Down the Nile Page 9

  It was all I could do to keep myself from saying, Fat chance you’d catch me eating these fish!

  Amr called out to a very old man rowing upriver in a skiff that there were dead fish here that he might want, but the old man couldn’t hear him and rowed obliviously by, and Amr clicked his tongue at the thought of all that good poisoned fish going to waste.

  As we neared Elephantine Island, I saw a woman in a small cove walking into the river in a full black gown and veil. Standing neck deep in water, she began splashing her face. I asked Amr what she was doing. “She is making a shower for washing herself,” he said, as though this should be obvious.

  I had seen plenty of men bathing in the Nile, some of them fully naked, but never a woman. When I told Amr this he said, “Lot of women wash like this, but they has to be very secret. They can’t be doing free like a man. That why you don’t see so much.”

  “How can she really wash herself when she’s wearing all her clothes?”

  Amr smiled wearily at my naïveté. “She can.”

  Amr brought my attention to a boat that had sunk the day before between Elephantine and Kitchener islands. The boat was nothing but a jacket-sized scrap of sail clinging to the top of a mast poking straight up out of the water. Like the tip of an iceberg in the middle of an ocean, there was something spooky about the sight — so much hidden mass lying still and silent and possibly sundered below it.

  Amr seemed not just unsettled but bewildered by the sight. “This could not happen to Nubian captain,” he said, shaking his head. “Egyptians in Aswan sometimes try to be felucca captain to get money, but they has not enough experiences and sometimes is not clever. They don’t watching the wind.” He waved his arm at the steep dunes on the west bank. “Wind can be changing and changing all the time. Sometime it can come” — he snapped his fingers — “very fast from the desert, and is full of sand and if you don’t seeing it, it can put the boat over in three seconds.”

  At Elephantine

  NEARLY A WEEK had passed, and still I had no boat of my own. The chances of finding one seemed to grow slimmer the more I searched. I had been to the street of the wooden boat makers on the edge of Aswan and watched the men there working. Their boats were beautiful and simple, made mostly of wood imported from Russia. They sold for a mere nine hundred Egyptian pounds: approximately three hundred U.S. dollars. But it would be two weeks before the boat makers had finished their next boat, and that one had been commissioned by someone else. I left there feeling deeply disheartened. This project had become a bit wearing. I was tired of having to hedge and pretend with every man in Aswan and frustrated that none but Amr seemed to take me seriously. Amr’s tiny boat was rowable but impractical for the trip I had in mind. Finally I went to Elephantine Island to see Amr, and I told him what I hadn’t told anyone here: I wanted to buy a rowboat and row it down the river.

  Sitting cross-legged on the dock in front of the Oberoi Hotel, Amr listened with one round fist pressed gently to his lips. He was, I had already determined, an admirably discreet person. He kept his own counsel. He was polite, straightforward, reserved, and disliked small talk. I never saw him engage in the juvenile jocularities Aswan’s felucca captains were always tossing back and forth among themselves and their foreign customers. His intelligent face was peaceful and difficult to read. He was imperturbable. When I said, “I want to row down the river alone,” it was not Amr’s face that betrayed his apprehension but his muddy eyes. He blinked several times, rapidly, as if a sudden sliver of hot wind had lodged beneath both eyelids, then his eyes fixed on mine for a long moment as his thoughts gathered.

  Slowly he stood, and, glancing furtively at the other felucca captains sitting not far from us, he said gravely, “Rose, please come in my house for tea.”

  I followed Amr up a dirt path behind the Oberoi Hotel; I had been on the path before and knew that it led to Elephantine’s three Nubian villages. We walked for five minutes without talking. Amr’s body was dense and muscular, yet he moved with economy and grace, his short arms gently swinging in a manner reminiscent of a sumo wrestler. I could not imagine what he was thinking, couldn’t imagine what he would say or do when we got to his house. Tea he had said. Was he angry? Would he chastise me for even proposing my harebrained idea? I had no fear that he would harm me in any way, or even speak harshly to me, but I wondered if I had somehow insulted his Nubian sensibility.

  Elephantine Island was thick with date palms and gnarled sycamores, and the mango groves were dark and spooky. All around us doves cooed and roosters crowed and sparrows and finches clicked and buzzed, eerily re-creating the sounds of a video arcade. Goats locked horns in the woods. Mud-brick walls divided the island into little fiefdoms, and narrow canals irrigated the small green fields. There were no cars on the island, and the footpaths were narrow as horse stalls. The Elephantine houses had an almost European feel, like Tuscan cottages painted in vibrant colors — ochre and cadmium yellow and olive green, the colors of Van Gogh’s palette. Through open doorways the houses looked dark inside, and cool. I heard laughter and voices coming from a few houses, but for the most part the villages were remarkably quiet. Here was an abundance of what I later came to think of as the second-story syndrome, a phenomenon ubiquitous in Egypt: fully inhabited houses with the uncompleted skeleton of a second floor clapped onto the roof. These second floors were always hastily constructed brick walls with rusted rebar bristling out of them like unkempt hair. A second floor was a sign of status; everyone had to have one.

  There were many small outbuildings for animals here and a network of low mud walls to corral them. Elderly women sat on stoops in black gowns and veils. I never heard shouting here, and in the time I was here no one had ever said hello to me or asked me where I was going or tried to sell me anything or pleaded with me to hire them or beseeched me to give them a pound or a pen. Everyone looked sleepy in the midday heat; everything moved slowly. We came upon an old woman in a black veil and gown sitting peacefully at the edge of the footpath on a pile of dirt. A fly scribbled at her ebony cheek. She looked at us as we went by, said nothing, looked down at her hands in boredom. Another woman came toward us carrying a small electric washing machine on her head. Only her eyes were visible behind a black veil. She walked with gliding ease, straight-backed as a caryatid. When a goat approached her, she drew a stone from the pocket of her gown and threw it at him. The goat reared up and clicked his heels, and the granite-spined woman glided on. A pride of kittens caked in mud came skittering out from behind a wall, crossed our path, and disappeared. Like most of the cats in Egypt, they looked as though they had slid down a dirty chimney and hadn’t eaten in months.

  As we walked on I noticed bloody dripping handprints on the doors and fronts of shops and houses. I had seen this same thing elsewhere in Egypt — it always looked like the remnant of some horrible massacre. It called to mind Mansonesque symbols of evil and destruction. Not knowing what was going through Amr’s mind, what mood he was in, I had been hesitant to speak. While it seemed it would be nearly impossible to say anything truly inappropriate to the other felucca captains in Aswan, with Amr I constantly feared being indelicate. But my curiosity about the handprints overwhelmed my apprehension. I had to ask him about them.

  “It is khamsa,” he said. “For eyes.”

  Trailing behind him with my head down, I tried to make sense of that. Khamsa was the Arabic word for “five.” Five fingers, I supposed. “But what does it mean?”

  Amr glanced over his shoulder at me. “Mean it keeps away the other people’s jealous. When they build maybe new house, they take the goat blood and put the hand on the house. For keep away evil eyes.”

  I knew it was an Egyptian belief that other people’s envy could bring a person down. Admiring another person’s infant was considered bad manners, for it represented a threat and a bad omen, and some Egyptians deliberately left their children dirty in order to ward off the evil eye. The belief must have been strong here, for every other structure
on Elephantine Island seemed to be branded with a bloody handprint.

  Amr’s house was big and painted a pleasing ochre yellow. We went through the door into a small dark room where an elderly woman lay on a couch, her face turned toward a tiny black-and-white television. On the television, throngs of pilgrims dressed in white were circling the mastaba at Mecca, a scene that appeared with surprising frequency on Egyptian television. The woman glanced up vaguely as we came in, gave us no greeting, and went back to staring at the television. She had the sagging reddish eyes of a hound, and one long front tooth that jutted between her lips like a little ivory latchkey. Amr muttered something to her. She moaned in response, feebly lifted her hand into the air and dropped it again onto her thigh. Frailty and sadness seemed to be holding the woman captive, and it made me uneasy to be standing there looking at her this way. It was as though we had walked in on her lying naked in a bathtub, though she was fully clothed in the way only a Muslim woman can be fully clothed — in wraps so thorough she looked mummified.

  As he led me out of the room and through the kitchen, Amr said, “That my mother.” At the door of another room he said shyly, “And this my sister,” pointing his thumb at a young woman who was sitting on a bed watching Egyptian cartoons on another small television. Introducing his family, Amr seemed, for the first time, uncertain and slightly apologetic.

  Like the mother, the sister was dressed in a long black gown. She was fat and pretty, with a round shining humorous face, a short neck, very white teeth, and an inquisitive smile. When I stepped into the room to shake her hand, she giggled and covered her mouth with her plump fingers. I could hardly blame her. Sunburned, greasy with sweat, wearing dirty trousers, dusty boots, and a brimmed hat, I must have looked absurd to her.

  Amr led me up some cement stairs to the second floor and into a small room.

  “This my bedroom,” he said, motioning for me to sit down on the only chair, while he sat on the bed. Amr’s bedroom seemed like a very intimate place for me to be sitting alone with him, and I couldn’t help wondering what his mother and sister might be thinking below. If I were an Egyptian woman, I would certainly not have been sitting here. What did it say to them that I was? Amr had spent years dealing with foreigners. It was his job, and certainly his family had grown accustomed to visitors like me. Still, it intrigued me that what would never be acceptable for an Egyptian woman was wholly acceptable for me.

  The room was small and its walls were crowded with photographs that had been clipped from magazines and calendars, mostly pictures of the main tourist sites in Egypt — temples and pyramids and tombs. Over the door hung several framed passages from the Koran written in elegant Arabic lettering, a feature as ubiquitous in Egyptian homes as pictures of the Sacred Heart were in Irish ones. There were several photographs of Amr posing with foreign visitors, and a large poster of what looked like Vermont in autumn. Amr’s possessions were few: two gallabiyas hanging on hooks on the wall, a small red television, a copy of the Koran with a bookmark in its middle, and a mirror. Beneath the bed I could see an enormous metal cooking pot and a latched wooden trunk. Draped over the bed was a blue and white hand-sewn canopy. Like his boat, Amr’s bedroom betrayed a deep fastidiousness.

  Amr went to the door and shouted something down the stairs, then came back into the room and said, “My mother will make tea.”

  I thought, She will? She didn’t look as though she could stand up. As if reading my mind Amr explained that his mother, who was sixty-five, had had rheumatoid arthritis for twenty years, that she took several pills every day for the pain, and that she never went out of the house.

  “She should do more,” he said. “Maybe the garden. Something to make her feel better. But only she lie down and do nothing. She don’t go out. She just looking at the TV.”

  I asked about his father. He looked at his hands. “My father been died for eight years.”

  Amr had been in northern Egypt at the time, in the army, and one day a telephone call came that his father was dead. I asked him what his father died of. He said, “I don’t know why he died.” The father was only sixty years old. Amr returned home for the funeral, and when he and his brothers cleaned out his father’s room they found more than five hundred empty liquor bottles there. “He drink too much. Maybe that why he die. Egyptian liquor is very bad.”

  Looking out the window at the burning sky, Amr said his father was a nice man who had at one time in his life been very rich. He had owned six feluccas and this big house. He had worked for a hotel for many years and then suddenly had lost his job. After that he began drinking and that was the end of him.

  “He never hit me, how some father do. When I am little boy, if I am sad, my father feel sad too.”

  Amr said that his mother, on the other hand, was “too strange.” If you were sitting in the house with her and you put an ashtray down on the left side of you, she would tell you to put it on your right side instead, and if you didn’t put it where she wanted it, she would become very angry. Amr spoke about his mother in a rueful, resigned way, but not without affection.

  Amr sneezed, wiped his nose with a Kleenex, and said, “Half of village has a cold because the weather. The wind by coming from in east. It was cool before. Now today is very hot. That why everyone sick.”

  I had heard this belief before — in hot climates the shifting direction of the wind was responsible for general ill health. It always sounded like pure superstition to me.

  Amr’s eyes had grown watery and red. He dabbed gingerly at them with the Kleenex. It struck me that he was wearing a dress and I was wearing trousers and a man’s hat.

  “Half of village,” Amr said, then threw the Kleenex out the open window. His easy littering surprised me, and then I was amused at my own surprise. Amr’s world and its concerns were very different from mine. Pollution, conservation, an aesthetically pleasing environment, these were hardly issues foremost in the consciousness of a people preoccupied with merely surviving. I remembered that years ago in China, I had once asked a man why Chinese people never had cut flowers in their houses. The man said, “They have no time to think about these trivial things. They are busy just trying to get their next meal.” Poisoning fish seemed to me to be a case in point — it wasn’t sporting, and it was environmentally objectionable. Yet when one is starving, who cares about sportingness or long-term consequences?

  I crossed my legs and folded my hands in my lap and looked around the room, nervously waiting for Amr to raise the subject of my rowing proposal, but he said nothing. He simply stared out the window. The window overlooked the village footpath below and an enormous tangled sycamore that Amr said was nearly two hundred years old. Beneath the tree a pair of glossy baby goats pranced and skittered. I could see women in black sitting on a nearby stoop and two young women stepping out of a dark doorway and into the street with large cans of water on their heads. They walked slowly in a swaying, wide-hipped way, their long skirts trailing dramatically behind them like the costumes on a Greek chorus. The village, pretty as it was, was smattered with trash.

  For want of anything else to say I said, “You’re lucky to live here, Amr.”

  Amr gave me a tepid smile and said nothing. He was an admirably still person, untroubled by social silences. He had none of the forced and calculated friendliness of his peers. Beside him I felt like an anxious, chattering jack-in-the-box. The silence stretched. After a while I said, “You don’t think you’re lucky?”

  He wagged his head noncommittally and said with resignation, “I have lived here all my life.” He told me he was building a house on the other side of the river, at the top of the hill above the Cataract Hotel. “My new house will be better ’n this,” he said, “because there you could see everything and feel free.”

  Though Elephantine Island was perhaps my favorite place in Egypt, I understood what Amr meant. I had spent several days combing every inch of this island for a boat, and despite its beauty and tranquillity, the place did also have a hermeti
c, claustrophobic feel. It was one of the oldest continually habitated spots in Egypt and one of the least changed by the passage of time, which lent it an exhausted, haunted air. On the high barren hill of the southern tip of the island lay an amazing jumble of the architectural remains of various settlements — predynastic, dynastic, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian, and Fatimid — all the eras tossed in together in ruins, one built upon the other, many uncovered from beneath forty feet of soil that over the years had been shoveled onto the island by the flooding river. In this one small place there were the ruins of Abu, which had been settled by ancient Egyptians; the old-kingdom Temple of Khnum; a Greco-Roman necropolis; a gateway from the time of Alexander the Great; and Queen Hatshepsut’s ruined Temple of Satet. The ground there was positively littered with ancient potsherds and human bones, like a dusty museum of history set up under the open sky. I had stepped on a human jawbone there, found pieces of ancient turquoise faience and gorgeous fragments of hand-painted pharaonic pots, and had been startled by the sight of a mummy’s linen-wrapped skull and shoulders poking out from the side of a mound of dirt. Florence Nightingale had been horrified by this particular spot, calling it “one mountain of broken pottery, fragments of red granite, sand, and mounds . . . Such a world as might have been turned out of the Caldron of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters,” a description still dead-accurate a hundred and fifty years later.

  Yet accurate too were the observations of Amelia Edwards and Edmé-François Jomard, a member of Napoleon’s 1798 expedition, both of whom had ventured beyond the southern tip of the island and had been as delighted as I by its gentle beauty. The northwest shore, studded with palm trees, green fields, and sandy coves, was idyllic enough that Amelia Edwards claimed she half expected to meet Robinson Crusoe there, “with his goat-skin umbrella, or man Friday bending under a load of faggots.” Jomard had written, “The verdure and freshness of this region contrast so agreeably with the arid land that it has been named the blooming island and ‘the tropical garden.’”