'd seen scrubby deserts and hard, flat deserts, but I wanted a “real” desert, the kind I'd seen in cartoons and read about in books. I wanted to see an
Arabian Sands
desert, a Tintin desert with dunes like meringue. So we rented bicycles and followed a road to the edge of town, then kept going. The road became a track, and the track got softer, until it was lost in sand drifts, and our bicycle tires sank and refused to roll. We laid the bikes aside and walked on a little, until we were amid dunes higher than our heads. I couldn't resist: I climbed to the top of a dune and then took a giant leap off its peak. I was airborne, arms spread, then crashed into the forgiving powder.

It was dusk when, pedaling back into town, sand falling from our spokes, we were stopped by a sight we couldn't make sense of. Rising on the eastern horizon was a giant orange sphere, too big to be the moon, too big even to be the sun. It seemed as wide as the whole oasis, as wide as Egypt, lighting up the sky with its glow.

It was the moon after all, but like I'd never seen it. The desert
air was playing a trick of refraction, doing something that could be explained by physics. As the orb rose further, it appeared to shrink and become less orange, but it remained a full, glowing ball, and as we returned our bicycles and got dinner from an open-air café, right up until we retired to our room for the night, we kept pausing to stand and stare. It was as though a hieroglyph had come to life. We vowed that the next night we'd take pictures.

Back in our long and narrow room, I got under the blanket and Graham lit a mosquito coil to begin his campaign of insect terror. I watched him.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want? In your life.” I felt awkward saying it.

“I want to be wild; I want to be free,” he said. He leaped from a chair to the floor, then added, “Do you love me?”

The paradox of love is that to have it is to want to preserve it, because it's perfect in the moment, but that preservation is impossible, because the perfection is only ever an instant passed through. Love, like travel, is a series of moments that we immediately leave behind. Still we try to hold on and embalm, against all evidence and common sense, proclaiming our promises and plans. The more I loved him, the more I felt hope. But hope acknowledges uncertainty, and so I also felt my first premonitions of loss.

The next afternoon we walked around with our cameras. Palm trees. Crumbling buildings. Donkeys. We came upon a group of five children, siblings, all dressed in the same garish fabric, a floral print on a bright yellow background. I imagined their mother: She'd somehow scored a bolt of cloth; maybe her husband had picked it up in Alexandria and presented it as a gift. A practical and frugal woman, she'd used every last inch, sewing dresses for her daughters,
shirts for the little boys, maybe a head scarf for herself and cushions for the home. Graham and I wanted to take the children's pictures. The oldest child, a girl of around nine with a toddler on her hip, herded the rest of them in front of the camera, and began to negotiate precociously. Fatima didn't want money, or pens, or candy. She wanted copies of the pictures we took. We said we'd give them to her, but she held up a hand so commanding that we put our cameras down. No, really, we had to send her pictures. She'd been trying and trying to get some, but she was still waiting for a foreigner to come through. We explained about developing film, that we wouldn't be able to do it until after we left. Fine, Fatima said, she'd give us her address, and we had to mail her the photos.

“You must,” she said.

“We promise,” we told her, ballpoint address tucked into my notebook. It was rudimentary: her father's name, Siwa Oasis, Egypt. We raised our cameras.

Before the sun went down, Graham and I climbed back to the crumbling tower we'd visited two days earlier, and up to its roof. We were prepared for the night chill in scarves and sweaters, and we had cameras and tripods, the better to hold still while we captured the moon. We waited, but it didn't come. Maybe it was just rising later, we told each other, still hopeful for the vast orange ball. But the sky became dark. Eventually an ordinary little white, waning moon appeared on the horizon.

Photographers, like writers, want to pin things down. Not entirely happy with the flow of time, we try to capture and explain, to seize moments and then hold them up to the light for examination, savoring what's passed. The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, afflicted with a wanderlust that took him to West Africa at the age of twenty-three, said he wanted to “‘trap' life—to preserve
life in the act of living.” Every photographer, every tourist taking a snapshot, wants to do something like that. Photography is one way we try to stop time.

We regretted not capturing the great orange moon, even though we knew photographs wouldn't be like the real thing, wouldn't convey the awe we felt when we first saw it come up over the horizon. What I regretted more was not being able to capture our own state, not being able to preserve us, right then, in amber. Even if I could have stopped time, I knew it wouldn't have the desired effect, because something essential would be missing, some sharpness of focus made possible by the fact that life was fleeting.

A week after we left Siwa I accompanied Graham to the airport late at night for one of the bizarrely inconvenient departure times imposed on foreign airlines. We stood holding each other, crying, until finally he had to go beyond the security gate. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as I stepped out of the airport, into the scrum of taxi drivers and their black and white cars, shouting out fees of twenty pounds. I had exactly six in my pocket, less than even a fair price. But our good-bye had left me stony and unafraid, nothing could hurt me more, certainly not hitchhiking home. I was all too convincing in my willingness to try my luck on the highway. When I started out on foot, one of the taxi drivers relented on price, saying he was worried for my safety, and gave me a ride.

Neither of us did keep our promise to Fatima, nor eventually did we keep our promises to each other. I'm harder on myself for the first. The pattern was set. Travel equaled longing equaled love.

chapter seven

I
befriended Mona early in the school year.
She had tight dark brown curls that came from her Arab side. Her father had been a Palestinian professor, killed in Beirut when she was eleven. Her mother was an American heiress. After the family left Beirut she'd attended an English boarding school and then Oberlin College. Now she was a year-abroad student like me. The admission that embarrassed her the most, the one she made me agree not to tell, was that she'd been a debutante. It was a concession, she said, to her grandmother on her mother's side.

Over the summer she'd studied Arabic at Middlebury College, which was renowned for its summer language course where it banned students from speaking English. We now shared a class in the colloquial Egyptian dialect, where the professor used a repeatafter-me method, and never moved much beyond the niceties we already knew. One day, on a hunch, I suggested that we instead have lunch and go play backgammon. I didn't know her well, but sensed there might be a chemistry of the kind I'd failed at with Michelle.

I took her to my favorite
kushary
place on Qasr el Aini.
Kushary
was a wonder: seasoned lentils, chickpeas, fried onions, and rice, served in a heaping portion in a metal dish. A bowl cost one Egyptian pound, or around thirty-three cents; another pound got
you a small bowl of rice pudding for dessert. Mona could sometimes eat two bowls in a sitting.

I liked Mona's confidence, which was occasionally punctuated by flights of alarm and seriousness over things I didn't find alarming or serious—for example, she avowed that you could get AIDS from the toilet seats at the Semiramis, because prostitutes used them. Mona had been fearless about lacrosse at boarding school, and now was fearless about roving around Cairo. She was fearless about speaking Arabic too, even though she wasn't very good. She was dogged about learning it, but the reasons for her obsessive study emerged only slowly. Like most girls I'd met in college, I didn't believe that I had any important stories to share, though I hoped one day to acquire some. Mona believed that she did have important stories, ones that went beyond boys kissed and majors chosen, but she held on to them until she thought you could appreciate their significance.

Mona demanded regard. But she also gave it, believing that her friends didn't just happen to be special to her, but that they were people who really mattered. She liked my confidence too. We both aspired to be steely, and sensed that we could push and prod each other in that direction.

We moved on from the
kushary
restaurant to a backgammon establishment. A whiskered and weathered man, balancing a tray of steaming glasses, dramatically gestured us to an open table, calling “over here, over here.” He whooshed a few other patrons out of the way, who, politely and nodding, removed themselves. The dominant sound of a Cairo teahouse is the slap of hard plastic pieces on playing boards, a
clackety-clack
that rises above the conversation and exclamations and televised soccer. We ordered tea and a water pipe with apple-flavored tobacco. I'd been a nicotine virgin before Cairo, and
so the first few hits always went to my head. We played the version of backgammon we knew, the one Americans learn, which begins with all the checkers on the board. If an opponent's piece lands on yours, you have to take it off. You then roll the dice until you can get the piece back on, and when you do, you begin the journey again at the farthest point from home.

Several customers closely watched our game. A bony neighbor with a finely tooled brown face issued a general challenge; Mona immediately accepted. His friends gathered around to watch. He beat her once, then again, and again—but by the third time she was playing a respectable game, holding her own and eliciting impressed mutterings of
“aiwaaaa,”
an elongated “yes.”

“Do you know how to play another style?” her opponent asked. And he proceeded to show us. You start with all of your pieces
off
the board rather than on it, and move them on with each roll of the dice to start their horseshoe journey. The other key difference is that instead of being sent back to the beginning when your opponent lands a checker on your own, you stay in place, paralyzed, until the enemy piece moves on. This version of the game opens up new questions of strategy. Being immobilized halfway around the board can be even worse than being sent back to the beginning, where the possibility of movement at least presents itself at every turn.

Yemen, as Mona and I perceived it from Cairo, was far away, isolated, poor, traditional, religious, possibly violent, a boondocks even by the lights of its own neighborhood. It was farther, and that was where we wanted to go.

The books also showed a unique and surpassingly beautiful architecture of sand-colored minarets and towers frosted in white.
They showed stair-step terraced green fields of a kind that, like the architecture, didn't exist anywhere else. The Romans called the region “Arabia Felix,” happy Arabia, for its agricultural riches. Yemen was a land beyond the mountains, the home of the Queen of Sheba.

Scooping from our metal bowls of
kushary
one afternoon, and talking about the upcoming winter break, one of us said, “Let's go to Yemen,” and the other said yes. There was a dare in this discussion, an I-will-if-you-will aspect. But there wasn't a voice of caution between us. Once the possibility was admitted out loud, we had to go.

To our fellow American year-abroad students, our decision required no explanation. Their eyes shone with admiration; we were trumped in our adventurism only by a trio who planned to spend their winter break in northern Sudan. To the Egyptian and other Arab students, our act seemed senseless, like planning a trip to Appalachia when we could have gone to Paris. To our parents we emphasized that this was an extension of our geopolitical studies.