by Warren Adler
Before they went out, he bent under the bed and removed the traveler’s checks. Somehow, her presence removed any sense of security in the room. This country was not a place to be short of funds, he decided.
She started on him again in the outdoor café, where he ordered a brioche and Turkish coffee for both of them. The coffee tasted of curry. As always, the streets were a mass of crowds and color.
“Why is it so important?” she asked between bites of the brioche, which she ate ravenously. He also noted that her eyes searched the crowd, like an animal watchful for predators.
“To them as well,” he said. “Why is it so important to them?” It seemed the heart of the puzzle.
“A rabbit doesn’t question the fox,” she said.
He liked the analogy as well as the revelation of her intelligence. At least she had not tried to deceive him about that. He looked into the crowds, surprised how he was now able to separate the street images.
He watched a barefoot boy push an incredibly large wheelbarrow load of kerosene cans, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. A goat roamed aimlessly in front of a dingy barbershop, where a barber in a dirty striped djellaba shaved an old man who slumbered during the process on a broken chair. A sleeping dog lay not far from where they sat, his mangy coat covered with flies. This land is mad, he thought, as his attention wandered again to the girl. She, too, was an enigma.
“What shall I call you?” he said. “A name.”
“Abdel.”
“That’s a boy’s name.”
“My name is Abdel,” she repeated, dipping her face into the coffee cup.
“And you think I’m crazy,” he said.
“If you go back there,” she said.
“I have to.”
“In that place, one body more or less won’t matter. Especially a foreigner, a stupid American.”
“Now I’m stupid.” Despite her bruises, her concern for him seemed exaggerated. Besides, he felt a lingering distrust of her story.
“You are dealing with people who are very powerful. They do what they want. The government does nothing. The police look the other way.”
She bent closer to him. “Many things here are not legal.” She held her nose in the air and sniffed. “Hashish,” she said. “It is everywhere.”
“A body needs some pleasure, some respite from”—his eyes swept the streets—“from this.”
She looked at him blankly, not comprehending, and he saw how wide the gulf was between them.
“Look,” he said gently. “Thank you for warning me. I’m also real sorry you got involved. But I think you had better walk away. It’s not your affair.”
She stared at the black grounds in her coffee cup, and began to pout.
“No need for gloom, kid. You do your thing. I’ve got to do mine.”
Dipping a hand into his pocket, he drew out a roll of bills and peeled off an Egyptian pound, putting it on the table in front of her.
“For services rendered,” he said. “Now we’re even.”
“You are very stubborn,” she replied, lifting the pound note as if it carried some disease and placing it on the empty plate that had held his brioche.
“Crazy. Stupid. Stubborn,” he said sarcastically, standing up. He had had about enough of it. “Then pay for the damned breakfast,” he snapped, moving off. He hadn’t wanted to be so abrupt, but it seemed the only way to get rid of her.
He looked toward Ezbekieh Gardens for his bearings. Soon, she was beside him again.
“The old woman who was sitting in the entrance,” she said. “She was angry with them for hurting me. She was not as afraid as the others.”
He ignored her, and began to move through the traffic. A bus slowed nearby and he ran for it, grabbing a handhold and hoisting himself up. She jumped after him, using his shoe as a foothold. The bus lurched forward.
“You don’t give up?”
“Maybe I’m crazy, too,” she muttered.
“No maybes,” he said. He tried to make it sound like a joke. She did not smile.
“Without me, you won’t even find the place.”
He groaned and shook his head.
“I speak the language,” he snapped.
“It will be like yesterday,” she said, her voice rising above the traffic din.
The bus chugged forward, stopping frequently as crowds shoved and clawed their way through each other on the moving vehicle. He studied her battered face.
“It’s not your show,” he said finally. “I don’t want to expose you. Really, Abdel.” He ignored the incongruity of her name.
They were passing the Presidential Palace, Abdin, a huge somber structure surrounded by a fence. Soldiers in black unpressed uniforms and bared bayonets guarded each entrance.
“I don’t want you on my conscience,” she said belligerently.
***
They dropped off the bus near the old aqueduct. Crossing the street, they entered the cemetery. The gloomy aspect of the mausoleums, their faded sameness, recalled his previous confusion. But he did not want to show her that he had lost his bearings, and strode forward resolutely.
“Why do you insist on being stupid?”
“Why don’t you just bug off?” he said, turning toward her.
She looked down at the ground and kicked the dust with her worn sandals. He wondered if she were about to cry.
“It’s none of your business,” he said, too gently, hinting at his lack of conviction. Ragged children smiled at them as they milled aimlessly in the blazing sun. A sheep baa’d persistently. The loud beat of rock music blared from a rubble-strewn alley.
“You’ll never find it,” she said. “You’ll just wander around until someone decides to rob you.”
She repeated the admonition several times as he pressed forward again. After a while, he stopped and faced her in exasperation. She looked back at him, dry-eyed, tightlipped, smug.
“Just point the goddamned way,” he said. The heat and his confusion increased his irritation. “And beat it.”
“It is not so simple.”
“Shit,” he spat, disgusted with himself, with her, with the idea of his so-called mission, with this filth, with Egypt.
“You are going in the wrong direction,” she said quietly, standing her ground. Shaking his head, he offered the most reluctant nod of assent he could muster.
She moved ahead of him, now sure of his consent. Occasionally, she looked back over her shoulder to be sure he followed her.
They walked for a long time, slower than yesterday’s frenetic pace. She was being more cautious, watchful. She paused in a narrow, dusty alley and pointed to an open area several yards beyond. He saw the mausoleum. The old woman was sitting on the threshold, surrounded by the children.
“If you are smart, you will talk to the old woman alone. Without the men inside seeing you. That will be healthier for you.”
He started to move away from her, ignoring her warning. Her fear seemed abstract. Then he reluctantly decided she was right and checked himself, moving to the protection of a ruined wall.
“How?” he asked. Abdel squatted against the wall and he crouched beside her. She sighed, emphasizing her own exasperation.
“She will go to the water faucet. Sooner or later.”
“Suppose she doesn’t?”
She looked up at him and scowled, showing her authority. Obediently, he sat beside her, his fingers circling in the dust, watching the mausoleum. The woman could not see them.
The wall gave them some protection from the sun, which baked relentlessly through the smog. He forced himself to sit there, annoyed at his dependence. The place was a wasteland, a moonlike landscape where even the living had the aspect of moving cadavers. Was this a preview or afterview of his own world? It was inconceivable that his mother could possibly have lef
t a daughter here. He tried again to summon up some image of her. Isis!
How had his mother lived with it all these years?
Sitting there in the fetid air, he groped in time for the sparse bits and pieces of this land his mother had recalled, bits and pieces of images she had inserted in his mind when he pressed her. The pyramids are not Egypt, she had told him, inexplicably. Nor the Sphinx. They mock us, she had said. Well, then, who put them there? he’d asked. Egyptians? Strangers?
What did these people in the City of the Dead know of the pyramids, the Sphinx? He wondered how he would have reacted if his mother had confessed that he had a half sister living in Seattle, or San Diego, or on the other side of Manhattan.
Abdel stirred, touching his knee. The woman had risen and was moving, like some broken antique machine. A motley group of her tiny wards followed her. What was she, he wondered, a nanny, a baby sitter? He stood up.
“Wait,” Abdel whispered. She seemed more alert than him. They watched the woman move away from the mausoleum. Abdel rose and loped along the shadow of the wall, then turned in the opposite direction, beckoning him to follow.
They moved into another street, confronting the woman head-on as she turned the corner. Abdel hung back. The woman, coping with the inevitability of her entrapment, looked around her, then faced him, her one good eye peering at him from its wrinkled chicken-skin sack.
“I told you,” the woman said with a sigh. “It is trouble.”
“Why trouble?” he asked, his voice deliberately flat and menacing. But the woman was not intimidated. She opened her mouth, showing the stumps of teeth on a bed of pink, empty gums.
“You will bring only trouble. To her as well,” the woman whispered.
“Isis?”
The woman nodded.
“You know where she is?” The one good eye opened as wide as it was able, swimming in its sack, observing him with ominous foreshadowing.
“Always the same question? Where is Isis? Where is Isis?”
“Who asks?”
“He.” Her good eye moved as if to signify some vague direction.
“Who?” he pressed.
“Zakki.” She hissed the name. “He cannot forget.” She looked at her gnarled fingers. “He thinks she will come back to old Herra someday. Never.”
She talked haltingly.
“She was left here by her mother?” Si asked. “Why?” It was his private enigma. But it did not seem to have the same relevancy for her. She nodded. It did not answer his question.
“Why?” he repeated. Her good eye stared at him.
“She was your mother as well?” the woman said, scrutinizing him. She nodded her head and showed her awful smile. “The same eyes.”
“You knew her?”
She nodded her head.
“It was not her fault,” the woman said. “She had no choice.”
He had not expected this defense of his mother’s motives. He felt suddenly closer to the woman.
“She died. In America,” Si said. “She was a good mother. I loved her.”
The woman watched him and her aged face seemed to grow darker, the wrinkles deeper etched. “Then why does it matter?” she asked. Beyond the parchment face, her mind was alert.
“It matters,” he said.
“Let the old dogs sleep,” she said.
“It is too late for that.” He felt suddenly that he had passed some Rubicon, had proceeded beyond the point of no return.
“Why does he want Isis?” he asked, knowing it was, for her, the heart of the matter. She bent closer to him and he could smell her stale breath.
“For what she did to Zakki. There is no forgiveness for that.” A croak bubbled up from her throat. She put a gnarled finger up against her closed lips.
“I had better be silent now,” she said, softly.
“You can’t,” he pressed.
She started to move away, but he blocked her path.
“I must find her,” he said.
“If Zakki can’t find her, no one can.”
“I can,” he said with theatrical bravado. She surveyed him again and shook her head.
“You will be worse than dead,” she hissed.
“Worse? What is worse?”
She turned suddenly, and the ancient cords of her neck tightened as her head moved like a lighthouse beacon, surveying the indifferent faces on the street. She turned to him again.
“You had better go home,” she said. “Or perhaps they will settle for you instead.”
Settle? He was chilled by the assertion. What did she mean? A prod in his ribs made him turn. It was Abdel.
“Him,” she said, calmly. “Don’t look. The man who beat me last night. We must go.” The old woman sensed the surveillance.
“You had better heed the boy,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m not afraid. And I won’t go until you tell me something.” Abdel tugged at his T-shirt. The old woman contemplated his face. Again, her one eye turned in its sack. Her voice grew lower, barely perceptible, and he had to cock an ear to hear.
“She is safe now. She came to me that night. She was alone, afraid. I brought her to him at the university.”
“To whom?”
The woman’s voice dribbled off, and she began to walk again. Abdel prodded him.
“To whom?” Si pressed. He reached out and grasped the woman by her shoulders.
“I have never told a living soul,” the woman said. The words had been expelled in a tiny whisper and her single eye became blurred with tears. “No,” she said, her voice rising now, as if the confession had exploded something inside of her. “I brought her to him. And he took her away. From them.”
“But where? Where is she?”
“Go away. You can only hurt her.”
“But I must know.” The woman’s face grew blank.
“Please,” Abdel pleaded. Some sense of an alien, potentially harmful danger asserted itself. Turning, he saw the man, a huge black man with a bulbous face and tiny, sinister eyes. He watched them blatantly, keeping his distance.
“She is right,” the old woman said. “You don’t know them. Life means nothing.”
“Where is Isis?” he persisted.
A dark pall descended over the woman’s face. Her eye looked beyond him. Turning, he saw that the man was moving toward them.
The sense of danger overwhelmed him. It was time to go.
For now.
Chapter Nineteen
He let Abdel propel him forward, until they were running as fast as they could. Sweat oozed from his pores, soaking his clothes. He ran beside her like an automaton, his mind turning over what the woman had said. I brought her to him at the university. It meant nothing.
They reached the outside of the cemetery, crossed the train tracks, and proceeded swiftly into a warren of highrise slums that began on the other side of the old aqueduct. Animals and people crowded the narrow streets. Incongruously, many of the faces were smiling, as if all this frantic scrambling for survival was a vast entertainment. For a moment, he thought he was in an amusement park. Disneyland of the Middle East!
They reached a huge bazaar. He bought two oranges from a vendor and gave Abdel one.
“The woman knew,” he said.
He rolled it over in his mind. What she had said cast a long shadow, the edges blurred and unfocused.
“I have to go back,” he said. There were too many unanswered questions. He cursed his ineptness at this business. He saw the girl’s frightened perspiring face. She shook her head.
“They’ll hurt you. I know they will.”
The danger she transmitted was visual, and he felt its strength. But she said nothing.
“Later,” he mumbled. “When it gets dark.”
They finished the oranges and edged their wa
y through the crowds of the bazaar. He bought them some helpings of steaming ful from a yellow-toothed street vendor, who spooned the mash of beans, rice, and lentils into a large circular bread loaf. They ate it as they walked. The bazaar thinned and they passed the old Mamluk tombs to the high stone walls of the Citadel built by Saladin. Climbing the hill, they entered the Citadel itself in which Muhammad Ali, in a fit of devout megalomania, had built his incredible mosque.
He purchased two tickets and they entered the huge courtyard, moving to the stone balustrade that surrounded it. Below them, from this highest vantage point in the city, they could see Cairo simmering in the heat and smog. Miraculously, in the distance, the Pyramids of Giza caught the sun’s spangles.
“Makes you feel like the most inconsequential speck of bacteria,” he said.
She looked at him, uncomprehending. He turned toward the high dome of the mosque, recalling the Allah occasionally invoked by his mother. Praise to Allah. He recalled her voice. Why praise? he wondered, turning again to view the umber city in its dusty halo.
A group of squeaky clean Japanese tourists led by a guide holding a little Japanese flag stopped by what looked like a well not far from where they stood.
“Allah,” the guide yelled down into the well. “Allah,” the voice came back in a booming echo.
“There’s your Allah,” Si said to Abdel. “An echo.”
Abdel looked at him curiously. She turned to watch the city. He observed her. A breeze had caught a loose curl and he could see, clearly, the feminine outlines of her face, a visage that she had, so assiduously, tried to hide. She must have felt the penetrating observation, turning away to hide her face.
Sound suddenly exploded from the minarets, a clarion, it seemed, announcing the falling sun.
“There is no god but god. Come to prayer. Come to salvation,” a scratchy loudspeaker voice intoned in Arabic.
They watched the spangles on the minarets grow orange. Crowds of the faithful began to enter the mosque.
“I must go back now,” he said, adding quickly, “I think I can find my way.” He was trying to pry her away gently.
