Evel Knievel Days (15 page)

“Or in any part of my life.”

“What do you do?”

Agnes Mouri straightened her back. She gathered together a few renegade strands of her thick reddish-black hair and tucked them behind her ears. It was an endearing gesture. She lifted her chin
slightly. She adjusted the loose shawl, tossing it farther over her shoulder. “I’m an antiquities dealer,” she said.

I’d never met an antiquities dealer before. I told her this. She wasn’t surprised. It was an industry that centered around the Mediterranean, at least in part because of the extreme age of the human settlements in this part of the world. I glanced around the sitting area of her apartment. I was astonished by the lack of anything ancient, of even the smallest trace of the pharaohs or the pyramids or, say, the Sphinx.

“You have to understand,” Agnes Mouri said, “that I can’t just ignore what you’ve told me.”

“Of course,” I said.

“I can’t ignore the fact that my fiancé might have a twenty-year-old child.”

“Twenty-three,” I said.

She frowned. “And an ex-wife.” She shook her head. “A living ex-wife.”

I stared at her. She really was quite beautiful; she was about to become my stepmother.

“When did you meet my father?” I said.

“Eleven months ago. I met him at the Gezira Sporting Club. At the bar there, after a polo match. He rode in the polo match.”

It was my turn to be astonished. “I didn’t know he played polo,” I said.

“He was terrible,” Agnes Mouri said, laughing a little. “He fell off his horse.”

“For some reason,” I said, “that doesn’t surprise me.”

“And then,” she continued, “when I asked him why he’d fallen,
he told me he’d never played polo before. Never. He’d just watched. But someone had fallen ill. And there was a visiting team from Argentina. Egypt doesn’t have a lot of polo players, believe me. And so he volunteered.” Agnes Mouri smiled. “He told them he’d been a star player at his American university.” She shook her head. “It really was quite dangerous.”

“He lied,” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “He lied,” she said.

“It seems like a theme,” I said.

That was the wrong thing to say. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: The citadel of the self is built on tremulous supports. Much more tremulous than we might imagine. Pressure, even the smallest pressure, can cause something drastic to happen. And we are fragile, all of us, so damn fragile. The organism, the body and mind and spirit, are quite poorly designed. Emotions can break us, too. They can come from nowhere and suddenly we are destroyed. Agnes Mouri began to cry. Not dramatically, not with sobbing and hysteria. But slowly and steadily.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t cry.”

Why had the ghost sent me here, of all places? Damn ghost. Never trust an undead copper baron.

“Forgive me,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come. I think there’s been a mistake. I must have the wrong Akram.”

Agnes Mouri dried her eyes with the back of her wrist. “The wrong Akram Saqr,” she said. “It’s not exactly a common name.”

“Well,” I said, “there were several names it could have been. I think the man I’m looking for is much older than your fiancé.”

“We
should
call him,” she said. “To clear this all up right now.”

I stood. “I’ve taken up too much of your time already,” I said. I wanted to leave before she started dialing the phone. “I’ll just show myself out,” I said.

“But you haven’t finished your tea,” she said.

“You’ve been very kind to invite me in,” I said, moving toward the front door. “I should have done more research. I shouldn’t have upset you. Please don’t be upset.”

“Wait a moment,” she said.

I was backing out of the room. “Congratulations on your engagement,” I said. “Sorry about the misunderstanding.”

I left my soon-to-be-stepmother behind, left her in her clean-lined, marble-filled apartment, left her to her cooled tea and her interrupted Saturday. The door closed behind me with a solid thud. The street opened in front of me, newly gigantic and foreign and torched by the evening sun.

As soon as I was in the street, I heard the next call of the muezzin—the fourth call of the day. A number of men knelt on prayer mats in stalls and in little alcoves here and there. I closed my eyes and listened to the amplified sound of the prayer call. From my hotel room, it had seemed serene and distant. Down here on the street, things were different. There seemed to be a number of muezzin in this neighborhood. Their amplifiers cut through the day, layering one on top of another, creating a cacophony of dueling prayer calls. There was a little bread cart just to my left, a man selling big, slightly sweet pretzels and
fiteer
, the ubiquitous Egyptian pancakes. The owner was evidently a Christian. He was holding his hands over his
ears. “Is it always this loud?” I asked him in Arabic. He leaned in toward me, a questioning look animating the features of his face.

“Is it always this loud?” I repeated.

He furrowed his forehead and nodded. “
Allah akbar
,” he said, and smiled.
God is great
.

It was late evening. The sun was beginning to slip toward the horizon. The air pollution did two things. It made the sunset more gradual. The day wasn’t as bright as it could have been without the intervening haze of breathable carbon. But the sunset was also brighter, more pink and orange and yellow. It lit up the margins of the firmament. It made the sky worthy of that word,
firmament
.

My stomach churned. I’d seen a ghost after all, a flesh-and-blood version of a man who’d been dead for a century. How could I trust anything? How could I believe my encounter with Agnes Mouri? Had
she
really existed? Was I actually in Cairo? The streets threatened to dissolve. I almost expected them to lift like a movie set, to reveal, perhaps, the padded walls of some Pacific Northwest asylum.

The hotel was a welcome relief. I burrowed under the familiar sheets and lay propped on my elbow, looking out through the window, looking out as the evening gave way to night, and the night gave way to deeper night, and the deeper night gave way to a fragile morning.

I spent the next day, Sunday, being a tourist. It was the happiest, calmest day I’d had in weeks. I walked up and down the length of the Nile. I visited the Egyptian Museum with its funerary vases and elaborately illustrated Books of the Dead. I stared for nearly half an hour at Tutankhamen’s famous death mask, twenty-five pounds of jewel-inlaid solid gold. He’d been small—a boy-king—and he’d led
a life full of pain, suffering from malaria and bone necrosis and a clubfoot. After leaving the museum, I wandered through the city, feeling anonymous. I ate more street food. I went back to my room early and watched a Lebanese soap opera about a family of brothers who betray one another in business deals. I slept. A sticky, heavy, cocooned sleep.

At seven-thirty the next morning the phone rang.

“Mr. Saqr,” said the desk clerk. “You have a visitor in the lobby.”

“Who is it?”

“One moment, sir.” The phone line went quiet. After a few moments, the clerk returned. “I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot obtain that information.”

“Well, why don’t you just ask him?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” He paused. “But that’s impossible.”

Fifteen minutes later, I stepped out of the elevator, half expecting to come face-to-face with the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. I went to the front desk and asked the clerk to direct me further. He nodded and extended his arm to his left and pointed. I turned around, and I will never forget that moment—never forget what I saw.

What I saw was the man from the museum—my father—standing there in the flesh and the sinew and the ligament and the bone and the blood and the soul,
yes
, perhaps even the soul, hovering in front of me, too shocked to do anything but stare. We recognized each other. He was wearing the same heavy overcoat. There was no figurative language to describe that moment. It was stripped, bleached of color and content and bare of secondary life. I thought:
What if I sneeze? Will that ruin the moment?
I thought:
I wonder if it’s still a hundred and
twenty degrees outside?
I thought:
Evel Knievel has nothing on this
. I thought:
Alfred Nobel’s recipe for dynamite: three parts nitroglycerin, one part diatomaceous earth, one small admixture of sodium carbonate
.

We met halfway between the café and the front desk. He spoke first. “You’ve caused a lot of problems for me, Khosi,” he said.

My eyes widened. I looked at him, afraid to say anything.

“My fiancée is locked in her bedroom,” he added. “She’s calling off the wedding.”

“I see,” I whispered.

He nodded and frowned.

“I didn’t have your address,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I guess it’s not completely your fault, then.”

“Not at all,” I said. “And it was luck that led me to your fiancée. Luck and a ghost.” I hesitated. “It was a ghost of a chance,” I corrected, “that I’d find her.”

His frown deepened. “Khosi, listen,” he said in English. “Do you play backgammon?”

“I speak Arabic, you know,” I said in Arabic.

He said, “You
do
speak Arabic. That was very nice indeed. But let’s stick to English. And: Do you play backgammon?”

There was something strange about my dad’s demeanor. His posture reminded me of the porters at the hotel. He looked completely healthy.

“Yes,” I said, “I know how to play backgammon.”

“Let’s get out of here, then,” he said, “so we can talk properly.”

We ventured back out into the city. As we walked, I noticed the small backgammon box poking out of one of the pockets of the gray coat.

Cairo has a café culture. You hear that about the cities of Europe, but in the Middle East, it’s even more true. Men congregate in the cafés. They congregate on the margins of the cafés. They sit against the walls of the buildings beside the cafés. They spill into the streets surrounding the cafés. Two things are ubiquitous in Egypt’s capital city: televised news and sweet mint tea. It seems to be more vital to the life of Cairo than the oil that runs its industries. A lot of the cafés are built downward from the street to preserve some amount of the coolness of the soil and to avoid the blistering heat of the day. We passed two crowded establishments, but my father shook his head. I followed him to Abn al-Shryn, a small place tucked in an alley ten blocks from the Kewayis Cairo Marriott.

Within minutes we were seated at one of the tables on the cusp of the café, half in and half out, the streetlights just beginning to turn on at the ends of the block. He’d procured a water pipe, which he filled with apricot-flavored tobacco. “When I was a teenager,” he told me as we sat down, “I used to fill these with hashish. I’d mix hashish in with the tobacco.” He sighed and shook his head. “It was so delicious, you couldn’t even imagine.” He’d also ordered us coffee and bottles of mineral water. The waiter had called him by name. Now he began to arrange the backgammon board between us.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to take a moment, here.”

“Light or dark?” my father said.

“Dark,” I said. I glanced over at him. “How can you wear that coat in this heat?”

He chuckled. “This? This isn’t heat. It’s only—how do you say—one hundred Fahrenheit degrees. When it’s warm like this, it’s best
to wear thick clothes and drink hot tea. Here, have a little tobacco. It calms the blood. I may smoke a cigarette as well.”

“You shouldn’t be smoking,” I said.

He concentrated on the gesture of taking a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket. “Dunhill?” he said, and extended them to me. The writing on the pack, I saw, was in Arabic.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick to one kind of tobacco.”

He nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “I like to smoke cigarettes when I’m nervous. You—you’re nervous, but you don’t like to smoke cigarettes. Everybody’s nervous. Probably the waiter is nervous, too. I’ll answer your question in a second. But first, because we are all so nervous, can I tell you a story?”

I nodded. My father was sitting across from me, telling me a story as if he were an old friend—someone who’d popped into the hotel for a drink—and to accentuate the strangeness of everything, he looked a little like Cary Grant. A Middle Eastern Cary Grant, sure, but Cary Grant nonetheless.

“When I was six years old in Cairo,” he said. “I went to see
Lawrence of Arabia
at the cinema. Have you seen it,
Lawrence of Arabia
?”

I shook my head. My father’s eyebrows shot upward into an arc. He was still holding the Dunhill in his hand, and he waved it through the air, almost like a conductor waves a baton.

“Ah!” he said. “How is that possible? A pity! That is such a pity! And a travesty.
Une bêtise
. I will buy you the DVD tomorrow, downtown.” He cleared his throat and took a sip of his drink. “I went to see it so many times, you know, in 1962. We’d pay one piaster and we’d hang on the railing in the balcony—ten of us, all of my friends.
We learned the words. Or the sound of the words, anyway, what we thought the words sounded like, because we didn’t speak English. We all wanted to be Omar Sharif. Every one of us. Many of them still do, I think, the friends of mine who are alive. And I met him not long ago, Sharif, because he still lives in Cairo, in his family’s house. He used to smoke, too, you know—they say two and a half packs a day. But then he had triple-bypass surgery and quit,
habibi
.

“Anyway, we’d learn the lines, you know. And we would say them as they happened. Think of it, what a thing: a line of boys hanging like monkeys on the railing of the balcony and saying the lines of the movie as they happened. But I’m going on and on. You’re wondering, perhaps, when I will cease talking?”

I blinked several times, wide-eyed. Without meaning to, I shook my head.

“We wanted to be just like Sharif, all of us. One of my friends would have a cigarette—one cigarette—and he’d light it right when Sharif lit a cigarette on-screen. We’d pass it down the row of boys, you know. I was six years old. And that’s how I started smoking.”