Adé: A Love Story (2 page)

At dinner the next night, over a bowl of pasta with mushrooms, Miriam exclaimed that boys could come and go—and
here she raised her wine glass and leaned toward me, touching her perfect nose to mine. “But we,” she said with a flourish, “we are what remains.”

Within days, Miriam and I had a plan. We had traveled together before, but this time we would go for a year, maybe two. Within weeks a huge map of Africa was taped on top of the giant Walasse Ting poster of wildflowers hanging on the wall of my tiny off-campus apartment. As we drew lines and calculated distances, I eked out the last major paper of my college career on the poetics of space and the encoding of meaning into the built environment, paragraph by paragraph, citation by citation. There were days I thought I could not write another line, could not figure another way to make one idea tie coherently to the next. The giant map, the huge continent, beckoned, but Africa did not seem real. I could not imagine taming the beast at the computer.

But then one day, there it was. The end. Miriam and some friends took me out for tapas. I ate olives, little pieces of bread dipped in oil, a salad of tomato and fish. I drank wine, a nice Sancerre. I came back to the apartment afterward, light-headed, and began to pack. I threw hundreds of pages of drafts into a huge black garbage bag and tied it shut. I sat in the middle of the living room, watching the sun come up, as Segovia played classical guitar through the tiny speaker on my windowsill.

Miriam came to check on me in the early afternoon. We rented a storage space on Orange Street, and she had picked up the key. We took our books over, and the chair and ottoman splashed with green flowers I bought for twenty-five dollars at the Salvation Army. My paintings—a Mexican girl standing by the window, the Picasso etching my father gave me as a child, a
huge disfigured ghost I bought from an art-school student who buried his canvases for months, then dug them up as if reclaiming dead ancestors—went too, encased in large cardboard picture boxes. I kept my favorite sweater and unceremoniously dumped the rest of my clothes on the porch of the campus ministry. I was spent and hungry, high on the promise of the unknown.

And then we left that place, the cold walls of stone. We were going. We were in flight. We were gone.

FOR THE FIRST
few weeks of travel, it was as if I had been asleep for a thousand years. I had been all over America, but hadn’t yet seen the bridges of Prague, the arches at Auschwitz, the ports of Gorée. I hadn’t walked the streets of Paris at night, or wandered the enormous Buddhas at Angkor. I hadn’t sipped water from the Chalice Well at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, or gawked at the Harajuku girls in Tokyo. All of these places live in me now, many years later, but then, before I met Adé, when I was still a child, my body was almost clean, like a plain piece of cloth without tapestry, batik, or indigo. It was as if nothing penetrated until I began making my way toward him. And then it was as if I had been dying of emptiness, so readily did the world bleed into me.

We landed in Cairo and moved south. Following the date palms? The desert? The hidden voices of all the women I couldn’t see? Or was Adé calling me, in silent prayer, as he rolled up his fishing nets? Whatever it was, I made my way from Giza—or
Gi-zeh,
as the women and men who lived there called it, spitting the word to the ground from full dusty lips. In Giza I wandered past the pyramids and the Sphinx and the Kentucky
Fried Chicken shop directly across, out of the parched, gravelly earth and into the verdant valley, the emerald-green fields dotted with ancient palms. I arrived with Miriam, but found that in Giza I wanted to be alone, to blend in with people who looked like me, and so I left her in the compound where we had taken a room, her fleshy white calves tossed over the lip of an enormous washtub in the courtyard, her slender fingers reaching for a bottle of shampoo we had bought in Tahrir Square.

“I’ll be back,” I said gently.

She kissed me on the cheek. “Bring chocolate. Please?”

In Giza I carried a camera as a crutch for conversation:
Can I take your picture?
followed by
What is your name?
and
Do you live here?
My Arabic was poor and yet the women and children, and sometimes the men, talked to me, standing with their arms wrapped around faded wooden posts, staring at the way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I pointed the camera at them. A few times I was invited in for mint tea, and I accepted, passing shyly into living rooms of pressed earth, bare but for a rug caked with dirt, a fire pit with tin pots stacked off to the side. The tea was brewed from fistfuls of the herb pressed into a blackened, fat-bellied kettle, sweetened by mounds upon mounds of brownish sugar poured from wrinkled sacks.

I know for many reasons that it is unfair, exploitive, and blasphemous to think this, but I began to feel at home there, walking between the palms, looking at the pink and purple, turquoise and orange clothes, faded but clean, fluttering on gray clotheslines crisscrossing above me. Some might say it was only First World romanticism causing me to see myself reflected in the faces of those to whom I could not speak. And yet at each house, even
though I had no words to tie us together, a recognition between me and my hosts rose up and hung in the air, roping us together long after I had walked away.

As night fell, I rode the buses in Giza and other outlying suburbs of Cairo, making my way on rickety old trolleys that ran from Tahrir Square to Maadi before returning to the perfume and parchment hawkers at the Sphinx, where tourists of every nationality swarmed like the flies we swatted from our plates at dinner. On the buses I was overtaken by children, tens of them in blue and white school uniforms, chattering loud and fast to one another, thrusting their heads and arms and fingers outside the gaping holes that served as windows. After a lifetime of being the only copper-colored girl with brown eyes the shape of almonds, I was now one in a great mass of long lost reflections of myself. The language was different but the skin, the way we looked moving through the colors and contours of the world, was the same.

The women gazed at me intently, without reservation, their dark eyes boring holes into the side of my face. I imagined their thoughts. What kind of a person was I? What was I doing in their midst? Was I their sister? What would I tell them? That Miriam and I had a vision to see their place while sitting in a steam room across the world? Certainly I could not tell them what I did not know, that I was finding a new home, shedding a self that made me foreign. That I was, in fact, being reborn before their eyes.

“As-salamu alaykum,”
I said to their stares.

“Alaykum salaam,”
they answered respectfully, before looking away.

After weeks of this, so many that I kept time by the muezzin’s call to prayer, Miriam and I decided to leave the city and head south
to see the temples of Abu Simbel guarded by enormous statues of Ramses and his queen Nefertari, saved from the Aswan Dam by Jacqueline Onassis. We wanted to meet the Nuba people of Sudan even farther south, the huge men Leni Riefenstahl captured in washed-out black-and-white photographs, virile as gods, carrying one another on their shoulders.

I knew we would also find war and famine in the Sudan, and shitty towns with only syrupy soda to drink and goat meat swimming in fatty broth to eat, but still I wanted to go. Even when people told me I could die there in the desert—be kidnapped, murdered, or worse, raped, I persisted, disbelieving. It did not occur to me that I could be hurt, or that anything could be bigger or stronger than my own will to move freely, unobstructed, across the plains. Perhaps this was because my parents had divorced when I was very young, and left a fault line in my psyche. I was accustomed to the shaking of the earth. I knew it was inevitable, unavoidable—it was how things would always be. I was not afraid to fall between the cracks.

In Aswan, I dared to swim in the Nile even though there was said to be giardia in the water. I ignored the young men who manned the felucca and told me with emphatic, agitated gestures that the current of the Nile was deceptively strong; I could easily be carried away, past the tomb of Aga Khan and over the perfectly smooth boulders that lay in the eddies like sentinels. I nodded, but knew that I had to submerge myself, to feel the cool brown green of that mighty river against my skin. As if possessed, I threw one leg over the side and then the other, and then I was in and swimming and imagining all of my illnesses, each and every one of my impurities, being washed away.

The Nile was a baptism, an initiation. All the elements were there: the water, the boat, the young men named Mohamed and Amir and Hassan gracefully managing their flowing robes, balancing barefoot on the prow of the dhow. The meals with them at sunset, the breaking of the fast with dates and beans made with onion and tomato that appeared miraculously from beneath worn strips of foil on cracked and faded plates. They tolerated me, a foreigner, a stranger, with a rough tenderness as they would a sister, or a wild girl from another place, or maybe more realistically a brother, pulling my heavy, waterlogged body from the water, handing me huge chunks of bread dripping with fava beans; in Arabic,
ful.

In the end I was struck down only by the heat, the piercing and relentless quality of it, the absence of shade by the rocks. Because there was water all around I did not feel the need to drink it. Because they offered it, I did not question the food I was given. I lost and then regained consciousness. When the doctor came with needles and hydration packets, I willingly extended my arm, my feverishly hot body undeterred. When he reached under my blouse to see if women from the West were as promiscuous as advertised, I vomited on the pale blue bib of his shirt.

At the border, dark men with AK-47s slung over their shoulders forbade us to enter Sudan, so we climbed back on the bus back to Cairo, and made it back just in time for the train to Sharm el-Sheikh, a tiny dot at the tip of the Sinai. As was my habit by then, I struck up a conversation with a woman on the train. She took mercy on us when I told her where we were going, and begged us to look for a tea shop run by a woman named Mouna.

“The Sinai is very big, and very empty. She will help you young girls. You must find her. Mouna, you will remember that name, yes?”

After the train, we hailed a taxi and asked the driver to let us off close to the shop, but he knew nothing of it and dropped us instead in the middle of nowhere. We tumbled onto the famously embattled triangle of land that Israel always wanted but Egypt would never cede. The air was black and cold; we could barely see each other. A building that might have been a bus station was closed, and any passengers long gone. We combed our guidebook by flashlight until a young soldier stopped his jeep alongside us, appraising the two women sitting, perfectly balanced, on their backpacks. He asked why we were alone. He asked if we needed a place to stay. He told us his name, Mustafa. He barely looked at Miriam but said I reminded him of his sister. At his compound, he gave us chunks of feta cheese, a piece of bread, and his narrow bottom bunk for our weary bodies.

In the morning, the sky burned with the blinding desert sun. We splashed cold water on our faces, and Mustafa pointed to a crop of purplish mountains outside of the one window in the military dormitory.

“There, there is Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments,” he said. And then he turned his body the other way and gestured to an endless stretch of sand. “And there, there, is where they will build the hotels.” He moved his arm a bit to the left, gesturing toward another dusty brown strip. “And there is where the road will be, a big wide road.” His fingers scraped around an orange he had pulled from the refrigerator, peeling it, and he said, “This is the place where all of the tourists will come.
They will come from all over the world to this faraway, crazy place. Then we will know the war with Israel is over, and we have won.”

Miriam and I looked at him, this handsome young Egyptian of sharp nose, full lips, and dark eyes framed by lush lashes as long as any woman’s. His pronouncements seemed preposterous. The train station was two hours away. We were eating
beans
from a can in the communal kitchen of the only standing structure visible in any direction. Even now, in broad daylight, there was nothing to see.

“Come, come. You do not believe? You do not believe? I will show you.” He dragged us out of the building, him pulling Miriam and Miriam pulling me, and took us to the edge of the cliff we found ourselves perched upon. “There,” he said. “Do you see all of that water?”

We looked out over the Arabian Sea with its azure waters and large swaths of shallow green revealing the silky white sand beneath. “There are hundreds, thousands, of fish out there,” Mustafa said. “They will come, you will see, the tourists, for their scuba and their snorkel and all of that, you will see, and this place will be like Israel’s famous Eilat.”

He spat on the ground and then looked directly at me. “But everything for Egyptians. Egypt for Egyptians. You know what I am saying, don’t you? Everything for us this time.” And he told me again. “Ah, you look like my sister, you know? Her name is Fatima.”

Angling for inclusion, Miriam used some of her newly acquired Arabic.
“Fein?”
But Mustafa ignored her completely.

I said we were in Sharm to find Mouna’s shop. “Do you know it? Mouna’s?”

“
Aiwa,
of course I know Mouna’s. We go now?”

Miriam and I looked at each other. It occurred to both of us then—she looking Israeli, me feeling Egyptian—that something about us would never, could never, change. Without my saying a word, I was being drawn, compelled, to the other side of a line. I felt less and less like an outsider, and more like someone fated to be in this new place. To stand where I stood. Miriam could not enter with me, not fully. She could only watch.

The tent rose up from a vast plain of desert in the middle of the Sinai mountain range surrounded by nothing but sand, a bunch of white flaps fluttering in the wind. A dozen ten-year-old Mercedes-Benz sedans were parked neatly out front. The cars were identical: cream colored and completely covered in the constantly swirling dust that coated everything in Sharm el-Sheikh, with brightly colored pieces of carpet gracing each dashboard.