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 12^th 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. 

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[i] Weaver, Gary, The Iceberg Analogy of Culture…..