Sphinx (3 page)

Erica Baron's reaction was pure reflex. The muscles of her back and thighs contracted and she straightened up, twirling to face the molester. She had bent over to examine an engraved brass bowl when an open hand had thrust between her legs, grabbing at her through her cotton slacks. Although she had been the object of a number of lewd stares, and even obviously sexual comments since she had left the Hilton Hotel, she had not expected to be touched. It was a shock. It would have been a shock anywhere, but in Cairo, on her first day, it seemed that much worse.

Her attacker was about fifteen, with a jeering smile that exposed straight rows of yellow teeth. The offending hand was still extended.

Ignoring her canvas tote bag, Erica used her left hand to knock the boy's arm to the side. Then, surprising herself even more than the boy, she clenched her right hand in a tight fist and punched the taunting face, throwing all her weight into the blow.

The effect was astonishing. The punch was like a good karate blow, hurling the surprised boy back against the rickety tables of the brass vendor's shop. Table legs
buckled, wares crashed into the cobblestone street. Another boy carrying coffee and water on a metal tray suspended by a tripod was caught in the avalanche, and he too fell, adding to the confusion.

Erica was horrified. Alone in the crowded Cairo bazaar she stood clasping her bag, unable to comprehend that she had actually hit someone. She began to shake, certain the crowds would turn on her, but uncontrollable laughter erupted around her. Even the shopkeeper, whose wares were still rolling in spirals in the street, was chuckling away, holding his sides. The boy pulled himself from the debris, and with his hand to his face, managed a smile.

“
Maareish,
” said the shopkeeper, which Erica later learned meant “it can't be helped” or “it doesn't matter.” Feigning anger, he waved his ball-peen hammer and chased the boy away. Then, after giving Erica a warm smile, he started retrieving his belongings.

Erica moved on, her heart still beating quickly from the experience, but realizing that she had a lot to learn about Cairo and about modern Egypt. She was trained as an Egyptologist, but unfortunately that meant knowledge of the ancient civilization of Egypt, not the modern one. Her specialty of New Kingdom hieroglyphic writing afforded no preparation for the Cairo of 1980. Ever since her arrival twenty-four hours previously, her senses had been assaulted mercilessly. First it was the smell: a kind of cloying aroma of lamb that seemed to pervade every corner of the city. Then it was the noise; a constant sound of automobile horns mixed with discordant Arabic music blaring from innumerable portable radios. Finally it was the feel of dirt, dust, and sand, which covered the city like the patina of a medieval copper roof, accentuating the unremitting poverty.

The episode with the boy undermined Erica's confidence. In her mind all the smiles of the men in their skullcaps and flowing galabias began to reflect prurient thoughts. It was worse than Rome. Boys not even in their teens followed her, giggling and asking her questions in a mixture of English, French, and Arabic. Cairo was alien, more alien than she had expected. Even the street
signs were all written in the decorative but incomprehensible Arabic script. Looking back over her shoulder, up Shari el Muski toward the Nile, Erica thought about returning to the western area of the city. Perhaps the whole idea of coming to Egypt on her own was ridiculous. Richard Harvey, her lover for the last three years, even her mother, Janice, had said as much. She turned again, looking into the heart of the medieval city. The street narrowed, the press of people looked overwhelming.

“Baksheesh,” said a little girl no more than six years old. “Pencils for school.” The English was crisp and surprisingly clear.

Erica looked down at the child, whose hair was hidden by the same dust that covered the street. She wore a tattered orange print dress and no shoes. Erica bent to smile at her, and suddenly gasped. Clustered around the child's eyelashes were numerous iridescent green house flies. The little girl made no attempt to shoo them away. She just stood there unblinking, holding out her hand. Erica was immobilized.

“
Safer!
” A white-uniformed policeman, wearing a blue badge that said
TOURIST POLICE
in bold authoritative letters, pushed his way into the street toward Erica. The child melted into the crowd. The jeering boys vanished. “May I be of assistance?” he said with a distinctive English accent. “You look like you might be lost.”

“I'm looking for the Khan el Khalili bazaar,” said Erica.

“
Tout à droite,
” said the policeman, gesturing ahead. Then he thumped his forehead with his palm. “Excuse. It is the heat. I've been mixing my languages. Straight ahead, as you'd say. This is El Muski street, and ahead you will cross the main thoroughfare of Shari Port Said. Then the Khan el Khalili bazaar will be on your left. I wish you good shopping, but remember to bargain. Here in Egypt it is a sport.”

Erica thanked him and pushed on through the crowd. The minute he was gone, the jeering boys miraculously reappeared and the innumerable street vendors accosted her with their wares. She passed an open-air butcher shop hung with a long row of recently slaughtered lambs,
flayed except for the heads, and covered with splotches of pink ink representing government stamps. The carcasses were hung upside down, their unseeing eyes making her flinch and the smell of the offal forcing her lunch into her throat. The stench quickly merged with the decadent smell of overripe mangoes from a neighboring fruit cart and the odor of fresh donkey dung in the street. A few paces beyond, there was the reviving sharpness of herbs and spices and the aroma of freshly brewed Arabic coffee.

The dust from the densely packed narrow street rose and filtered the sun, bleaching the strip of cloudless sky a faint, faraway blue. The sand-colored buildings on each side of the street were shuttered against the blanket of afternoon heat.

As Erica advanced deeper into the bazaar, listening to the sound of ancient wooden wheels on granite cobblestones, she felt herself slipping back in time to medieval Cairo. She sensed the chaos, the poverty, and the harshness of life. She was simultaneously frightened and excited by the throbbing raw fertility, the universal mysteries which are so carefully camouflaged and hidden by Western culture. It was life stripped naked yet mitigated by human emotion; fate was greeted with resignation and even laughter.

“Cigarette?” demanded a boy of about ten. He was dressed in a gray shirt and baggy pants. One of his friends pushed him from behind so that he stumbled closer to Erica. “Cigarette?” he asked again, launching into a kind of Arabic jig and pretending to smoke a make-believe cigarette in exaggerated mime. A tailor, busy ironing with a charcoal-filled iron, grinned, and a row of men smoking intricately embossed water pipes stared at Erica with piercing, unblinking eyes.

Erica was sorry she had worn such obviously foreign clothes. Her cotton slacks and a simple knit blouse made it clear she was a tourist. The other women in Western clothes that Erica had seen had on dresses, not pants, and most of the women in the bazaar still wore the traditional black meliyas. Even Erica's body was different
from the local women's. Although she was several pounds heavier than she would have liked, she was a good deal slimmer than Egyptian women. And her face was far more delicate than the round, heavy features crowding the bazaar. She had wide gray-green eyes, luxuriant chestnut hair, and a finely sculptured mouth with a full lower lip that gave her a faintly pouting expression. She knew she was pretty when she worked at it, and when she did, men responded.

Now, picking her way through the crowded bazaar, she regretted she had tried to look attractive. Her attire advertised that she was not protected by local street morality, and even more important, she was alone. She was the perfect catalyst for the fantasies of all the men who watched her.

Clutching her tote bag closer to her side, Erica hurried along as the street narrowed again to cluttered byways jammed with people engaged in every conceivable type of manufacture and commerce. Overhead, carpets and cloth stretched between the buildings to cover the market area, keeping out the sun but increasing the noise and the dust. Erica hesitated again, watching the widely varied faces. The fellahin were heavyboned, with wide mouths and thick lips, dressed in the traditional galabias and skull-caps. The bedouin were the pure Arabs, with sharp features and slim, wiry bodies. The Nubians were ebony, with tremendously powerful and muscular torsos, often naked to the waist.

The surge of the crowds pushed Erica forward and carried her deeper into the Khan el Khalili. She found herself pressed up against a wide variety of people. Someone pinched her backside, but when she turned around, she couldn't be sure who had done it. She had a following now of five or six persistent boys. She was being hounded like a rabbit in a hunt.

Erica's goal in the bazaar had been the goldsmith section, where she wanted to buy gifts. But her resolve waned, particularly when someone's dirty fingers ran through her hair. She'd had enough. She wanted to return to the hotel. Her passion for Egypt involved the
ancient civilization with its art and mysteries. Modern urban Egypt was a little overpowering when taken in all at once. Erica wanted to get out to the monuments, like Saqqara, and above all she wanted to get to Upper Egypt, to the countryside. She knew that was going to be as she dreamed it.

At the next corner she turned to the right, stepping around a donkey that was either dead or dying. It didn't move, and no one paid the poor beast any attention. Having studied a map of the city prior to leaving the Hilton, she guessed she should reach the square in front of the El Azhar mosque if she continued heading southeast. Pushing her way between a clump of shoppers bargaining over scrawny pigeons in reed cages, Erica broke into a jog. She could see a minaret ahead, and a sunlit square.

Suddenly Erica stopped dead in her tracks. The boy who had demanded a cigarette and who was still following her now crashed into her, but bounced off unnoticed. Erica's eyes were riveted to a window display. There in front of her was a piece of pottery in the shape of a shallow urn. It was a morsel of ancient Egypt shining in the middle of modern squalor. Its lip was slightly chipped, but otherwise the pot was unbroken. Even the clay eyelets apparently made to hang the pot were still intact. Aware that the bazaar was filled with fakes, highly priced to attract tourists, Erica still was stunned by the bowl's apparent authenticity. The usual fakes were carved mummiform statues. This was a splendid example of predynastic Egyptian pottery, as good as the best she had seen where she was currently employed, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. If it were real, it would be more than six thousand years old.

Stepping back in the alleyway, Erica looked at the freshly painted sign over the window. Above were the curious squiggles of Arabic script. Below was printed
Antica Abdul.
The doorway to the left of the window was curtained by a dense row of heavily beaded strings. A tug on her tote bag by one of her hecklers was all the encouragement Erica needed to enter the shop.

The hundreds of colored beads made sharp, crackling
noises as they fell back into place behind her. The shop was small, about ten feet wide and twice that deep, and surprisingly cool. The walls stuccoed and whitewashed, the floor covered with multiple worn Oriental carpets. An L-shaped glass-topped counter dominated most of the room.

Since no one came forward to help her, Erica hiked up the strap of her bag and bent over to look more closely at the amazing piece of pottery that she had seen through the window. It was a light tan, with delicately painted decorations in a shade somewhere between brown and magenta. Crumpled Arabic newspaper had been stuffed inside.

The heavy red-brown curtains in the back of the shop parted, and the proprietor, Abdul Hamdi, emerged, shuffling up to the counter. Erica glanced at the man and immediately relaxed. He was about sixty-five and had a pleasant gentleness of movement and expression.

“I'm very interested in this urn,” she said. “Would it be possible for me to examine it more closely?”

“Of course,” said Abdul, coming out from behind the counter. He picked up the pot and unceremoniously put it into Erica's trembling hands. “Bring it over to the counter if you'd like.” He switched on an unadorned light bulb.

Erica gingerly put the urn on the counter and removed her tote from her shoulder. Then she picked up the pot again, slowly turning it in her fingertips to examine the decorations. Besides purely ornamental designs, there were dancers, antelopes, and crude boats. “How much is this?” Erica looked very carefully at the drawings.

“Two hundred pounds,” said Abdul, lowering his voice as if it were a secret. There was a twinkle in his eye.

“Two hundred pounds!” echoed Erica while converting currencies in her mind. That was about three hundred dollars. She decided to bargain a little while trying to determine if the pot were a fake. “I can only afford one hundred pounds.”

“One hundred eighty is my best offer,” said Abdul, as if making a supreme sacrifice.

“I suppose I could go to one hundred twenty,” said Erica, continuing to study the markings.

“Okay, for you . . .” He paused and touched her arm. She did not mind. “You are American?”

“Yes.”