by Mona Simpson
I stared at the back of his neck. His hair was cut short there but it still curled. Right below where the hair ended were two lines of sweat, tiny drops balanced on the dark taut skin. I thought that moment how hard it was to be a man. Because this was all just in me. And the distance between imagining and placing a hand in the world on someone’s skin—I didn’t know how that happened. That seemed enormous. Even when there were two cultures and no language and you had the money.
But no. That wasn’t good. Being bought with money could harm anyone. Whether he knew it or not. I shuddered then, thinking how much it attracted. There is a real temptation of, you are alone and you can get this and no one is watching from anywhere, no eyes, you are absolutely alone and you have some way to make this person yours. And no one will ever know. I could take what I wanted for American dollars and no one would see. Isn’t that what Kenneth Klicka thought, I have her alone, she has nothing, no one, there is only this basement room and nothing else.
I tapped his shoulder—his skin through the cotton was warm—and pointed for him to stop at a market, a bazaar of some kind by the side of the road. It looked like a farm food stand anywhere in the country at home, except the trees were high date palms. I was hungry. He pulled over the Mercedes, its bulk calming smoothly on the dirt gravel pass. We got out. The canvas and tin-roofed tents shaded jars of oil, dates still on the branch, almonds, pine nuts, diamond-cut pastries in tin pans—running with honey and hazed by close thick black flies—pomegranates, olives; figs lay open and red, dusty purple on the outside. A thin man, dark-skinned with almost no hair on his legs and arms and head, sat cross-legged on a striped rug uneven on the ground. His eyes were mostly closed. A clear glass jar, like something you would buy jam in, sat full by his knee. I kept trying to get close enough to see. I browsed by a table with nothing recognizable on it: some kind of cheese in water, I thought. I saw then in his jar; it was a coiled snake, I couldn’t tell dead or alive.
I wanted figs and dates and almonds and started to gather them, they had brown paper bags, but then my driver came up and with elaborate arm motions pointed to his chest establishing, I’ll do this, without words, and the thin man’s flat sunken mouth smiled a big smile like, I was caught, okay, she’s an American, it’s all game.
Walking back to the car with my bag of fruit, I heard a familiar monotonous sound. I walked across the sand and looked behind the tent. A rickety Ping-Pong table was set up on the ground and two boys were playing.
And then we were driving again, he conducting a long speech to me in Arabic, probably about how much money he’d saved me, and I murmured in ways that I hoped made it seem I understood. “Is no good for you, is better for you,” was all I understood. His one arm sometimes lifted off the wheel articulate and graceful but I wished I could settle it back to driving and I ate the fresh dates, the skins crumbling like sugar and the fruit inside melting like honey. I could eat like this for a hundred years. In the backseat there was a long soft breeze and sun on the left side, so I took off my shoes and my long shirt and just lay down in my tank top and skirt, legs bare, feet on the leather, feeling it almost like another skin. I was sort of asleep but not really. The breeze played on my belly, my upper arms, the bones of my neck. It was good. The smell of the fruit in the footspace swelled up in shells of air.
A long time later he made some punctuating noise in the front and I sat up and in the distance we began to see Alexandria like a series of half staircases on a hill. This was the place my father grew up. It was early evening now, seven o’clock and not much light kept, and what was came oranging around the white buildings, at corners and window wells as he drove through the winding streets. The roads looked older than the Ottoman Empire, some of them, but still used, not kept for antique. There were geraniums in windows like Paris. Close up, the stone and plaster were crumbling and dirty. A lot of the houses had a clay pot on the roof, I wondered what for. Some of the buildings had a white sheen, with mosaic. The streets felt quieter than Cairo, neighborhoods lower, the old sun like a bucket full of water spilled on the bricks. This was a smaller city, I guessed, and it was supposed to be holy too, I knew that. Not just for me.
“Mumkin ahgiz ohda ghur-fa min hi-na?”
I tried to read to him from the guidebook but he didn’t understand. Then I just gave up and moved to right behind his shoulder and showed him where it was printed in Arabic calligraphy, pointing with my fingernail while the car moved unevenly over the bricks. I wanted a hotel. He put his hand to his forehead thinking, I guess, and then exploded with the head-nod ecstasy of yes. He was so young. His shirt was striped, yellow and green. Just then I noticed a Band-Aid on his right arm, near the elbow, a Band-Aid printed with circus animals, the kind we always wanted as children. Is that what became of circus Band-Aids? The surplus shipped to the third world. That would be like American business.
Then we turned a corner and beyond us was the Mediterranean, blue and green and moving with unrest, like a sea of barking dogs. He drove me to an ugly hotel, modern and rundown, and he stopped the car. I said no, crossed my arms, and found the word for old in the guidebook. This set him wondering awhile and then he got it, and the next place was right: white and Persian-looking, with small cracks snaking down the towers. He just parked the Mercedes, pulled the keys out and came inside with me, carrying the pack. It seemed too hard to argue. He wanted to deal with the desk for me, so I stood next to him, holding out my credit card. The man behind the desk took it, produced a key and that was the end of it. An old cage elevator, with script I could never read, lyrical cursives strewn in fancy metal painted white, stopped at the ninth floor where the smell of old geraniums came profuse and dusty and breath-stopping almost, but I followed and he opened the door of my room and it was good.
French doors opened to a small terrace and a sunset fired outside. I looked in the bathroom, it was completely tiled, even the ceiling, so it seemed you could wash it out with a hose. The bed was plain and white, a small prayer rug waited in one corner. The carpet was a very faded red and dirty. Everywhere here’s probably like that, I thought. I don’t know why.
My driver put my backpack down and stood there.
I reached my wallet out of the pack and paid him the amount we agreed plus ten dollars.
He counted slowly, with complication, twice, then his face cleared and he handed me back ten one-dollar bills.
I shook my head no, pointed—for you, then I grabbed the phrase book and tried to find the words that meant “for the children.” In the guidebook, it said you were supposed to say “for the children.” He looked pretty young to have children and I couldn’t find the damn phrase anyway, so I just pushed the money back in his hand and he started shaking his head no, and I put my hands behind my back meaning I won’t take it and then he pushed my shoulders, gentle but a real push, the money held up in his hand between us, and for a minute we didn’t know what was happening and then we were falling back, me first on the bed and then him.
I looked at his skin where it stretched and spread taut wings from his neck to his top chest bones and remembered he was young. Younger than twenty probably. All of a sudden I had to hear his name. I didn’t want him to be Atassi. He could have been. My father might have come back. Then I remembered my father telling me around that old kitchen table, “If I went back, I’d be running the country.” Well, he wasn’t running the country. I read the newspapers. I knew those people’s names. That’s how much I still believed everything he’d said. He said so little to us, I kept every sentence saved. I could lift one up like a bracelet or strand of pearls from a box. As if any young man could be held responsible for grandiose dreams whispered to an infant daughter, when he was new in a country and still thought everything was possible.
But he could have come back. It was more than twenty years ago he’d said that. He was a very young man then.
I rolled over on my belly, reached down for the guidebook. My shoes fell off the side of the bed. He pulled me back by my ankl
e. I felt his fingers like a bracelet. I riffled through the pages. There it was, My name is ______. “Ismee Mayan Atassi,” I said.
He pointed to his chest. “Me Ramadan el-Said. Me born during the Ramadan so my mother she call me that.”
Okay. Fine. I lay back on the bed, the book dropped. This was good. We couldn’t say a word and I’d stopped trying, but maybe because of that something else worked. I always talked too much in bed anyway I was thinking and I lay back and wished he would touch my neck for some reason I don’t know why and I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted that or thought that before, my neck, but he did, first with his fingers, hard so I felt my pulse flutter. I didn’t know if it would be different or the same this far away with someone not in my same language or anything, a complete stranger, but I watched the fan in the ceiling slowly mark the room with carousel shadows and in a minute I was lifting my hips to shrug my skirt off and then we were both naked, he was dark and thin and not different really. I touched him and looked in his face, his cheeks seemed to spread wider apart and questions stood like cool statues in his eyes and I wanted him and started it and then it began. It went on a long time, well into first dark, it never really stopped. I’d turn over on my side and clutch some sheet around me and look out the windows at the clear stars and he’d be on my back with his hands and mouth and then something would feel like a shot, absolute and four-pointed but blooming pleasure and we’d begin again and it went on so long sometimes I’d forget and I’d feel I was the man, entering him and he seemed that way too, opened, split, eyes shallowing up like hungry fish on the surface, as if in the night we traded who owned the outside and the inside, who could penetrate and who could enclose. The stranger was in me and I wanted that. I guess I finally fell asleep. I heard water rushing then and he woke me. It was still dark. I dragged sheet behind me to the window where there was one loud star that almost hurt to look at like a too proud diamond, somebody else’s, and then I wondered why he’d woken me so late or so early and then he pushed me to the bathroom where he’d run a deep tub with a flower floating on the top the whole thing smelling almond and he put me in it. Then I saw the blood. It wavered in the water like a frilly ribbon. I stepped out and saw him kneeling by the bed. The sheet was soaked red. I was bleeding. He started kissing the inside of my thighs, which were bloodstained like some all-directioned flower. I couldn’t tell him how happy I was, with the guidebook, anything, there was no way to explain. Before I lost my period, like a stitch in knitting, I’d minded blood in a prissy way, hated the bother of it, worried about spotting. Now I could have tasted it. I felt like shouting. That was over, the long punishment for what I’d done to myself. I had my own full choices again. He was looking up at me now with different eyes, submissive. He knelt by the bed and capped my knees with his hands. He said words I didn’t know.
Then he rampaged around the room. I found him squatting over the guidebook. He said in English, “I love you.” He kept looking up at me in this slave way. Then I understood. The blood. He thought that meant virgin, that I’d given that to him. “No,” I tried to tell him. “No.” He picked me up then, an arm under the crook of my knees and one under my back. He took me to the tub again. He was carrying me like some fragile child. I had to clear this up. But there was no way. His brown eyes fixed. I slipped down into the water, and I heard him again in the other room. I heard him pull up his pants, the clink of keys and change. He stole out the door. I figured I’d never see him again and that was fine like a sealed perfect envelope. A tangerine peeled, every section intact. I got up out of the water to latch the door behind him, though. Then I went back to sleep, thrilling even in dream every time I felt the trickle of blood.
The next morning, the hills were still raw brown with a haze of purple on the surface. The ocean was a plain gray color. I felt proud because with the guidebook I ordered room service coffee and it came with a wet rose on the tableclothed tray. When I took a bath I remembered last night and pulled the petals which fell off easily because the flower was full and seedy. I sat with the coffee on the tiled rim of the tub. A line of blood ran jagged like the thinnest twig. This blood was going to be a problem. I went to the guidebook but there was nothing under Tampax. This was definitely the kind of thing you should bring with you to a place like this, but I hadn’t had a real period for so long. I tried to think what my grandmother would have done. She wouldn’t have liked it one bit, either. And I never was like her, the kind of woman who traveled prepared with things like safety pins and Handi Wipes. I called the desk and sat with the guidebook and finally sputtered “Tampax” in English and the man said, “Oh Tampax,” and a few minutes later the elevator creaked and a boy appeared with a blue unopened box on a clothed tray with a new rose. I put on the white shirt, brushed on mascara. Then I left to get going.
His car was there, parked across the street, the sight hit me like a sling. I tiptoed up: he was asleep on the backseat. He looked pathetic. He was too big for the car, and he slept with one leg folded under him and his head bent against the window. I left him be and walked downhill to ask directions at a fruit stand. I waited my turn. The high citrus smell tickled my whole face and behind the man two towers hovered made of orange hulls and lemon hulls. When it was my turn, I showed the man my scrap of paper with the Miramar address and he pointed. I wanted to buy lemonade but then I remembered I still hadn’t changed any money. So I started walking.
I passed a movie theater with calligraphy on the marquee. But the photographs by the ticket booth showed a huge Omar Sharif, older now, with salt-and-pepper hair. So his career hadn’t fallen to ruins. He was just here.
This was the day. Morning was different here. The sun took its time and then alighted with weight.
The thing I hadn’t expected in Egypt was the whirring of bicycles everywhere and they, like the cars, were all black and old. In the morning already and last night on the street, the wheels in the soft air made a constant running noise. It was not like insects but like butterflies, if butterflies had a noise. And at the edge of your hearing, you were always reminded by the tinny metallic dingings of little bells.
I heard birds as I climbed the winding street and I smelled myrtle and sage. There was also the distant hammer sound of construction. After a half hour outside I was used to camels. I’d stopped and felt one’s black lips wet and soft, gumming my hand. Then all of a sudden, I felt something nudge my hip. It was the Mercedes. At first I was mad. I twisted my skirt to see if it made a mark. He sat at the wheel grinning, motioning me to get in. I didn’t see what else I could do, so I got in the front seat, giving up my adventure already but glad anyway. I showed him the Miramar address.
He put a hand, softly, on my lower belly. I wriggled away.
But it was a good thing he found me. He studied a map and it took us fifteen minutes of turns on curving streets, in the opposite direction than I’d started.
Then we were there at the house. It still stood. A straggly tall eucalyptus waited in front. Ramadan handed me back the scrap of paper where the address was, written by the woman in the office with the parrot. Rania. I curled up out of the car. I almost didn’t want to go. I knew before I started up the short walk that I would never forget. It was a wooden and concrete house, three floors with two balconies. Brownish-colored with some old rusty metal and stucco. The roof was red tile, Spanish looking. I saw a metal drainpipe like at home. The eucalyptus moved in wind above me. I wanted to get rid of the driver. Once I knocked on the door, I didn’t know how long I would be. I didn’t want anyone waiting for me.
I went back, banged on his window and motioned wildly, trying to say it could be a long time. He pointed to his chest, then to the floor of the car. I guess he meant he’d be here. I shrugged, tapping my watch. I spread out my hands wide. Eternity. He folded his arms and closed his eyes.
Fine. I didn’t care. It was beyond me. I’d tried. The sky was a clear blue again with no clouds and I heard the drift of a slight wind in the eucalyptus leaves, a tired and
very old sound. Patience, they seemed to whisper, patience. Summer is long, and peace. I straightened my skirt and walked to the door. My heart was beating like something flinging itself again against the wall of a room. There seemed to be no bell, so I knocked. Crude glass and metal pipes hung from the eave and worked as wind chimes. Nobody answered. The porch was cool, clay-tiled. I kept knocking. This was the end, I thought. I stood there at the door a long time. This was it.
There was a number printed on the door and I checked my slip of paper. Yes, this was right: 34. Outside the door was an old orange plastic chair and on the ground, the dish for a plant, filled with what looked like rainwater. Then I heard a window shove open in the house next door to the right, and a woman’s hot, fast voice spilled through and I said, “Ismee Atassi. American,” and in moments there was noise inside her building like feet on a staircase and a door whipped open and the woman stood there looking me over.
She crossed her arms firmly, like a known prayer, over her substantial chest, all the time saying words flying from branch to branch and the only ones I recognized came out “no America, no America,” her head shaking. For a moment I thought she was trying to chase me away but then she was showing me into her house with her arms almost bowing, big loops of them hanging down like stretching dough from shoulder to elbow, then again from elbow to hand. She stood with her ample back to me, hands on hips, calling up the stairs and a little girl ran down, a round-limbed blue-eyed blonde. The woman said something to the child and the child gathered her skirts in both fists and started running. “No America,” the large woman said again, this time bending in what was almost a curtsy. Now I got it; she meant she didn’t speak English. She motioned me to sit and I did. She sat across from me and folded her hands on her lap and her feet one behind the other. I couldn’t help notice her legs. Her calves were enormous, over that dainty gesture of the feet, patterns of black hair caught under nylon stockings. Then she sprang up—she was graceful and light on those feet—and she slowly lifted the lid off a green cut-glass bowl of some kind of candy. To be polite I took one. It was a date wrapped around nuts, rolled in sugar and ground pistachio. It was good. She slowly pantomimed drinking from a glass then lifted her eyebrows to ask if I wanted anything. I shook my head no, not wanting to get into the what-kind-of-beverage charade.
