Down the Nile Read online

  That show ended and another began. From what I could glean from the imagery and from Safaa’s occasional translations, this one concerned a smart Egyptian lawyer who goes to a party, is so upset — or perhaps just so depraved — that he has to drink straight out of the host’s whiskey bottle, gets drunk, feels up a buxom young woman in a back room, then drives home, and accidentally kills people with his fancy car. The next morning he’s hung over, unshaven, and disheveled but brilliant in court. He ends up redeemed mostly because he’s handsome and smart and because he brings presents to a boy he has crippled in the accident. That show was followed by an advertisement for a talk show interview with a famous Egyptian movie star reputed to be very funny. In the ad, the movie star was crying sincerely and tamping her eyes with a hankie. I asked Safaa why she was crying.

  “Ah, those silly craps!” Safaa howled. “They always pretend to cry! They have to! People like it!”

  And finally we sat staring at a show in which women were discussing what you should do if your daughter has a baby before she’s married.

  Surprised, I said to Safaa, “That happens?”

  “All the time, Rose! Just last month an infant was found abandoned in a basket two blocks from here.”

  Safaa grabbed the TV remote from Mary, clicked it off, told the kids to go and do their mathematics and take the baby with them, then she turned to me and began to speak with rueful envy. Outside Egypt things were different, better. She knew this because she worked in a hotel and met many foreigners. Men and women could sleep together before they were married, and the women didn’t have to ask their parents before marriage if the husband was an acceptable prospect. Egyptians were too obsessed with sex and marriage and family. And women couldn’t do anything on their own. For Egyptian women, marriage was the only way you could really get out of your father’s house. Safaa hadn’t married her husband for love. He was a nice man and a good husband, but she didn’t love him. Sometimes she wanted to go to Kitchener Botanical Garden alone just to sit and relax and look at the pretty trees that she had heard so much about, but she never mustered the courage to go there because strangers — men — would incessantly ask her whether she was married, where was her husband, where were her children, and why wasn’t she at home minding her family. She clucked her tongue in disgust. “Women here can’t do anything alone.”

  When I told Safaa that I did many things alone she said, “And I know it! I see you. You go out in the world by yourself. You can go in Aswan by yourself. You go to Kitchener Island, Elephantine, Luxor, and Cairo by yourself and you can enjoy. And you wear trousers. I saw you run once. On the corniche you was running. You can talk to strangers and men and ride in the felucca with the captain. But Egyptian women? No! Egyptian women — doesn’t matter Christian or Muslim — can’t be like you.”

  Safaa stared at the blank television screen with utter disdain. “Rose, I tell you. I wish I could be free like you.”

  The Cataract Islands

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I went back to the place where I had seen the twenty white rowboats at the top of Elephantine Island. As I walked among the boats, examining them, a tall, very thin young Nubian man came up behind me and said gloomily, “I will help you. What you need?”

  I told him I needed a boat. He said, “I have a friend with felucca. We can take you sailing.” I explained that I wanted a rowboat. He tried to persuade me that a rowboat was not the best means of seeing Aswan. I had had this conversation so many times here that I was numb with boredom. I said, no, I was looking for a rowboat not in order to see Aswan but in order to buy the boat.

  The man went silent for a moment. And then we ran through the tedious, unvarying charade:

  Why you want?

  “Because.”

  Because why?

  “Because I want to buy a boat.”

  For what?

  “For a surprise for my husband.”

  Where your husband is?

  “Asleep in the hotel. It is his birthday. I want to surprise him with the gift of a boat.”

  Where you are from?

  “America.”

  How you will take the boat home to America?

  “Well, we live in Cairo now. We’ll use it there.”

  Why you don’t buy boat in Cairo?

  “The boats here in Aswan are better than the boats in Cairo.” (This always flattered them.)

  Yes. That is true. I know a boat you can buy. But! No one will sell you the boat.

  “Why?”

  It’s difficult. It will cost you lot of money.

  “How much money?”

  Three thousand bounds!

  “Who owns this boat that you have in mind?”

  A man.

  “Could you introduce me to him?”

  Please sit over here with me.

  This particular fellow was inviting me to sit on a fallen palm tree in the middle of what looked like the village dump. I declined. He asked why. I explained that I wasn’t keen on sitting in the garbage. He looked at me hungrily and invited me to visit his family’s house; the look on his face positively shrieked, I want your money! He was the most cheerless person I had met in Egypt. His name was Hashem.

  We got up, and I followed him down a shady path through a grove of trees until we came to a pumpkin-colored adobe house with an open courtyard in its center. “Hashem” was handwritten over the door in roman letters. As we came into the house a woman who had been feeding sticks and twigs into the mouth of a stove in the courtyard scurried out of sight, struggling to cover her hair with a veil, which had slipped back onto her shoulders as she worked. I caught a glimpse of her hair before she had a chance to hide it; it was black, surprisingly long and straight, and very soft looking, with distinct streaks of gray in it. It looked utterly different from the Nubian men’s brittle Afros.

  “That is my mother,” Hashem said.

  The mother went into the kitchen to make tea, while Hashem and I sat in the sitting room, a long, narrow, windowless vault crammed with furniture. At one end of the room a full-sized refrigerator stood, still housed in the cardboard box it had been shipped in. Because of the deep dovecote ceiling, a particularly Nubian architectural feature, the room was cool as a wine cellar. There were cotton rag rugs on the couches, and on the floor a rug made out of what looked like polypropylene rope.

  As my eyes began to adjust to the darkness of the room, I saw that Hashem’s face bore the turbulent expression of a man who is dying and knows it. He began to talk about many things, none of which had anything to do with rowboats. The house had been in his family for years, but he wanted his own house, off Elephantine Island. But there was the matter of money — he had none. He would never do felucca work, for it was immoral. It was not the right way. It was only about money and more money with those bad felucca captains. He was the oldest brother in his family and therefore was obliged to take care of everyone. He was angry because he wanted to do something solely for himself.

  Hashem spoke in a droning, lowing way. He told me that his sister was soon to be married. He would have to come up with the money for the wedding. A lot of money. As if to prove the sister’s existence, he opened a box, took out a Polaroid photograph of her, and handed it to me. She was pretty. When we were finished looking at the photo, he put it down on the couch beside him. A minute later, realizing in the middle of a sentence that the photo lay face up, he reached out and turned it over, to protect his sister’s purity.

  I asked Hashem if his brothers were married. The question made him indignant. “They are younger than I am!”

  I asked why his name and not his father’s was written on the front of the house.

  “My father don’t work anymore. He is not the one taking care of the family. He is not getting the money. He live next door.”

  I asked him about the garbage that seemed to be strewn all over Aswan’s villages. He nodded knowingly and said that at one time the government had given the people of Aswan assistance with garbage removal,
but for some reason they stopped helping and so now there was no way to get rid of it.

  “I drink beer,” he said suddenly and with the bored matter-of-factness with which one delivers one’s date of birth. “One or two times per week, because sometimes I feel that I need it.”

  There was an air of calculation about Hashem. I sensed that he was fully aware that complaining and self-pity can bring sympathy, and sometimes gain, and though I wanted to trust him, I didn’t. He expressed no interest in anything but his own woes, which admittedly were considerable and varied.

  I listened to Hashem for what seemed like an eternity, while a plastic clock on the wall with “Big Ben” written on its face played “Camptown Races” every half hour. Hashem was indisputably boring. His laugh, when it came, was sepulchral. As he talked I noticed one of his sisters peeking through the doorway at me; the whites of her eyes glowed for a moment and she disappeared again.

  I found it difficult to feel compassion for Hashem because of his sourness and lack of humor, but I tried to gather some perspective on his situation. Such destitution and unhappiness commanded sympathy, but what sympathy I could muster felt distant and abstract. He seemed plotting. He hadn’t invited me here simply to be hospitable. He wanted something. But so did I.

  “Hashem,” I said. “What about the rowboat?”

  “You can buy mine.”

  “Where is it?”

  He waved an arm. “Down there.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “We will go.”

  As we were leaving I noticed Hashem’s sister and mother sitting on the floor in another small room. It seemed rude to have spent time in their house without saying a word to them. I told Hashem that I wanted to say good-bye to them. Without consulting them, he said, “They don’t want come out.”

  On our way to the boat, Hashem showed me his family’s fields. “This is my father’s side,” he said, waving at groves of trees. “And this is my mother’s side,” waving at fields. The groves on Elephantine Island were dark and eerie. The shade was dense and the ground was very dry. Enormous banana leaves crackled underfoot, crows bleated, doves hooted spookily. Ancient, the mud walls here sagged, and everything was blanketed in a veneer of brown dust the thickness of cupcake frosting. It seemed a miracle that the trees were able to photosynthesize under all that dust.

  Hashem’s family owned guava, mango, lemon, fig, date, orange, and eucalyptus trees, as well as grape bowers. Hashem explained that he sold his fruit by the tree: each tree had a price no matter how much fruit it yielded. “That tree is four hundred bounds,” he said pointing at a mango. “That one is three hundred.”

  He didn’t smile. He seemed to take no joy what-ever in being alive. He looked intensely dissatisfied. When we came to the spot where his boat was anchored, I could see why he was willing to sell it. It was a rotting hulk, full of garbage, with both oarlocks missing and a broken bow. It was nothing like the boats at the top of the island. I declined the boat and knew that he wouldn’t introduce me to anyone who would sell me a good one. This was a problem in Aswan: finding someone who would be truly helpful, who would not be jealous that you were giving business to someone else.

  As we waited at the river’s edge for the ferry back to the mainland, Hashem insisted on buying me a Coke. I thanked him, said it was very kind of him but not necessary, and that anyway I preferred water. He bought me a bottle of water, which I hadn’t realized was far more expensive than Coke. In a desperate attempt at some sort of recompense for his expense, he asked me to give him the nearly empty bottle of water I had with me. His obvious depression made me soften slightly, and I handed him a twenty-pound note — six U.S. dollars or so — which he refused to accept until I couched the money in terms of gratitude for his hospitality. His face relaxed as he pocketed the twenty.

  The level of appeasement a few pounds could generate in an Egyptian soul was chastening and edifying. Having seen again and again the salubrious effect of a small contribution, I found it impossible to be stingy here.

  Three days in a row I used Amr’s little boat, all the while debating whether I could take such a small boat on my trip down the river. So far, Amr seemed like the only truly approachable and serious man in Aswan. With each day of rowing I grew braver and went farther up the river, trying to explore the Cataract Islands. The High Dam was not visible from Aswan, and the knowledge of its majestic presence so nearby was tantalizing, like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I was curious to see where the Egyptian Nile began.

  The farther upriver I went, the more the islands seemed to multiply in the distance, each one more beautiful, isolated, and exotic than the last. But with every island I passed, the current grew stronger, the river rockier and more complicated, seeming to divide itself into a dozen separate creeks. As I approached the top of each island, I had to struggle mightily to surmount the surge of water that the head of the island had diverted. Going higher on this part of the river was a bit like climbing a mountain. (Florence Nightingale had referred to this place as “the staircase.”) Every major step was a struggle, interspersed with moments of blessed rest. I picked my way, crablike, backward up the river. I rested by wedging my oar behind an island rock or tree trunk, and it was only then that I had time to look around and see where I was. The islands were uninhabited, supported no man-made structures, and offered a pristine glimpse of what the Nile was like thousands of years ago; the grasses and plants that were here had remained unchanged for aeons. Every so often I saw this government sign posted on an island shore: SALUGA AND GAZAL PROTECTED LANDS. SCIENTIFIC PROJECT. DO NOT GET OUT OF THE TRUCK. ANYONE DAMAGING THE PLANTS OR DISTURBING THE ANIMALS WILL BE PROSECUTED BY EGYPTIAN LAW.

  Exotic birds — reed larks, olivaceous warblers, little green bee-eaters — perched on swaying reeds a mere foot from my face and stared boldly at me. They seemed unafraid. Minnows skittered through the duckweed that floated along the banks in billowing rafts, like blankets of worsted green gauze.

  One day as I sat resting in the boat on the bank of an island, I realized there was a dark face just behind the bougainvillea bush I was hanging on to — a fisherman wrestling with a long strip of tin, which he was shaping into some kind of animal trap. Beyond him was a tiny shelter made of reeds and bamboo, a makeshift lean-to cluttered with fishing nets and cooking pots and glass bottles. The solitude I had found on this part of the river was so pleasant that at the sight of the man and his little dwelling I wanted to slink away, but he caught sight of me before I could leave, and with shocking speed he scuttled around the bush on his hands and knees to gape at me. He was so startled, he appeared to have stopped breathing. He was barefoot and small and movie-star handsome, and his mustache was black and full. His eyes had an almost feral brightness. The legs of his tattered cotton trousers were carefully rolled up, revealing hairless brown shins and knotty calf muscles. He studied my boat, the oars, my bare feet, my face. We stared mutely at each other for a weirdly long time. Finally he raised one hand and conveyed his incomprehension with a particularly Egyptian gesture: a brisk twist of the wrist that exactly mimics the tossing of dice, and in a near whisper he spoke one incredulous Arabic word: Lay? (Why?)

  Not an unreasonable question. Why would a foreign woman do the work that rowing required when she could hire any Egyptian man to do it for her for a pittance? On the Nile, rowing was not a pastime. It was work that no one wanted to do if he didn’t have to. It was tantamount to laying railroad tracks or digging graves or tarring highways.

  The rushing water slewed and whirled beneath my boat, rocking me slightly. Limited by the few Arabic phrases I had learned, I gave the fisherman a typically Egyptian answer: Mafeesh lay. (There is no why.)

  “Drink tea,” he said abruptly. It sounded like a command. He pointed at a narrow path that led to the center of the island through a wild overgrowth of bushes and brambles and acacias and weeds. I thought of the government warning: Don’t get out of the truck. I declined the tea, smiled politely, and be
gan to row farther upriver. The fisherman followed me, stumbling along the shore, saying, I can row for you. Again, smiling, I declined the offer and rowed on. The fisherman resigned himself and went back to twisting his piece of tin.

  Twenty minutes later, as I neared the top of the island, I saw him again. He was studying me from behind a bush, his white teeth glowing like jewelry beneath his hanging mustache, his bright eyes pinched to slits in the sunlight. As I readied to round the top of the island, a task that I could see would be difficult, if not impossible, for the swiftness of the water, he sprang up and rushed at me through the bushes, smashing reeds and twigs under his bare feet and crashing into the river up to his knees. “No, no, no!” he said, pawing furiously at the air with one hand, the frantic motion of a dog digging a hole, another peculiarly Egyptian gesture, which meant Come here.

  I chose to ignore him and headed into what amounted to a minor rapid. After trying three times to beat the current, I gave up and allowed myself to be pulled downriver.

  The fisherman gestured wildly at me with his piece of tin, indicating that I should come through a skinny inlet that led out to the top of the island, a shortcut that would thoroughly circumvent the most difficult part of the current. The inlet was narrow, passing between two rocks. With pure luck I managed to haul the boat through it, and the fisherman showed his approval by giving me a double thumbs-up.

  “Now I will row for you,” he said decisively.

  I looked at him. “Why will you row for me?”

  “You can’t do it. Only I can do it.”

  “But I don’t want you to do it,” I said. “I want to try it.”

  He nodded and shrugged and watched as I tried to leave the island behind. The current now was too strong for me to beat. I rowed with all my strength but remained hovering in the same spot, flapping my wooden wings like an osprey fluttering above its prey. I tried and failed several times and eventually gave up, steering myself to the bank and grabbing hold of a purple bougainvillea frond to keep myself from careering downriver on the brisk current.