Down the Nile Read online

  I asked him what he thought about people who drank alcohol. Diplomatically he said, “Madame, it is different for the foreigners.” I told him that I had noticed a lot of Egyptian men in Aswan drinking beer. “They are not Egyptian,” he corrected me. “They are Nubian.” And he glanced behind him at a lone middle-aged man sitting at a table in the shadows, drinking beer and smoking. The man sat slightly slumped, his head hanging low, his watery eyes blinking and muddled, his cigarette a damp stump between his fingers. He looked miserable and distracted and swamped with worry.

  “Nubians drink?” I said.

  With neither disdain nor admiration the waiter answered, “Nubian peoples always like be happy and singing and drunk. I am not Nubian.”

  Later that night, I found it too hot to sleep, decided to wander around the Aswan souq, the crowded shopping district, and fell into a conversation with a young man working in a shop full of cheap wooden carvings, Nubian drums, hammered brass plates, glass perfume bottles, garishly painted papyrus, and Formstone imitations of pharaonic sculptures: Akhenaten, Anubis, Nefertiti, the owl, the cat, the ram, Toth, Seth, Mut, Nut, Tut, Ra, and the rest of them. The same dusty clutter being sold by the truckload to tourists all over Egypt.

  The young man wore not a gallabiya but the shiny rayon trousers and polyester dress shirt that seemed to be the uniform of many young Egyptian shopkeepers, an approximate stab at modern Western style. We sat on the doorstep of the shop and watched a man selling perfectly spherical watermelons off the back of a wagon in the busy square. Predictably, the conversation turned to sex. The young man told me he had had an affair with an English woman whom he loved. He had had sex with her, though they were not married. “I was twenty-two the first time I made sex,” he said. After a long pause he added, “Now I am twenty-eight.”

  Foreign women who dressed in scanty clothing he did not respect. “I would try to touch them and make sex with them,” he said. “When I see foreign men and women friends greeting each other with huggings and kissings here in the market, I think they are like animals making sex in the street. Egyptian people would never do this.”

  I pointed out that when different cultures met, misunderstanding and suspicion were bound to arise.

  He stared stonily at me, as if he had suddenly lost his hearing. Since he seemed to have set the parameters for a certain level of frankness in this conversation, I pressed on, explaining that some people in the West had similarly disdainful views of Arabs, believing that Arabs were backward, fanatical, and rapacious.

  The shopkeeper’s face went dead, and in a voice gone childlike with disbelief he demanded, “Because of why?!”

  Knowing it was risky, I repeated for him something a disgusted Australian woman had said to me that morning: They are pigs! They throw their garbage in the river! They brutalize their animals and defecate in the street! They treat their women like beasts. They won’t eat pork because they think it unclean, and yet they will sit in the middle of a stinking rubbish pile with their children!

  The man looked shocked, as though I had reached over and slapped him square across his plump cheek. Confusion brewed behind his face. He seemed to be waiting for the voice of outrage to catch up with him. Presently it did. “But our way is the right way! It is in the Koran!”

  And he began to speak at great length in a humorless, resentful, persecuted tone. He spoke of holiness, law, right actions, the Prophet, honor, and God. As he talked, I found myself tugging the sleeves of my blouse lower over my wrists. He told me that there was prostitution in Egypt but that if you visited a prostitute you would gain a bad reputation. If his sister had sex with a man before she was married, he said, he would kill her. I asked him if he was serious. He was completely serious; he would not hesitate to take his sister’s life. I asked why. “Because she has no future and has shamed my family’s name.” When I ventured that this seemed extreme, illogical, and not terribly humane, he talked on, as though he hadn’t heard me. “If your wife is not a virgin and you find out, you can kill her. For your pride.”

  “So you kill her, get arrested, go to jail, and then your life is over too.”

  “I don’t care. No one would blame me.”

  “But you were willing to take such a risk with the English woman you loved and were not married to.”

  He gave me a look that said, You fool! “She was foreign!”

  “She was a woman.”

  “It is not the same for her. Her family wouldn’t care.”

  “If a woman’s virtue is so important in your eyes, why would you not respect that same virtue in any woman you loved, no matter where she’s from? Don’t you care?”

  I had begun to sound like an overearnest youth counselor futilely laboring in a reform school. I wanted very much to get out of this conversation.

  The shopkeeper squirmed on the stoop, clucked at my stupidity, and looked around the market with impatience. He spat into the dust in front of the shop. He pouted and sulked. He had no answer. I had offended him. I looked into the square, wondering what to do next. Nearby a barefoot boy with huge hands, a brass pinkie ring, and red polish on his nails was wrestling with the puffy snout of a hobbled camel twice his height. The boy pried open the camel’s jaws, and with the sweeping gesture of a man throwing water on a fire he sloshed a jug of water down its throat. The camel smacked its bewhiskered lips and did a little tap dance of protest on the broken pavement.

  The young man turned toward me again, inspired with a new idea. “Some foreign women are evil!”

  “Evil?”

  He glared at me. “They show their flesh to tempt us on purpose, even during Ramadan.”

  I was preparing to tell him that some foreign women didn’t understand the importance of covering their bodies while they were in Egypt, and then I thought, Why explain? It seemed hopeless in the face of this universal age-old contradiction: women were calculating temptresses whose sexuality needed to be stifled at any cost, and yet they were the object of constant speculation, interest, and discussion. They alone were to be blamed for the thoughts and desires and irresponsible behavior they provoked in men.

  Encouraged by my silence, the shopkeeper posited some hypothetical questions: If my husband had sex with another woman and I found out, what would I do? If my husband had taken a drink and in a weak moment had sex with another woman, what would I do? If my husband had an affair with a woman, and I didn’t know about it, but he confessed it to me, what would I do? If my husband had been seduced by a wicked woman whose fault it was, and I found out, what would I do? He had devised so many intricate and specific moral dilemmas that it was as if, after studying the subject in great depth, he was now about to prepare a Koranic treatise on it. On and on he hypothesized about infidelity and adultery, while I stared, beleaguered, at the camel’s spindly legs.

  Finally, when the shopkeeper ran out of depressing variations on marital transgression, I asked him why he was asking me these things. His answer was “Heelary Cleelington is a good wife.” I asked him if he would question an Egyptian woman in this manner. He simply laughed in a way that meant, Of course not!, and it dawned on me that in the Islamic scheme of things, the breezy eagerness of so many Egyptian men to talk about sexual matters with me and other foreign women could have been interpreted as a supreme insult.

  On my way back to my hotel that night I came upon a very old woman sitting barefoot on a street corner selling small cones of paper filled with peanuts. She was tiny in her black veil and gown. Her bare ankles against the concrete of the sidewalk were no thicker than the handle of a hockey stick. She moved slowly, arranging and rearranging the cones in her wicker basket with delicate care and attention. Her head looked heavy on her thin neck and slight shoulders. She wore a big pair of horn-rimmed, government-issue eyeglasses that in their weightiness resembled a chemist’s protective goggles. The street was dark and dirty. I gave the woman two pounds for two cones of peanuts. Nearly blind, she lifted the paper money to within an inch of the enormous lenses of
her eyeglasses and scanned it until an expression of guarded satisfaction appeared on her face, then she adjusted the glasses with both hands — money clutched in one of them — and nodded at me without a smile and went back to adjusting the cones.

  In my hotel room, I ate the roasted peanuts and realized that the old woman had fashioned the paper cones from lined notepaper covered with a grandchild’s penciled math homework — 3 × 11 =3, 3 #215; 12 = — an act of recycling thrift that I found inexplicably moving.

  The First Small Boat in Egypt

  THE NEXT DAY was scorching hot, and when, with sweat trickling down my back, I said somewhat vapidly to my hotel manager, “It’s hot,” he replied in a correcting, foreboding way, “It is only the beginning of hot.”

  It was too hot to row Amr Khaled’s boat in the middle of the day, too hot even to leave the hotel. All day I lay on my bed in my underwear with one forearm slung across my eyes, listening to a fly careering against the lamp shade, lifting the arm now and then to stare at a lizard on the ceiling or at the wall beside me that was dotted with little brown stars of dried blood: a constellation of violently mashed mosquitoes.

  Unable to sleep, I read the books on Egypt that I had brought with me and learned numerous things about Aswan. It was rated among the hottest places in the world. Its population was about a million. It was one of the oldest towns in Egypt (evidence of predynastic culture seven or so thousand years ago; seriously old). The fruit of Aswan’s date palms had a “high reputation.” Once, twenty thousand Aswanians died of the plague. Most of Egypt’s ancient monuments were made from granite quarried at Aswan. When poor old Juvenal was banished from Rome for his satirical writing, they sent him to molder in Aswan. Aswan’s famous wells (summer solstice, high noon, sun fully reflected in bottom of well, no shadow, etc.) had inspired Eratosthenes’ formula for determining the circumference of the earth. During the nineteenth century a group of people called the Howling Dervishes had a house in Aswan; they met there on Fridays. Also during the nineteenth century, the Egyptian taverns that sold boozah (said to be the origin of the English word booze) were run mainly by Nubians who concocted the drink themselves and served it to customers, both men and women, from a large wooden ladle that was passed, presumably with some hilarity, around the room. In 1838 Edward Lane described boozah as an intoxicating liquor made with crumbled barley bread mixed with water, then strained and allowed to ferment. “It is commonly drunk by the boatmen of the Nile,” he wrote, “and by other persons of the lower orders.” Finally, I learned that by the 1820s Aswanians were already considered “the shrewdest people in Egypt,” famous for charging foreigners prices three times what their merchandise was worth.

  When I got bored with the reading, I went to the window. My view was of a tall minaret, a colonial-looking boys’ school, the public toilets, and the brand-new Hospital for Eyes, with paint splattered on its windows and cabbages growing in the dirt on either side of its entrance. Just beyond the boys’ school was a little tailor’s shop where a sad old blue-eyed tailor sat every evening waiting for customers. He spoke no English, but when I stopped and said hello to him one evening he slid the sleeve of his shirt up his arm and showed me the bluish tattoo of a cross on his inner wrist. Like most of the tailors in Aswan, he was Christian, and like most Egyptian Christians he wore this tattoo as proof of his faith.

  That afternoon two Nubian women were selling live pigeons in the shade of the public toilets. Draped in black gowns and veils, squatting on their haunches, their fine black hands visoring their eyes, they had sat all day waiting for customers. Their skin was so black that from this distance of a hundred feet their only discernible facial features were their frost-white teeth and the whites of their eyes. The pigeons had been stuffed, one hard upon the other, into bamboo cages. From time to time one of the women would take a swig of water from a red plastic gasoline jug, yank a pigeon from the cage with a roughness that seemed to spell immediate destruction, fit the pigeon’s beak between her own lips, transfer the water to the bird, then stuff him back in the cage, patting the others down to make room for him. They handled the birds like dirty washrags. When a potential customer came down the hot street, one of them would haul a dozen birds out of a cage, pinch their wings together, and display them six in each hand, like a fan of playing cards.

  A woman came down the street pushing a baby stroller, and it struck me that the women in Aswan who could afford strollers — most women simply carried their babies astraddle one shoulder — were always dressed in the Islamic veil, the long cloth wrapped around their heads and under their chins. No hair showing, no neck, just the face revealed. The veil hung down to the backs of their thighs over a black gown that hung to their ankles. They had noble faces, full voices, and walked with straight backs.

  At four o’clock I ventured out to look for Amr Khaled’s boat. The city looked as though it had been baked senseless during the day. Nothing moved. Even the river seemed to have slurred to a halt. The simmering streets had surrendered their utility as streets; empty, the pavement threw up ripples of heat like beds of hot coals. Over time, thousands of bottle caps had been trampled into the molten surface of the corniche; at that hour they glinted dully like the profligate scatterings of some drunken millionaire. Every car in sight sat still, with an openmouthed body stretched across the front seat. Semicomatose figures lay sprawled under trees and awnings or flopped over in doorways. I had the strange sense that if I turned on a radio in this heat, I’d find nothing but static on every station.

  On the hotel ferry, I made the short trip across the river to Elephantine Island, and when I arrived at the dock in front of the Oberoi Hotel, eight felucca captains were standing by their boats, waiting for customers. They appeared to be the only upright people in Aswan. In their long white gowns they were like idling priests. Though he had only ever seen me in the dark, Amr Khaled recognized me and came forward. In the daylight I realized he was a dark-skinned Nubian. I saw too how small his rowboat was — approximately seven feet long. Its name, Happy, was hand-painted on its prow in rough black letters that called to mind angry profanities scrawled on a highway underpass. In the cockpit, written on the cubbyhole door, were the oddly ominous words “Don’t Worry,” in the same intemperate handwriting. The oars, lashed to metal pegs with strips of what looked like floppy rubber cut from a bicycle inner tube, were a pair of termite-eaten two-by-fours. Wooden floorboards had been laid over the steel hull.

  As if reading my mind Amr said sheepishly, “It is small boat.”

  I nodded.

  “The first small boat in Egypt.”

  I looked at him. “The smallest boat in Egypt, you mean?”

  He tilted his head and grinned, abashed. “I mean. Yes. Is smallest.”

  We sat down on the dock to talk. He was an unusually calm man and an attentive listener. He had large, gentle eyes, the whites of which were a muddy yellow, and long curling black lashes. His mustache was traced with veins of white. His skin was dark and his face had a toddler’s pudginess. Everything about him looked pleasingly rounded: his small mouth was round and his cheeks were round, and his belly pushed roundly at the front of his gallabiya. He was stocky and thick shouldered, and though he was no taller than I, he looked fiercely powerful. His tongue was heavy and he spoke in a crowded way, with an almost imperceptible lisp. He had a habit of reducing the word than to nothing but its final n, so that “This is better than that” became “This is better ’n that.” While most men in Aswan had brown spots on their teeth, Amr’s teeth were impeccably white. His age was impossible to determine. His short hair was the complex gray of a squirrel’s tail, but he had the smooth skin of a young man. In the center of his forehead he bore the raised and darkened callus that came of frequent prostration in prayer; the unofficial term for it was zabib, which meant “raisin.” The callus was worn proudly as a sign of great piety and devotion. The more you prayed, the bigger the raisin. It was widely known that in an act of religious vanity some men rubbed the spot w
ith a stone in secret, deliberately and falsely increasing its size. On some Muslim men this callus was so large and so dark it looked like a horrible hematoma. Amr’s zabib was small and looked genuine.

  Eventually Amr suggested that I take my row. I climbed into the boat, and while Amr untied the lead the other felucca captains twitched their gowns and looked on in uncharacteristic silence, taking their cue as much from the unexpectedness of the situation as from Amr’s polite gravity. I told Amr that I would row around Elephantine Island and return in an hour or so.

  “As you wish,” he said, with no trace of mockery, worry, or doubt.

  I pushed off from the dock and began to haul the boat upstream. The oars were immensely heavy, with thick wooden handles that had been coarsely fashioned with a machete, and one oar was longer than the other. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it happened to be a Coptic holiday that day, doubling the river traffic, which usually came to life at this hour when the heat began to abate. Long, underpowered launches moved back and forth across the river, overloaded with singing, clapping, bongo-thumping revelers. On some boats, spontaneous dances had erupted: twenty dark heads bobbing up and down on the decks, while the boats teetered this way and that. The atmosphere was one of general hilarity. The water seemed to thrum.

  Nervous under the watchful eyes of the seven felucca captains and unsure of the current, I rowed hard and began to make progress toward the top of Elephantine Island. Men in large feluccas sped by, slicing through the water just inches from my bow, grinning wildly and shouting, “Come here, madame! I help you!” or “Come in my boat!” Others simply stared, surprised into silence at the sight of me. I tried to ignore them, to concentrate on the oars and the water. Amr had placed such unusual confidence in me that I was determined not to disappoint him.