From The Egyptian Chronicles: A Fulbright Memoir

A part of a hoof. Then an ear. I can't figure out why so many body parts are mixed with the rubbish.

"Mom, there's a horn."

"Maybe it's from the same animal."

We walk a little further down the street.

"No," Alex says. "Here's part of a leg. It's black—the ear was white." He prods it with his shoe.

I discourage direct examination of refuse.

"I'm not touching it!" He veers suddenly to the left, near an over-flowing trashcan. "Look, Mom—a hoof! A perfect hoof!"

It lies there in a pile of fine gravel, its enamel gleaming in the sun.

We walk on, thoroughly fascinated by the trash at our feet. And besides, if we keep our eyes down, we can avoid meeting the stares from other pedestrians and completely ignore our surveillance in the slum towers that line the road.

"Why are there so many needles?"

"People are doing drugs—see? There's a bottle." I'm not sure methadone comes in a bottle like that, but the object has some sort of illicit quality about it, guilt by association with syringe.

I spot a tail next to a gummy cola can. "Looks like a sheep."

Alex stands over the amputated patch of fur. "Sheep," he concludes solemnly. "How come Egyptians leave sheep parts everywhere?"

"That's it!" Some neglected neural net surged to life. "You don't remember the sheep slaughtered on our front steps in Beirut." 

He was too young, and I didn't let him watch. Blood stained our porch for days. It faded from brick to brown to grey, and finally wore away.

"Gross," frowns Alex. "Wow—there's a really good horn. Can I keep it?"

No.

"For the Aïd holiday," I recall. "It's sorta like Christmas, only Muslims eat lamb." The slaughtering follows very strict guidelines, with lots of prayers and verses from the Qur'an. "The butcher knows exactly where to place the knife so that the sheep doesn't suffer—it's a lot like the kosher traditions of the Jews."

The similarities among Semitic peoples seem to outweigh their differences, once the weapons are taken away.

"In fact, hallal and kosher butchering is more humane than Western slaughterhouses where the animals are traumatized en masse and die a painful death."

"I don't want to talk about it."

Then Alex adds, "If the horn's still there when we get back, can I have it?"

*****

WESTERNER NEEDS TAXI.

As soon as my arm goes up—one swoops to the curb.

"Mumkin Carrefour Mall?"

The young man at the wheel, his dashboard lined with Nubian tassels, nods.

While the man in the passenger seat looks at us coolly, the woman sitting in the back scoots over. Her head is covered in a hijab, but her eyes are visible. They are bright and wide with surprise, shiny stars.

Alex hesitates. "Mom, there's a veiled person in the back seat."

"Taxis are shared here," I say in French as we squeeze in. "The drivers can’t make enough money off one fare so they have to combine riders."

I'd learned this particular point of taxi etiquette in Lebanon where I had harangued a taxi driver from Hamra all the way to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, thinking he was taking advantage of me by loaning the taxi ride I'd paid for to other people. Wrong. The other riders paid, too. Just like here.

Our fellow passengers look at us curiously as they come and go in the other seats, as if we are stray parts of the body politic, odd bits that have somehow ended up in a broken-down taxi wheezing its way through the most densely populated country in the Middle East where over one-third of the region's population lives and kids drink from sewers. But in the last ten years, Mubarak's policies and kick-backs have apparently created a middle class, enough of them to warrant a shopping mall on the outskirts of Alexandria—or maybe the mall survives on the Persian Gulf influx during the scorching summer months when Alexandria's population swells to the point of paralysis.

The mall seems incongruous in the dun-colored landscape, all glass and marble and neon. It's more like a movie set than a shopping center, a kind of surreal icon of the US suburbs displaced to the shores of the fetid Lake Maryut, the ancient waterway from Alexandria to the Nile now silted up and home to families living in squalor.

"Maybe there's a Chucky Cheese!" says a hopeful Alex, as we drive across the parking lot to the grand entrance that tries a little too hard to be impressive. The colorful signage and buoyant architecture seem somehow suspect, like a woman with too much perfume.

I hand the driver 15 Egyptian pounds through the open car window. It's important to pay when you're out of the car so that if an altercation with the driver ensues, you can steel yourself and walk away.
   
"I'm sorry, but the fare is twenty dollars," the driver says in perfect English. He might speak French, too. He's been listening to us talk the whole way. He probably has a graduate degree in engineering or political science. He's lucky. He has a job.

"La'," I reply. "Khamastãshar."

"Twenty," he insists. The driver is doing this, I'm certain, because we're foreign.

"Khamastashar da sah." Fifteen is right, I protest, though I wonder, for a second, if Fatima has told me the wrong price. "Ana sekna hena." I live here.

"Iskandria?" The driver is befuddled.

I nod.

"OK." He raises the money to his lips and kisses it tenderly, intimately, the way a lover presses his lips on the hand of his beloved.

Alex plows through the sliding-glass doors of the entryway, confident in known circumstances.

I follow.

*****

And just like that, the nature of reality changes. The film between worlds is thinner than we often think, more like the skin of a bubble than the heavy velvet weight of the curtains on stage.
Inside the mall, everything is bright and shiny and new, muzak in the background, potted ferns thriving in the atrium light, the fronds reaching toward the skylight with tiny, determined fingers. Many women are showing their hair—some are even dressed like westerners, in tight jeans and transparent shirts—they must have come here in chauffeur-driven Mercs. They are probably educated Coptic Christians or Muslims from liberal families. I unbutton my black coat and drape it over my arm, slide my hat into my backpack while Alex makes a beeline to the entertainment center, his kid radar honed by previous challenges. After the bumper cars, bungee ropes, moonwalks and slides, we find a Western-style café.

It isn't exactly Marilyn's Pie Shop in downtown Belleville, Illinois, but some fiber of recognition seems to beckon from the refrigerated vat ringed by strands of attractive plastic ivy where the tuna salad is heaped in decorative mounds like a landmark of youth, some mini-Mount Rushmore of the protein and fat variety. You can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of the girl. I order up. For some strange reason, I even feel compelled to eat the potato chips with my sandwich, something I never, ever do.

Is it a latent expression of homesickness triggered by the disorienting circumstances of eating Western food while listening to Sting in a DNA pool of Hamites? Or does the tuna just look irresistibly tasty? Do the Egyptians who order it know how quintessentially American tuna salad is? Could it even be that some Egyptians have a passion for tuna fish salad the way that some Americans have a passion for Egyptian cotton? Or is tuna fish salad sales based strictly novelty? Would the Egyptians who welcome tuna fish salad into their personal stomachs welcome us as readily into their collective homeland? Or, like the pirated DVDs of Sex in the City in the shop next door, did they want the symbol of America but not the real thing? Eyes, of course, follow us everywhere we go in the mall—hey! there's a couple of khawagaaya!—but we aren't quite as sensational in the mall as we are in the slum where we live. And I certainly feel more relaxed.

"Look!" I point to a storefront. "Sleeves."

Alex considers The Modesty Shop display. "Those sockie thingies?" He chuckles.

Muslim women, I explain, wear the sleeves under their veils in case they move an arm in such a way that the flesh above the glove is exposed. I also point out the dickies, those bizarre turtleneck garments with just enough fabric to make certain that the neck and throat stay covered, lest a woman move abruptly or loosen her veils in a sudden gust of wind. And then there are the stocking caps, which the women wear under the veils to make sure that no seductive lock of hair slips out of place. The black abaya goes over it all, unifying the parts in a continuous drape of black cloth. The facial veils are mostly simple transparent pieces of sheer black fabric, but the store also carries a kind of hockey-puck face-guard worn by ladies in Yemen. It makes them look very scary, at least to me.

"This is the place you go if you want to dress like a Muslim woman," I conclude.

"You aren't going wear all this stuff, are you?" wonders Alex.

No way, I thought—once I get back to Europe, my cleavage is showing.

"Look at that one," says Alex. "Is she facing forward or backward?"  We consider a manikin submerged in floes of black cloth. On the edge of the veils is a discrete row of black beading, matt, not shiny, since shiny things are considered haram under strict interpretations of Islamic law. "I can't see you wearing that," he says. "You look weird enough already."

He's not quite used to my Egyptian uniform yet.

"Alex—Egyptians think our clothes are weird, too. Here you don't judge women on how they look—here the women are all equal. And they hide Western clothes under their abayas if their husbands and fathers permit it. When they get home, they get rid of the veils and hang out in halter-tops and mini skirts.

"But why do they do that? Why put on all that stuff?" He is genuinely puzzled.

"Fabric or death," I announce.

1) Traditional Muslim women have to do what their husbands and fathers tell them; 2) The men have been taught at conservative mosques that there is a link between family honor and fabric; 3) In order to keep family honor intact, the men tell the women to wear fabric; and 4) If the women don't wear the fabric, wear it incorrectly, or bring dishonor upon the family in some other way, they can be killed. I don't tell Alex the part about being buried up to the neck in the earth and being publicly stoned, a fate Muslim women still suffer from Afghanistan to Algeria, though more often a quick jab with a knife is preferred.

Alex suggests that maybe we should go into the store and buy me some extra layers, but I reassure him that as a foreign woman, I'm not being held to the same standards as my Egyptian sisters. I can't bring dishonor upon my family. Besides the lovely little boy whose hand slips so effortlessly into my own, I don't have one.

As long as I behave modestly, we'll be fine.

*****

In an adjacent bookstore, Alex flips through The Magic School Bus in Arabic, while I consult Islamic Facts Refuting The Allegations Against Islam by Dr. Zakzouk. I go straight to the section on fashion. Dr. Zakzouk does not suffer from questions and confusions concerning Islamic dress. For him, the matter is clear:

The attire that Islam imposes upon the Muslim woman is that she appears in a decent and respectable mien in order to save her from any unpleasant remarks or from being harassed by irresponsible youths or men. Thus the Muslim attire for women is to safeguard their honor and dignity and does not hinder their movement or activity. Islam does not command women to cover their faces with a veil or to wear gloves. This custom belongs to certain communities for which Islam is in no way responsible. (p. 74)

In other words, Islam does not advocate head-to-toe robes and veils, at least according to Dr. Zakzouk—it's the men running fundamentalist mosques. But like the American father who would tolerate a slightly low-cut blouse but prevent his teenage daughter from leaving the house in a transparent midriff, Dr. Zakzouk believes women should dress modestly for their own protection.

He's right.

I've never been in a hornier country.

*****

Every time I'm in Egypt, men offer to give me Muslim babies, a fact I've often pondered. In my experience, Greek men don't say, "You want Orthodox baby?" Japanese men don't say, "You want Shinto baby?" Even Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese men don't proffer their seed, a couple of random Bedouin notwithstanding. But the phrase, "You want Muslim baby?" I've heard a lot in Egypt over the years, to the point that it no longer shocks me. Just the other day in the museum store in Cairo, a man asked if I'd like a Muslim child. "No thank you," I politely replied, as if I were declining a high-caloric sweet.

The Egyptian men who propose their semen aren't aggressive or rude. They're more like Boy Scouts, trying to do a good deed so they can get another badge. Their queries are gentle, rational, almost as if they feel sorry for me. In fact, I do think they feel sorry for me—a single woman, a single Mom, clomping around their country, my maternal longing evidently stymied since I'm not tucked away taking care of the kids. But they'd never risk asking an Egyptian girl if she'd want a Muslim baby. No way.

"Look at it like this," a Greek diplomat to Egypt once explained. "Egyptian girls are virgins until they marry, and they keep the bloody sheets from the bed to prove it—sometimes the evidence is even examined by a Sheikh. If a girl is sexually wayward, she will never get married. She'll bring dishonor upon her family. They may ostracize her… or worse. Frankly, the behavior of some tourists here just reinforces the notion that Western women—."

"Are total sluts."

"Frankly, yes," the man agreed. "But the worst offender is the media. If you want your daughter to remain chaste until you find the right boy for her, how are you going to handle an episode of some sixth-rate US-made TV show portraying the sexual prowess of teenagers? You're going to think—thank God I don't live in that country among those people! And every time you see a Western woman on the streets of Egypt, you'll think she's like the show you saw last night."

Since the women in this land of tawny, dark-eyed beauties are kept under lock and key, the country is awash with repressed sexual energy that cannot manifest through flirtation, much less through physical touching or even autoeroticism. Islamic law confines sexual activity to marital intercourse or to the paradisiacal afterlife where 72 virgins will service each man, providing him with a "sensation," according to commentators, that is "out of this world." Virginity is obviously a key component in strict Muslim versions of satisfying orgasm. For reasons that remain obscure, Islamic sources equate sexual bliss with sexual ignorance.

At their origin, these rules for sexual behavior were aimed at groups of loosely affiliated tribes. When the Qur'an was codified, men married their first wife when they were 15, not 35 or 50. There wasn't a huge mass of disaffected youth, no seething urban centers, no gold standard. Where camel herders once reigned supreme, now horny young men, bursting with testosterone, simmer. In other countries, sexual longing is sublimated into jobs and hopes for the future. But there are no jobs in Egypt. Few men can obtain the minimum financial independence required for marriage. Few know the pleasure of god-given sexual release.

Into this raw void, where the longing of the soul screams and cries and whimpers, steps the Islamic fundamentalist agenda.

No wonder mainstreamers, like Dr. Zakzouk, are losing the battle. But I buy his book anyway. Then, true to my American upbringing, Alex and I march into the Carrefour Super-Center, determined to find a deal.

*****

It begins with a headache on the third day of school. "I need to lie down," says Alex.

I clutch a tepid mug of Nescafe, "Coffee American" as it's locally known. Alex and I have already had our breakfast—feta, pita and thumb bananas—and are about to meet the 6:45 A.M. mini van. "Are you sure you don't want to go to school?"

He nods, looking more confused than ill. After all, we've changed time zones, continents, languages, houses and schools in little over a week.
 
I hand him his coat. The to-do list pulses impatiently.

"Come on—you'll be OK."

I have a poem in my brain—I have to get it down before it flies away. Then I have to scavenge an internet connection, surmount bureaucracy at various agencies, meet with colleagues at the university and undertake the considerable labors of food shopping.  I am determined to get a lot done.

Or so I think.

Something stops me from pushing my kid out the door.

*****

The screams from the golden couch are real. My son is in agony. It is the second time in his short life when he has suffered the kind of excruciating pain that adults seldom forget. I wish I could die myself, transfer that pain from him to me, take it, all of it, in some sort of wretched intravenous transfer that would save him from the onslaught of misery. Oily tears smear his face, his temperature just over 40C/104F and, like the burning star in the morning sky, climbing.

"Mommy's going to help you," I say calmly, trying to hide my fear, my egregious ineptitude, my flat uncertainty as to where, exactly, Mommy might find help.

*****

Four years ago. We are in Beirut. All of a sudden, like one of the Israeli bombs exploding too close to home, Alex is in crucifying pain—he actually passes out from the pain. I think he is dying. I call a friend to help me translate at the hospital, and she says I must call Dr. Ayoub. "Now!" she admonishes. "Dawn, call him now!" She knows the country better than I do. While my son lingers in an ashen state, the film of death upon his face, I dial—it's a rotary phone, so I have to place my finger carefully. Get it in the number slot, slide it around. The doctor tells me to hail a cab and bring Alex to his house. "Hospital! Hospital!" I scream into the phone because I think my son is dying. I can still hear the doctor's words: "Madame, you will regret taking your child to the hospital. I suggest you bring him to me first."

All the way to Dr. Ayoub, I watch my son die—he is unresponsive, then screaming, then unresponsive. I hold him in my arms while the clock slows, slows to a pace that only crisis allows one to perceive, when you realize that so much of what takes up your life, your attention, takes you away from all that matters, the present moment, one breath, and then another.

The doctor greets us wearing a silk dressing gown. We walk past a small, original Monet painting hanging in his living room—I glimpse it the way one notices a flower in a devastated landscape—and go to the examining room. No words are exchanged. The doctor looks Alex over while I lean against a wall, weeping. After a while, he says quite simply, "Your son will live." Later, we arrive at the hospital to meet the surgeon Ayoub has summoned for the procedure. Alex is limp in my arms. The two urgent care interns, who Ayoub has prompted to receive us, are intently reading, The Pediatric Guide to Emergency Medicine. I see it in one doctor's hand, the other one reading over his shoulder.

I don't let them touch Alex until the surgeon arrives.
 
*****

There is no Dr. Ayoub to call in Alexandria. My infrastructure isn't sketched yet, let alone the girders of a network. There is no ambulance to call, no paramedics. The Fulbright staff in Cairo won't be at their desks for another hour or so. They haven't supplied me with a list of emergency contacts because they don't have them. And even if they had them, the numbers change, the phones go out, the line ends up in a store where everyone wants to help but no one understands what you're saying. 

Once a woman I barely knew, a woman who lives in New York City, a mother of two small children, reproached me for not having a pediatrician before leaving for Egypt or Lebanon or wherever. She didn't understand. So much she didn't understand.

Alexandria is not America. Alexandria is not Cairo. There are no detailed maps or phonebooks in any language. Ditto a directory service. Scant expatriate resources. Guidebooks exist in honor of the glorious city that Alexander the Great founded, but no guidebooks to demystify the scruffy modern one. If you need something, it's phone-tree all the way. If the phones work.

My landlady Fatima doesn't answer hers. The switchboard at Alex's school isn't on yet. I can knock on a neighbor's door in the General Tower 13 with an English-Arabic glossary in hand. But which door will open on the path of knowledge, expert medical care, relief? Who can I turn to in Alexandria? The only thing I'm sure of is that I have to know exactly where—or to whom—I'm taking him.

Alex screams.

I stand in the emergency of my life.

Nazek! The Chair of the English Department at Alexandria University! Knowing things is a scholar's business.

"German Hospital!" Nazek shouts into the phone in an effort to make herself heard over Alex's cries.

I half-carry my son to the elevator. But in my fluster I have forgotten to ring the soldier on the interphone before I close the door. I have to drag Alex back, open the door to the apartment, and shout into the interphone: MIDFADLUK! ASANSAYAR! TALATTASHAR!

The soldier sends the elevator up and calls it back down—the only way it functions. As we descend, we view the club sandwich of floor doors and floor insulation—sometimes with wires, sometimes with pipes, and often with crunchy stuff I hope isn't asbestos. The elevator itself has no door.

"MOTASHFA ALMANEE," I roar into the lobby. The soldier's eyes widen in alarm.

"Monsieur-Madame—!" He scoops Alex up and surges down the broken sidewalk, past abandoned vehicles full of cats, to the street to hail a cab. Just the other day, Alex and I stopped at one of the cars where we thought the cats were dead. We rapped on the windows. They moved.

By the time we reach the hospital, Alex's pain has, like a sudden thunderstorm, ceased. He can hold himself upright, unassisted. The aspirin I've given him has kicked in, and his fever has fallen. I don't know what worries me more—his capricious symptoms or the medical consultation. After all, the reason Alex got so sick in Beirut was that a doctor from the best hospital in Lebanon misdiagnosed his illness.

*****

Hospitals that serve the poor are always under-funded, whether they're in the projects of Detroit or the center of Paris. The German Hospital in Alexandria is no exception. Judging by the crowd at the soiled entrance, the ubiquitous trash mounding the steps, money isn't available to staff it properly, let alone repair the cracked walls or repaint. I wonder what the hospitals are like that care for Egyptians who cannot afford even a nominal consulting fee.

The crowd looks at us and parts. The sick, the maimed, the pained, the disfigured, the suffering—they let us pass. I want to wait, to take our turn—I feel unworthy of the privilege, as if that blond hair is being treated like real gold. Did some weird colonial reflex, something left over from the British occupation, open a path through the masses? Or was it more of a class issue than a racial one, since by definition, we are rich Anglos and they poor Egyptians? Or is it the sickly look on my son's face? The worry that inscribes mine? These conflicting emotions pale in the presence of my fear. My only concern is saving my son from more pain.

The nurse who greets us in Urgent Care wears immaculate white veils that frame the moon of her face. She has an admirable command of English. I recount Alex's symptoms. She eyes him skeptically. "No fever," she says, pressing a perfectly manicured hand to his forehead. I am relieved to see her fingernails are impeccably clean.

"But fever very high! Fever 40.3." I insist, pointing to my watch. "One hour ago, fever high. Much pain here!" I point to my stomach.

"Diarrhea?"

"No." I can't help pointing to my bottom—when I'm in sign-language mode, it's difficult to stop. "Here, OK."

She leads us to a cubicle with a bed covered with a clean sheet. Various old, sad, outdated medical apparatus stand guard around the parameter, like ancient retainers of a prior medical regime. The walls are soiled with the gloom of illness and tragedy.

"How are you feeling, Sweet Pea?"

The bags under Alex's eyes, translucent silver shadows, whisper in the florescent light. Then the pain hit. He folds into a torturous work of origami, moaning.

"MIDFADLUK!" I yell, yanking the curtain, noting that I'd promised myself not to touch it. The nurse runs back, her face whitening with alarm. "I see."

While she summons the doctor, I hold Alex in my arms, feeling a kind of fear I had felt in Beirut, when the one you love more than anything else in the entire world, the one you love more than yourself, the one you want to teach, and help, and nourish, and protect, is powerless in the throes of suffering, and all you can do is touch and hold and rock and reassure when really and truly, if you are honest, you only want someone else to touch and hold and rock and reassure you.

"I here," a young man in casual dress announces. "I Doctor. What problem?"

He is a cheerful fellow emanating confidence.  I trust him immediately, although I have no rational reason for doing so. "Here," I say. "Here problem."

A tucked and grimacing Alex points at the upside-down V-shape below his ribcage.

The pain halts as abruptly as it has commenced. The doctor runs his hand lightly over Alex's abdomen in a practiced gesture that has always seemed to me more intuitive than empirical. Then he pulls a plastic glove full of tongue depressors from his back pocket—obviously a private stash—and peers into Alex's throat with such determination that Alex gags and chokes.

"There it!" he exclaims, breaking the tongue depressor in two and lobbing it triumphantly into the trash. "I doctor university, pediatric medicine."

"I doctor university, too. Literature."

"Alexandria University?"

I nod.

We pause a split second in mutual recognition before entering into a lengthy noun-driven communication.

The doctor explains that Alex has contracted a serious bacterial infection called haemophilus influenza. It comes with a high fever, manifests in the throat and drips down into stomach, triggering excruciating abdominal pain. Antibiotics are prescribed. Then the injection.

Who cares what the hospital looks like—this guy knows what he's doing.

"Stop now," he concludes solemnly, referring both to his imminent departure and to the healing properties of what proved to be a large, burning shot in Alex's hip.

I pay the equivalent of $2.00 and leave with medications, precise instructions on food and drink, and an admonition to phone every four hours. I think the doctor is perhaps overly solicitous in having me check in so often. It's only later that I learn haemophilus influenza is the precursor to meningitis.

It's the primary school nurse who tells me. "I have to go through all the immunization records in the school to make sure the other children Alex came in contact with are immunized," she says sternly. "The children from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are legally required to have HIB vaccinations, and the Egyptian parents are very good about it, too. It's the children who were vaccinated in Europe and America that I have to be careful about."

I don't understand why Alex wasn't immunized—his pediatrician examined him and gave him a tetanus booster before departure. I also don't understand how Alex could have become infected so fast—after all, we've barely arrived. But there are moments of life in which so much happens that time itself seems to dilate, and you live more intensely in the span of a few days than you have in last few months, or even years.

Egypt always has that effect on me.

*****

Some lives collect adversity the way that dust collects on wood, on countertops, on tabletops and floors and window sills, fireplaces, toilet seats, bathtubs, nightstands and end tables, lamp shades and book cases, shelves, cars, stoves, terraces, b-b-q pits, dust in the curtains and sheets, dust in my archives, my hair. I can taste adversity in my mouth. I was born with it. Instead of wiping me off, the doctors had to dust me off. On top of my soft, heavenly baby-skin, there must have been a sprinkling of grit that collected in the womb and has been drawn to me ever since. Maybe that's why I'm attracted to desert countries—I understand hardship. I understand friction and fall-out. I know how the tiniest grain of sand can irritate your vision for hours on end, how the bit in the toe of your shoe can hobble even the most obvious progress, the grain in your bed can amputate sleep. When I die, I’ll roll the particles around in my mouth, worry their edges with my tongue before my whole body follows suit. I understand the meaning, the true meaning, of dust.

It seemed to seep through every pore in General Nazim's apartment in General Tower 13, in the cracks around the windows, the door, falling from the ceiling, powdering the golden interior with fine particles carried by the wind across the Sahara. Each grain carts along the memories of caravans and privation, tents and livestock, as well as the hope for the fabled oasis where, at long last, the journey pauses and you can look at the stars, not in the hope of finding your way, but just for the sheer pleasure of their beauty. In the mud brick house in Luxor where X and I once lived, the dust was so bad every glass had