WE SET OFF FOR LUXOR, half an hour’s ride, and immediately it became obvious that something was seriously wrong with the taxi. Every five minutes or so, the car would suddenly break into a feverish trembling and bucking, like a draft horse expiring, and the driver, leaning forward in his seat as if to coax it forward, would begin muttering anxiously to himself and gesticulating with his hand over the steering wheel, as though trying to reason with the demented engine. Each time he leaned forward, the sun illuminated a bald spot at the back of his head. A trip to Luxor at the price of forty pounds was a boon to him. He didn’t want to lose us. He drove too fast. The car trembled and shuddered. The driver muttered and sighed, ground his teeth, frenetically shifted the gears up and down in a way that seemed wholly experimental. There were no seat belts in this car.
I looked out the window. In this middle of nowhere, a group of women draped from crown to toe in flowing black robes walked barefoot along the edge of the road, with baskets balanced on their heads. They looked otherworldly, almost demonic in the blinding light, their shadows slithering across the desiccated ground. Chickens and children straggled in and out of the open doors of mud-and-straw houses. Dry irrigation ditches with cracked mud bottoms sprouted weedy grass. Flat fields of alfalfa rolled endlessly by. A van overcrowded with turbaned men sped past us at ninety miles per hour, honking and teetering wildly.
Egyptians drove in a fashion that could only be described as chaotic. They seemed compelled to position their car in front of the one ahead of them at any cost. At night they drove with their headlights off until an oncoming car approached, at which time they helpfully blinded the opposing driver with a sudden flash of the high beams. And Egyptian highways were minefields of disaster. There were always skinny figures leaping across them at just the wrong moment, entire families sitting down to picnics in the middle of them, cars speeding along them in the wrong direction, men stopping their cars to pee in the fast lane, sudden pointless barriers stretched across the road, or wayward oil barrels, or boulders, or a huge herd of hobbled goats. Every ten miles or so the hideously crushed hull of a truck or car would appear at the edge of the road, the rusting, twisted remains of past accidents, and yet these gruesome and shockingly numerous reminders never seemed to chasten Egyptian drivers. They raced and careered and honked their way along with the heedless abandon of people who believe either that they are invincible or that life has no value what-ever.
The problem with our taxi gradually grew worse. We were now traveling a mere ten miles per hour while the car shuddered and pitched and fumed. Smoke billowed out of the exhaust pipe. The driver seemed to be praying over the steering wheel.
In her patient, tactful fashion, Madeleine asked in Arabic, “Is there a problem with the car?”
The driver giggled anxiously. His bald spot was damp with perspiration. “There is no problem. No problem.” Realizing that our attention was on him, he disguised the crazed, clutching motions of his gesturing hands by setting them to rolling his shirtsleeves higher on his hairy forearms.
The car suddenly ground to a halt. We sat still and silent in the heat and dust for a minute, staring through the bug-spattered windshield. The late afternoon sun slanted through the windows and made the car an oven. Finally the driver got out of the car.
Madeleine rolled down the window, leaned out, cleared her throat, and said, “Sir, excuse me, is there a problem with the car?”
I looked at her. Was she being facetious? She was speaking Arabic, which made it hard to tell.
“No problem. No problem.”
The driver lifted the hood. We heard a lot of bashing and clanking, felt him tugging violently at something, and then the hood closed with such force I thought the windows would shatter. The driver walked slowly toward an isolated tin shack across the road and banged on the door. A man appeared in a navy blue monkey suit; a mechanic by the looks of him. He had smudges of grease on his forehead and a tire iron in his hand.
There is in Egypt a weird kind of storybook serendipity. In the middle of the desert, a lone bedouin always appears with nothing in his bag but precisely the sort and size of socket wrench you need to fix your Jeep and escape death. And though their state factories generate products of often questionable quality, Egyptians as individuals have a great genius for fixing things. They are capable of repairing anything at all with what-ever happens to be at hand. They could coax a sundered axle into spinning another million miles with nothing but a piece of dental floss positioned just so.
The two men ducked under the hood of the car, and, after bashing at the engine for ten minutes, we were on our way again.
The next morning Madeleine and I sat on the porch of our Luxor hotel and watched five young men in plastic sandals washing the marble paving stones at the entrance to the brand-new Mummification Museum across the corniche. They used enormous squeegees to shove the soapy water around; from where we sat the process looked like a watery game of shuffleboard.
Luxor — which was ancient Thebes and the great cemetery of the Valley of the Kings — had a melancholy beauty and a haunting history that seemed almost thoroughly overshadowed by the commerce that had been built on its famous pharaonic back. There was, effectively, no business in Luxor but tourism, which gave the local men license to speak to the foreigner with immediate intimacy — they knew in advance what the visitor wanted. Packs of sunburned foreign tourists spilled out of cruise ships and paraded through the streets of Luxor in shorts and floppy sunhats and were immediately besieged by the local touts. Carriage drivers slowed their jaunty black vehicles alongside them on the corniche chirping, “Calash? Calash? Five bound!” in a way that sounded almost lewd. The Luxor horses were uniformly tiny and delicate, overwhipped, and forced to canter frenetically up and down the hard hot pavement of the corniche, laboring under the weight of cargoes of beefy German businessmen on their way to the temple complex of Karnak, their dainty hooves slipping on the oily blacktop. Felucca captains descended from the docks saying, “Felucc? Felucc? Go boat?” And at the entrances to the scores of souvenir shops, young men stepped in front of you and said, “Come in, have look. Drink tea. Just for welcome,” while the subtler ones sat outside their shops with dog-eared postcards written in English and asked you to translate them as a way of getting you to stop and engage. They knew what the postcards said; they had had them translated countless times before. If they could get you to speak to them, they might also get you to give them money. With an Egyptian man, there is never any such thing as a simple or straight answer. If you ask, “Where is the post office?” he will squint at you, rake his mustache with his fingers, and answer, “Oh, lady, what you need to buy?” If you tell him that you want to post a package, he will say, “Big backage? Small backage?” Unable to see how the size of the package could make any difference what-ever, you ignore his question and ask again where the post office is. “I can help you!” comes the answer. Yes, I’m sure you can help me, but where exactly is the post office? “Bost office closed now at this o’clock.” Yes, fine, but can you just tell me where it is? “Too far,” he will say ominously, because if he risks telling you that the post office is just around the corner, you’ll leave him and dash his chance for a tip or a business transaction.
The Luxor men cracked silly jokes, made silly puns, said “Welcome to Alaska!” and “How now brown cow,” and “See you later, alligator,” and a million other English phrases they learned from the tourists and repeated with the uncanny accuracy of parrots. They had a talent for mimicry. They could do Bronx, Liverpool, South London, and Melbourne accents, all with ventriloquistic precision. Amelia Edwards caught the essence of Luxor when she wrote in 1878:
Our arrival brought all the dealers of Luxor to the surface. They waylaid and followed us wherever we went . . . And now there is a rush of donkeys and donkey boys, beggars, guides, and antiquity dealers . . . the children screaming for backshish; the dealers exhibiting strings of imitation scarabs; the donkey-boys vociferating the names and praises of their beasts; all alike regarding us as their lawful prey. “Hi, lady! Yankee-Doodle donkey; try Yankee-Doodle!” cries one. “Far away Moses!” yells another. “Good donkey — fast donkey — best donkey in Luxor!”
Edwards noted that the men of Luxor, whether Coptic or Arab, were all “polite, plausible, and mendacious.”
Little had changed. The Luxor guides and shopkeepers had a genius for human psychology, for the holidaymaker’s mindset. They knew how to inspire guilt in the wealthy visitor and had constructed a colorful array of hand-tied verbal flies with which to hook the foreign fish. The shopkeepers put on a humorous, amorous, energetic show, but when you caught them off guard they always looked forlorn, paring their nails, scraping dried horse manure from the bottoms of their flip-flops, or sleeping slumped in the dust in front of their shop with their mouths hanging open. It was only when they saw you coming that they hopped up and put on the mask of bravado and romance, a mask that after just one day in Luxor grew tedious. You are looking for me, lovely lady? Come and look my shop. For free. We go dancing to-night. Smile, you are in Luxor. Welcome back. You remember me? Here I am, Miss Lady. Miss Madame. Mrs. Madame. Mrs. Lady.
Once in Luxor two Egyptian men had approached me and asked me to buy them a bottle of whiskey in the duty-free shop, the only place that sold hard liquor. Egyptians were not allowed to buy in these shops. One of the men peeled seventy pounds from a thick wad of bills and held it out to me. “Blease, madame,” he said. He was handsome and strong. He had a wooden leg and held the top of one crutch skillfully tucked under his gesturing arm like a rolled-up newspaper. When I asked the men if they were going to drink the whiskey they said, “Us? No! We is Muslim. We do not drink. We will sell it to hotel.” Or they would sell it to some unsuspecting tourist for twice the going rate.
I agreed to buy the whiskey, to see what would happen. When I went into the duty-free shop, there were four British women there, shopping loudly. They were bare shouldered in sundresses, and had fat, sunburned knees, and they jollied up their skinny, beleaguered Egyptian guide with jokes and sexual innuendo and cajoling pokes in the ribs. It was fascinating to see this unusual reversal: an Egyptian man for once overwhelmed by the overbearing, even bullying attentions of foreign women. The women bought gin and cigarettes and one of them held a can of German beer up to her face and said, “ ’Ow much alcohol is in these beers?” and her bosomy daughter, without looking at the can, shouted expertly, “Five point three percent! The Egyptians invented beer!” When the cashier gave them the price of their goods in dollars, one of the women yelled, “ ’Ow much is that in British? Ask ’im, Mabel. And fetch us another bottle of gin.”
Behind them in line stood a tiny, fragrant, Italian man in a white sport coat who was speaking broken Arabic to no one. He was drunk. “Luxor is my paradise,” he said over and over, until the British daughter turned to him and said authoritatively, “It’s my paradise too, love. I been ’ere ten times in two years!”
There were, indeed, Europeans who loved Luxor obsessively. It was cheap and easy and down at the heels; the weather was always good; and there were enough cruise ships docked along the river that the sight of a foreign woman in a bikini was less shocking here than elsewhere in Egypt. In the days of Flaubert and Nightingale, it required money and time to travel to Egypt. Now, anyone could afford to come and spend a few nights in a hotel. They came as much for the constant sun and cheap beer and papyrus souvenirs as for the ancient monuments. British truck drivers, Dutch farmers, French shopkeepers, Australian secretaries. Young European women flounced up and down the Luxor corniche in clothes not much more concealing than underwear. The felucca captains stared and followed them.
It was generally known that many European women came to Luxor expressly to buy sex from the young Egyptian men, that homosexual prostitution thrived here, and that all this went on, seemingly unchecked, in the stern and censorious shadow of Islam. One afternoon in Luxor, outside a trinket shop on the corniche, I had had a conversation with a garrulous young man who worked in the shop. His name was Ahmed. He was tall, strong, and remarkably handsome, with a slender waist, powerful arms and thighs, and big eyes the color of raw honey. He had sharp cheekbones and a square jaw, and his golden eyes were shaded by long, dewy, black lashes. He wore jeans and loafers and a tight white T-shirt. With no trace of shyness, no trace of self-consciousness, no natural sense of pudency or decorum, this young man stood on the street in the hot sunlight smoking a cigarette and telling me everything he knew about sex, everything he knew about those sex-crazed European women, mostly middle aged, who jumped off the cruise ships and went running through Luxor hunting for Egyptian men half their age.
I had been to Luxor three times and knew that what he said was true. It was not unusual in Luxor to step out of the blinding sunlight into a dark little trinket shop to find a bare-limbed, middle-aged, tousle-headed German woman sitting sunburned in the lap of a panting teenage shop boy. It was not unusual to see these strikingly mismatched couples walking hand in hand along the corniche. I had seen it with my own eyes, but for the sake of the conversation I told Ahmed that I didn’t believe that any of that took place here. I wanted to hear him tell it.
He laughed loudly at me. “You don’t believe? I can show you myself!” He pointed his cigarette across the river to a row of apartment buildings at the edge of the ferry landing on the west bank. “You see those buildings? Many French and German women, they keep apartments there so they can come here and fuck the young men. They pay them money. They come to Luxor five and six times every winter.” He slapped his own chest. “They pay me!”
I asked why these women needed to come all the way to Egypt to find men.
“They like us because they know we strong. We get hot easy. We is Arabs. Not like pansy white men. We is Egyptian. Big men. Strong benis.”
He sucked on the cigarette, blew smoke over my head, looked up and down the corniche at the tourists tottering down the gangplanks of the big white ships parked three deep along the edge of the river. Taxis trawled slowly up and down the street, the drivers hollering out the windows at potential customers.
Ahmed waved his arm at three white women crossing the street in shorts and T-shirts. “A lot of these women they married, but the husband is no good. Weak benis. Or some husbands is gay. Sometimes the French husband he come to my shop and he tell me, ‘You can have sex with my wife only if you have sex with me first.’”
“And do you have sex with the husbands, Ahmed?” I said.
He spat on the dusty pavement to show his distaste. “I don’t make sex with men. I don’t need to. All the women they love me. But there lot of gay men in Luxor. Mostly English.”
As we stood there, four young French girls went by. Ahmed interrupted the conversation to leer at them. His mouth hung open. He stared unabashedly. “See that fat one?”
He was whispering almost collusively at me, as though I was just another Egyptian fellow with like sentiments. I saw the woman; it would have been difficult not to see her: high heeled, double chinned, in a short skirt so tight I could see the outline of her underwear, her bra straps intertwined with the spaghetti straps of her red halter top, peroxided hair dangling in spears down her back. Her fat and freckled upper arms jounced and jiggled as she walked. I had been in Egypt just long enough that this woman, dressed as she was, looked nearly naked to me. I was as surprised and fascinated as Ahmed.
“I like her ass,” Ahmed said.
“Really,” I said.
From the easy way Ahmed spoke, it was obvious that I was not the first foreign woman he had talked with this way. He expected no rebuke, no rebuff, no affront; he never stopped to wonder whether I might take offense or be scandalized or annoyed or even bored by all this salacious patter.
“That kind of ass I like. Big. But she got too much tits. I don’t like tits so big. Anyway, I don’t like the young women as much as the old. I love any women that is older than forty. They have more experience. They better in bed.”
The first woman Ahmed had ever had sex with was German. He was seventeen; she was forty-two. And just last week he had a French woman who was fifty. He approximated her figure with his hands, sighed wistfully, and rolled his eyes. “She was fucking great!” He spent three days walking around Luxor with this woman, and on their last day together he asked her if she wanted to sleep with him. She said yes, of course, and invited him to visit her in her cabin on the cruise ship. “But I never go to the ships. I invite them to my apartment. That why I don’t live with my family. I have my own place so I can bring the women there. Once I made sex with a woman seventy years old. I drink a lot of alcohol, then I can do it.”
“Do your parents know that you have all these women?”
He winced and frowned at me as though I were insane. “Fuck, no! They would be angry. They would kill me and tell me I am not their son anymore.”
“Are you Muslim?”
He was silent a moment. He crossed his big arms on his chest and nibbled at his lower lip. He lowered his voice. “Well Muslim, yeah. But I don’t do Islam things right now. I don’t do Ramadan. I don’t read the Koran. Later, when I’m older, I will do those things.”
“Why later?”
“To make good with God.”
I asked him if he ever had Egyptian girlfriends.
“Shit, no! I hate the Egyptian women! They talk too much. I work all day, get home at eleven at night, and she would be talking talking talking like a crazy lady. And they is all religious. They want a baby, a nice house, spend money on nothing.” He spanked his hands together as if to rid his palms of dust. “Never. No Egyptian girls!”
Two British women went by, one in a sleeveless blouse. He ogled the woman’s arms, looked her up and down, wrung his hands, sighed with desire.
I asked Ahmed if he ever met a foreign woman who was offended by his advances.
He smiled. “Yeah! Lots of them they don’t like it. One day I’m sitting here and a pretty German lady she walks by. I say to her, ‘Don’t walk away! You break my heart if you leave!’ She turn around to give me a punch. Like this” — he grimaced and raised his fist — “and she say, ‘I break your heart? How you like I break your neck, you bastard!’”
He giggled at the recollection. “I talk to every girl who go by. I want to catch them. I make them stop and talk to me. Egyptian men, we know that all these foreign women they are prostitutes.”
I looked at him, trying to decide whether to laugh or protest. “I am a foreign woman, Ahmed,” I said.
He raised his palms at me and backed up on the sidewalk, realizing he had made a mistake. “Yes, I know, lady, but not you.” He waved at my long trousers, my boots, my long-sleeved blouse buttoned up to my throat. “You is not prostitute. That’s obvious.”
“How is it obvious?”
“You dress careful. I can’t see what you look like except your face. You got pride. You got nice face too. You looks like bird. But lot of them, lady, believe me lot of them is prostitutes.”
The boy was not stupid, just crude and a blabbermouth. I asked him if he knew what the word prostitute meant.
He gave a proud little shrug to indicate that the question was too easy for someone whose English was as good as his. “Yeah. Of course. Prostitute mean somebody who take money for sex.”
“From what you’ve just told me, Ahmed, it sounds as though these European women you’re talking about aren’t taking money for sex. It sounds like they have sex with Egyptian men because they want to. In fact, it sounds to me like it’s the Egyptian men who are taking money for sex.”
Ahmed stared at me, his long lashes blinking rapidly, his golden eyes shining with confusion in the sharp afternoon light. Suddenly the handsome boasting chatterbox had nothing to say. His big face seemed to have shut down. He was still as a stone. I helped him along. “I mean, you said that yourself, right? European women come here and pay the Egyptian men for sex?”
Ahmed was speechless for a long time. And then, slowly, he began to giggle nervously in recognition. “You’re right, lady,” he said, absorbing the irony of it. He tossed his cigarette into the dusty gutter. He looked wounded and embarrassed. “You are right.” He plucked his lower lip in thought then turned to go back into his shop. “I got to go now,” he said with a wave. “I got some customers here.”
It was just another modern development: at the turn of the twenty-first century, Western woman had managed to turn the Egyptian man into an exotic prostitute, much the way Western men had done with Egyptian women for years. It was perhaps damaging to the pride of the Muslim man to be bought by the Western woman, nevertheless the transactions took place with willingness from both sides. Women had been selling themselves for ages. “It may be a perverted taste,” Flaubert wrote, “but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects . . . The idea of prostitution is a meeting place of so many elements — lust, bitterness, complete absence of human contact, muscular frenzy, the clink of gold — that to peer into it makes one reel.” Sex could be a commodity; everyone knew that. But now the flow of the transaction had been revised and reversed. In Luxor, it was now women who clinked down their gold for men.
So many young Egyptian men approached me on the street in Luxor and whispered, “You want make sex with me?” that it grew tiresome and annoying, and when, in irritation, I knocked the baseball cap off the head of one of these boys, he looked utterly shocked by my unexpected protest and hurried away in fear. A nearby policeman who saw me slap the boy’s head came running to my assistance. “What that boy do, madame?”
I didn’t tell the officer what the boy did, for I knew that if I complained, the officer would arrest the boy, beat him, and put him in jail — far too harsh a punishment for such a thing.
Across the Luxor Nile there was the Ramesseum, the Temple of Ramses II, and the Valley of the Kings, the enormous pharaonic cemetery. Just as at Elephantine Island, walking across the desert on the west bank of Luxor became an exciting adventure when you realized that all that crumbling rubble under your feet was composed of bits of ancient pottery, human kneecaps, strips of linen winding-sheets, and scraps of painted wooden sarcophagi. You could walk across the open plain below the Temple of Hatshepsut and stumble on the mud-brick walls of the dwellings of ancient tomb builders. Strewn about the crumbling walls lay the builders’ broken teacups, pot handles, and bits of painted jugs. The dust was pink with the powder of crushed pots. Like Amelia Edwards and that whole band of nineteenth-century travelers, the more I found of these colorful chunks of crockery and wood, bits of plaster painted in yellow and red, the more I wanted to find. The ground here was not protected, enclosed, or part of any government museum, and the sight of all these ancient scraps scattered freely about underfoot was thrilling. I once spent an entire afternoon wandering in the dust of the west bank discovering human jawbones and femurs and ancient rubbish. Holding these fragments in the palm of your hand is a way of connecting to the distant past. Some potter had made this now broken cup three thousand years ago; the fine lines that his fingertips had left on the clay were still visible. He had held it in the palm of his hand, exactly as I was holding it. When he looked up at the night sky, he had seen virtually the same stars I saw now. The thought of it made me realize that the potter and I were not so different; I could almost hear him breathing.