Evel Knievel Days (14 page)

None of this changed what I had in my hand, what I hadn’t put down since the ghost had given it to me: 20 Abdel Rehim Sabri. Every time I crossed a street, I was sure to step precisely onto each sidewalk. I kept glancing over my shoulder, making sure nothing was going to materialize in midair. If my foot landed in precisely the right place on the street, if it had the properly geometric ninety-degree angle to the chaos and disorder of the pavement, then I’d be fine. I’d be safe.

Only occasionally was the sidewalk in disrepair, necessitating some kind of emergency action on my part. Once I had to turn around and recross the street twice, east to west. Once my way was blocked by a vendor with a cage of chickens on her head. I waited patiently beside her as she concluded a transaction, pulling a protesting chicken from its last home with her strangulating grip. Feathers fluttered through the air. The other chickens, momentarily spared, resumed their clucking. I stood on the edge of the street and saw scraps of ghost in every peripheral movement, heard them in every honk of a car horn. Finally, the vendor moved along. I stepped on the exact square of sidewalk she’d been inhabiting. Relief flooded over me. Momentary relief.

My legs kept moving. Alleyway led to boulevard led to alleyway. I found Abdel Rehim Sabri and made my way toward Number 20. The apartment I wanted was on the second floor. I climbed the tiled staircase. There was graffiti in Arabic on the walls.
Such messy handwriting
, I noted. I rang the bell. A thin young woman answered the door. Her hair was shaggy and cut in a way that accentuated her rich olive eyes. She wore an eye shadow that seemed to contain faint gold
glitter. Wrapped around her upper body—but not her head—was a silvery silken shawl. Its ends bore small glass beads.

“
Masa’aa el-kheir
,” she said.
Good evening
.

In Arabic, the word for love,
hawa
, is almost indistinguishable from the word for air,
haawa
. The only difference is a slight aspiration, a breath inward, a minor doubled inflection. Now, standing in the sudden breeze created by the opening doorway, I felt the connection between the two words: In July, in Cairo, any burst of air was a burst of love, a brief freedom from the stultifying heat.

“Hello,” I said in Arabic. “I’m looking for someone—perhaps you can help me? I am looking for a man named Akram Saqr.”

She paused for quite a long time, turning the hem of that shawl over in her long, elegant nails. There was the smallest clatter, the smallest noise of lacquered nail brushing against beads. It’s funny that I heard this sound so distinctly.

“Why are you looking for him?” she finally said.

An unexpected question—or rather, a simple question with a complicated answer. Not to mention the fact that this probably meant the ghost had been right; this was the only address I needed. I wiped the sweat off my face.

“So you know him?” I asked.

“Very well,” she said. She paused. “He’s my fiancé.”

F
IANCÉ
:
A
F
RENCH WORD
, I immediately thought, derived from the word for
to promise
. This took only a fraction of a second as the dictionary page floated up and in front of me. It wasn’t a photographic memory, exactly, that I had, but more a disquieting pattern of obsessive thought. I photographed the things I saw for later. This time it was the page of a dictionary.

“Are you feeling ill?” the woman asked. She switched to English: “Can I get you something to drink?”

“One moment,” I said, also in English.

I paced away from the door, afraid to look back, afraid to see the look of concern and care, the look that would astonish me once again. Engaged? I should have known. I should have known that marriages, like illnesses, cluster together—entering your life in multiples, in twins, or triplets, even. My father was engaged again. That was why he’d traveled to the United States to get my mother’s official signature on a divorce decree; he’d needed it legally. And should I pinch this woman to make sure she wasn’t a ghost?

I scanned the street for some kind of refuge, some place where I might be safe. Nothing. It was a foreign street, broad and thick with traffic. The sun was relentless in the pale blue, slightly smoggy sky. Great. I wasn’t exactly the most resilient fellow in the world. This was something of a challenge. I turned back and walked over to the woman. She had inched back into the house, and I noticed that she was now holding the door so that she could easily slam it shut, if necessary. Possibly, possibly, there was an undercurrent of fear beneath her look of concern?

“Can I come in?” I asked. “I’ve traveled a long way with a very important message for him, and I’m feeling quite tired.”

The woman seemed to hesitate. She glanced over her shoulder into the hall of the building. She looked back at me. “One moment,” she said. “Ibrahim,” she called.

Ibrahim appeared in five seconds—a big, burly man wearing a formal housecoat. “Yes, madam?”

“Would you show this man inside?” she said. She smiled at me. “Come in,” she added. “Sit down.”

Can I describe for you the fact of a door frame? It towered above me as I passed through it. It felt like an aperture, a conveyance, a means of conduit from one life into another. For the first time in years, I didn’t pause on the threshold, I didn’t perform any ablutions or touch anything or think of some image that might protect me.

The apartment was a modernist marvel. It was a calming interior space, a space entirely devoid of clutter. Clean white marble was everywhere: the floors, the tables, the buffet, all of them hewn from the milk-veined, silver-flecked rock. There was a single tall iron
lamp in the center of the main living room. It shed soft illumination over the interior, giving it a calcium glow.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“Thank you. Won’t you have a seat?”

My father’s fiancée asked Ibrahim for two cups of tea. He’d been standing nearby, at attention while we sat down. He appeared to hesitate and then disappeared wordlessly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You astonished me just then, at the door.”

“I could tell. I need to introduce myself. It’s very rude of me, otherwise. My name is Agnes Mouri.”

“It’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Mouri.” I paused. “Where did you meet my—your fiancé?”

Agnes Mouri looked down. “We met through mutual friends,” she said.

Sweat stood out on the sides of my forehead. I felt my throat constrict. I tried to guess her age. Twenty-seven? Twenty-nine? She was young, in any case, at least twenty years younger than my father. And then I realized that I had to do it: I had to be honest. It wasn’t easy for me. It was, in fact, the last thing that I wanted to do. When you grow up in a household with an unpredictable parent, with the constant duty of shepherding her emotions from condition to condition, the last thing you want to do is provoke a confrontation. Ever. Of any kind. But here I was. “My name is Khosi Saqr,” I said, and waited for her reaction. She smiled broadly.

“Saqr?” she exclaimed. “Why, then you are a relative of Akram’s.”

This wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. “Do you know who I am?” I said.

She frowned. “Not exactly. But are you one of Banafrit’s children? Or Fatima’s?” A look of puzzlement skittered across her face. “Khosi? But I thought I would have met you by now.” The look of puzzlement expanded. “Wait a minute. Are you named after Akram’s son? The one who died?”

It was strange, the sensation of my heart dropping into my stomach and my legs turning leaden, all while my head felt so unnaturally light that I thought I might float away.

“No,” I said. “Not that I know of. But I am his son. And I’m very much alive.”

“His son?” she said. “You mean his nephew.”

“His son,” I said.

Ibrahim arrived with the lime-flower tea. The idea of a servant made me nervous. I would have been just as happy getting my own drink from the kitchen. The tea had the smell of fresh citrus. There were also six small madeleines on a flowery porcelain plate. I looked at the soft arches of the cookies. I imagined—briefly, powerfully, comprehensively—diving into the safe luxury of those cookies, surrounded by the soft, buttery sponge cake, an escape.

“His son?” Agnes Mouri said again. “There must be some mistake. His son drowned, along with his first wife. She was an American. Like you, I’m assuming?”

I nodded slowly. “Yes. From Montana,” I said.

“Montana, yes,” she said, furrowing her brow. “But Akram’s son drowned. It was a terrible tragedy. It completely changed the course of his life.”

“Really?” I said.

That was when it came together for me. The escape back to his
country, the disgrace of his abrupt arrival, his apparent lack of luggage, the lie that solved everything. The total cut from the previous life, the words that must have felt stunning and foreign and outrageous in the way that they aroused sympathy, in the way that they drew the family around him, the undeserving man, the fugitive, the deserter. The image of my father shifted, his countenance darkened in the imaginary portrait I’d rendered of him: An undercurrent of sorrow rose beneath the cheerful gambler’s face. He was a liar, lying was a deep grain in him, a pattern that marked him with depth and constancy.

Agnes Mouri’s tea cooled on its tray. It went from steaming warm to still and cold. At first she said: “But that’s impossible.” Later, she said: “I cannot believe this.” And then, as I continued talking, continued detailing my father’s life in Montana as I understood it, explicating the end of my parents’ relationship, an end that did not, as far as I knew, contain any drowning whatsoever, she said: “
Khalas, khalas, khalas
.” Which means, in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic,
Enough, enough, enough
. Finally, we sat there in silence for quite some time.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “As you can imagine, this is not how I expected to spend my Saturday.”

“It’s Saturday?” I said.

She just stared at the blank white wall, the white wall with its single stripe of charcoal paint running vertically from floor to ceiling. “I just don’t believe you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Why would I be lying to you?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Revenge? Revenge against me. Against my father. He was a wealthy and powerful man. Akram wouldn’t lie to me like this.”

“It must seem true to him,” I said, scrambling. “After all these years.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s much more complicated than that.”

I wondered what she meant, but before I could ask her anything, she pulled a cell phone out of the drawer in the end table. “I’m going to call him.”

“Please don’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “If you were really his son, wouldn’t you want me to call? Don’t you think he should be honest with me? His fiancée, of all people?”

I didn’t want this—I was already so far from home, so enveloped in a different culture, in a different world. I was wearing another man’s clothes. I was speaking a foreign language. I felt like half a person. I felt like the kind of person who could imagine that William Andrews Clark was a gun-toting Wild West cowboy, a specter who’d decided to depart from his eternal rest and directly intervene in my earthly affairs. To calm myself, I started counting the tiles that formed a glistening mosaic in the floor. I began to sweat again, despite the gentle cool breeze that came from the air conditioners in the hallway.

“Of course,” I said. “But maybe he was working his way up to it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “He should come over here and explain himself to me. To us.”

“Yes, he should. But that’s not how I’ve imagined it. And the visualization—it’s important to me. You have to trust me. My father is who he says he is.” I paused. “Except when he’s not.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Imagine how I feel. Can you even imagine how I feel?”

That was true. I couldn’t. I stood up and walked over to the far wall of the apartment, where there was a bank of windows. The windows had a view of the tops of mango trees—leafy mango trees with their bright yellow-green crowns. Beneath the windows was the street, with its snarl of traffic. There was a painting just behind her, an oil canvas in the style of a muted Rothko. It bore primarily gray and light blue sections. I was staring at the painting as I walked back to her. She followed my gaze.

“It’s an original,” she said. “I bought it in Paris.”

“Listen,” I said. “We started off badly. All wrong. I don’t know anything about you. Or—that sounds wrong, too. Forgive me, my Arabic isn’t as good as my English. I lose subtlety in Arabic.”

She smiled. “And I lose subtlety in English,” she said in English. “But I thought Americans didn’t learn other languages.”

“We’re too busy bombing weddings?”

Agnes Mouri stirred her tea. “It just seems,” she said, “that the Americans I meet only speak one.”

“With each language,” I said, “you add another person to yourself.”

“Then I am five people,” she said. “But why is it so difficult to get anything accomplished?”

I looked at her. The cell phone was still lurking there, poised in her hand. “For work?”