Because I Said So (50 page)

And I remember myself at a time that seems not so long ago, looking down at my own breasts three days after the birth of my daughter: in a matter of hours my milk-engorged breasts had bal-346

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looned exponentially, literally before my eyes, each growing to the size and taut firmness of a child’s rubber ball. The absurdity of it, the outrageous disproportion to the rest of me and to my tiny baby, was hilarious. My breasts, then, like the scarred and irradiated and poisoned flesh of my friends with cancer now, were hard, melon-thumping hard. But they were full of milk. They were meant to sustain life. I have rarely, before or since, felt more truly feminine, or more vital. Just as with her older brother, long after my daughter stopped breast-feeding I continued to lactate.

My milk continued for years, seemingly unstoppable.

I needed to find a curator
or a director, someone who could lead me to Demos. I pestered disinterested guards at the endless security checkpoints, brandishing color photocopies of the portraits of Demos and her baby, trying to follow the confusing, contradictory instructions I was given, the indiscriminate honking of traffic at Midan Tahrir in the background a soundtrack, relentless. I wandered the museum into the afternoon, finally stumbling into the administrative wing. Veiled women in aprons passed by with trays of tea, and men in shirtsleeves were crowded into a broom closet eating their lunch. Under a low arched doorway another bored guard watched a small television, his feet up on an ugly desk. Behind him, a bearded Western man in Indiana Jones garb spoke earnestly to a clean-shaven Egyptian wearing ordinary street clothes.

“I need to speak to the curator of the Fayum portraits,” I said, holding up the photocopied Demos for the relaxing guard. I repeated my request twice before I managed to gain his attention.

The guard jerked his head sideways, not taking his eyes from the TV screen.

“Mrs. Tawfic,” he said.

“This way?” I asked.

The guard jerked his head again.

At the end of the hall, through an open door, there was a room full of women. All veiled, they sat together around numer-M o t h e r o f t h e Wo r l d

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ous desks crowded against the walls, sharing tuna sandwiches and drinking milky tea. One of them spoke quietly on the solitary telephone. Flies ambled in esoteric, repeating patterns in the center of the shabby, nondescript room: the curators’ office.

“Mrs. Tawfic?” I said, all the women turning to look at me as I entered. One well-dressed woman sitting in a chair with her back to one of the file cabinets, her purse in her lap, looked quizzically at me. I’d broken into a profound sweat. I dabbed at my face with a tissue from a packet I kept in my pocket; already I’d noticed many Egyptian women doing the same.

I held out the photocopy of Demos’s portrait, like an offering in exchange for a blessing. My request, however indistinct its reasons, tumbled forth: that I’d come from America, that I’d written and called, that I wanted to see this portrait, but it wasn’t in the gallery.

“You want to see the portraits?” Mrs. Tawfic replied, standing up. “Yes, yes. Nobody comes to see the portraits. They all want to see the old things.” She edged herself gracefully through the narrow space between her desk and the next one, taking the likeness of Demos from my hands. “She is in storage,” she continued. Though she looked to be about my age, she was taller than me, meticulously made up, and she carried herself with serene authority. “But if you want to see her, I will bring her out for you.”

“You will?” I answered, disbelieving. “Yes! Please. I’ve come all the way from America,” I said pointlessly again.

“Can you come back?” Mrs. Tawfic asked. “I can’t . . .” she hesitated, searching for the English words. “I will need papers. I will need a letter.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I can come back any time. I’m here until Thursday. I have all of my papers here. What do you need?”

Mrs. Tawfic looked at everything I had: the photocopies of the portraits along with my stack of unanswered correspondence, my passport, my California driver’s license, the card from my hotel, and the half-bogus press pass my son had concocted for me the night before I left home. I sat at an empty desk and handwrote
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a new letter to the museum’s director, waving away a persistent fly as I wrote.

“This is good,” said Mrs. Tawfic, smiling warmly at me as she finished reading the letter slowly. “Can you come back, umm . . .

Wednesday? Two days, at ten o’clock?”

Walk Like an Egyptian

Before the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1900s, June had been the time of the Nile’s annual flood. All life in Egypt was reliant on the Nile’s flooding and receding. The right amount of flooding meant fertile fields and healthy harvests; too little or too much meant desperation and starvation. My experience of Cairo, of waiting to go back to see Mrs. Tawfic, wavered equally between extremes, ecstatic and despairing by turns.

I left the museum, stunned and excited by finding Mrs. Tawfic and the prospect of seeing Demos, only to be stranded again at the edge of the Midan Tahrir. Even worse, it was just before Cairo’s rush hour, and drivers were taking advantage of any free space in the nonexistent lanes, gunning their engines to get as far toward their destinations as possible before the vehicular dead-lock that would soon come.

I could see no way to get back across the street. Even the local pedestrians were avoiding any attempt to cross on foot. Suddenly someone grabbed my elbow, an old Egyptian man with a face shriveled to leather, wearing a stained
galabiyya
and rubber flip-flops. “Walk like an Egyptian!” he urged me. I almost burst out laughing, thinking of the insipid eighties pop song with that title—was it the Bangles or some other girl group?—but there wasn’t time. My escort pulled me straight into oncoming traffic, walking, not hurrying, gripping my elbow firmly, holding his other hand out toward speeding cars and buses as he wove me between them; they passed us within inches. I held my breath; I kept walking. “Welcome!” the man shouted as he left me on the opposite curb.

Not all the Egyptians I met in the next thirty-six hours were
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so magnanimous. My elbow was grabbed many times, often to force me toward someone’s “art gallery,” which would turn out to be a shop selling hideous paintings on ersatz papyrus, or by hucksters who opened their wallets to show me dubious photos of friends and relatives in America before trying to drag me to their

“family shop.” After being reluctantly pulled down a few alleys I learned to stop their hard sells immediately by saying, “My husband will kill you!” with a smile, a strategy that worked every time. I knew they only wanted my business; diminished as I felt—

as well as grimy and perpetually sweaty—attracting sexual attention, desired or otherwise, from men seemed an almost laughable absurdity. Most Egyptians were merely friendly, acknowledging my presence in their country with whatever English they had at their disposal: sometimes “Texas?” or “Hollywood?” but also

“Okay!” “Yes, yes!” and once, “Yankee doo doo!”

Still, Cairo was exhausting, dirty, and overwhelming, difficult almost everywhere. Maps were useless against the intricacy of the city’s many narrow, name-changing streets, and cash was hard to get: The ATM keyboards were in Arabic (of course!) and even the bank exchanges at major hotels were open for mystifying, unpre-dictable periods. I spent hours searching for money, a necessity in Egypt’s largely cash economy, and for phones that would work with the international phone cards I purchased. When I did manage to get through to the United States, I resorted to leaving long, rambling messages for my family, knowing they had no way to reach me: The grubby phone in my hotel room didn’t work.

Finding Demos

Mrs. Tawfic was waiting for me at the door when I reached her office on Wednesday morning. “I am still meeting with my director. Can you come back in one hour?”

“Of course,” I said, fighting off my auto-response of skepticism, the low gnawing of disappointment anticipated. “I’ll come back in an hour.”

I have an hour, then, I encouraged myself, standing unexpect-350

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edly in the penetrating morning light in the museum courtyard. I crossed the alley to the Nile Hilton, thinking I would get some money and try to call my family again. But I spent most of the hour walking back and forth between the unattended bank exchange office and the hotel operator’s booth, until I finally gave up. I had some cash; it would have to last me indefinitely. As I turned into a breezeway leading out of the hotel’s main lobby, I passed a bookshop. In the window was a copy of
The Mysterious
Fayum Portraits
by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, the same book in which I first saw Demos.

“Can you take a credit card?” I asked the bookshop clerk.

The answer was yes. Success! I bought the book—for moral support, even if I didn’t end up needing it to shore up my application to see the portraits—and crossed the Hilton’s garden back to the museum.

When I arrived at the curator’s office for the second time, Mrs. Tawfic had a stack of papers for me to sign. I exhaled. Again I surrendered my passport, my press pass, everything, while Mrs.

Tawfic went to the director’s office for his final approval. When she returned, impeccably dressed, her dark hair barely showing at the hairline under a navy scarf, her eyes lined in blue, I thought for a moment of how crude I must look to her, in my dusty pants and shoes and my enormous, baggy cotton shirt—my daily Egyptian getup. “Now we can go,” she said, holding the stack of signed, sealed forms. “What is that?” she asked, pointing at the book of Fayum portraits.

“This is how I discovered Demos,” I said, handing her the book.

Immediately, hungrily, she started to page through the volume.

“I have never seen this,” she said, almost breathless. “I need this! How can I get a copy? I need this to write the catalog for my new exhibit.”

The portraits of Demos and the baby, as well as many of the other portraits in the museum’s collection, were in storage, Mrs.

Tawfic told me, because she wanted to mount them in a newly curated exhibit, something that would lend them more honor than the neglectful way that some of them were currently disM o t h e r o f t h e Wo r l d

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played. But without more information she could not develop a catalog, and without a catalog, the director would not schedule the dates for the exhibit. She was gleeful, almost giddy, as she pored over the faithful reproductions and careful scholarship in Doxiadis’s book.

“Take this book,” I said. “It’s my gift to you.”

Mrs. Tawfic gasped and looked at me, hugging the book to her chest like a child, holding it up to show the other curators, who had gathered around to see. Mrs. Tawfic turned to me, her kind face beaming. “We can help each other, yes?” she said.

Our entourage had assembled at the door. Led by Mrs.

Tawfic, we entered the museum through the director’s entrance, trailed by four or five men brought along to move the portraits out of storage, a guard, Mrs. Tawfic’s assistant, and a museum official. We walked down the halls of the ground floor, past befuddled tour groups, and into a gallery where there was a pad-locked door leading to a storage room.

The door opened onto an unlit space crowded with precious antiquities in what appeared to be desultory order, like the average garage or basement. Just inside was a tall wooden chest of drawers. Mrs. Tawfic began giving directions in Arabic, her voice maternal and firm, as the workers pulled the knobs on the first drawer.

I could feel my emotions begin to spill over, welling since I left the hotel that morning, since December, since last fall—about everything: the elated, stunned amazement; the gloating anticipation and self-satisfaction; the shame and confusion; the fear of mortality’s darkness rumbling toward me and my friends; the crushing sense of powerlessness and inadequacy against the responsibilities of my life. The realization that I couldn’t count on myself or on the identity I’d taken for granted, and how ineffec-tual, fraudulent, simply used up I’d come to feel. And then, in that bleak and colorless time, how something rich had begun trickling back, something essential, because of an ancient face.

Inside the first drawer were Plexiglas cases padded with thick white flannel. Fitted into the cases were taupe-colored wooden
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boxes lined with linen display boards, and on the linen the portraits rested. The workers brought out Demos first, two of them mindfully carrying her case, which they set upright on the floor in the open gallery. Demos, in her lavender tunic, looked out at us, her deep brown eyes caught in an eternal moment of melancholy wonderment. My eyes started to burn.

Mrs. Tawfic was still giving instructions, now in Arabic and English. “The baby, too,” she called to the workers.

I turned to look at Mrs. Tawfic—her lovely, open face. “She’s so beautiful,” I said, my ability to communicate emaciated, what this meant to me ineffable. And then I burst into tears. “Thank you, thank you . . .” I muttered, wiping my eyes with a wadded tissue.

Mrs. Tawfic hugged me, smoothing my hair back from my dripping face, keeping her arm around my shoulders as she took my tissue to dab it at my cheeks. “You love her, too,” she said.

“You love her, too.”

Two workers brought out the baby’s portrait and placed her on a scuffed cube of painted wood, while the others unscrewed the Plexiglas covers from the display cases and set them aside.

There was Demos’s serious baby girl. As delicately rendered as Demos, her face was more thickly impasto than her mother’s, as if the artist had had to work all the more quickly to capture a still moment in the life of a busy little child. The rough lines created by the quickly drying pigmented wax left the impression of arrested energy in the baby’s face, as if at any moment she might have crawled away or hidden herself in her mother’s lap. I had to keep digging into my pocket for more tissues to keep from dropping tears and beads of perspiration onto the lustrous wax.