Down the Nile Read online

  When I pointed out that the two could not both marry Amr at the same time, they screamed with laughter, fell back in their seats, grasped each other’s forearms as if steadying themselves on the deck of a tossing ocean liner, and indicated in vigorous pantomime what a thoroughgoing card I was.

  Then the front door slapped open again, and two more young women dressed to the chins burst into the room. They all greeted each other in a flurry of kisses, exclamations, and entreaties to God. The newcomers, too, collapsed dramatically onto the couches. Hoda switched on a radio, and the chanting, wailing sounds of Nubian music filled the room. She offered us cookies, which at first the women politely declined, but when Hoda presented the cookies a requisite second time, they all took two or three apiece and devoured them, laughing and chewing, the crumbs tumbling down their pretty veils and into their laps.

  We sat that way for fifteen minutes, giggling, speculating about boys and fashions and Amr to the beat of bongo drums, while other dolled-up young women in flowing robes passed by on the dirt footpath in front of the house, pausing just long enough to fling their waves and hellos through the open door. The sun had just set, the call to prayer had begun, and the village seemed to be coming to life.

  Through the door I could see the sky glowing blood red, and in their evening frenzy swifts and bats had begun to fill it. Songbirds thrummed in the palms across the way.

  Wafaa, who was newly up on the Islamic rules of marriage, reminded us all that Amr could technically marry both Samira and Mouna if he first properly divorced one of them. Affronted, Samira declared that she would prove such an ideal wife that Amr would never have any reason or desire to divorce her. Decisively, dismissively, Hoda announced that she wanted someone very pretty for Amr and that Basma, for example, a girl who moments ago had passed by the front door in a pink head scarf, was not — no, certainly not — pretty enough.

  The women’s voices were excited and so loud they drowned out the Nubian music. The room was hot, the ceiling fan struggled overhead, the women tamped their perspiring brows with hankies, and suddenly, Amr himself stepped through the door. At the sight of him all the women struggled to their feet and fled to the street in a frantic rush, as if in response to an urgent alarm. Over their shoulders they flung hasty good-byes at Hoda and were gone, veils fluttering behind them.

  Hoda immediately switched off the tape player, and without saying a word she quickly retreated to the kitchen to finish her cooking.

  The hilarity had ended so abruptly and unexpectedly that even I jumped to my feet with the vague feeling of having been caught at something unseemly.

  Alone in the middle of the empty room, Amr looked bemused. He carefully closed the front door and greeted me in his formal way, with a handshake and questions about my health, and he invited me to stay for dinner. Though I hadn’t come for dinner and wasn’t hungry, I felt it would be rude to decline his offer.

  Amr said, “First, I must pray, then we eat. Please sit here a few minutes.”

  I sat again on the couch and watched through the kitchen door as Amr prepared for prayer by washing his face, neck, hands, and feet at the kitchen sink. He washed with the fastidiousness of a preoperative surgeon. Then he went into the far bedroom, still within my line of vision, and without closing the door he faced the eastern wall and raised his hands to either side of his face, thumbs touching his earlobes, and began the elaborate physical ritual of Muslim prayer. He lowered his hands briefly to his waist, right hand holding the left, then put them on his knees and stared at the floor. It seemed to make no difference to him that Hoda was clanking pots and dishes in the kitchen or that I could see him clearly as he knelt down and pressed his forehead to the carpet, a posture that struck me as so intimate and personal that I had to look away.

  When his prayers were finished, Amr called me into the kitchen and urged me to sit at a very small table that Hoda had laid with Nubian dishes — roast pigeon, fried fishes the size of minnows, a savory dish of brown rice and soft bread, macaroni with gravy, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, a salad of minced vegetables, and goat cheese. In the Nubian tradition we began the meal with sweet dates soaked in water, and as we ate the delicious dates I realized that for a tablecloth Hoda had used several broadsheets pulled from an Arabic newspaper. In one corner of the table was a small feature written partially in English. It contained some complicated physics problems. To the right of my plate I read: Problem: A gardener works on the grass with a rake. If the angle between the arm of the rake and the plane of the surface is 60 degrees, and the gardener exerts a force of 10 N, find the work done when he moves through a distance of 2 m.

  In the Nubian custom we had no napkins and nothing but soupspoons for utensils. Amr ate most of his food with his hands, scooping at the various dishes with a flat piece of wheat bread. Hoda was in her room watching an Egyptian soap opera, and when it became clear that she wouldn’t be joining us at the table, I asked Amr why.

  “She will eat after us,” he said. I knew it was not uncommon for Egyptians to invite a guest to dinner and then seat the guest alone at the dinner table while they sat separately in another room, a form of etiquette that felt exceedingly uncomfortable to me. Hoda had prepared the food; I felt rude eating it without her. I wanted to ask Amr where his mother was but sensed that the mother was a subject better left undiscussed.

  I explained to Amr that I had come to tell him that my friend Madeleine in Cairo had agreed to join us in order to make our trip to Edfu possible. She would arrive by train the day after next. Amr looked delighted and raised his water glass at me in a toast. “So we can celebrate,” he said.

  We clinked our glasses and decided that we would leave Aswan in three days. Amr would make all the arrangements and purchase all the necessary supplies. He would provide sleeping bags and pillows and everything else we would need for our trip. I would pay him what seemed to me a less than nominal fee. All three of us would leave Aswan together, towing the rowboat behind us, and once we passed the Aswan river police, I could take the rowboat off on my own. Amr told me I wouldn’t be sorry that I had agreed to take my trip this way.

  We ate silently then for a few minutes, with the sound of Hoda’s television drifting into the room. I tasted one of the little fried fish and was disturbed to find that it had a slightly chemical flavor, not unlike chloroform. Reminded unpleasantly of the mysterious powder that the Aswan fishermen were in the habit of using to murder the local fish, I shoved the rest of the minnow under my stewed tomatoes.

  “The food is very good,” I said, because except for the little fish the food was indeed delicious.

  Amr nodded. “Hoda is good at the kitchen.”

  The kitchen was a small windowless space at the bottom of the main staircase. The staircase had been painted the bright silver of an iron steam radiator. The walls were pale green. Lit by a long fluorescent bulb on one wall, the room had the impersonal, utilitarian feel of a rural bus depot. It held a refrigerator, a small sink, a mirror, and a Nubian water cooler — an unbaked clay vase with a conical bottom that was suspended in a wire holder; water seeped through the pores of the vase and through the process of evaporation the water within was kept cool. I saw no counter and no stove in this kitchen. When I asked where exactly Hoda had done the cooking, Amr pointed to a room the size of a coat closet at the back of the kitchen. In it were a gas stove and a small second sink. The doorway to this closet was so narrow that I wondered how Hoda fit her considerable hips through it.

  Hoping to make cheerful conversation I said, “It’s interesting how those girls who were here earlier all say they love you and want to marry you.”

  Amr’s spoon, piled high with stewed tomatoes, stopped still in the air beneath his chin. He blinked at me, mute with surprise. “Who said it?”

  “All those girls who were here earlier,” I said. “Hoda’s friends who ran off when you came in. They all said they wanted to marry you.”

  Amr put down his spoon. I saw instantly that he was annoyed by the
very thought of these village girls. “They love me?” he said. “Why they don’t talk to me, if they love me? Why they run away when I am here? Rose, it is only foolish talk. The women in our village have many faces. They play lot of games. When they see me in the street, they cover their face and don’t looking at me when I go by. If they like me, why they don’t say, ‘Hello, Amr’ when I am here? Why they run away like little children?” He imitated their laughter by slitting his eyes coyly and covering the lower half of his face with the wide sleeve of his gallabiya. He dropped his hands to his lap and snorted derisively. “I hate this way!”

  My offhand mention of Hoda’s friends had struck a nerve and provoked an unpre-ce-dented flood of words and emotions from Amr. He told me the village girls were stupid and sly and caused a great deal of trouble. They talked behind one’s back and said things that weren’t true. They cared only about their looks and their clothes and their jewelry. They were untrustworthy, dishonest, shallow. They called him on the telephone, and as soon as he picked up the receiver and said hello, they hung up. “Ten times a day they do this!” Their tricks and schemes made him incredibly Nervous, and he could become so distressed by their games that he couldn’t think. Even his sister talked too much and told other people his business, though he tried to teach her not to. These were the reasons he didn’t like living in the village and was eager to finish building his house across the river so that he could move away. “Sometimes if I am too unhappy here I go and sleep in the new house to get peace.”

  I asked him why the young women had laughed so much at the mention of the Aswan Moon restaurant.

  “They laugh?”

  “They told me they were going to the Aswan Moon and laughed about it.”

  Amr shook his head in disgust. “Because they should not go to the Aswan Moon. They know this. But they go anyway and think nobody know this. But everybody know what they do.”

  “But what’s so terrible about the Aswan Moon?” I said.

  Amr extended his hands palms upward over the table to show me that the answer was obvious. “First of all, they is Muslim girls. They should not go to a place like that without they have a husband. There is foreigners and men there, and alcohol and smoking. It is not right they go there alone.”

  I told Amr that I had been alone to the Aswan Moon, had quite enjoyed it, and had survived the experience uncorrupted.

  He twisted his mouth impatiently at me and showed me the palms of his hands. “Yah, Rose. OK. But you is not Nubian woman. It doesn’t matter for you.”

  Not Nubian, not Muslim, not Egyptian — these facts conspired to disqualify me entirely from the female category. What mattered for a Muslim woman could never really matter for me. In Egypt, a Western woman would never truly be a woman, nor did she quite approach the status of a man; instead, her identity was more like that of a pleasant but irrelevant animal like, say, a peahen or a manatee. It was like moving through a strange kind of limbo, yet Amr seemed to take me more seriously than he did the local women. I felt no disrespect from him.

  He said, “This is Nubian way from long time ago. Nubian women should not smoke, not drink the alcohol, not be going to public places alone. I know there is Nubian women in Cairo smokes. But they should not smoke. Nubian woman should not be doing nothing. Nothing. They should only be staying home and minding the house.”

  The sound of laughter came bubbling out from the television in Hoda’s bedroom, and Amr’s mind veered toward Hoda again. “My sister, she talk too much to other people outside the family. She tell people my business. She don’t know how to keep the family business inside the family only, the way that is Nubian tradition. Because my mother always sick and don’t teach her right.”

  I tried gently to defend the Nubian girls by suggesting that if they truly were childish and silly, as Amr maintained, then perhaps that was precisely because they were not allowed to have any experiences outside the home, because their world was too small and too unstimulating. Maybe if they had more freedom and more experience they’d be a bit more interesting, a bit more reasonable and judicious. But I knew that was probably too progressive an idea for Amr to absorb. The women had to be isolated, contained, and controlled; it was a long-standing matter of pride and power among the men. Florence Nightingale had been horrified by the state and status of the Egyptian woman: “She is nothing but the servant of a man . . . the female elephant, the female eagle, has a higher idea of what she was put into the world to do, than the human female has here.” In a letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert wrote of the dullness of the Egyptian women: “The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee — such is the circle of occupations within which her existence is confined.”

  Respectfully but firmly, Amr shrugged off my notions. “No, Rose. They is just silly.”

  Amr was old-fashioned and intensely private. I sensed that he mistrusted his neighbors, whether male or female. Though he was traditional and proud to be Nubian, he seemed to dislike his own people.

  I struggled for something useful to say. As if reading my mind Amr said, “I cannot marry any woman like these girls in Elephantine.” He disliked the Nubian practice of a woman offering a dowry in exchange for marriage. “I can never marry a woman who has to give me money for it. I can never do this.” He was traditional, yet some of those traditions were unacceptable to his sensitive heart.

  I asked Amr why Hoda didn’t want to get married. He looked at me a long time, his round cheeks and gray hair shining hotly in the fluorescent light. “Hoda say this?”

  “Yes. She did.”

  Amr studied the many dishes on the table. He shook his head in thought. “Hoda say this because she know no one will marry her,” he said. “With her foot like this. That why she say like that. Of course she want to be married and be like other girls.”

  A long silence followed. An electric clock on the kitchen wall hummed noisily. I stared at the newspaper tablecloth, at the weird little physics test written in English. Problem: A body of mass 1 kg is moving with a velocity 2 m/s toward a body of unknown mass. After collision, they move together as one body as shown in fig. 1. If their velocity after collision was 2 m/s, find the mass of the second body.

  Hoda’s television now offered the call to prayer, and then I heard a small squawking sound from behind the refrigerator, like a tiny chicken clucking. I looked at Amr. “What’s that noise?” I said.

  He smiled. “Is small animal.”

  The thing squawked again, a distinct little cry of protest, per-sis-tent, repetitive. I couldn’t imagine what it was. “What kind of small animal?”

  Amr indicated six inches with his fingers. “Is look like crocodile. Same face. Is green kind of color. Got a long tail. He is eating a fly; that why he make that noise.”

  A lizard or a chameleon. I had never heard a lizard make a noise before, but I believed Amr. I looked up to examine the ceiling and was startled to realize that we were sitting under the open sky. The kitchen sat at the bottom of an open well around which the house was built; it was essentially a courtyard but gave no sense at all of being out of doors. The well we were sitting in was so deep that without looking upward I would never have noticed that the room was roofless, and indeed hadn’t noticed it the day before as Amr and I had climbed the stairs. This little square of sky above us, purple now, was dotted with three yellow stars feebly competing with the fading sunlight.

  I asked Amr what happened in the kitchen when it rained. He scooped up some rice with a piece of flat bread and said, “It don’t rains.”

  “But maybe once in a while it rains.”

  He would not be coaxed. “No. Never. It don’t rains here.”

  “OK. But what about birds?” I felt certain there should be some peculiar consequence to setting up one’s kitchen under the open sky — a puddle in the middle of the floor when you came down for breakfast in the morning, a pair of bats da
ngling from the edge of the sink, a pigeon snoozing on the staircase. “Don’t birds fly in?”

  Amr was amused by my curiosity and wonder. He smiled and showed his teeth. “No. They too afraid, Rose.”

  “Or bats maybe,” I said hopefully. “They’ll fly anywhere.”

  Amr didn’t know what a bat was. I explained by pointing to the cloud of them flying far above our heads, faintly visible as caped little shadows skittering through the evening sky. He laughed. “No.”

  It seemed a delightful thing to be sitting in a kitchen at the dead center of a house with nothing but bats and stars for a ceiling and a lizard shrieking and chattering behind the refrigerator.

  Eventually Hoda came limping out of her room and put a kettle on the stove in the little closet. I told her the food was excellent, but she dismissed my praise with the same grimaces and flapping gestures she had used to dismiss the idea of marriage and the excursion to the Aswan Moon.

  Before I left Amr’s house that evening to return to Aswan, I removed the cotton scarf from my neck and gave it to Hoda. Her big, pretty face beamed with surprise and plea-sure as she held the scarf in her hands. She thanked me many times, wound the scarf around her neck, and asked me whether it made her look very beautiful.

  It did indeed make her look beautiful. I told her so. And as I went out the front door I looked back and saw her appraising herself in the cracked mirror above the kitchen sink, her mouth curled into a smile of speculation and plea-sure, her small black hands adjusting the scarf just so.

  Not Floating but Flying

  THREE DAYS LATER, when Amr, Madeleine, and I arrived at the police dock at the southern edge of Aswan, the presiding officer was standing barefoot in the bushes at the edge of the dock, chewing on a roasted chicken leg. Plump and mustachioed, shirt untucked, hair hanging in his eyes, he looked like a plumber relaxing at a Saturday barbecue. Egyptian officialdom, in theory so forbidding, religious, and stern, often materialized in such lax and unbuckled guises as this.