MADELEINE AGREED with me that the best place to try to buy a rowboat discreetly in Luxor was slightly downriver beyond the town, where we would be more likely to find fishermen and less likely to be hindered by the web of shopkeepers. The following morning we rented bicycles and rode north along the river, past the Temple of Karnak, until we came to a roadblock manned by young soldiers. We would not, they said, be allowed to pass through. Why? Because it was not safe for foreigners to venture out of the city. But, we said, we only wanted to go a little way and see what the countryside was like, what a real Egyptian village was like.
Madeleine charmed the young men with her very good Arabic. She assured them that we would go, have a look, and come back in ten minutes. “I promise by Allah,” she said, and the soldiers laughed. Miraculously, they waved us through.
On we rode past mud houses and mango groves and a place that looked like a power plant or a military compound. We turned down a rutted dirt road toward the river, riding beneath enormous palm trees until we came to an empty stone ghat. We saw fishermen working in the middle of the river, bending over the gunwales of their boats, hauling in nets like hanks of wet hair. We sat on the ghat and waited for one of them to pass close by, which, although we were in an insignificant and secluded spot, would inevitably happen, and we discussed how we would approach our delicate task, rehearsing what we would say.
Eventually, a young man appeared behind us on the riverbank and asked us the usual questions. We told him we wanted to buy a boat. We told him about the sleeping husband in the hotel, the surprise birthday gift, and all the implausible rest of it. Another young man appeared, and when a fisherman in just the right sort of rowboat came around a bend in the river, the two young men cheerfully yelled for him to come over and told him that I wanted to buy his boat.
The fisherman was young. He stared at us, grinning rigidly in surprise and wonder. Like many Egyptian peasants, he had three or four front teeth encased in a chrome-bright metal; his grin glinted like a teaspoon in the sunlight. I asked the fisherman if I could try his boat for a minute. He paused for a few puzzled seconds, and then he nodded. But I could only try the boat if he came with me. The two self-appointed agents wanted to come too. They were all amiable and eager to be part of the adventure.
Madeleine spoke to them. “She knows how to do it. She must try the boat alone.” And the sound of her accomplished Arabic seemed to reassure them that this was true and that I was trustworthy.
I climbed into the boat and rowed it upriver a hundred yards, parallel to the bank, spun it around, and rowed back again. The boat was ideal. It was light, easy to row, and just long enough to lie down in. The men stared as I worked the oars.
I pulled up to the ghat and got out of the boat. When Madeleine asked the young fisherman if he would sell me the boat, he didn’t laugh. He scratched his head in thought, then set the price at seventeen hundred pounds (about six hundred dollars).
I was nearly faint with happiness and hope.
Madeleine said, “But she could buy a brand-new boat for only one thousand pounds. Your price is too high.”
It was true that the fisherman’s boat was far from new. Like most Egyptian fishermen’s rowboats, it was steel, painted marine blue, and was twelve feet long and just under three feet wide. It was dirty. It was dented in several places, and the paint on the hull was peeling and showing signs of rust. The oars were the usual clunky balks lashed to pegs with twine; they too were painted blue. The oarlock pegs had been roughly fashioned from tree branches. The seat and floor were covered with plastic imitation grass matting of a brilliant green and riddled with holes made by cigarette burns. The boat had a tiny storage cabin in the bow with a latched door. It had red and green hand-painted trim, an Islamic design of triangles. A few Arabic phrases, mostly involving the praise of Allah, had been painted in pink in choice spots around the boat, and there were some bulbous red hearts painted on the prow. Hearts seemed a requisite decoration on Egyptian boats, the sort of hearts drawn by schoolchildren on Valentine’s Day.
I thought the boat was beautiful. I wanted it, but I could afford only nine hundred pounds. I took off my watch and silver earrings and bracelet and held them up and said, “I’ll give you nine hundred pounds and my watch and this jewelry.”
Madeleine translated. The man stared at me, fascinated and tempted, but he said nothing. Fearing he would say no, I reached into my bag and brought out a Polaroid camera I had with me. “And I’ll give you this camera too.”
I lifted the camera and snapped a picture of the young man. When, with an important plaintive whine, the camera instantly vomited up a stiff square photograph, the men’s faces registered alarm. Like many Egyptians, they had never seen a camera quite like this before. They huddled around me, a mass of sweating heads, and held their breath and watched the image developing in its ghostly way.
The fisherman took the picture between his delicate fingertips and stared at his face with a look of both fear and delight. He stared a long time, then pointed at his teeth, as if surprised and a bit disappointed to find that his natural beauty was marred by all that garish metal in his mouth.
The men began to talk excitedly all at once, each one telling the other what should be done. They raised their palms to each other’s chests in emphasis; they grinned and grimaced and blinked in the sunlight. The fisherman said nervously, “But I have to ask my father if I can sell the boat.”
“Where is your father?”
He waved across the river to the west bank. “Far across.”
We agreed to wait for him while he went to ask his father.
He tucked the photograph carefully into the pocket of his gallabiya, climbed into the boat, and rowed quickly away. I hated to see him go; I feared he wouldn’t return.
The two young men sat on the steps with us at the edge of the river. As we waited, I realized that I might have felt a bit like a manifestly destined Massachusetts Pilgrim sneakily tricking the American Indians with novel trinkets and booze, but for the fact that I was still offering the man far too much cash for the boat. The camera was cheap and so was the watch, but they were all I could spare.
A third man in a lumberjack’s flannel shirt joined us on the ghat. It was terribly hot in the sun. The steps of the ghat radiated waves of heat. We drank water and listened to our Egyptian companions conversing excitedly. They were pleasant. They spoke no English. They all talked at once, loudly and at length, a very Egyptian habit. One of the men had a hammer and kept tossing it up in the air excitedly like a majorette’s baton. Another inspected my bracelet and then giddily fitted it over his ear and let it hang there like a crazy earring.
I was Nervous, hoping not to be thwarted or told no by anyone, hoping that something good was going to happen. Across the river, the red string of hills above the Valley of the Kings was faint in the afternoon haze.
The time passed quickly, and before long we saw the boat returning across the water, this time with four men in it, which made me doubly Nervous. Who were they all? What bad news would they bring? One of the men squatted precariously on the high little deck at the rear of the boat. Two others were standing up in the boat, like George Washington crossing the Delaware. Why weren’t any of them falling over? The fisherman rowed quickly against the heavy current.
In a moment of forethought and firmness, Madeleine turned to the three chattering men sitting on the ghat with us and said, “Gentlemen, please. Please promise me that when they arrive you will all try your very best to remain silent for at least five minutes.”
The men laughed hysterically and slapped their knees and tapped their watches and said, We promise, we promise. Five minutes exactly, madame. We shall time it!
When the boat arrived, a tall man in a white gown stepped forward with the Polaroid photograph in his hand. The young fisherman had been unable to find his father and so had brought his uncle, who looked not much older than the nephew. The uncle’s name was Shazly Fouad. His intelligent eyes locked immediately on my camera.
I made my offer again to the uncle — the money, the supplementary watch, jewelry, and camera. He said, “No. Just the money and the camera I will take.”
“You will sell her the boat?” Madeleine said, surprised as I.
“Yes. Nine hundred pounds and the camera.”
I was beside myself with relief. I wanted to hug Madeleine for her skill. In my excitement I threw into the bargain the two boxes of Polaroid film I had with me and promised Mr. Fouad that if he gave me his address, I would send him four more as soon as I got home.
Never expecting I’d find a boat so quickly, I hadn’t brought any cash with me. I would have to return to Luxor to get the money. We agreed to meet an hour later at a dock on the other side of the roadblock, closer to the Temple of Karnak. Madeleine translated briskly for me, a lot of fast talk back and forth. Every now and then through the mush of unaccustomed sounds, the gulping vowels and glottal stops, a word would bubble up that I recognized, each one creating the weird effect of a door clicking shut, pushing me farther outside the circle of this fuming conversation. Finally, with Madeleine as our bridge, Shazly Fouad and I sealed the deal by shaking hands, and the men immediately began clearing out the boat, gathering up its clutter of burlap bags and plastic buckets, cigarette butts and fish bones.
As Madeleine and I prepared to leave and go back to our bicycles, the young man with the hammer held the hammerhead in his hand, pointed the butt of the handle at my nose as if it were the barrel of a gun, and said, “Bam!” in a way that spooked me. When he saw the unsettled look on my face, he shook my hand and smiled and patted my shoulder to show it was only a joke.
The men reappeared at the dock at the prearranged hour — all of them: the fisherman, the uncle, the three bystanders, as well as several more who had come along for the spectacle, and when Madeleine and I arrived they clamored around us, chattering at full volume.
Madeleine took charge, and after a great deal of pleading and howling and frantic exchanges among the men, she managed to silence them. I wanted a written receipt from Shazly Fouad to carry with me on my trip. I wasn’t eager to go off down the Nile in an Egyptian boat without some proof that I had paid for it. For the same reason, Shazly Fouad wanted a receipt for the camera. The transaction was unusual enough that we were both worried about the Egyptian authorities. Madeleine wrote up a makeshift legal document in both Arabic and English, and as Shazly Fouad was reading it aloud, a man in the crowd stepped forward and said, “I am a lawyer. That is not the correct and proper language. You must use the correct and proper legal language.”
I could see Madeleine growing uncharacteristically impatient. Egypt was ridden with self-proclaimed lawyers mincing on about proper phraseology. Madeleine snatched up the note-pad and began to rewrite the contract. The crowd — now fifteen people — surged against us, peering over our shoulders, jostling us, jockeying to get a better view of the foreign woman writing in Arabic.
A big village woman all in black appeared with her three naked children. The children were wet from swimming in the river and were covered in sand. The four of them pushed their way into the middle of the crowd and began moaning, baksheesh, baksheesh, in that mournful, pleading way, pushing against our hips. The woman held an unflinching naked baby on her broad shoulder, and with deep suspicion she watched Madeleine writing. Flies crawled across the baby’s cheeks, attracted by slick trails of snot. The fuzzy heads of the other children bobbed beneath our elbows; they turned their curious, woeful faces up at us and clamored for money. I gave the mother a ten-pound note and the children a pen, hoping they would leave us alone, but one of the children began to wail because I hadn’t given him more. His mother, delighted with the ten pounds, mimicked his wailing, laughed for my benefit, and gave me a chummy poke in the arm.
Madeleine wrote what the self-important lawyer had dictated to her:
In the name of Allah the Merciful and Compassionate, I the undersigned declare that I bought a fishing boat from El Shazly Fouad from the town of Luxor from the neighborhood of Azaneyya Il-Qibly for the amount of 900 pounds Egyptian only. And here I declare that.
Signed:
The seller: Shazly Fouad
The buyer: Rosemary Mahoney
The first witness: Madeleine Stein
The lawyer: Ahmed Mossad
I handed the camera and the money to Shazly Fouad, and Madeleine snapped a photograph of us shaking hands while Shazly held the nine hundred pounds up in the air.
When the sale was completed, the village woman came up beside me, wrapped her arm around my head in a kind of half nelson, and with staggering force she yanked hard until my ear was pinned to her shoulder, an indication of her congratulations and her deep affection. Her hold had the biting power of a carpenter’s vise. When I opened my eyes, all I could see was the ovoid black curve of her belly and the bluish henna tattoo on her thick wrist. The woman had a pleasant smell, like fresh oats and cinnamon. Her shoulder was wet and gritty from the sandy bottom of the baby who had recently occupied the spot. She wouldn’t let go of me. From beneath her forearm, I asked Madeleine to ask her to set me free. The woman pointed at herself, then pointed at me, then pointed at the boat and emitted a startling zagareet, that famous Arabic ululating sound that Arab women make at weddings and parties and on the occasion of important purchases, or when anything at all good happened. The woman wondered, did I want her to perform a traditional celebratory blessing, for which, she was happy to report, there would be only a very small fee?
I declined the formal celebration. I would be leaving Luxor early the next morning in my new boat and had many things to do before I left. I feared that all this jolly chaos would go on indeterminately if we didn’t bring it to a close. I gave the woman another few pounds and she drifted happily away, trailed by the naked children.
I realized that I needed a place to keep the boat safely overnight, and I wanted to leave it here, away from the busy eyes in downtown Luxor. If I rowed off down the river the next morning from this spot, there would be less chance of hindrance. A nearby restaurant had a dock in front of it. We asked a waiter who worked there whether we could leave the boat at the dock for the night. He went to get his boss.
The boss was a heavy, dark, officious man who spoke English very well. Dramatically he informed me that I could leave my boat at his dock but that he, for one, washed his hands of all responsibility for it. He brushed his hands together repeatedly to illustrate the meaning of this. I said I would hire someone to watch the boat all night, and the waiter gladly volunteered. I offered him thirty pounds, which made his eyes bulge with happiness.
“Fifty bounds,” said the busybody boss.
“Forty,” I said.
The waiter, hardly able to believe his good fortune, stepped forward and said, “OK, madame. It’s good. Forty,” before the boss could queer the deal with his greed. The waiter’s name was Muhammad. I told him I would return the next morning at 3:30 to retrieve the boat and hoped no one would ask why on earth I wanted to pick it up so early. I wanted to leave Luxor under cover of darkness. The two men thought I was taking the boat to Cairo in a truck. When the boss asked me who would help me remove the boat from the river, I said lamely, “Some nice men. Don’t worry at all about that. Everything is fine.”
No one asked another question about this weird arrangement. This could never have happened in Aswan. It was as if the Luxor people were so familiar with foreigners they simply didn’t care what crazy hijinks we got up to.
Madeleine and I said good-bye to Shazly Fouad. He was worried about getting his extra Polaroid film in the mail. He gave me his address and asked Madeleine, “Is this lady trustworthy?”
Madeleine said, “Very. Very. She will do everything in her power to get that film to you. It may take some time but, God willing, you will get it.”
Shazly peered skeptically at her. “By God, you say this?”
Somberly Madeleine said, “By God, I say it.”
“Praise God.”
Madeleine nodded and offered the proper response, “Praise God. Praise God.”
When Shazly Fouad had gone, the restaurant owner commanded us to come into his restaurant and drink lemonade. I didn’t want to drink lemonade. I wanted to go and buy the supplies I would need for the rest of my trip; it would take three more days at least, and this time I would be on my own without Amr to cook for me. But I didn’t want to alienate this fellow who had agreed to harbor my boat on his dock.
We sat with the man at a long table in an empty dining room, and immediately he informed us that the “accident” the previous year in Luxor — the massacre of fifty-eight tourists, many of them hacked to death with machetes — was not the work of Egyptian terrorists, that this horrible act of violence was the work of some foreign troublemakers.
“Egyptian people can never do this kind of thing,” the man said. “If you kill my father, my sister, my brother, I can shoot you for this, of course. OK. But I never can use an ax to cut a person that way. Egyptian people never can cut another person with blades. Some other foreign countries do this terrible thing.”
Why, we asked, would some foreigners come to Egypt and do such a thing?
He pushed out his lower lip and said with brisk certitude, “Jealous of our tourism. The Entity, Spain, Europe — they want us to have bad press so that tourists do not come to us. Mostly the Entity.”
“The Zionist Entity” was the way Egyptian newspapers referred to the state of Israel, for to use the word Israel was to honor the existence of that state, something Egyptians could not abide. Most Egyptians were eager to see Israel and its people disappear from the face of the earth. Whenever a terrorist attack took place in Egypt, Egyptians found a way to blame it on Israel, though the terrorists, when apprehended, were always Egyptian nationals and usually members of Gama’at Islamiyah, the extremist Islamic group. Whenever tourists got shot on their way to the pyramids, the attack was planned by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. When tourists were shot at on the train to Luxor, it was of course the Israelis who had plotted the event. I had never met an Egyptian who didn’t fully believe these stories.
“No other country has what Egypt has,” the restaurateur said with a summarizing sip of his lemonade. He told us he had been to many places around the world. When I asked him which country was his favorite, he thought for a conspicuously long time, then, shutting his eyes, he pronounced with a slow, indifferent wave of his hand, “They are all the same those countries. Nobody in the world has what Egypt has.”
A few hours later, Madeleine left Luxor to return to Cairo and her job at the university. As she climbed into the taxi that would take her to the airport, she warned me, “Don’t row any farther than Qena.” North of Qena there was political and religious unrest, riots, shootings, Christians and Muslims killing each other. To travel any farther north than Qena was dangerous. Though I wanted to row much farther, I promised that I would go no farther than Qena.
That night I sat alone on the balcony of my hotel room and looked down on the Nile and practiced the Arabic phrases that Madeleine had taught me, phrases I might need when finally alone on the Nile:
Di markebti. This is my boat.
Faahim? Do you understand?
Guzzi udaami. My husband is ahead of me.
Guzzi waraya. My husband is behind me.
Gaayeen dilwati! They are coming now!
Ma’aya sikeena. I have a knife.
Andi tasriih. I have permission.
Mashi. Mafeesh mushkila. OK. There’s no problem.
Emshi! Go away!
I thought about my new boat. After all my failures in Aswan, it had been shockingly easy to get what I wanted here. I sat in a state of surprise. I was ready now, finally, to begin rowing on the Nile by myself. I was Nervous and had to keep getting up to check my luggage, my supplies, and my map. That afternoon I had bought enough water and provisions for four days. Qena was forty-five miles north of Luxor. I guessed that if I rowed at a leisurely pace, it would take me approximately three days to get there.
I had bought bread, apricots, raisins, peanuts, a couple of tins of sardines and tuna fish, olives, cheese, and fruit. I had found a hardware store near the train station and bought some handmade cotton rope in case the twine that bound my oarlocks broke. I bought a length of thicker rope as a spare painter or anchor line. In the dark and dusty hardware store, I had rummaged amid the huge spools of rope, and when I lifted one large spool to have a look at the spool beneath it, the shopkeeper ran over and lifted the rope out of my arms. When I told him I didn’t mind doing the lifting myself, he smiled and wagged his head at me. “Oh no, my lady, it is too heavy that work. You would get tired from it. I do not want any lady to get tired.”
I had found it impossible to explain to Egyptians that even though I was a tourist, I enjoyed hard work, that I liked doing things for myself, that I didn’t mind carrying a heavy bag or chopping wood or walking a long distance. Once, when I told the driver of the Luxor ferry that I had walked from the ferry landing to the Temple of Hatshepsut and back again, he laughed loudly. “No. Impossible. No one do that.”
The walk was only five or six miles. “Yes,” I told him. “I did do that.”
He pursed his lips defiantly, his mustache twitched. “No, lady. I don’t believe. No one do.”
It was true that very few tourists actually walked from the ferry landing to the Ramesseum or the Temple of Hatshepsut, but I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t far and the walk was interesting, with its mud huts and dusty palms and ancient-looking plows being dragged along by enormous water buffalo. I had walked along the tops of irrigation mounds through the green fields of wheat and alfalfa and sugar cane and had met farmers and bullocks and children along the way. The two Colossi of Memnon rose up on my left with their huge fractured hands resting primly on their huge thighs; they sat straight backed, like two bad boys sent to sit in the corner of a classroom. A big-eyed eleven-year-old girl hugging a wooden doll in her arms had walked along with me for a while, and we had had a brief conversation in Arabic. With her warm brown hand laid flat on my forearm she asked me my name. I said, “I am Rose.” She nodded with sisterly interest and approval and asked where I was from. I told her I was from America. Her brown eyes widened generously in recognition and support. “And I,” she offered with one hand pressed to her heart, “am Aïda!” Then, lest there be any confusion as to her provenance, she added regally, “From here” and pointed at the cracked black earth beneath her bare feet — eight thousand years’ accumulation of Nile silt. Aïda wore a yellow robe and a purple scarf tied tight against her head, like a pirate. She had enormous golden eyes and a dainty little mouth. I gave her a piece of candy, and she offered me her wooden doll in exchange. I declined the doll as too extravagant a gift; instead she gave me the pink ribbon that held the doll’s hair in place. We said good-bye by very formally shaking hands.
I would rather walk to the Valley of the Kings and have the privilege of meeting Aïda from the floodplain of Luxor than sit in a rattling taxi listening to a lot of familiar banter from a shouting, smoking, mustachioed driver. I would rather lift a spool of rope myself, just to see how heavy it is, than have a fellow do it for me. But this was Egypt, where a woman was never allowed to get “tired,” where, in fact, a woman was never allowed to do much of anything but cook and scrub.
That afternoon when I went to the Thomas Cook office to get some money, the man behind the counter had said to me, “Which country you from? Holland?” No. “Swiss?” No. “Belgium?” He was clearly enjoying the guessing game, but like so many Egyptians he never guessed America. “You speak like Holland!” he said.
“No,” I said. “English is my language.”
“Spain you come from!”
“No.”
“You are very beautiful.” He picked up a telephone that had been lying off the hook on his desk and said, “Allo, Italiana? Momento,” and then to me he said, “I am speaking to an also beautiful Italian woman.”
“Have you met her?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know she’s beautiful?”
“Ha-ha,” he said, “I likes the Holland’s people!”
In my hotel I took inventory of my possessions for the third time. I had maps and a sleeping bag and a flashlight. I had a knife and a notebook. I had mosquito repellent and matches and some money. I had rope and a good boat. What more did I need?
I went out to my balcony to look at the Nile once more before I went to bed. The evening was warm, and the air had a gentle weight to it, like a light cotton blanket. Across the river the Temple of Hatshepsut was illuminated by floodlights — a somber, solid, rather rigid structure built into the side of a mountain. As I looked at the glittering river below, the hotel owner’s son appeared in the shadows on the next balcony. His name, I knew, was Adel. After a long silence he said to me, “You are very beautiful.”
Nice words, those — words that anywhere else in the world one would be pleased to hear, but in Egypt you hear them and your heart sinks a little in boredom and apprehension. Exactly twelve Egyptian men had said the same hollow thing to me that day. I told Adel that. He didn’t seem to care. He stepped closer.
“I guess that you are an English,” he said, “because you have small nose.”
A few days before a man had told me that I looked Argentine, and another had said I looked like a cat, and another had said I looked like a bird. I was prepared now for comparisons with anyone or any thing.
Adel was twenty-six years old, tall and slender, a lawyer. Unable to find a suitable job, he worked here in the hotel for his father. It was difficult to see his face clearly in the dark. “In Egypt,” he said sadly, “many people don’t living like human. They is living like animal. No good water, no shoes, no electricity. No reading nor writing. Like animal. The government do not caring about the people.”
I listened and sympathized and waited for the next topic to catch up with him. Inexorably it did.
“And,” Adel said, “relationship between men and woman is not good.” He had, he said, never seen a woman naked. He had a friend of twenty-four who was so ignorant about sex that he didn’t know what to do with his wife on their wedding night. “No one tell him. Until now I don’t know too, but then I saw sex films. In sex films they have men and women doing many things with the body that I am surprised. Not normal things. Is true they do these things?”
Adel was looking at me, that much I could see, but the exact nature of his stare was obscured by darkness. I could hear him breathing, could see the tip of his cigarette flare when he puffed at it. I was at a loss for something intelligent to say. A dim streetlight cast its sallow light on the big leaves of the plane trees below us. Horse carriages clacked by on the corniche. Men in bent postures were still fussily working on the entrance to the new Mummification Museum. “I suppose, yes, they do.”
“Egyptians people don’t do these things,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t thinks Egyptians men do. They only lift up the dress and — excuse me, madame — fuck her. Americans people they do these things?”
Once again I had landed in the middle of a surreal conversation with an Egyptian man. The aggrieved tenor, the content, the choice of words — they never seemed to vary in these conversations. I could fairly predict how this one would go. I weighed whether I wanted to continue with it. “Well, I think people all over the world do them,” I said.
He asked me if women actually enjoyed sex, a question I was not expecting. It was so direct and surprising and apparently naive that I could think of nothing to say. Into the silence that ensued Adel said, “In Egypt, we say sex is only for the men and that when men do it to the women the women would be angry.”
I was reminded of a group of wealthy Arab women — probably Saudi Arabian — I had once seen leaning eagerly over the balconies of the new Globe Theatre in London watching As You Like It, their faces hidden behind full black veils, and how they clapped their hands and screamed with delight at the bawd’s licentious behavior, and how their laughter struck a note of screeching hilarity and their hands flew to their faces when, in an unscripted and unpre-ce-dented development, the leading lady’s trousers (she was at that particular moment disguised as Ganymede) suddenly came untied and fell to her ankles, revealing her thoroughly bare white bottom to the audience. “I don’t believe that,” I said.
Adel sat down in a chair on the balcony and told me he had asked an Egyptian woman, a friend of his, whether women enjoyed sex. The friend’s answer was “I don’t mind it because I am strong.”
I knew that clitoridectomy, or female genital cutting, was widely practiced in Egypt; it was an ancient method of controlling a woman’s interest in sex, of assuring faithfulness, of curbing promiscuity. Maybe it was true that Egyptian women didn’t enjoy sex; I had no idea. The French naturalist Charles Sonnini had witnessed a clitoridectomy while in Egypt in 1778 and reported that the woman who performed the surgery had told him that if the clitoris was allowed to grow unchecked “by the age of twenty-five the thing would exceed four inches in length.” Sonnini believed this and attributed the phenomenon to an “Egyptian ethnic development.” To Louise Colet, Flaubert wrote of the Egyptian women, “As for physical plea-sure, it must be very slight, since the well-known button, the seat of same, is sliced off at an early age.”
I tried to disabuse Adel, said most women do enjoy sex, but that sometimes it was a difficult subject to talk about. The young man was so open about his own sexual ignorance that at certain points in our conversation I suspected him of putting me on. We were in Luxor, the trickery capital of Egypt, where the shopkeepers, sailors, and carriage drivers skillfully seduced the custom of tourists with elaborate schemes and stories.
Adel was long legged and sat slouched so low in his chair that he was almost lying down. His face was pointed at the moon, which was just beginning to show over the roof of the hotel. He shifted his legs and searched earnestly for the proper English words. His voice was soft and low. I listened for a false note in it, for the tightening sound of a smirk or a grin. “Yes, Egyptian women you cannot talk to about these things,” he said.
“What about your close female friends?”
In a gesture of disgust he threw his cigarette down into the street; sparks trailed from it as it tumbled. “I have no female friends.” There was a pause, and then, as though this fact naturally followed, he said, “Sex films are expensive.”
He spoke in a burdened, sorrowful, frustrated way, and at times he lowered his voice to a half whisper, as if he knew he shouldn’t be discussing these things with me, and yet he plowed on frankly. Was it a trick or was it a guileless quest for information? Both, I decided, and that was what made Egyptian men so vexing. You never knew whether to give them a brisk slap for their impertinence or to welcome the irreproachable trust they seemed to offer. It was also what made them interesting. They were skillful liars but also gullible. They were emotional and quick tempered but could be easily mollified with a few kind words. They were greedy, yet they could be very generous. The Egyptian men I had encountered, because they worked with tourists, knew that foreigners had money and sex and freedom; their reaction to all that fell just short of resentment and contained a great deal of curiosity. Even the Luxor hucksters on the corniche with their bags full of tricks were so unworldly that their ploys always stopped just short of being truly offensive or harmful.
Adel’s tone was confiding. “When I touch a woman’s hand, I feel something like electricity, but I don’t think this happens for foreigners.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “They already have too much seckiss.”
I leaned toward him, trying to catch his eye in the faint light. I needed to see his face to determine whether he was serious. I wanted to detect an ulterior expression on his face. He had the beautiful, fine, elongated features of the pharaoh Akhenaten. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. But my doubt about him was rising.
“I never have saw this thing that woman wear on her breast. What it’s called?”
This was the unmistakable giveaway. In every Egyptian city there were entire window fronts full of bras and girdles and slips, women’s clothing stores that sold a surprisingly sexy array of underwear. If Adel had truly never seen a bra before, he was blind.
“Can you send me one in the mail?”
“Would you ask an Egyptian woman to send you a bra?”
“Never!”
“Why?”
“Haram!” Forbidden.
“Then why ask me?”
He leaned toward me in the darkness; I could see he was frowning. “It’s different for you,” he said plaintively, his voice rising with irritation. “You are free!”