THE NEXT DAY was scorching hot, and when, with sweat trickling down my back, I said somewhat vapidly to my hotel manager, “It’s hot,” he replied in a correcting, foreboding way, “It is only the beginning of hot.”
It was too hot to row Amr Khaled’s boat in the middle of the day, too hot even to leave the hotel. All day I lay on my bed in my underwear with one forearm slung across my eyes, listening to a fly careering against the lamp shade, lifting the arm now and then to stare at a lizard on the ceiling or at the wall beside me that was dotted with little brown stars of dried blood: a constellation of violently mashed mosquitoes.
Unable to sleep, I read the books on Egypt that I had brought with me and learned numerous things about Aswan. It was rated among the hottest places in the world. Its population was about a million. It was one of the oldest towns in Egypt (evidence of predynastic culture seven or so thousand years ago; seriously old). The fruit of Aswan’s date palms had a “high reputation.” Once, twenty thousand Aswanians died of the plague. Most of Egypt’s ancient monuments were made from granite quarried at Aswan. When poor old Juvenal was banished from Rome for his satirical writing, they sent him to molder in Aswan. Aswan’s famous wells (summer solstice, high noon, sun fully reflected in bottom of well, no shadow, etc.) had inspired Eratosthenes’ formula for determining the circumference of the earth. During the nineteenth century a group of people called the Howling Dervishes had a house in Aswan; they met there on Fridays. Also during the nineteenth century, the Egyptian taverns that sold boozah (said to be the origin of the English word booze) were run mainly by Nubians who concocted the drink themselves and served it to customers, both men and women, from a large wooden ladle that was passed, presumably with some hilarity, around the room. In 1838 Edward Lane described boozah as an intoxicating liquor made with crumbled barley bread mixed with water, then strained and allowed to ferment. “It is commonly drunk by the boatmen of the Nile,” he wrote, “and by other persons of the lower orders.” Finally, I learned that by the 1820s Aswanians were already considered “the shrewdest people in Egypt,” famous for charging foreigners prices three times what their merchandise was worth.
When I got bored with the reading, I went to the window. My view was of a tall minaret, a colonial-looking boys’ school, the public toilets, and the brand-new Hospital for Eyes, with paint splattered on its windows and cabbages growing in the dirt on either side of its entrance. Just beyond the boys’ school was a little tailor’s shop where a sad old blue-eyed tailor sat every evening waiting for customers. He spoke no English, but when I stopped and said hello to him one evening he slid the sleeve of his shirt up his arm and showed me the bluish tattoo of a cross on his inner wrist. Like most of the tailors in Aswan, he was Christian, and like most Egyptian Christians he wore this tattoo as proof of his faith.
That afternoon two Nubian women were selling live pigeons in the shade of the public toilets. Draped in black gowns and veils, squatting on their haunches, their fine black hands visoring their eyes, they had sat all day waiting for customers. Their skin was so black that from this distance of a hundred feet their only discernible facial features were their frost-white teeth and the whites of their eyes. The pigeons had been stuffed, one hard upon the other, into bamboo cages. From time to time one of the women would take a swig of water from a red plastic gasoline jug, yank a pigeon from the cage with a roughness that seemed to spell immediate destruction, fit the pigeon’s beak between her own lips, transfer the water to the bird, then stuff him back in the cage, patting the others down to make room for him. They handled the birds like dirty washrags. When a potential customer came down the hot street, one of them would haul a dozen birds out of a cage, pinch their wings together, and display them six in each hand, like a fan of playing cards.
A woman came down the street pushing a baby stroller, and it struck me that the women in Aswan who could afford strollers — most women simply carried their babies astraddle one shoulder — were always dressed in the Islamic veil, the long cloth wrapped around their heads and under their chins. No hair showing, no neck, just the face revealed. The veil hung down to the backs of their thighs over a black gown that hung to their ankles. They had noble faces, full voices, and walked with straight backs.
At four o’clock I ventured out to look for Amr Khaled’s boat. The city looked as though it had been baked senseless during the day. Nothing moved. Even the river seemed to have slurred to a halt. The simmering streets had surrendered their utility as streets; empty, the pavement threw up ripples of heat like beds of hot coals. Over time, thousands of bottle caps had been trampled into the molten surface of the corniche; at that hour they glinted dully like the profligate scatterings of some drunken millionaire. Every car in sight sat still, with an openmouthed body stretched across the front seat. Semicomatose figures lay sprawled under trees and awnings or flopped over in doorways. I had the strange sense that if I turned on a radio in this heat, I’d find nothing but static on every station.
On the hotel ferry, I made the short trip across the river to Elephantine Island, and when I arrived at the dock in front of the Oberoi Hotel, eight felucca captains were standing by their boats, waiting for customers. They appeared to be the only upright people in Aswan. In their long white gowns they were like idling priests. Though he had only ever seen me in the dark, Amr Khaled recognized me and came forward. In the daylight I realized he was a dark-skinned Nubian. I saw too how small his rowboat was — approximately seven feet long. Its name, Happy, was hand-painted on its prow in rough black letters that called to mind angry profanities scrawled on a highway underpass. In the cockpit, written on the cubbyhole door, were the oddly ominous words “Don’t Worry,” in the same intemperate handwriting. The oars, lashed to metal pegs with strips of what looked like floppy rubber cut from a bicycle inner tube, were a pair of termite-eaten two-by-fours. Wooden floorboards had been laid over the steel hull.
As if reading my mind Amr said sheepishly, “It is small boat.”
I nodded.
“The first small boat in Egypt.”
I looked at him. “The smallest boat in Egypt, you mean?”
He tilted his head and grinned, abashed. “I mean. Yes. Is smallest.”
We sat down on the dock to talk. He was an unusually calm man and an attentive listener. He had large, gentle eyes, the whites of which were a muddy yellow, and long curling black lashes. His mustache was traced with veins of white. His skin was dark and his face had a toddler’s pudginess. Everything about him looked pleasingly rounded: his small mouth was round and his cheeks were round, and his belly pushed roundly at the front of his gallabiya. He was stocky and thick shouldered, and though he was no taller than I, he looked fiercely powerful. His tongue was heavy and he spoke in a crowded way, with an almost imperceptible lisp. He had a habit of reducing the word than to nothing but its final n, so that “This is better than that” became “This is better ’n that.” While most men in Aswan had brown spots on their teeth, Amr’s teeth were impeccably white. His age was impossible to determine. His short hair was the complex gray of a squirrel’s tail, but he had the smooth skin of a young man. In the center of his forehead he bore the raised and darkened callus that came of frequent prostration in prayer; the unofficial term for it was zabib, which meant “raisin.” The callus was worn proudly as a sign of great piety and devotion. The more you prayed, the bigger the raisin. It was widely known that in an act of religious vanity some men rubbed the spot with a stone in secret, deliberately and falsely increasing its size. On some Muslim men this callus was so large and so dark it looked like a horrible hematoma. Amr’s zabib was small and looked genuine.
Eventually Amr suggested that I take my row. I climbed into the boat, and while Amr untied the lead the other felucca captains twitched their gowns and looked on in uncharacteristic silence, taking their cue as much from the unexpectedness of the situation as from Amr’s polite gravity. I told Amr that I would row around Elephantine Island and return in an hour or so.
“As you wish,” he said, with no trace of mockery, worry, or doubt.
I pushed off from the dock and began to haul the boat upstream. The oars were immensely heavy, with thick wooden handles that had been coarsely fashioned with a machete, and one oar was longer than the other. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it happened to be a Coptic holiday that day, doubling the river traffic, which usually came to life at this hour when the heat began to abate. Long, underpowered launches moved back and forth across the river, overloaded with singing, clapping, bongo-thumping revelers. On some boats, spontaneous dances had erupted: twenty dark heads bobbing up and down on the decks, while the boats teetered this way and that. The atmosphere was one of general hilarity. The water seemed to thrum.
Nervous under the watchful eyes of the seven felucca captains and unsure of the current, I rowed hard and began to make progress toward the top of Elephantine Island. Men in large feluccas sped by, slicing through the water just inches from my bow, grinning wildly and shouting, “Come here, madame! I help you!” or “Come in my boat!” Others simply stared, surprised into silence at the sight of me. I tried to ignore them, to concentrate on the oars and the water. Amr had placed such unusual confidence in me that I was determined not to disappoint him.
At a mile long, Elephantine Island forced the Nile to divide into two channels on either side of it. I rowed up the narrow eastern passage between the Old Cataract Hotel on the mainland and the enormous rounded clifflike boulders near the top of the island. One of the many theories for the derivation of the name Elephantine was that from a distance these boulders resembled elephants. Floating not two feet from the smooth rocks, I could see clearly the unfinished cartouches and hieroglyphs that had been chiseled into them millennia before. Just above these rocks was the Elephantine nilometer, built by the pharaohs to measure the river’s annual inundation and rebuilt by the Romans.
The water was black, glassy, and, squeezed as it was through this narrow channel, very swift. I rowed hard until I rounded the top of the island and could rest a little. Because of the huge boulders that lurk just below the flat mirror of the water’s surface, the currents here were tricky: shifting and twisting with turbid force. At the top of the island, I was dazzled by the sight of twenty white rowboats anchored in the shallows below the ruins of the Temple of Khnum, every boat freshly painted, and every one perfect for my purposes. I realized that among the boats a young man was bathing in the river stark naked. He saw me looking at him yet didn’t seem to care. In fact, he waved his skinny arms and shouted at me to come and sit on a rock with him and drink tea. When I began to row off he screamed, by way of introduction, “I am in the army!” and jumped out of the water and bounded toward me across the rocks, desperate for my attention, his naked body glistening, bands of silvery water streaming from him. A big felucca passed behind me, and its captain shouted coyly at me, “Hey, Egyptian! Want to come in my boat?”
The distractions and confusion made the coordinated labor of rowing the boat nearly impossible. My linen trousers were transparent with sweat; the legs of them clung to my shins. The metal hull of my boat grazed a rock just below the surface of the water with a grinding squeal. Seconds later, coming through a narrow passage between two small islands, the prow of a felucca called Smile glanced off the stern of my boat and spun me around like a pinwheel. I had never seen so many sailboats moving so fast in such a small space, nor had I ever witnessed quite this daredevil brand of sailing. The sailors in Aswan operated their feluccas the way adolescent boys operate dirt bikes in a mud pit, with flashy flourishes and abrupt precision; their stunts were the nautical equivalent of fishtails, hairpin turns, and wheelies. A lifetime of sailing had given them a kind of rollicking freedom on the water. I envied them.
I was tired and realized that my hour was quickly passing. I didn’t want Amr to worry about his boat. I rounded the southern tip of Elephantine Island and headed easily downriver on the western side of it, the current coaxing me swiftly along. The river was less crowded on this far side of the island, and there was some semblance of peace here. The sun, though far from setting, had sunk fully behind the high desert dunes on the west bank of the river, cloaking the water in purple shadow. A boat overloaded with young police officers raced by without noticing me.
Farther along, a boatful of gamesome Nubians moored in an island cove sat smoking marijuana. One of them shouted at me, “Whose boat is that?” Another said, “Please come in our boat and smoke!”
When I asked what they were smoking, they giggled and showed their dazzling white teeth.
“Lady, you know what we smoking. You have any we can buy?”
I said no.
“We would pay for it!”
“I don’t have anything to give you,” I said and thought of the sign I had seen in the Cairo airport the first time I arrived in Egypt, a sign informing visitors that should they be found carrying anything faintly resembling intoxicating drugs, their hands might be cut off, they might be executed, and either way they would certainly have to pay the Egyptian government something like a million-pound fine. Who would dare? But many of the sailors in Aswan smoked marijuana and hashish, and I had seen a small but unmistakable Rastafarian element among some of the young Nubian captains. Some wore their hair in dreadlocks, not a natural Nubian style, and boldly smoked their ganja in the open air. In Aswan I had seen an anomalous few feluccas with the names Hash Family, Rasta Famely, and Jamaica Famely. Chiefly Muslim, the sailors’ interest in Rastafarianism seemed to have less to do with religious belief and a devotion to Haile Selassie than with Jamaican fashion and the ethnic identity that grew out of it. The pot smoking in this Muslim country struck me, but according to some of the earliest travelers in Egypt the use of the hemp plant as a narcotic was an old and common tradition here. Charles Sonnini, who traveled from France to Egypt in 1777, claimed that the consumption of hashish in Egypt was “very considerable” and that hashish was to be found in all the Egyptian markets. Sonnini wrote, “The Arabs and the Egyptians compose several preparations from this plant, with which they procure for themselves a sort of pleasing drunkenness, a state of reverie which inspires gaiety and produces agreeable dreams. This sort of annihilation of the faculty of thinking, this kind of slumber of the soul, has no resemblance to the intoxication produced by wine or strong liquors, and our language has no terms expressive of it.”
Edward Lane in his 1836 An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians noted that though the sale of hashish and Cannabis indica was then prohibited in Egypt, Egyptians still employed this “pernicious and degrading custom,” and that hashish could be got at coffee shops and smaller private shops called mahsheshehs, which were exclusively for the sale of hashish “and other intoxicating preparations.” Lane wrote, “It is sometimes amusing to observe the ridiculous conduct, and to listen to the conversation, of the persons who frequent these shops. They are all of the lower orders.” He went on to explain that in Egypt the Arabic word hashshasheen, which meant “users of hemp,” was often applied to “noisy and riotous people,” and that during the Crusades the name hashshasheen (the origin of the word assassin) was given to Syrian warriors who used mind-altering drugs to confuse and disarm their enemies.
I waved good-bye to the pot smokers and moved on past Kitchener Island, a small island wholly taken up with the most exotic botanical garden I had ever seen. It was filled with tropical trees and flowers, everything marked in Latin and Arabic. On another trip I had seen a horse-radish tree there, a cape honeysuckle, a mountain ebony, a baobab, an ironwood, a rubber vine, a spotted gum, a silver trumpet tree, and an enormous mahogany. I had seen a Strychnos nux-vomica, a strychnine tree, and had put one of its spherical seedpods in my pocket, then later threw it away for fear it would poison me. Kitchener was cool and quiet and shady, and it was home to a curious cat that had one green eye and one blue.
Half an hour later I rounded the bottom of the island and pulled myself up to Amr’s dock. He was still standing there with several other sailors, still waiting for work. As I climbed out of the boat he looked at my face, took the oars from me, and said nothing. When I moved to hand him some money for the use of the boat, he shook his head, showed me the palm of his hand in protest, and then pressed it to his chest, an indication that he could not possibly take money from me.
Such a refusal was unheard of in a man in his line of work. I offered the money again; again he protested. Clutching the knot of tattered Egyptian pounds, I asked Amr if I could come back and take the boat again the next day.
He smiled. “Any time you feel.”
That evening the woman who tended the front desk in my hotel invited me to come to her house. In her late thirties, Christian, married with three children, Safaa was short, solid, intelligent, and spoke English very well. She was gap toothed and good natured, well educated, had a sense of humor and a sometimes comical manner, but was often bored and frustrated and glum about her life. She had the air of one whose ambitions had been thwarted at every turn. She spoke freely, as though she had known me for years. She was tired of being poor, disliked Egypt, and wanted to travel. She had nine-year-old twins, boy and girl, and a six-month-old infant whom she referred to as “the surprise.” Every day Safaa’s husband minded the baby until the twins came home from school in the afternoon, then he would go off to work and the twins would take over the babysitting until Safaa returned home at eight.
Safaa valued education and was depressed about her twins; they were smart but didn’t study. They spent all their time watching television, and the husband never lifted a finger to prevent them, though she complained about it again and again. “When they with my husband, they watch TV all day,” she told me. “Soon as I come home from work I turn that crap box off. And then my twins, they do nothing. They won’t read a book. I have to put the book in their hands and point their heads at it and say, ‘Now, you two little dogs, you read!’”
If the children refused to study, they would never pass their exams, and what sort of future would they have if they didn’t pass their exams? They’d end up poor like everyone else in Aswan.
Safaa had learned the word crap from some Australian guests in the hotel and used it often and with relish. Like most Christian women she wore modest cotton dresses that covered her arms and knees and never wore a veil or a head covering of any kind. Because of their relative freedom of dress, their exposed shins and ankles, their uncovered necks and heads and fully visible hair, Christian women were easily identifiable on Egypt’s streets. They always looked more modern, lighter, freer, less alien and mysterious than the Muslim women.
That evening we walked together to Safaa’s apartment. Along the way I praised the dress she was wearing, a pleasant, long-sleeved, flowered gown with a black Peter Pan collar. She looked down at the dress and said, “I like this one too, but my manager in the hotel, he says, ‘Safaa! That’s a crap dress. It so old-fashioned; from the days of your old mother.’ But I give no damn. I like it. He tells me don’t wear it. I wear it anyway.”
We walked through the older streets of Aswan, away from the river. The farther we got from the corniche and the markets, the darker the streets became, and eventually the pavement gave way to dust, and we were walking in a black maze of small pathlike alleys between run-down two-story houses that looked on the verge of toppling. The smell of cooking and coal smoke drifted through open doors; dim yellow lights shone in open windows. Dogs barked in the distance. Suddenly Aswan felt like a small village. Safaa pointed to a row of dark buildings in a narrow street and said, “I hope they rip those craps down! They are only empty and dangerous! And kids like to play in them and sometimes they get hurt. Aswan is a crap.”
At the end of the street a group of older Muslim women stared as we approached, and one of them asked Safaa why she was walking with a foreigner. Safaa told the woman, “She’s my American cousin, and it’s none of your business anyway,” then translated for me what she had said, tittered at her own impertinence, and added “Crap!” for good measure as we walked on.
Safaa’s apartment was big, clean, and appointed in the Egyptian fashion with a lot of heavy and uncomfortable hand-hewn wooden furniture. An enormous television sat on a table in the middle of the room. The walls were covered with Christian symbols and decorations: a picture of Mar Girgis, or Saint George, slaying a pathetic-looking dragon who was rigid and twisted with agony; a picture of the Coptic Pope Shenouda with his big grizzly beard; a picture of an Egyptian-looking Blessed Virgin with big dark eyes, a long nose, and a wide mouth; and beside the Virgin a fuzzy reproduction of The Last Supper. The knob on the front door was embossed with a cross and the words “God is Love” in Arabic. And on the mantel stood a two-foot-tall statue of a Caucasian Jesus in a rose-colored robe cradling a slightly cross-eyed lamb in his arms. Dust had collected in the ceramic folds of Jesus’s gown and turned the rose color to gray.
The modern Coptic Christians are the descendants of pharaonic Egyptians who had been converted to Christianity by Saint Mark in Alexandria. It is believed that the later pharaohs spoke the Coptic language, a modern form of Egyptian heavily influenced by Greek. Copts now make up only 15 percent of the Egyptian population. Safaa liked Hosni Mubarak because he defended and protected the beleaguered Egyptian Christians. Sometimes, she said, Muslims kidnapped Christian women and forced them to convert to Islam by threatening to rape them if they didn’t convert. In Lower Egypt, north of Qena, there were constant fights, gun battles, even small riots between Christians and Muslims.
I asked Safaa why all the tailors in Egypt were Christian. She said disconsolately, “I ask myself that.” Her view was that in the fifties and sixties there had been many more Christians in Egypt and that when Nasser came to power he stole the important jobs from the Christians and gave them to the Muslims. “So that’s why the Muslims have all the good jobs. The professional jobs. Now the Christians that’s left here can only be tailors and other crap jobs. Nasser took the Christians’ money and their land.”
This reminded me of Florence Nightingale writing in 1849, “Abbas Pacha is so furiously Mahometan that he has just dismissed all Christians from his ser-vice . . . besides 900 Coptic scribes who are fallen into the lowest poverty thereby.”
At the sound of our voices, Safaa’s children came out from a back bedroom. They were pale faced, dark haired, handsome, and small. The daughter Mary carried the six-month-old infant expertly on her hip. The boy, George, stood behind them. The infant, very tiny and naked from the waist down, was beaming and gnawing on the edge of a small saucer gripped in her hand; later I saw that the saucer was painted with an image of the Virgin and Child. The three little children had been home alone all afternoon minding each other. They stared at me with sweet, fascinated smiles.
Safaa brought me mango juice, a cup of hot karkady tea, and two pears. The twins turned on the television and, like children anywhere, began frantically flipping through the channels, past glimpses of Arab rappers with baseball caps worn sideways on their heads, past the BBC world news, past CNN, Yasser Arafat, Benjamin Netanyahu, Omar Sharif looking elderly with longish white hair, a nightclub singer wailing “Habibi” into a microphone, and multiple car advertisements from Saudi Arabia that showed sexy long-haired women purring, “Next Ramadan, buy a new Jaguar for your wife.” The life depicted on the television bore no resemblance what-ever to life in the streets of Aswan.
Safaa dandled the baby on her knee and sighed. “I spend all my extra money on the house, good furniture, new floor in the kitchen. And my husband? What he do? He spend all his money on the stupid TV. A hundred channels that crap TV has. And these kids they never stop watching it. Look at them, Rose.”
The children stared at the television, openmouthed, dead eyed, deaf to the world. Like their mother, they had small blue crosses tattooed on their inner wrists. The baby began to cry. Safaa bounced her up and down on one knee, kissed her, then passed her over to Mary, who bounced her, kissed her, then passed her over to George, who walked her around the room and kissed her until the diaperless baby emitted a rude shower of diarrhea on his little arm. Calmly, as though he was entirely used to this, George took the baby into the bedroom, changed his shirt, washed the baby, and brought her back to the living room, again diaperless.
Safaa was annoyed with Mary because Mary had fed the baby nothing but juice all day. “She do that because it’s easier than giving her real food,” she said to me, then she turned to Mary and said hotly, “Kula yom kida! Every day it’s like this! I tell you to feed her food but you give her juice! That’s why she has diarrhea.”
Pale-faced Mary stood up and protested loudly with a long string of angry-sounding Arabic. She slapped her own forehead like an elderly woman, then flopped down on the couch and sulked. I couldn’t blame her — she was far too young to be held responsible for the diet and welfare of an infant.
Safaa lifted up the baby and studied her face. “The baby isn’t beautiful,” she said flatly. “I am not beautiful. I am look like Indian lady. I have big nose and dark skin.” It was true. “And I got a big wide mouth. My daughter Mary is more beautiful than me. She is whiter. I hope the baby will be better looking later.”
Safaa asked me how I liked the hotel I was staying in. I told her it was very good for such a cheap place — clean, safe, with a pleasant staff. My only complaint was that every time he saw me, the chef in the rooftop dining room — a fat, unshaven, toothless old man — invited me to go dancing with him. “It’s a bit tiresome,” I said.
Safaa howled with laughter so loud the startled baby began to cry. “Oh, that big crap!” she said. “He has had five wives and many children and he thinks he is a young man but he isn’t and he has no teeth in his head and also bad breath on top of it. God, that old goat.”
Safaa told me that last year the manager of the hotel had found pornographic magazines “for sex” in a cupboard in the hotel kitchen, and in a fury had burned them on the roof of the hotel and had shrieked at the chef that if he ever brought such filth into the hotel again he would fire him.
The children were now staring at a film on the Christian Channel; a story about a Muslim man who wanted to convert to Christianity because the corrupt Muslim leaders were always telling him he had to kill people in the name of God, and how on earth could that be holy and right? The Muslim imam ranted incessantly at the man about how he should live and what he should do. The imam looked like a caricature of the devil, leering in a skullcap, with a long unkempt beard and hard little lightless eyes and two hands like menacing claws with which he pantomimed his rage and hatred for the Christian infidel. The would-be Christian convert was, of course, handsome, noble, and gentle. He admitted to the imam that he wanted to become Christian, whereupon the rabid imam flipped his lid and tried to strangle the traitor with the two claws.
I watched the scene in fascination, wondering how the Christian Channel could get away with a show like this. Christians were a tiny minority in Egypt, were persecuted and maligned, and yet they had managed to air on national television this incendiary polemic portraying Muslims as fanatical murderous maniacs.
That show ended and another began. From what I could glean from the imagery and from Safaa’s occasional translations, this one concerned a smart Egyptian lawyer who goes to a party, is so upset — or perhaps just so depraved — that he has to drink straight out of the host’s whiskey bottle, gets drunk, feels up a buxom young woman in a back room, then drives home, and accidentally kills people with his fancy car. The next morning he’s hung over, unshaven, and disheveled but brilliant in court. He ends up redeemed mostly because he’s handsome and smart and because he brings presents to a boy he has crippled in the accident. That show was followed by an advertisement for a talk show interview with a famous Egyptian movie star reputed to be very funny. In the ad, the movie star was crying sincerely and tamping her eyes with a hankie. I asked Safaa why she was crying.
“Ah, those silly craps!” Safaa howled. “They always pretend to cry! They have to! People like it!”
And finally we sat staring at a show in which women were discussing what you should do if your daughter has a baby before she’s married.
Surprised, I said to Safaa, “That happens?”
“All the time, Rose! Just last month an infant was found abandoned in a basket two blocks from here.”
Safaa grabbed the TV remote from Mary, clicked it off, told the kids to go and do their mathematics and take the baby with them, then she turned to me and began to speak with rueful envy. Outside Egypt things were different, better. She knew this because she worked in a hotel and met many foreigners. Men and women could sleep together before they were married, and the women didn’t have to ask their parents before marriage if the husband was an acceptable prospect. Egyptians were too obsessed with sex and marriage and family. And women couldn’t do anything on their own. For Egyptian women, marriage was the only way you could really get out of your father’s house. Safaa hadn’t married her husband for love. He was a nice man and a good husband, but she didn’t love him. Sometimes she wanted to go to Kitchener Botanical Garden alone just to sit and relax and look at the pretty trees that she had heard so much about, but she never mustered the courage to go there because strangers — men — would incessantly ask her whether she was married, where was her husband, where were her children, and why wasn’t she at home minding her family. She clucked her tongue in disgust. “Women here can’t do anything alone.”
When I told Safaa that I did many things alone she said, “And I know it! I see you. You go out in the world by yourself. You can go in Aswan by yourself. You go to Kitchener Island, Elephantine, Luxor, and Cairo by yourself and you can enjoy. And you wear trousers. I saw you run once. On the corniche you was running. You can talk to strangers and men and ride in the felucca with the captain. But Egyptian women? No! Egyptian women — doesn’t matter Christian or Muslim — can’t be like you.”
Safaa stared at the blank television screen with utter disdain. “Rose, I tell you. I wish I could be free like you.”