Evel Knievel Days (12 page)

I brushed my teeth madly, vigorously, and I wedged myself into
my clothes. I’d brought the copper bracelet, too. It had whispered softly to me as I packed, saying:
Bring me, bring me, bring me
. Now, on the brink of leaving the hotel (maybe), I slipped it in my pocket, along with the Evel Knievel bookmark. I needed protection of some kind. This seemed to be a way of getting it. Obsessions and compulsions occur in cycles, and the speed of my cycles, the move from panic to calm to panic once again, seemed to be increasing.

I dashed to the elevators and rocketed down to the lobby. Actually, both of those things probably happened at normal speed, but they felt dangerous to me, they felt like being behind the wheel of a brakeless car. Taking a deep breath—and choosing one of the many addresses on my notecards—I headed out into the maelstrom.

I would not be the first person to compare walking through Cairo to the video game Frogger. The difference being that if I were flattened by a truck (or a taxi or a private sedan or a military Humvee or a pedicab or a motorcycle or a rickshaw or a donkey pulling a wooden cart full of melons, all of which sped by with a certain wild grandeur) (except for the donkey, the donkey was slow and sweet), I would not regenerate a new life at the bottom of the screen.

One hundred and twenty degrees. A dusty hot wind. I’m a sucker for cities, but Cairo wasn’t easy. It didn’t open itself to me immediately. I wasn’t prepared for it, not really. I mean, I knew a lot about the place from textbooks, from hours and hours in the little Saturday school in Billings. Tante Wada had supplemented my studies with a series of videos, videos that she’d often show me as soon as we got back to her house, videos with names like
Yemen Today!
and
Oh My, Oman!
These had been aggressively cheerful instructional films
with cheap production values and direct sponsorship from the Ministries of Tourism. They didn’t get me knowledge of the street in the Arab world, of the textures of daily life. Somehow I wasn’t prepared for the visual image of the poverty, for the pollution, for the rows of informal settlement houses that sagged into each other, that seemed to be reaching for the street, leaning toward it and opening their hands in supplication. I thought of Dickens’s Coketown, with its black ladders appended to the outsides of tenement buildings, black ladders used exclusively by undertakers to lift out coffins where the stairs were too narrow.

I found myself avoiding the asphalt where possible, because it was melting. The asphalt was melting and I saw children playing with it, scooping handfuls of it from the margins of the roadway, scooping it up and flinging it at each other like mud. I sweated through my new shirt, the fabric sticking to my chest and my back. My feet chafed against my new loafers, which turned out to be a little too big. Blisters bloomed on both of my ankles, big wet blisters that sent tendrils of pain up the backs of my calves with each step.

It wasn’t all grim. One of the things that worked in my favor was that anyone I talked to thought my accent was hilarious. A few people laughed at me outright as soon as I began to speak. I couldn’t blame them. Imagine someone asking you for directions in proper Victorian English:
Kind sir, perchance you could direct me to the nearest purveyor of fine comestibles?
I took the subway (surprisingly pleasant) to the other side of downtown. I walked and sweltered but finally made it to the first address.

2 Omar Ibn El Khattab. Big apartment building, ground-floor apartment, two pigs in the courtyard in a jolly-looking, trash-filled
sty. The pigs sniffed me as I walked past, raising their snouts in unison and smelling the air. I found Apartment 2 and knocked on the door, using the sizable brass knocker, its metal scorching hot in my palm. I knocked three times, long ponderous knocks, knocks that could certainly be heard in the interior of the house. I heard shuffling in the apartment. Someone was opening a series of locks. What would Natasha think of me now? My heart clattered in my chest. Sure, this wasn’t jumping over the Grand Canyon, like Robert Craig Knievel, but for me—for me it was close.

The door swung open, revealing a wiry little man in a powder-blue Adidas tracksuit.

“
Sabaah el-kheir
,” he said.
Good afternoon
.

“Good afternoon,” I repeated. So: This wasn’t my father. Not that I’d expected to find him immediately, but it would have been nice, I have to admit. Standing there in the doorway, I panicked. My words blurred together, my accent was all wrong. I was using my stiffest formal Arabic.

“I’m from America,” I said in a rush. “My father deserted me when I was three, and I lived with my mother for my entire life, and now I’ve tracked him down to here, to Cairo—he’s Egyptian—and I really think he might be living here, his name is Akram Saqr, and he is kind of short, like, like, like a circus bear.” That’s exactly what I said, word for word, with the exception of
circus bear
. In my panic I couldn’t remember the Arabic word for
circus
, so I said instead “bear on a chain that wears a hat.”

It was not one of my linguistic high points.

The man in the tracksuit just smiled at me. “America?” he said. “Will you be voting for Barack Obama?”

“Of course,” I said. “Who else?”

The man grinned. “My name is Ahmes. Please come in.”

Inside the house, I met a half dozen of Ahmes’s relatives. No one had ever heard of my father.

“You would like perhaps some rice with chicken livers?” Ahmes’s mother asked me. She was a tiny, wrinkled postage stamp of a woman. I knew the drill, in part from years of living with my mother. The answer was yes, even if the answer was no. I ate the livers, scooping them up with my fingers. They were tender and greasy and salty and delicious.

Ahmes made a phone call to an elderly relative in Alexandria who’d lived in the house as a child. She’d heard of a Saqr in the neighborhood, but he’d been a translator of old French novels. The relative hadn’t heard his name in nearly fifty years. Then Ahmes’s son, Gabir, pulled out his Toshiba laptop. He connected to their cousin in Dubai via Skype. Gabir introduced me to this stranger and prompted me to tell my entire story from the beginning. This stranger then called his mother in Damascus, whom he thought knew of a Saqr. She did, it turned out, but not one named Akram. And so my image spanned the Middle East, beamed around the globe by satellite, living however briefly in the air, in a language as brief as a single breath.

I should have known that nothing good could happen to me once my hands smelled like chicken livers. I looked at my map for directions to the second address: 8 Al-Gamaliya Street. As I headed there, the boulevards narrowed. This was the older part of the city. Over
centuries, Cairo had layered its roads higher and higher, the stones and asphalt and concrete accumulating like the layers of a cake. Houses now looked like they were sinking into the earth. First-floor windows no longer let in any light.

There were fewer pedestrians. Phone lines and cable television lines and electrical lines looped overhead. Air conditioners dripped coolant—steadily, gradually—onto the pavement around me. A store window offered an array of dried fish, all of them hanging from ropes affixed to the ceiling. I paused in front of this shop, staring at the dead, dry eyes of the perch and the catfish and the trout. I felt like I was underwater, standing on the bottom of a lake.

8 Al-Gamaliya had a doorbell. I rang it.

Egyptians are known for their hospitality. The streets of Egypt were full of cheerful, friendly strangers. This was not a house full of cheerful, friendly strangers. No one answered the door. I should have taken that as a sign. But the door did seem to be slightly ajar, and when I pushed on it, it gave way. In fact, it swung open.

“Hello?” I called. I poked my head around the corner of the doorway.

There was nothing in the front hall—no furniture, no rugs, no evidence of human presence. There was a single ladder just to the left of the entrance. The whole interior, actually, seemed to be a construction site. A big room that was visible from the doorway had been sealed off with sheets of hanging plastic.

To this day, I’m not sure why I decided to go farther into the building. It must have been part of my compulsive thinking:
I’ve made it this far
, I must have thought,
so I have to see the thing through to the end
. Too bad that it almost turned out to be
my
end. The hallway led
toward a room at the back of the building. Its illumination flooded out toward me, beckoning me. I walked through a doorway.

The room I entered may once have been a kitchen. Now it had been stripped of all of its appliances. All that remained was a single round table around which sat three men in sport jackets, playing cards. It took them a moment or two to see me. When they did, they stood up immediately and began shouting at me in a language I didn’t understand.

“I’m an American,” I said, inching back out of the room.

The men exchanged looks. One of them walked over to the wall and reached for a single black button. A buzzer sounded somewhere in the depths of the house. I heard rapid footsteps, and then three more men came running from an alleyway veranda, surging through the rusted French doors and into the room. The six men had a hurried exchange. Then a man who must have been the leader of the group started walking toward me. He was smiling in a way that seemed vaguely predatory. He was still speaking the language that I didn’t understand.

Instinctively, I backed away. I backed all the way down the hall, just far enough to determine that: 1) Yes, he was chasing me. 2) No, it wasn’t so he could give me a proper, welcoming embrace. I fled. With a dexterity that surprised me, I used one hand to topple the ladder that stood near the aperture of the door, and the other hand to slam the door, itself. A double impediment. Perhaps it would not have impressed a jaded action-movie fan. It sure impressed the hell out of me.

I was running then, running down the street I’d just traversed in the opposite direction. Blockading the door had given me a half-minute
head start. In my panic, I ducked into the medina, into the Khan el-Kalili, hoping to get lost in the crowds. Clouds of propane and cumin opened before me as I ran. I was gasping for breath. The hot, dry Cairo air seemed to scorch my lungs.

The streets of the medina were a confounding maze. It had once been a walled city, after all, built like a rabbit warren to defend itself against invasion. As I fled, I saw a number of people above me, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Who were they? I couldn’t tell. All I knew was that I’d turn a corner and see one of the men who’d chased me. Then I’d dash back the way I came and, two turns later, see the same man. I couldn’t lose them, no matter how hard I tried. I was too easy to spot in my American clothes.

I was heading north through the medina when I passed a sign for something I remembered from my guidebooks: El-Habb, an ancient Coptic Christian church that dated from the fourth century. I followed the arrows and dashed up the exterior stairs, and sure enough, there was a massive group of foreigners poised outside of the basilica entrance.

It was a strange reversal. To save myself, I became the very kind of person I’d spent so many years subtly dreading at the Copper King Mansion: a tourist. I sidled into the group and bluffed my way through the main gate. I got in for free, at least; that was a plus.

I scanned the interior for any sort of hiding place. Sure, I blended into this group of tourists, but would it be enough? The walls of the church were covered in icons. These were the Coptic saints—and they were enmeshed in scenes of martyrdom. They were small iconic images painted to fit the smallish wall panels. The saints looked out and over me into the infinite distance. “We come from a time of
great suffering,” their mournful eyes seemed to say. “Also a time when people were much shorter than they are today.”

I loitered near the back of the nave. I glanced out of the double doors before they closed. In the little courtyard outside of El-Habb, I immediately spotted one of the men who’d followed me. What—exactly what—had I blundered into? I stood out, I was easy to spot, a blundering American in loud American clothes.

I had an idea. At one end of the church was a man sitting at a table selling holy postcards. He was about my size. I rushed over to him and shoved another customer out of the way.

“How much,” I said in Arabic, “for your clothes?”

“Please, sir,” the man said, evidently thinking I was trying to rob him. “I have very little. I have nothing you’d want.”

I looked over my shoulder. “No, no,” I said. “You misunderstand. I will give you my clothes and money. Lots of money,” I added. “Maybe two hundred pounds?”

“For my shirt?” he said, his mouth agape.

“And your pants,” I said.

“My pants?”

“And your shoes,” I said.

Egyptians love to haggle. The man raised both palms in the air. “The shoes are extra,” he said. “They are well worn.”

“Excellent,” I said. I stuffed a number of notes into his open palm.

The man looked at them. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,” he said, and smiled.

Five minutes later, after a hurried wardrobe change in an unused confessional, I took my place among the parishioners in the pews.
I hung my head low, placing it on my hands, kneeling in the posture of a deeply penitent man. My heart was thudding in my chest. I sat there with my head down, and slowly, slowly, my breathing returned to normal. With nothing else to do, I listened to the babble of the various languages—the pattern of the foreign voices that seemed to follow roughly the same script, the tour guides pausing in the same places, pointing out the same holy relics. I closed my eyes. And then I did pray. I prayed for guidance, for safety, for some kind of divine protection.

After half an hour or so, I noticed that everything had grown quiet, that even the tour guides had ceased their bubbling explication. I cautiously straightened up and lifted my head. My neck burned from being in the same position for all that time. I looked around. My pursuers were nowhere to be seen. There were only tourists in here. And then, from the space behind me, from the little balcony at the back of the church, a singing rose up, a number of voices intertwining and cutting through the air. It was a hymn. I turned and saw a black-robed choir, all of them wearing threaded gold belts. One of the men had a censer and shook the white smoke of incense into the room. Everyone thinks of Islam when they think of Egypt. They forget that the country has been, for nearly two thousand years, the seat of the Coptic Christian church.