Authors: Pauls Toutonghi

Evel Knievel Days (16 page)

BOOK: Evel Knievel Days

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He inhaled deeply from the Dunhill and then exhaled through his nostrils. I blinked some more. “Be like Omar Sharif,” he said. “Smoke Lucky Strikes. It’s toasted. It wasn’t until I came to America that I realized that the cigarette companies bought those scenes in the movies. And—as for your mother,” he concluded, “don’t believe a word she says about me.”

“You can see how that would be a challenge,” I said. “Her having raised me and everything.”

“Habibi,”
he said, “that sounded wrong. I didn’t mean it like that.
What I meant is that she needed it. When I left, Khosi, in 1988, you see, we were still very much in love.”

“She says she hates you,” I said.

“Of course,” my father said. “But you don’t hate people whom you do not care about.” He used the word
whom
, slipped it easily into the conversation, as if he were saying
coffee
or
mango
. He rummaged in a pocket and took out the pack of cigarettes again.

“What greater gift can you give your ex-wife,” my father said, “than the gift of your own death?” Here he laughed, a loud, off-kilter laugh, one that I didn’t share. And when I didn’t share it, he said, “Look, why did you come today? You could have come at any time. You knew I was Egyptian. You knew where I lived. More or less. Why not come when you were sixteen?”

“I was a minor,” I said.

“Then why not when you were twenty?”

“I was in college,” I said.

“See: You are more like me than you believe,
habibi
. The margin between action and inaction is quite small.” He held up his thumb and his forefinger, held them an inch apart, illustrating the margin. “Just like the margin between the truth and a lie.” My father ran a hand through his thick silvery hair. “I knew you’d come,” he continued, “after that day in the museum. I knew you would. But what a thing: Right here, in front of me, Khosi, my own darling boy.” And then he did something that I had in no way anticipated. He stood up and walked around the table and knelt beside me, almost knocking over the water pipe with its smoldering ball of condensed tobacco. He knelt beside me and he took me in his arms and held me against
his chest, he smothered me in that coat, really. I could smell the citrine odor of his aftershave and the lingering odor of the Dunhill.

I cleared my throat and pushed him away slightly, straightening my shirt, which had wrinkled from the combination of my own body heat and the fierce pressure of my father’s embrace. “What about backgammon?” I said.

He nodded and sat back down. “Backgammon,” he said, his voice deepening in register.

We played the first moves in silence. There was only the small clatter of our dice and the burbling of the water pipe. A few conversations ebbed and flowed around us, and I caught the occasional word. It was tough to understand the Egyptian dialect. The pronunciation, first of all, was entirely different from what I was used to. Every
j
sound became a
g
sound.

I rolled a six and a five. Eleven moves. I have to admit that I love board games. I love their codified rules, with their careful delineation of what’s right and what’s wrong. By far my favorite kind of game is the simple mathematical kind, the kind that involves a basic grid and pieces that were probably once rocks. Backgammon is a perfect example. And it is such an enduring mystery, the very fact of its existence. It is nearly five thousand years old. It’s directly related to the ancient Egyptian game of
senet
, which was unearthed from the sarcophagi of the pharaohs.

“Do you want to bet?” my father said. “A small gentleman’s wager?”

I stared at him. “Isn’t that what caused your problems in the first place?” I said. “Isn’t that what caused
my
problems in the first place?”

He shook his head and raised his palms in a suppliant gesture.

“No bet, then,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Can you tell me one thing, at least?” I said. “Since you seem to be so bad at answering questions.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Why didn’t you ever write to me?”

My father frowned. “Of course I wrote to you,
el hamdillah
,” he said. “At least, I don’t know, ten times. But I’m sure your mother guarded the mail. She probably burned the letters. Or threw them away, anyhow, somewhere you couldn’t find them.”

Ten times
, I thought. I thought again:
Ten times?
At first that seemed like a big number. Then it seemed like a tiny number. I did the math. “So you’re not dying,” I said, “and you wrote me one letter every two years.”

“I never received any letters in return,” he said.

“But you haven’t been living in the Sahara Desert,” I said. “You’ve had a phone, I’m sure.”

My father poked at the smoldering ball of tobacco in our water pipe, a ball that by now was surrounded by a corona of ashes. “How good is your Arabic?” he said finally, in Arabic.

“It’s all classical,” I said. “It’s kind of a shame because people have been laughing at me.” It was true. They’d laughed at me and then tried to imitate my way of speaking, using formal address and formal diction and carefully pronounced verbs and nouns and adjectives. I imagined it was particularly ironic here in Cairo, where everything seemed to be dominated by such informality: informal traffic, informal settlements, informal systems of payment in nearly every store.

“That’s okay,” my father said. “We can teach you the real thing.” I couldn’t help but notice that this was a promise of a mutual
future. It also made me angry. “Tell me why you lied to her,” I said. “Or at least apologize. To me, to Mom, to somebody.”

My father picked up the dice. He rolled them. “Doubles!” he exclaimed. When he handed the dice to me, he made eye contact. “I have something for you,” he said.

He reached into his pocket and took out a small stack of what looked at first like money.
A bribe?
I thought. But then I saw that the stack was much too thick for banknotes. It was a stack of photographs. Polaroids. Unmistakably, they were Polaroids of me, me working at the Copper King Mansion, standing at the till, guiding a tour, carrying out the trash to the big Dumpsters behind the house. I remembered that photograph distinctly. The flash had surprised me, and I’d tripped and stumbled and fallen on top of one of the bags, its composted refuse leaking all over my clothes. I conjured the image of Ms. Vogel, snapping her pictures and surprising me almost every time. As a result, I looked a little startled in each photograph. I sat there and flipped through almost eight years of my life, watching my acne bloom from an isolated condition to a furious storm and back to an isolated condition.

“Pictures of you,” he said.

“No kidding,” I said in English. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant is: How did you get them?”

“It’s not important how I got them. What’s important,
ya’ani
, is that I kept them. I kept them.”

This—this, then, was madness. I was utterly mad. I hadn’t thought this through, not thoroughly enough. My heart rattled the bones of my chest. My breath tightened in my throat. I could not breathe. This was where my story would end, at an outdoor café in Cairo,
poised on the edge of a backgammon move. I would die of a panic attack right there.

But then I experienced a visitation. Perhaps in response to my prayers? I visualized Ms. Vogel. I imagined her standing in El-Habb. She was standing on the altar with her hair in a bun, a clipboard in her hand, doing a safety check of the exhibit. She inspected the statue of Jesus on the cross, wiggling Him slightly to ensure that He was mounted in place. “There’s no substitute for awareness,” she’d said to me time and time again. “I first learned about awareness on the Riviera in 1962. It was a different time. Your lessons will be less complex.” I pictured her straightening the papers on the clipboard, tightening the bun, and nodding in approval. She was in control. Then she took a Polaroid of the icon. “Gotcha!” she exclaimed.

I wiped the sweat off my forehead, wiped the stinging sweat out of my eyes. I looked at my father. He was sitting there, holding the dice, turning them over and over in his hands as if trying to rub off their spots. He tucked the Polaroids back into their place of concealment. Then he said: “Do you want to come to the house tomorrow morning and meet the family?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I would love that.”

“Excellent,” he said, leaning back. “But first I would like to ask of you one small favor.”

The small favor, it turned out, was actually a large favor. Maybe the largeness of it was why my father had switched to Arabic. Maybe he knew that he could better control me there, in that language, since our vocabularies were so unequal.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Can you,” he said again, “pretend to be someone else? Someone
other than who you are? Perhaps you can be Wael, the son of my friend Malik?”

“Wael?” I said. “The son of your friend Malik?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Do you even have a friend Malik?” I said.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“But I’m his son?” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Aren’t parents supposed to encourage their children to tell the truth?” I said. “No. No, I won’t do it.”

“Come on, Khosi,” my father said. “What’s a small lie between two gentlemen?”

“No,” I said. “I deserve better.”

We finished the game in silence. Techno music hung in the air like gauze, filtering in and out of hearing, just barely audible, rising from some sub rosa dance club.

“Let’s go,” my father said.

“Wait,” I said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?” he said.

“Payment?” I said.

He laughed. “Oh no,” he said. “There is no need. I never pay here. They know who I am.”

As if to illustrate the point, he waved to the waiters as we walked away. The waiters nodded and waved back. We walked for a while in silence.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “I just can’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”

“It’s only for a little while, until they get used to you. Then I will
tell them the truth. This is better, trust me. I know my family. It’s the Saqr way.”

The Saqr way?
I thought.
What are we—a car rental company?
I wanted to object further, but then I realized: It didn’t matter what I did tomorrow. Agreeing to the deception was the price of admission. Once I was inside, I could act however I wanted to act. I didn’t have to play a role. I didn’t have to be anyone other than myself, someone who’d traveled across an ocean to reclaim a part of his birthright.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be the gentleman son of your gentleman friend Malik.”

“Excellent,” my father said. “I’ll write the address down for you.”

“No!” I exclaimed, but then when I noticed his look of puzzlement, I realized that I’d overreacted. “Just tell me.”

He watched me suspiciously. “37 Talaat Harb,” he said. “
Bukra inshallah
,” he added.
Tomorrow, God willing
.

“God willing,” I said.

“Goodbye, Khosi.”

My father leaned down and kissed my cheeks sequentially. The skin of his face was rough with stubble, and it scraped against my skin. I stood there and watched him disappear into the crowds of the daytime city. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t look back.

Why has our country
, writes the Egyptian novelist Mohamed El-Bisatie,
endured long years of colonization—and the worst sorts of colonization: Turkish, French, English?
The answer is, in part, cotton. Egyptian cotton sheets, with their luxurious high thread count—they have a legacy of suffering, too. Everybody knows what cotton did to the United States. But who knows the story of Egypt’s plantations,
which brought about the downfall of a well-planned civil society—and caused the country to spiral into bankruptcy and British rule?

In 1860, during the American Civil War, the blockade stopped the South from exporting crops. So British textile mills turned to the Nile Delta for raw materials; Egyptian farmers had grown cotton there since 4000 B.C.E. For five years, British demand was massive. The Egyptian ruler, Ismail the Magnificent, took out loan after loan from European banks to finance the construction of the country’s infrastructure. The upper tiers of Egyptian society grew unbelievably wealthy. But then in 1865 America started exporting once again. As quickly as they’d arrived, the British merchants disappeared, taking their contracts with them. This bankrupted the country, allowing for its takeover just fifteen years later.

When I first learned this, I inescapably thought of my father. He was a colonist in this exact sense of the word.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in my hotel room, staring at the ceiling, imagining Ms. Vogel snapping those photos of me for my father, surreptitiously mailing them across an ocean. Sleep wouldn’t come. Or at least I thought it wouldn’t. As I lay there, I was floating up and out across the city into a shadowy nightmare version of Cairo where the traffic was even more aggressive, and the dust thicker in the air, and the heat utterly merciless. I floated over the tourist boats gliding up and down the Nile and landed gently on a dock, a dock with a view of the entire nightlit city. I watched as American tourist after American tourist stepped into the Nile, stepped off the end of the dock and into its waters. Or was it the Bitterroot River, just outside of Butte? I couldn’t tell for sure anymore. There was just the dark, flowing water—and the bodies. They
were drowning. But there was nothing I could do to help. And then Agnes Mouri stood beside me, and she held me in her arms to comfort me, telling me that this was just the way it had to be, it was the way it had always been, and I could smell the ginger of her perfume and feel the soft press of her arms around me, and I realized with a sickening surge of fear that despite what we were witnessing together, here on the shores of this river—despite our shared and communal burden—she and I were complete and total strangers.