Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russel

  One morning, our first stroll around the deck with Rosie was interrupted by a BANG!, a jolt, and a shriek of metal. An Arab waiter was passing just then, carrying two large breakfast trays. Thrown off balance by the shock, he lost his grip. Teacups, bottles of Evian, plates, eggs, toast: everything tumbled onto the engine room, its roof open to the deck above it. With a seemingly endless crash and smash, bits of glass and china were ground into the works. Nobody moved or said a word until the cascade had run its course.

  The waiter, nearly paralyzed, slowly looked up and met my eyes. It was a moment of human connection. Try as we might to look horrified, our dismay was quickly subverted by stifled laughter. With guilty looks over his shoulder, the young man put a finger over his lips. We nodded our conspiracy, and he scuttled away, hoping no one else had seen him feed a disastrous meal to the machinery below.

  Karl went off to see how much damage had been done. I leaned over the deck railing, watching fishermen in feluccas put out from a nearby village. One by one, they reached their favored spot and flung out circular webs, beating the water to drive fish toward the nets.

  Oils, I was thinking. Keep your oils! This is a watercolor world, all haze and mist.

  “A piston rod snapped,” Karl reported on his return. “The crockery made it worse. They’ll need most of the day to fix the engine.”

  He stood behind me. I moved against him, shameless in the sunlight. “What are they singing?” I asked, raising my chin toward the feluccas.

  “A song for the fish. ‘Be careful! We are poor! We are coming to get you!’ ” He moved to my side, at the railing. “Would you like to join one of them? The river is entirely different when you are close to the surface.”

  “If we leave Rosie in the cabin, she’ll drive everyone crazy, barking. Can she come with us?”

  “I’ll make it part of the package.”

  He raised his arm and waved until he caught a fisherman’s attention. The negotiations, as usual, took place in shouts. A deal was reached. Ten minutes later, the sailboat had drawn up beside the steamer.

  It was smaller than I’d anticipated. The fisherman grinned gummily and beckoned, the music of his Arabic recognizable to me as some variant on: Yes, yes! Allah-hu akbar! Watch your step!

  “Allah is great,” I agreed. “It’s the sailboat that worries me. Will it hold all of us?”

  “Feluccas are built to handle a load of fish,” said Karl.

  The fellah was transparently delighted by the idea of cash passengers, and I could not bring myself to second-guess the plan. Karl boarded amid much toothless Egyptian merriment. I held Rosie under her armpits and lowered her, amused when she lengthened like a Christmas stocking with an orange in the toe. I followed, glad for the feel of Karl’s hands, steadying what felt like an endless drop. The little boat bellied down alarmingly.

  With the fisherman in the stern, we nestled in: Karl’s back against a net wedged into the prow, me between his legs with my back against his chest, and Rosie in my lap. The felucca’s noiseless skimming glide soon quelled my fears of sinking. Karl and the fisherman talked quietly, and we headed off toward a low sandy depression, full of mimosas covered with pale yellow blossoms.

  “Hear that?” Karl asked.

  I became aware of the birdsong ordinarily drowned out by the steamer’s slapping paddle wheel and engine noise. It sounded like human laughter but it was the call of the Egyptian dove, a pretty bird that seems to find everything irresistibly funny. In the city, they nest in mosques and the galleries of souks, but here the mimosa was thick with them.

  “Listen! That’s the blacksmith bird,” Karl said.

  The sound of hammering was soon joined by a lovely liquid melody that floated toward us. “And a skylark! Where is it?” I asked.

  Karl pointed toward a tiny speck soaring above the plain that bordered the river. “Amazing how far the song carries! Ah, and those are bee-eaters.”

  Of all the birds of the Nile, bee-eaters are the most gorgeous, I think. They come and go in magnificent flocks, radiant with an impossible color: bronze, purple, green, steel blue, bright yellow, all mingled in an indescribable iridescence. I was just admiring their wheeling, flashing flight when Karl hugged my shoulders in quiet excitement.

  “Look, just there,” he whispered urgently. “A hoopoe! There is a legend about these birds. Solomon, the king of the Jews, once lost his way while hunting. He was dying of thirst in the desert when a flock of hoopoes came and led him straight to water. The king desired to reward the birds with tiny crowns of gold, but the hoopoes said, ‘O King, give us not crowns of gold, for men will hunt us then. Rather give us crowns of feathers. We shall remain in safety, but all shall know that we once served you.’ ”

  The fisherman said something and directed our attention farther down the shore. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something large and long ease down a sandy bank, and disappear into the water. “Good gracious! Was that a crocodile?”

  We had seen them before, but always from the steamer’s deck. Now we were on the river, only inches from the surface. Everywhere I looked, I seemed to see pairs of reptilian eyes, staring at me from just above the low, rippling water.

  The fisherman shifted the sail to bring us about, talking all the time. “He says the crocodiles are not so dangerous this time of year,” Karl told me. “When it’s dry, they have plenty to eat. All the animals are forced closer to the river—easy pickings.”

  Karl asked several questions, and the man replied at length and pointed. Karl suddenly sat up straighter. “Over there! A float of hippopotamus!”

  So much in Egypt must be seen for its sheer size to be appreciated: the pyramids, and the Great Sphinx, and these enormous purplish beasts. Not fifty yards away, eight of them wallowed in the mud. Our approach was making them as nervous as I was. One by one, they began to yawn, opening their stupendous mouths to display great stumps of ivory tusk.

  Rosie began to growl, and I shushed her nervously. “Those things could swallow a calf whole,” I warned her. “You’d hardly make a snack.”

  “They’re vegetarians,” Karl said, “but they can be bad-tempered.”

  The fisherman was chattering like a parakeet now, and startled me by pulling up his robe to reveal thin brown thighs. My stomach lurched: one of his legs was horribly scarred where a chunk of muscle had been torn away.

  I looked at Karl, and he nodded, confirming my guess: a hippo had attacked the man years earlier. God knows how he survived! “Shouldn’t we go back to the steamer?” I asked. “Really. This is foolish. Why are we taking a chance like this?”

  All the feluccas nearby were headed toward deeper water in the middle of the current, and the fisherman gestured toward them, explaining. “He says we’ll be safer there, but I’m not sure,” Karl admitted, disturbingly uneasy himself. “Hippos can close their nostrils completely. They walk underwater as quickly as a horse can trot on land.”

  Half a dozen sailboats had converged. Our own fisherman was being paid to skip the day’s catch, but the other fellahin continued to ply their trade, flinging out their nets, beating the water, singing to their quarry. Sometimes we came close enough to bump against another boat, but no one seemed concerned about the collisions or the hippos any longer. I won’t say I relaxed, but you can’t stay scared forever. I settled against Karl’s chest and tried to enjoy the sunshine, though I kept a grip on Rosie, who remained alert and tense.

  A yard or two away, a man began to haul up on his net, hand over hand. Suddenly the water boiled with small fish, trapped and thrashing.

  Rosie growled and began to bark furiously.

  In its frantic effort to escape the net, a fish flopped into our boat, convulsed, and bounced back into the water.

  I shouted, “NO!” but it was too late. Snarling, Rosie pulled free of her collar and vaulted after the fish.

  She sank like a stone. No one moved—it had happened so quickly!

  “She’ll drown!” I cried, and without thinking, I scram
bled out of the boat and plunged in after her.

  The river is always muddy, but the flailing fish had roiled it into an opaque soup. Slimy thrashing little bodies beat against my skin. Like a blind man, I threw my hands out around me, fingers stretched, trying to find Rosie.

  “Karl!” I screamed. “Help me!”

  I meant: Help me find Rosie, but my skirt began to tangle around my legs. Suddenly I was sinking. The river splashed into my open mouth. I gagged and gasped, pulling water deep into my lungs. Rosie was forgotten as I fought my way to the surface.

  “Karl!” I screamed, frantic now.

  I sank again. This was my fever dream come to life, and terror swamped me.

  An eternity later, I felt strong hands grip my hips, pushing me up and out of the water. I was heaved, sputtering and choking, into the boat. For a moment I lay in the bottom and coughed up silt.

  Rosie’s body thumped onto the hull beside me. Certain she was dead, I started to sob and cried out with relief when I felt her struggle to twist off her back and onto her feet. Bedraggled but exhilarated, she shook herself vigorously, flinging sparkling spirals of the Nile into the air. Then the little monster looked around happily, as if to say, That was even better than chasing chipmunks!

  Weeping, I wiped muddy water and tears from my eyes and sought out our rescuer, ready to throw myself into his dear strong arms.

  Hands gripped the side of the boat, and the little vessel rocked as the fisherman levered himself back into it. That was when I realized that it was he who’d saved us while Karl sat and watched the comedy unfold. “Ach, Agnes, I’m sorry,” he wailed, trying and failing to stop his helpless, ruinous, hateful laughter. “But truly, it was so—Mein Gott,” he gasped. “If you could have seen—! The fish! The dog! The lady! The fellah!”

  I must have looked a fright: filthy wet clothes, tangled hair, makeup smeared and melting. To all that, I added cold fury as Karl gave in to another gust of incapacitating glee. One of the other fellahin retrieved my floating sunglasses and leaned across the water to hand them over to Karl. The Egyptians’ sober concern for me made Karl’s hilarity more hurtful.

  “I called for you, Karl. I called, and you didn’t come.”

  “This is a new suit!” he objected. “Besides, I don’t swim.”

  Only slightly abashed, he dried my lenses with a white linen handkerchief and straightened their frame. Looking about as contrite as a ten-year-old boy who’s just made the whole class laugh by belching, Karl held them out to me, and laughed again when I snatched them back ungraciously.

  “Don’t be angry,” he pleaded, and offered by way of apology, “Perhaps this is good luck! They say that if you drink from the Nile, you shall surely return to it someday.”

  Ever since that morning, alive and dead, I have gone over and over those few weeks in Egypt. Maybe that’s why I can tell you about them now in such detail.

  One thing was clear, even while I sat there fuming and dripping: Karl could not possibly have planned what happened that day on the river, but like any good tactician, he was alert to changing circumstances. When he saw the opportunity to make clear the facts of our relationship, he did so decisively. And really? He must have been astonished they were not obvious to me from the start, for he had concealed very little. If I was blind to reality, it wasn’t his fault.

  You see, Karl wasn’t the sort of spy you read about in novels—the ones who skulk around in alleys and know a hundred ways to kill an enemy with a fountain pen. He understood that people love gossip, whether it’s trivia about the neighbors or scandals involving film stars or politicians. He all but told me straight out, on our first morning together, that he was a German intelligence officer with a long-standing professional interest in Colonel Lawrence. He simply let me enjoy sharing what I knew. Imagine that you’d met someone like Colonel Lawrence! You’d have been dying to tell somebody about him, too, wouldn’t you?

  Karl gathered intelligence by being interested in other people— especially people who felt insignificant and invisible. Waiters like Ash-our could tell him about the men who came to cafés. Chauffeurs and laundresses and bellhops probably enjoyed Karl’s attention as much as I had. It’s thrilling to share things you know about powerful or well-known people. It lifts you up a notch and makes you their equal, if only in your own mind.

  Karl understood as well that sharing secrets is a path to intimacy, both real and artificial. Lonely wives and unappreciated secretaries of officials would have found him a sympathetic listener, just as I had. Perhaps as a young man, even Lawrence had responded to Karl’s friendliness and warmth.

  At some level, I suppose I knew all along that I was the source of my own romantic illusions, but for an opportunity to live out those fantasies? I was willing to cast aside morality and dignity, and to pay for my pleasure with anecdotes and information about important people I had met.

  What passed between Karl and me was not much more than a banal sexual affair of the sort that is often indulged in while traveling far from home. It was also more one-sided than I had cared to recognize. So he let me splash, and sink, and flop gracelessly back into the felucca, knowing that it was time—knowing that his booming, good-natured laughter would break the spell.

  Even before I took my spectacles from him and replaced them on my nose, I saw everything more clearly. The real Karl Weilbacher was a pleasant man who had shared his knowledge and enjoyment of a foreign country with a tourist who—not incidentally—was able to provide him with useful information. For this, Karl had paid me in the coin I valued most: attention and affection. He was a perfect gentleman until I demanded more of him. Then, against his better judgment, he became more deeply involved with me than he’d intended— perhaps out of gratitude for more extensive intelligence than he’d anticipated.

  Or, perhaps, out of pity.

  I am grateful to him, honestly. A cruel man would have laughed at my desire the day I first kissed him on the mouth. Instead, Karl gave me what I wanted and was kind enough to wait for the right moment to let me down.

  With his assignment in Cairo finished, he would soon return to his wife and daughter. I imagined them rejoicing in the promotion he’d earn through his success in collecting information about the Cairo Conference with the fortuitous help of an American lady he met by accident at his own hotel. He might tell his daughter about his childhood dog, Tesssa, who looked so much like Rosie. And if his wife suspected anything, by his very openness Karl would make our time together sound completely innocent.

  I knew all that suddenly, and with absolute certainty, and with a curious lack of distress. The mirror of infatuation had shattered, and when it did, I felt many things, but not regret. I had enjoyed something that did not belong to me, you see. When it was taken away, I was disappointed but not harmed. I may not have made history like Gertrude Bell, but I’d had a grand romantic adventure, and I cherish the memories. Even here. Even now.

  The rest of our trip up the river was pleasant in a bland and surprisingly comfortable way. For Karl, the tension was gone; for me, the realities had been recognized.

  The river was quite beautiful farther south, especially at sunset, with lavender mountains rising beyond reed-fringed banks against a salmon-colored evening sky. And, of course, the pathetic splendor of Thebes, with its hundred gates, could fill a book, but you may read of it elsewhere if you wish.

  What else? Let me see … There is lovely pottery made at Kenneh, which is said to be the healthiest place in Egypt. And the Coptic girls in Assiout embroider exquisite net scarves with gold and silver threads. The scarves are sold in Cairo, but don’t buy them in the city. You can choose the best in Assiout and pay much less.

  The heat grew more oppressive by the day. We decided to hire a car and drive back to the city. It was the end of the season in Cairo when we arrived, and everyone was leaving, not just the tourists. Sudanese boys—waiters, porters, bellhops—were packing up their velvet trousers and Zouave jackets before heading back to the equator fo
r the summer. Bedouin dragomen would soon return to the desert, to their wives and children, to their camels and tents. Hotel hairdressers, barbers, and chefs were already on their way back to Europe. Jewelers and antiques dealers would shutter their shops and go north as well. On the Cook’s boats, wicker deck chairs were being folded, their cushions cleaned and stored. It was like an army decamping after a successful campaign. Before long, the heat would become unbearable, everyone said. The flies would make life a misery and sandstorms would become more frequent. Already the pyramids were lost in a yellow haze of particles so fine they never seemed to settle to the ground.

  There was one final night’s stay at the Continental, but I pleaded headache and slept with only Rosie at my side. To my delight, the little boy appeared first thing in the morning, waking us one last time with his piping offer to “Walk you dog, madams?” Rosie was happy to see him, and when he returned her, I tipped him a princely fifty piastres for his long and faithful service.

  Karl and I had one last breakfast, out on a patio, where magpies boldly competed with Rosie for bits of toast. Karl offered to see me off at the Cairo station, but I assured him that courtesy was unnecessary. He arranged for my luggage to be taken down to the taxi.

  I lifted Rosie into the backseat. Karl and I faced each other. I offered my hand. Karl held it for a moment or two. Then he said the most extraordinary thing: “Fear not, dear friend, but freely live your days.”

  There were no hard feelings, but neither was there an embrace. I thanked him for his companionship and his kindness, and climbed into the cab. As the driver pulled out onto the road, I didn’t turn to see if Karl was still waiting in front of the Continental to wave farewell.

  As the saying goes, we were even, Stephen. Karl had advanced his career, and he’d kept his promise to reward me with a trip up the Nile. And I? I would get what I wanted as well: a child of my own.