Down the Nile Page 10

  Nevertheless, Elephantine was Amr’s home. He had lived there all his life and was acquainted in one way or another with most of the island’s six thousand inhabitants. Though to me the three small villages on the island felt essentially like one, to Amr they were as distinct and discrete as if they lay miles apart.

  Looking at the street below, Amr said that every inch of earth under these houses held rare antiquities from the pharaonic periods. The deeper you dug, the older the find. Though it was illegal, some local men made good money selling these antiquities.

  Amr’s sister’s round face suddenly appeared in the doorway. She was carrying a tray with tea glasses on it, and as she came into the room I saw that she walked with a marked limp. Her right foot was twisted at an unnatural angle, which gave her gait the awkward, jerking rhythm of a seal laboring back to the sea across a sandy beach. She was short but heavy; her large rear end and big thighs filled her billowing black gown. The rubber flip-flops on her feet were twisted and crushed with overuse. When I thanked her for the tea, she cocked her head at me in curiosity, visibly fascinated by the sound of my words. She had the big round eyes of a startled infant.

  “She don’t speak English good,” Amr said. “Her name is Hoda.”

  Hearing her name Hoda smiled appreciatively, self-consciously. Her head was bare, her black hair pulled into a small bun at the back of her head. Like most Nubian women she wore dangling gold earrings. I asked her how old she was. She thought a long time, translating, her eyes vacantly darting in thought, then gamely she said, “Twenty-two.”

  I thanked her again for the tea. Comprehending, she tsked loudly, almost defiantly in response, and rolled her eyes at me in a way that meant, It’s nothing! She limped out of the room, glancing over her shoulder at me with a triumphal grin.

  As soon as Hoda was gone, Amr said, “My sister she got problem with foot. Since she a baby.” He explained that over the years he and his three brothers had paid for three separate operations to try to correct the twisted foot, but each one had been a failure and the foot was no better now than it had been before.

  When I asked him if his sister worked, he said, “She takes care of the house and cooking and cleaning and washing. Because my mother too sick.” I asked if he had any other sisters; he had had one other who, like his father, had died when he was in the army. She was cooking something at the stove, and her dress caught on fire, and the fire spread throughout the kitchen and she died. She was twelve years old at the time of her death.

  Amr showed no emotion discussing these events in his family history, and when I ventured that they were sad, he shrugged in his unquestioning way, a shrug that meant that although they were indeed sad, one should not dwell on things one could do nothing about.

  We sipped at our tea. The tea glasses had once been jam jars, and the saucers beneath them had been lifted from an Aswan hotel.

  Amr mopped his brow with the back of his hand. “This room always too hot in summer,” he said softly, tapping his fingertips against the side of his tea glass, “and too cold in winter.” His fingernails were a delicate seashell pink. The glass looked tiny in his big hands.

  We sat silently then. I had run out of polite things to say and was distracted by the business I wanted to discuss. As if reading my mind, Amr said, “Rose, the boat.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?”

  “No, Rose,” he said. “It is good idea. You likes do something different from usual. I also likes do something different. And I know you can do it. I see you row. And other felucca captains see you row. They say, ‘She looks like captain.’”

  “Do they think I shouldn’t row a boat?”

  “No. They happy. It’s something new. They cannot understand it why you know how to do this.”

  I told him that in America it wasn’t strange for a woman to row a boat. I told him that I didn’t plan to go very far down the river. Just from here to Qena, enough to feel that I had traveled, enough to see the river up close.

  “I know why you likes go alone. But, Rose, there is problems. You hast get past police.” At the bottom of every city along the river, he explained, there were police who monitored river traffic, both coming and going. No boat would be allowed to leave Aswan without permission. “They will not let you go.”

  “I’ll leave at night,” I said. “It’s a small boat. They’ll never see me.”

  Amr nodded indulgently at me. “But maybe other problem. Maybe you can tip over in the river. Maybe a fisherman can find you and get crazy if he see a foreign woman alone. I would worry all the time.”

  Amr did look genuinely worried at that moment, his placid face flexed in strain. Maybe you can tip over in the river was a sentence I had heard a dozen times now, and every time I heard it, it vexed me and made me impatient. Tipping over in a rowboat was not something that ever happened spontaneously or even easily. It took effort to tip a rowboat. Of course, the crazy-fisherman scenario that everyone was so fond of was always a possibility. There was no denying that. It was a possibility anywhere in the world for a woman alone. Yet it seemed to me it would have to be an awfully reckless Egyptian man who would dare attack a foreign woman, for if he was caught the consequences would be grave.

  I knew that I would never persuade Amr to accept my line of thinking. I asked him if he thought I should ask permission from the police. “Better maybe not to ask,” he said. “Our police are money police. And it will take a long time to get permission. And they will only give permission if someone man go with you. What man they send you don’t know good or bad.”

  We sat there for a long time, thinking and staring at our tea. My skin was damp with sweat. Finally Amr wagged his head and offered to let me take his rowboat down the river. “And I can follow behind you in the felucca. For safeness.”

  I thanked Amr for his generous offer and pointed out that as much as I liked his little boat, it wasn’t big enough to sleep in.

  “You can sleep on my boat at night.”

  I liked Amr and trusted him as well as one could trust a person she’s known for a week, and I knew he understood why I wanted to make this trip. I knew that he didn’t think I was silly or strange. But I didn’t want to take him with me. I didn’t want protection. I didn’t want a nanny. I wanted to go alone. One point of my trip was to make it without anyone guarding me. But I knew that I had come to an impasse. If I was going to leave Aswan in a rowboat, I would probably have to do it Amr’s way.

  I looked out the window at the ancient tree and tried to feel fortunate that of all the men I had met in Egypt, this pleasant, reserved, capable, and diffident man was the one I would most like to have trailing after me. I decided I had no choice but to take a positive approach, to take what I could get. “OK,” I said, “come with me. We’ll go as far as Edfu.”

  In his quiet fashion Amr was exultant. I saw it in the way he raised his hands and clasped them, as if in prayer, and in his gentle eyes. He had had no overnight trips so far that season and was restless to get out of Aswan. But for me it was a small defeat, and I was already planning that when we got to Edfu, I would finally find my own boat and make the rest of the trip alone.

  Amr looked suddenly worried again. He explained that he would not be allowed to leave Aswan with me alone. By law, no commercial felucca was allowed to travel below the Aswan police station without at least three foreigners on board. Photocopies of passports needed to be handed over. Regulations needed to be met.

  I looked at him, then stared out the window at the tired, dusty village without really seeing anything. I was utterly deflated. A trip to Edfu would take three or four days; I’d be making it with Amr and a couple of foreign strangers? It didn’t seem worth it. In fact, the whole prospect seemed awful. I was about to decline Amr’s offer when he told me that it might be possible to get past the Aswan police with only one other passenger on board, for he was in possession of a photocopy of an English friend’s passport, which he could use as repre-sen-ta-tion of t
he third person.

  I frowned at him. “But won’t they look for the third person in the boat?”

  “Sometimes they don’t count.”

  Now it seemed like Amr’s turn to be overoptimistic. “But what if this time they do count?” I said.

  He smiled and said in a quoting way, “We will cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  His sudden insouciance was encouraging. I had a good friend who lived in Cairo, an adventuresome American woman who just might fill in as the second passenger if I begged her to. Inspired by his eagerness, I told Amr that I would call my friend and see if she would join us. What choice did I have?

  When I left Amr’s house, Hoda was still sitting on the bed in her room watching cartoons, and his mother was still lying on the couch, still staring at her television, which now showed a bearded imam in an impressive white turban speaking fiercely into a microphone. In Arabic I thanked the mother for the tea. She turned her sallow face slightly toward me and muttered something unintelligible in response. On the wall above her were two oil paintings of feluccas on the Nile, one with the pyramids in the background. The paintings were dated 1964. I asked Amr who had painted them.

  “My uncle,” he said.

  When I said, “Did your uncle go to the pyramids?” he laughed loudly, as though I had asked whether his uncle had been to the moon. “No,” he said, “he never go out of Aswan. He only use the imagination.”

  I asked whether he had ever been to the pyramids.

  “No. I never.”

  “Have you been to Karnak?”

  “I been to Luxor. But I never saw the temple in Karnak.”

  That was unbelievable. Seeing the look on my face Amr shrugged. “Rose, we don’t have a mind for this kind of thing. The pharaoh and the ancient temple. We don’t have a mind for it. It not so important to us.”

  Hoda and the Women

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON I returned to Amr’s house to tell him that my friend Madeleine had agreed to fill in as the third passenger on his boat, and when I arrived at the house I found Hoda dragging a burlap sack out the front door. She was dressed in a worn old house-dress and had a flowered rag wrapped around her head in a style that called Aunt Jemima to mind; the rough knot that held the rag in place sent two rabbit ears of cloth sprouting into the air above her forehead. When Hoda saw me, her fat face ignited with interest. “Ya saalam!” she cried, which, though it literally meant “Oh, peace,” was figuratively the Arabic equivalent of “Holy smoke!”

  Hoda dropped the sack on the front stoop, spanked her hands clean, and limped eagerly toward me, her right hand raised to shake mine. I asked her where she was going with the burlap sack. She pointed to a little shed at the side of the house. I pushed the door of the shed open and found three goats, two chickens, and four pigeons staring up at me. Frightened, the chickens mewled like kittens. Hoda had been on her way to feed the animals, but now that I was here she happily canceled the task with a dismissive flap of her hand and waved me into the house.

  Inside, the house was warm and dark but for the golden bar of late afternoon sunlight that fell through the front door. The front room was empty, and from the kitchen came the smell of fried fish. Seeing my surprise that her mother was not in the living room, Hoda indicated that she was upstairs sleeping. At Hoda’s invitation I sat in the mother’s place on the couch. The couch was hard as a church pew and so high that my feet didn’t touch the floor.

  When I asked if Amr was at home, Hoda put her face close to mine and cocked her head in that keen and slightly canine way, listening to my words. Her eyes were dark and luminous; her big body blocked the light streaming through the doorway; she blinked at me. No, Amr was not here but, God willing, he would be here soon. I should wait. And in the meantime did I want tea?

  The Egyptian mania for tea is matched only by the Irish mania for it, and if you refused an offer of tea, the Egyptian host would react with disappointment and disbelief. I did not want tea, but in order to be polite I said that I did.

  Hoda knocked the front door nearly shut, blocking out the light. She switched on a fluorescent overhead lamp and limped off into the kitchen.

  By the sickly milk-white light, I saw that there was another couch opposite me and a large glassed-in bookshelf to my right. The bookshelf held an array of dusty trinkets — a pink plush Easter bunny, Frosty the Snowman in a black top hat, a vase of dust-encrusted plastic roses, some framed photographs, lace doilies — the sort of things that seem clever and significant when new but then quickly fade into useless clutter. The room was painted a pale mint green. Its only window was tightly shuttered on this hot day, and a metal wind chime hung listlessly in front of it. An indolent ceiling fan pushed the warm air and smell of fried fish around the room. Ajar, the front door inched back and forth in the evening breeze, creaking as it moved.

  Through the kitchen door I could see Hoda waddling heavily in and out of view with cups and pots in her hands. Eventually she came back into the room, set a banana and a glass of steaming tea on the low table in front of me, put her hands on her hips, and with stern authority directed me to eat and drink.

  Though she was twenty-two and endowed with a prodigious bosom, Hoda looked like a sixteen-year-old. She had an adolescent’s air of both innocence and boldness. I could see that she was delighted to have me here alone. Despite her nearly nonexistent English, she was an excellent communicator, speaking with her hands and her expressive face. Without a trace of shyness she sat close to me on the couch and asked was I married, did I have children, where was I from, how much money did I make. She questioned my shoes, my earrings, my watch. Between her thumb and forefinger, she assessed the material of my blouse. She approved of the cotton scarf around my neck. With no self-consciousness what-ever, she leaned closer and examined my face in the slow, frowning manner of an art critic appraising a mediocre oil painting in a gallery. How old was I anyway? When I told her I was thirty-eight she told me I was not. Thirty-eight? Not possible, for I was not fat enough to be that old. I showed her the gray hair behind my ears. Triumphantly, instructively, she showed me hers. Gray hair proved nothing.

  I asked Hoda if she was married. She grimaced and flapped her hands at me. She was not married nor did she care to be. Marriage was nothing but a burden and a greased chute to nowhere. A woman was better off alone. Why was I not drinking my tea? And what about the banana?

  As I reached obediently for the banana, the front door swung open with a bang, and three substantial young women clutching patent-leather purses burst into the house in a chattering rush. They stopped in their tracks at the sight of me, their mouths hanging open in astonishment. They were elegantly dressed in gauzy black gowns and colorful flowing veils that tightly framed their dark faces, fitted close around their necks, and trailed over their shoulders and down their backs. They were fat-fingered, wore golden rings on every finger, and their mouths were glossed with a lot of rich red lipstick. They were on their way across the river to Aswan for an evening’s excursion and had stopped in to say hello to Hoda.

  With visible pride at the presence of a foreigner in her home, Hoda slung her heavy arm around my shoulders, introduced me to the women, and invited them all to sit down. They flopped heavily onto the couches and blinked expectantly at me, hands on their knees. Their fingernails had been recently painted. One of them could speak a little English, and through her the other two asked me the same questions Hoda had just asked, and, like Hoda, they insisted that I was too thin to be thirty-eight. When I admired their colorful veils, they were delighted and flattered and eagerly informed me that a dear friend of theirs had brought them all the way from Saudi Arabia. They asked whether we had veils like this in America and whether New York was very nice, for they had seen many pictures of New York on the television and, oh, the wide streets and the impossibly tall buildings! Praise God! Too tall. And yellow cars too. Ho-ho! A gift for the eyes! They all wanted to see New York one day. It was their greatest dream.

  I asked wh
ether they had been to Cairo.

  No!

  Had they been to Luxor?

  No!

  What about the impossibly beautiful botanical garden of Kitchener Island right here next door to Elephantine?

  No!

  Had they ever swum in the river?

  No! They did not know how to swim.

  That struck me as very sad. When I asked them where exactly they were going now in their finery, they said, “To the Aswan Moon,” then howled with inexplicable laughter and covered their mouths with their hands.

  The Aswan Moon was a pleasant riverfront café on the east bank in Aswan. I said innocently, “That’s nice,” and they hooted louder and raised their eyebrows and smirked knowingly at each other in a scandalized way and said but of course they were not going to the Aswan Moon. Never!

  The women were not married, but one of them, Wafaa, who was sitting between Hoda and me, was to be married within the month, and each time she mentioned it (she mentioned it often) the others snickered with salacious delight and reminded each other that within twelve months Wafaa would have, God willing, a darling baby. Preferably a boy.

  Hoda opined that while Wafaa was quite pretty, her fiancé was, regrettably, not handsome.

  Wafaa slapped Hoda’s fat upper arm in injured protest; her fiancé was very handsome and she loved him dearly.

  Hoda straightened her slovenly head rag and smoothed her soiled house-dress across her big thighs and giggled at her lap. I could see that Hoda, the only one of the young women not primped and groomed, had become self-conscious; she examined the others’ outfits with a touching mix of envy, criticism, sadness, and awe. She looked absorbed, a little wounded, and wary. When I asked Hoda if she would accompany the other girls to Aswan that evening she made a sour face to indicate that such a pursuit was boring and beneath her.

  Mouna, twenty-four, and Samira, twenty-one, both hoped to be married soon. Mouna announced that for her own part, she was smitten with Amr and could see herself quite happily married to him. Samira, a histrionic, rough-voiced woman with a mannish face and a raucous laugh, pressed her hand to her heart to show that she too was taken with Amr and was certain that they had a future together.