A Story from Along the Path of Marriage
December 31, 1999- January 1, 2000
The Egyptian
pharaohs are painted in their tombs traveling in the great boat of Ra on the
River of Death. Before passing into the afterlife, they face the judgment hall
of Osiris, where the weight of their heart’s burdens is measured against that
of a feather: too heavy and the soul will suffer for eternity. They kneel in supplication, asking the god
Thoth to share his magic to get them through the portals of the world of the
dead, and the evils that would claim them.
The ancient Egyptians must have
known depression, I thought. I sat
wrapped in blankets beside the electric radiator in the salon of our apartment
in Zagazig, sixty miles east of Cairo.
How could they have otherwise imagined a long voyage of the soul through
a netherworld after death? We had been
through the tombs in Luxor in southern Egypt the week before. I found myself trying to re-envision some
manifestation of Thoth onto the concrete walls around me. Was there some clue in the paintings in those
tombs that I had missed? Something that
could help me negotiate the ocean between my
two worlds?
Osama had just left the
apartment. We were in the middle of a
wrenching discussion about celebrating our anniversary and the fundamental
incompatibility of our different cultural backgrounds. Not that we’d never grappled with this
before, but since my parents had left, I’d been in this mood, and the issue seemed somehow more pressing. I was grasping, if not for resolution, at
least for some kind of release from an impasse that seemed to hang between us
like a physical presence. But Osama had
interrupted my effort.
“I’m
sorry, but I have to go to the mosque,” he said. “I
shouldn’t be long.” Of course, I
should have remembered that it was midday on Friday, the one day of the week
when most Muslim men in Egypt go to a mosque for the noon prayer. He was back in his old hometown now, and he
was compelled to go. And, he would
undoubtedly run into old friends he hadn’t seen in the years since emigrating
to the United States. Promise or not, he
wouldn’t be back for hours. If I were
Egyptian, I would not have been caught off guard by the timing, I thought. I would have known better than to initiate
this discussion right before the Friday prayer. But this was exactly my problem. I am not Egyptian, and it had never felt
clearer to me than it did as he walked out the door.
I thought of my parents. They must be back home by now. They had been with us for ten days. We’d seen them off at the Cairo airport in
time to avoid any potential millennium bug that might have hampered their
departure. I could see them still,
walking slowly away from me on their artificial knees, side by side, checking
their tickets and passports, watching out for each other. I’d wanted to run after them, to go with them
and take care of them both myself. And
now I was feeling I should have. What
was I doing in this foreign world, pretending that I belonged?
Osama and I had come to Egypt many
times during our fifteen years of marriage.
With each trip, I’d convince myself that I could unplug my psyche from
its western moorings, a technique I’d begun to cultivate in Peace Corps. It required willing my native sensitivities
into suspended animation and allowing my responses to flow from my Egyptian
frame of reference. But this time the
technique had not worked. This time the
moorings had come with me, embodied in Mom and Dad. I had spent two weeks interpreting and
explaining; exposing my “Egyptian” self
to an insistent scrutiny that left me feeling fake and exposed.
I was surprised now to think that
Mom, at least, had not picked up on my inner conflict. But then, I’d had no clue of its pending
impact myself. We were too busy to be
introspective. Memories of the past few
days flooded back. My throat still
burned from the exhaust of Cairo. Uncle
Mustafa had lent us his driver Yahiya, who we got to know well as we spent
hours every day in his car. We would visit
one site – the pyramids, the Cairo Museum, Khan-el-Khalili, the old bazaar –
and then find ourselves around 4:00 p.m. in a fantastic traffic jam, when at
least half of the city’s 17 million souls would be heading home for sunset, to
break the fast of Ramadan. I could still
hear the horns of thousands of cars bleating futilely, signaling nothing but
their ability to create noise. Yahiya wove
back and forth through the traffic; sometimes missing his competition by,
literally, centimeters. Mom and Dad were
like kids on a theme park ride. Dad
invited Yahyia to come back to the States to drive in the Nascar races. He was sure he’d have a winner. Mom took pictures of the traffic through the
car windows: the man on a bicycle
balancing a huge crate of bread on his head while negotiating the mangled webs
of vehicles; a cart piled high with a load of alfalfa twenty times the size of
the donkey that pulled it, with an entire family perched aloft.
I could still smell the donkeys and
the alfalfa and the bread and the gasoline exhaust and the potent jasmine air
freshener Yahiya always hung in the car, and most of all, the dust. Dust coats everything here with a dulling
patina: rows upon rows of concrete-block
high-rise apartment buildings with laundry hanging from nearly every balcony;
painted and neon signs on the shops at street level; even the rare attempt at a
garden with scattered trees and grass.
Anything threatening to claim a true color is hopelessly muted by a
matte of dust.
I had tried to be the perfect
guide. We’d opted out of an organized
tour. We had Osama’s family, which meant that Mom and Dad were not
insulated from the forces of local culture.
We tried our best to interpret, but our challenge was enhanced by the
timing of the trip. It was Ramadan, the month of fasting, which
means much more in Egypt than not eating between dawn and sunset. It’s the time when people are even more
conscious than usual of the need to be pious.
The day after they arrived we went
to visit Fifi, Osama’s oldest sister, in Cairo.
We arrived just before sunset and walked up the five flights of concrete
stairs to her apartment.
“Assalaaaamu
Allahikum!” Fifi beamed as we walked
in, grabbing my arms and kissing me multiple times on each cheek. We hadn’t seen her in over a year. She embraced Osama and Sara and my parents, and
switched to English. “Welcome, welcome! We are so happy to have you. Entum nawarna - you bring light to our
house!”
I noticed the surprise on my
parents’ faces as they entered the apartment.
It was ornately decorated, in stark contrast to the bleakness of the
hall and stairs and exterior of the building.
The furniture in the salon was gilt and velvet, Napoleonic style. Sideboards and tables were inlaid mahogany. Oriental carpets covered the floors, heavy
drapes framed the windows, crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings, and
woven tapestries decorated the walls. “What a beautiful home you have!” Mom said to Fifi. “Itfadali,” she answered, “It is for you.”
All the relatives who lived in or
could make it to Cairo were there – my mother-in-law Mama Situ, other siblings
and spouses and nieces and nephews, even Uncle Mohamed, who didn’t usually come
to such gatherings, with his turbaned head and long galabeya. Greetings and embraces continued for some time.
We heard the call to prayer from the
minaret of the mosque next door, signaling the arrival of maghrib, sunset, time to break the fast. Fifi brought trays of apricot and mango and
guava juice, and dates. Then Uncle
Mohamed, the self-appointed shiek of
Osama’s clan, assembled everyone in the salon to pray the sunset prayer. He’s been a member of the group A-Tablir wa Dawah, (deliver the message
and invite people into the faith), for the past forty years, at least. Everyone deferred to his leadership.
I waited with Mom and Dad while they
prayed, men in one group, women beside them in another. Then Fifi herded us into the dining
room. “Subhan Allah ya Fifi! Allahu La’nah!”
We marveled at the table. My God, Fifi, God is with us! The table was piled with food, surpassing
even normal Ramadan standards, in honor of my parents. Fifi had hired extra help to prepare the
traditional Egyptian dishes: molokheya soup, baked chicken, fried
cutlets, roast, baked shrimp, okra, moussaka, macaroni béchamel, fried
potatoes, rice, stuffed grape leaves, stuffed eggplant, stuffed zucchini,
stuffed cabbage leaves, spicy pickled vegetables… It had the planned effect. It was overwhelming. Every time we tried to sit back and protest
that we could simply not eat more, Fifi or Mama Situ would pile more food on
our plates, “But you have not tried from
this…” We ate until we could not
lift our bodies from our chairs, and then we sat, praying for digestion to
relieve us.
Uncle Mohamed would not share in
this sloth, however. “Yallah ya ikhwani”, Come on my brothers,
“Yallah n’itsalli al-taraweh.” Let’s go to the Ramadan prayers. And then to my parents, “Please excuse us, we go to the mosque for the special prayer, for
Ramadan. We will return.” He left, with dutiful brothers and
nephews in tow. The rest of us
(including Osama, who chose to stay with his in-laws) were still at the table
when they returned an hour later. We’d
had a reprieve, and had started in on the fruit and oriental sweets and tea. Uncle Mohamed came right over and sat down
with us, and looked directly at Mom and Dad.
“I
would like to tell you something,” he proclaimed, and went on without
pause. “Do you know why the sun and the moon are in the sky, and why the earth
revolves around the sun?” We could
only stare at him.
“Do
you know who made the earth, and the sun and the moon and the planets, and
everything that there is?” I had
never known Uncle Mohamed could speak English that well. I began to panic. I looked at Osama. He was staring intently at his hands.
“It
is Allah, subhana w’ant’allah, who made the world and everything that is in
it.” My stomach twisted.
Dad responded diplomatically, “We respect your beliefs, and the fact that
you hold them so strongly.”
But Uncle Mohamed was
undeterred. “It is Allah, subhana w’ant’allah who made the moon to revolve around
the earth, and the earth to revolve around the sun…” I knew where this was going. Uncle Mohamed’s goal was to have my parents
recite the shehada, that “There is no
God but God and Mohamed is the prophet of God,” and thus convert to Islam. Dad would soon reach the end of his
tolerance. The rest of the clan was
speechless. They didn’t know how to stop him, without creating a
scandal that might have permanent repercussions.
I looked at Mom and remembered what
Aunt Dee, her Jewish best friend, had said about her. She called Mom “the most Christian woman I know,” meaning Christian in the generous sense of the term. Mom had raised us as Unitarians, and my
father was not committed to any particular church. I was imprinted early on with a very broad
definition of the meaning of God. I
realized now that I had always assumed that Uncle Mohamed’s kind nature implied
an acceptance of religious diversity, and that this assumption had been a
fallacy. I had to break his
monologue.
“You
know, Uncle Mohamed, it’s amazing that we have the same basic beliefs in
America,” I struggled. My words
finally jolted Osama out of his paralysis.
“Uncle
Mohamed,” he intervened, “what are
you trying to do here?” The
conversation between them took off then, in rapid-fire Arabic. “This is not the time for a speech about
Islam; my in-laws did not come here to be converted. Your words are inappropriate.”
Fifi left the table and quickly
returned, “Let me show you the pictures
of my new grandson!” I wanted to hug
her.
Uncle Mohamed did not apologize,
but before he left shortly after, he invited us all to dinner at his house in
Cairo. No hard feelings, I guess… all in
a day’s work for the cause. I later
learned that he travels around the world to tell people the good news about
Islam. My parents took the whole thing
in stride. Uncle Mohamed was no
different, they said, than Christians they know who are similarly
inclined.
Yahyia collected us again the next
morning for a tour of Islamic Cairo. We
drove to the hills of al-Muqqatam, past the old Mameluk cemetery with its domed
mausoleums, now inhabited by squatters.
The Citadel fortress and mosque, the highest point in the city, were
first built by the sultan Salah al-Din in the 12th century,
A.D. Seven hundred years later the last
Ottoman ruler of Egypt, Mohamed Ali, rebuilt the Citadel; around the same time
that my great-great grandfather Fox was a farm kid in Frederick. The multi-domed Mohamed Ali mosque has
dominated the skyline of Cairo since the U.S. Civil War.
We crossed the wide courtyard in
front of the mosque, past an elaborate covered ablution fountain, for washing before prayers. I pointed out the clock that Louis Phillipe
of France gave Mohamed Ali in exchange for the obelisk that sits in the Place
de la Concorde in Paris – a clock that has never worked. I took out head scarves for daughter Sara,
Mom and I. We put them on, removed our
shoes and entered the huge open prayer room.
I noticed other western women with heads uncovered. In past years I would have silently berated
them for their cultural insensitivity.
Now I felt silly for putting my mother through the ritual.
We stood for awhile in the hugeness
of the space, domed ceilings decorated like sun and stars above us, marbled
walls with golden verses from Koran.
Patterns of light from hundreds of mosque lamps and crystal chandeliers
filtered through dust, creating a feeling of antiquity that helped to calm my
spirit. Then Dad pointed to a small
section in the back of the mosque that was separated from the expansive hall by
screens.
“What’s
that for?” He asked.
That’s
where the women pray,” I told him.
“Why
is that?”
I repeated the explanation I’d
heard in the days when I was new to my marriage. “Men would
not be able to concentrate on their prayers with women bending in sight.” Dad looked at me over the rims of his
glasses, eyebrows raised. It reminded me
of my own innate resistance.
“Women
mostly pray at home,” I offered, feeling a need to defend the integrity of
my Egyptian sisters. We left the mosque
then, and I was glad he did not press me further.
When we had planned this trip, I’d
been too preoccupied with tangible physical concerns to anticipate the
inevitable emotional issues. Would my parents’
plane go down in the ocean? The odds
were against it. Would they get caught
in a terrorist attack? Again, not
likely. Would we have electricity and
water if we took them to Zagazig? Probably
not all the time. Would it be too cold
for them in winter, in apartments with no central heat? Almost certainly, yes. Nonetheless, Mom and Dad had wanted to visit
Osama’s hometown, and meet the rest of his family. And so, after several days in Cairo and our
visit to the tombs of Luxor, we headed east out of the city. I remembered the first time I drove on this
road through the desert, when parts of it were nearly covered by sand. Now we drove past mile after mile of new
factories. Leaving the desert road, we
followed the route that skirts the main irrigation canal from the Nile to the
farmland of Sharkeyya province. I always
loved this part of the trip to Zagazig, where the road is shaded by date palms,
sycamore, eucalyptus, and royal Poinciana with their brilliant scarlet-orange
flowers. I looked at Dad in the front
seat of the car. I remembered another
time I had looked at him from behind, when I was a child. We were riding horses and he was in front of
me on horseback. I remembered the feeling of total trust as he
lead a line of riders on the toe-path beside the C&O Canal along the
Potomac River. The path was lined with
oak trees, and poplar and maple and walnut.
We passed farmers and their
children riding donkeys beside the road.
We passed through villages that have become towns. We arrived, finally, back to a world of
concrete, to the town now the size of a city, Zagazig, the provincial
capital. We went to our apartment, and
immediately set up the electric radiator the family had bought us. The electricity stayed on, most of the time
we were there. We had no water during
the day, but it came back every evening.
Sleep was a bigger challenge. Concrete walls are exquisite conductors of
sound. On those Ramadan nights the
streets filled with revelers, energized by the evening iftar and strong Egyptian tea, joking and laughing into the wee
hours of morning. Then, just in case
anyone had been able to doze off, the misaharati
began his rounds through the streets an hour before dawn, banging his drum to
remind everyone to get up and have breakfast before resuming their fast. At dawn, the call to morning prayer sounded
from the minaret of every mosque in town.
And after the prayer, the morning street vendors called up to the
balconies, each with a signature cry.
The gas bottle man banged his hammer against his metal canisters; the
lime seller, his voice harsh from overuse, repeated a crackled, “liemoon baladeeyeeaah, liemoon
baladeeyeeaah…[lemons from the country]”
Cats shrieked, donkeys brayed, and the occasional herd of sheep bleated
its way through the streets.
Fortunately, Osama had brought a good supply of sleeping pills to Egypt,
and we were soon all using them regularly.
I had wondered how my parents would
cope with Osama’s clan in Zagazig: two
sisters with husbands and three boys each, Mama Situ, her brother and his
family, other in-laws, and any of the other siblings who might be visiting from
Cairo with their families. Few of them spoke English well, and
gatherings were always a chaotic mess of boys running, orders shouted, neighbors
dropping by, and everyone talking at once.
It went better than I’d expected.
Mom worked hard at remembering names whose sounds she could barely
distinguish. She mastered Nagwa, Hafsa, Wafaa, Moataz, Amr, and Naimaat. Zam-Zam
finally threw her. The poor girl became Zim-Zim and Zum-Zum and Zi-Zi before
we were through, but no one seemed to notice.
My in-laws tried hard too. They
had practiced their English in advance, or they conjured up lessons they’d been
embarrassed to practice with me. Our oldest
nephews jumped at the chance to demonstrate their improved proficiency in the
language, now that they were university students. They were thrown a bit by Dad’s Maryland farm
accent. “You all have just plain outdone yourselves,” was not the sort of idiom
with which they were familiar. But they
gallantly improvised to fill the gaps in comprehension. And there were, of course, the meals, which
needed no interpretation. Prepared in
turn by each of Osama’s sisters, they were huge, lavish, unequivocal messages
of welcome.
And then there was the visit to the
farm of brother-in-law Moataz. His
family had been wealthy landowners in 1952, when Gamal Abd el-Nasser engineered
a coup against the Egyptian monarchy and the British occupiers. The socialist land reforms of the Nasser era
had diminished the family’s holdings and given legal control to their tenants,
with security of tenure and fixed rental rates.
During the 1980s, market-oriented U.S. advisors had urged Egypt’s
President Hosni Mubarak to allow absentee landowners like Moataz to realize the
value of their property. By October
1997, a new law allowed all landowners to finally retake their land and charge
tenants market-based rent. Moataz had
spent the last two years in agonized negotiations with his family’s tenants,
trying to be fair to all parties.
Violence had erupted in other parts of Egypt, where these sorts of
negotiations had not gone well.
Dad was in his element when we left
the concrete city. His farmer eyes
scrutinized the fields as we drove with Moataz and our nephew Mohammed toward
the farm. He recognized rice fields,
wheat, and corn. Moataz identified the
crops Dad did not know: sorghum, fava
beans, sugarcane. We stopped beside one
of the fields where the farmers were taking a break from their work. A man with leathery, sun darkened skin
approached the car, long dusty galabeya hanging from a sinewy frame. Moataz had phoned ahead to the tenants’
village; the farmers were expecting us.
“Assalamu
Allahikum. Marhabukum fi baladina.” Peace of God be with you. Welcome to our country, the farmer bowed to
my father.
“Thank
you,” Dad answered in English. “We are honored to be here.”
A teenage boy approached, leading a
donkey. “This is my son Hashem,” the farmer said in Arabic, which Mohammed
translated for us. “He would like to offer your granddaughter to ride on the donkey.” Sara beamed. Osama lifted her up and followed as Hashem
led her around us.
Dad asked Abu Hashem (Father of
Hashem) about the rotation of his crops and
the composition of the soil. Abu
Hashem answered at length in Arabic, and Mohammed strugged to translate. “I’m so
sorry,” he finally said to Dad. “I don’t understand everything he says even
in Arabic, and my English is very bad.” Dad smiled wryly at Abu Hashem while he
nodded toward Mohammed, “Looks like this
boy needs to learn more about farming,” which Mohammed duly translated and
Abu Hasem laughed. Then Dad continued, “I would really like to know more about your
irrigation system.” We walked toward
a canal where a water buffalo was harnessed to a vertical stone-wheeled pump,
circling round and round to make the wheel turn. Buckets on the wheel’s rim brought water from
the canal to the irrigation channels running through the fields.
“This
is quite a contraption,” Dad said, studying the mechanism.
“Yes,”
said Abu Hashem, “but these gamousa’s
[water buffalo] are very difficult animals, very stubborn, and very slow. Soon we will have electric pumps, and we will
be free from this big headache.”
“I
can sure understand the need,” Dad said wistfully, “but I sure am glad I got to see this before it’s gone.”
Hashem and Osama rejoined us with
Sara, still on the donkey.
“Did
you like your ride?” Mohammed asked
her.
“Yeah!” she answered, “I wish I could have a donkey.”
Dad considered this, and smiled at
Abu Hashem. “I’ll give you fifty bucks for that donkey,” he said.
Abu Hashem threw up his arms when
he heard the translation. “This donkey is worth ten times that
price! This is my best donkey, as you
can see… strong, clean, good worker. I
need five hundred Egyptian pounds to replace him.”
“Why
that’s highway robbery!” Dad laughed, with Osama now taking over the
translation.
“Grandad,
are you really going to buy me this donkey?” Sara asked in amazement.
“Of
course he’s not, sweetie,” I needed to bring this back to earth. “Of course we can’t take a donkey home with us.”
“La,
tabaan,” Abu Hashem argued. “Tabaan,
of course, you can take donkey with you on the plane,” and we all laughed
at the image.
We returned to Cairo from Zagazig
in time for some final shopping before Mom and Dad left. Dad had wanted to visit El-Ghoreeya, the old manufacturing section of the city. Yahyia drove us to the gate of the most
ancient section of Cairo, but dared not negotiate its narrow streets by car. We continued on foot. Dad was looking for hats. He’d seen the kind of hat he wanted in
Luxor. It was cotton, in a bowler style,
with a three-inch brim that went all the way around. He was going to buy some for his fishing
buddies back home – “perfect for keeping
the sun off your face without blocking your view.” But in Luxor they only had white, and
white would not go well with splattered fish guts. We had looked for those hats in color in every
tourist shop and hotel we’d been through.
We’d even asked for them in Khan-el-Khalili,
where they have everything, or can
get it, “special price, just for
you.” I knew those hats did not
exist in colors in Egypt, except in my father’s imagination. However, to my amazement, Osama had nurtured
his illusion by suggesting that we might find them among the textile merchants
in El-Ghoreeya. And so we walked through the wizened arch of
the ancient city gate, through streets lined with Mameluk-era buildings. The wooden grills of the mashrabiyya windows doted the facades above us, sentinels of
centuries past, when women would peer through them into the streets without
risking notice.
Smells of incense wafted around us,
and the fruit-flavored tobacco sold to burn in water pipes by men whose eyes
followed us as we made our way through the streets. Osama asked the merchants where we could find
a seller of hats and we were guided, from one to the next. We passed artisans of all kinds, working in
leather, glass, wood and metal, with skills and instruments that haven’t
changed much since the Mameluks. And
then one of them told us, yes, there was a man who sold textiles. We followed the direction of a pointed
finger, around a corner, and there he was, standing behind a huge table piled
high with clothing. There were
tee-shirts, nightgowns, pants, sweaters, even babies’ socks made from scraps of
material stitched together by hand, wasting nothing. Osama made our inquiry, and the textile
merchant nodded. Yes, he thought he had
something like that, and he dug around under stacks of knitted prayer caps and
women’s brassieres. Finally he pulled
out a pile of bowler-shaped hats, and brushed them off with his hand. They were like the babies’ socks, sewn
together from discarded pieces of fabric, each one a unique patchwork of colors
and patterns. The effect was more than
adequate camouflage for the guts of any fish.
Dad smiled, validated, and bought two dozen. He had known he would find them. Now he could go home. I watched relief flow through my husband,
relaxing the muscles from his brow to his knees. Only then did I realize how much he’d wanted
to make my father happy.
Mom and Dad went home the next
day. Everyone agreed their visit was a
great success. So who was I now, to feel
so devastated, back in Zagazig, beside our new electric radiator? I remembered how Dad had instinctively
connected with Abu Hashem, a fellow cultivator, with a relaxed intimacy that
Moataz could never risk in the web of dependency and expectation that is tenant
farming in Egypt. I remembered Osama’s
confrontation with Uncle Mohamed, and my discomfort in the mosque. I thought of how my parents’ presence had
been both liberating and challenging for all of us. We were forced to confront the boundaries of
our normal social patterns.
I could no longer pretend I felt at
ease in Egypt. I wanted to go back
home. But I knew that was no answer
either. I was no longer just American,
any more than Osama was just Egyptian.
Was I, were we both, condemned to live our lives in this netherworld of
“in-between,” not one thing or the other?
Had our marriage destined us for permanent dis-association from our
respective cultures? We felt alien to
our native selves. It made us feel
distant from each other.
I remembered an old college
professor describing culture as an iceberg.
[i] If the surface of the water represents the
line between the conscious and subconscious mind, most of the cultural
“iceberg” lies below the surface, in patterns of behavior and expectation we
don’t even realize we hold.
That night,
I dreamed Osama and I were penguins, swimming back and forth in a murky sea
between the icebergs of Egypt and the United States.
Then my parents appeared on the Egyptian
iceberg, and we kept swimming frantically around them, jumping on and off the
ice to warn them about some shoal or crevice, or sharp point that could skewer
them through.
I woke the next morning, New Year’s
Eve, wishing I could get off this Egyptian ice.
I faced a fifteenth wedding anniversary that would be spent with Osama’s
sisters and their families, and I would struggle to understand the mangle of
people speaking Arabic too fast for me to follow. I would try to pretend I was having a good
time. And suddenly, just like that, it
was too much. Mom and Dad were gone, and
I felt they’d taken the core of me with them.
I should not care so much about an
anniversary, I told myself. People
didn’t celebrate anniversaries here, and doing so felt artificial to Osama,
especially among his family. But I
couldn’t stop the familiar memories of my own childhood. Dad had surprised Mom with a gift on their
anniversary every year. He’d always
include me in the “surprise,” asking me to find the best secret hiding place,
and wrap whatever he’d bought her. And
she’d always be surprised, and say that he should not have spent so much, and be thrilled. He always remembered. I’d told Osama about these memories. But the telling of them sabotaged their meaning. Even if he did surprise me now, we would both
know it had not been his idea. I felt
again, the physical presence of the impasse. I could not let go of my self-pity.
Not only was it our fifteenth
anniversary, which should be special anyway, (and which Mom had unwittingly
reminded me of several times by asking what we’d be doing to celebrate). It was also the eve of the new millennium.
And as much as I knew that the Christian calendar has only functional
significance in this predominantly Muslim culture, and as much as I had complained
about all the hype around this milestone in the States, I could not help
feeling a need to acknowledge it in some special way. But I would be celebrating alone. All I could do was write in my journal. And so I wrote until I felt, if nothing else,
purged and exhausted… too exhausted to care about what would or would not be
happening that evening.
We went, as expected, to dinner at
Nagwa’s. “Hafsa just called here to say that your parents called her house, and
they got home ok,” she said as we walked in. “You can’t believe how much it
meant to us to have them here,” she added.
I struggled to control my tears, “It meant so much to me too. I can never thank you enough for everything
you did for them.”
“La,
it was nothing,” she answered. “You are our sister, and they are our family
too.”
We sat down to dinner and I looked
from one familiar face to the next: Mama Situ piling more food on my plate,
Nagwa talking about how she sometimes gets home from her pediatric practice at
3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, her husband Mohamed regretting that he would soon
have to return to his work in Kuwait, Amr and Sheriff and little Osama, who I
have watched grow up over the years, my Sara and my Osama. The emptiness inside me slowly began to
dissipate. I thought of how much Nagwa
and Hafsa miss their youngest brother, my Osama, who was their closest
confident before he married me and moved to the States. I began to feel myself being pulled back
toward my Egyptian persona, but this time with a difference. My parents, the core of me, had been here in
this very room. They had been welcomed
and embraced and fed until they could not stuff in another morsel, just as I
was being now. I had shared my western
essence with my Egyptian family. I no
longer needed to suspend its sensitivities.
Osama excused us after a while and
he and I left for a walk in town, the same town we’d walked in years before as
newlyweds filled with dreams and excitement.
We paused at the bridge over the canal, to admire the view of the mosque
before us. I’d always loved this image
at night, with the lights from the minaret reflected in the water, and the dust
and grime of the day cloaked in darkness.
We walked downtown and he led me to the shop of Hafsa’s gold
merchant. He’d been planning to buy me a
bracelet on this trip, he said, and this seemed like the best time to do
it. I couldn’t help smiling. He’d found a way through the impasse. We went back into the streets and bought
party hats with blowers from a vendor, enough for the entire family. Then we walked back to join the others, to
watch the transition to the new millennium on CNN, by satellite from London.
For awhile I ached while watching
the coverage of the big party at the pyramids on television; I’d hoped to be
there in person. But Osama had not
wanted to deal with the crowds, or the possible security risks. It didn‘t seem that long ago that I, a young
world traveler, single and free, would have jumped at a chance to stand all
night in front of the pyramids and listen to an opera performed by a French
composer. But I was no longer
twenty-something, and I had to admit that the view of Jean-Jacques Jarre’s Twelve Dreams of the Sun was better, and
a lot more comfortable, from a living room.
I could also pretend I was having a more authentic Egyptian experience, removed from the tourists and elite
of Cairo.
But I also realized that my family
was probably watching it, even on television, because of me. Most Egyptians weren’t celebrating the new
millennium at all. The Islamic calendar
marked the year 1420. The party hats
we’d bought were being sold in anticipation of Eid, to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Nonetheless, the boys were excited by the
excuse to take Sara to the roof and set off firecrackers. And everyone enjoyed the holiday spirit as we
watched Jarre’s opera unfold. With each
of twelve acts, the image of the ancient god Anubis paraded across giant
screens set up in front of the pyramids in the Giza plateau. I remembered then, the most spectacular tomb
we had seen the week before with Mom and Dad, in the Valley of the Queens. Nefretari was the favorite wife of Ramses II. Paintings in her tomb illustrate chapters of
the ritual called “Formulas for coming
out into the day” (what Europeans later called the “Book of the Dead”). Nearly
every space on every wall and ceiling of her tomb was covered with color, line
and movement, in brilliant vivid detail.
The effect was stunning – not a world of dark and frightening spirits,
as I’d imagined the tombs would be. The
walls vibrated with life, in all its
abundance: dancers and singers, furniture, clothing, jewels, food, birds, fish
and beasts. There was Nefretari playing
a board game, Nefretari with Ramses, with her children, and then Nefretari
making her voyage through death,
assisted and protected by her gods, on her way to her rebirth, toward her new life. I saw her life remembered, so it could be
lived again. It had been far too
precious to be given over to an unknown fate in death.
.
Nagwa drew me back to Jarre’s
opera. “Why are there no Egyptian composers?”
She asked. “It’s all Europeans, coming here and having
a big party in front of the pyramids because they are fascinated with the
Pharoahs. They don’t care about the
Egyptian people at all.” Then
Jarre conducted his orchestra in a musical tribute to Um Khulthum - the
Egyptian diva who made people across the Middle East sob beside their radios
when Nagwa was a child, in Nasser’s time – and she was somewhat appeased.
It was already approaching midnight
when the opera rolled into its tenth act, the Tenth Dream of the Sun. The
sun asked for purity, Jarre had written, and the gods brought snow. And artificial snow was blown across the
stage, and across the desert. And then,
from behind the pyramids, a line of penguins began to weave its way across the
sand. There were dozens, maybe hundreds
of them. As the camera zoomed in, we
realized that they were young Egyptian men dressed in penguin suits. Several of their laughing faces could be seen
as they lifted the beaks of their costumes, delighted by the incongruity of
their roles. The memory of my penguin
dream came flooding back as I stared, amazed, at the television screen. I laughed out loud. The space between my icebergs suddenly didn’t
seem as murky. It became clearer, with
penguins playing, sliding on and off the ice.
And the icebergs began to change, their sharp points softening. Ice is only, after all, solidified water,
suspended in tenuous crystals. Like the
crystallized consciousness of cultures.
[i] Weaver,
Gary,
The Iceberg Analogy of Culture…..
