Because I Said So (51 page)

As Mrs. Tawfic studied the book I’d given her, sitting in the middle of the gallery with her assistant and the museum official on a chrome-sided bench that the workers had lugged in, I knelt on the floor in front of Demos. Since I first saw her face that spring I had wondered what happened to her—she was so young, her baby so small! Now in the same room with her, what mattered most to me was imagining how she felt as she met the inten-M o t h e r o f t h e Wo r l d

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sity of the artist’s gaze with her own. Demos’s expression was not so simple as obligation filtered through religious belief and culture. Hers is the face of a woman who knows she is confronting the end of her life, and the end of her child’s. In her eyes is a profound knowledge of loss, of sorrow and pity. All of it, soon, will be lost to her: the tenderness of her loved ones, the suckling of her baby, the Nile’s reliable cycle of ebb and flow, the calling of birds, and the scent of honey and mint. She knows that life itself has brought her to this moment; painful as it is to face, she does not look away. To deny this moment is to deny all the moments before.

I had not been able to understand how my friends could face the heightened possibility of death; it was unthinkable to me that my friends and I were walking the downward slope of our lives.

How could they—these vibrant women I love—stand to live with it, the inescapable reminder of mortality that cancer drags in its wake? Neither could I bear to know that my body was aging—

complicit in my baby’s death, less and less the body that had made me feel so potently alive. Everything in me, all I had come to feel about being a mother, a fertile woman, fought against this knowledge. I wasn’t ready—I wasn’t ready to give it all up, all the beauty and astonishment that living in my womanly skin had given me.

But there was Demos, gazing back at me. Notably absent from the complicated emotions washing over her face was anything resembling resignation. She had prepared for this moment in the ways available to her: She had dressed and perfumed her dark hair, coiling it at the top of her head, securing the braid with a gold pin, winding curls about her face. She wore her jewels—

her dowry, her inheritance?—and adorned her daughter with a magical necklace, a chain hung with
lunulae
, feminine fertility symbols, to protect her as well as she could. And so she faced the truth of her life: her lips slightly parted with something she needed to express, the look in her eyes incandescent.
See me
, her eyes seem to say.
This is me
. It was her deliberate expression of mortality—of being a woman, a human, a mother, fleetingly
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alive—that made her eternal. And gave me, I now understood, a redeemed trust in my own worth, mortal and human as I was.

What I saw in Demos’s eyes was not acceptance of death, but acknowledgment: of death, of loss, of suffering, as well as of desire and remembered joy, all of it part of living.

“When I look at their faces,” Mrs. Tawfic told me hours later, as we sat in her office together, “I see life. Not death. I see their eyes. Some are so sad. Some are so many different things.” So many different things, just as in the enigmatic quote from Mahfouz: like meeting one’s beloved in old age. If you could embrace all that you loved, all that you had lost and could lose, all that you were, however late it might seem—wasn’t that also an answer to the riddle?

Mrs. Tawfic and I were having tea at her desk. “Now I will show you
all
of my favorites,” she said. She unzipped her purse and pulled out a stack of photographs, which she carries around with her like baby pictures: all of the Fayum portraits in the museum. We looked at them together, pointing out their similarities and differences, reveling in the eloquence of these strangers we could know only across the gap of two thousand years. I told her about my tall, contemplative boy and my ardent little girl, and she told me about her three sons: the one in university and the one in secondary school, like my son. And the third, who doesn’t go to school; he had an accident, a brain injury.

“You have a friend here,” Zienab Tawfic said, squeezing my hand.

“Yes, I know,” I said, returning her grip.

“When you come back, we will show each other more,” she added.

“
Insha’Allah
,” I answered,
god willing
. We sat quietly together, intimates, our glasses of tea steaming.

The Closed Treasure Room

On my last day in Cairo, I went back to the Khan al-Khalili.

There was so much more of Cairo to discover, impossible in a
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day. After a couple of hours investigating the edges of the
khan
, analyzing my pointless map, unwilling to lose my sense of direction, I hadn’t found anything I’d intended to see: the crafts center, el-Fishawi’s, palaces I’d read about. But I was in Egypt—I gave up my plan. I would spend the day wandering deeper into the labyrinth, wherever it took me.

The streets of the Khan al-Khalili smelled of incense and mint and shit, of sweat and thousands of years of human grime, of waste and unexpected sweetness. I let the perfume sellers dab their heady oils on my wrists with their long glass wands. A spice merchant, after lighting crystals of frankincense in a clay burner, filling his shop with musky, aromatic smoke, gave me pinches of spice in my palm to smell; not to waste it, I rubbed each handful onto my arms. A strolling flower salesman held a thread of fresh jasmine blossoms out to me on his fingers; I bought it and put it on, raising it to my nose periodically, taking in the intoxicating scent.

“May I take your picture?” I asked over and over again. I took photographs of a lime seller and her smiling toddler squat-ting before their pyramid of green fruit, the young calico cat that followed me through the garbage-strewn passageways all morning, a girl before her display of floral paper boxes filled with con-fections of ground nuts and honey, a man selling fresh, puffy Egyptian pita breads stacked in a crate of crisscrossed sticks that looked like the frame of a kite.

Everywhere, I purchased presents for my family and friends: backgammon boards inlaid with camel bone, a red tasseled fez of thick felted wool, alabaster animals, bags of spices, tiny ornate perfume bottles of blown glass wrapped in cotton-filled boxes to keep them from breaking, powdery coffee ground with car-damom and allspice. I picked out semiprecious stones—peridot, raw emeralds, rose quartz, aquamarine, all mined in Egypt—and waited while the jeweler strung them. My many bags already heavy, I wore the necklaces out of the shop.

Late in the afternoon, laden with my purchases, I passed under the Badestan Gate, deep in the heart of the Khan al-Khalili.

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A canary in its cage was trying out its notes from a window on the second floor. On the steps were carefully folded stacks of deeply dyed Egyptian cotton scarves. I fingered the pleasing heft of a scarf, thinking how easily they would pack in my suitcase, a perfect present to give each of my friends.

“You like?” said a young man. “I have more in my shop.

Come.” He started climbing the steep stone steps beside the gate, beckoning me to follow him up the vaulted passage.

At the top of the stairs he led me through a closed door, into a shop stacked floor to ceiling with brilliantly colored textiles—

cottons and silk, see-through chiffon, gold-embroidered finery, as well as tribal bags, clothing, tasseled belts, even well-made T-shirts with tasteful, traditional patterns in silkscreen, totally unlike the Cleopatra faces and Tut-wear I’d seen all over Cairo. Another man folded textiles with his back to us, undisturbed by our entrance.

The young merchant and I started pulling out scarves of different sizes and patterns; we counted periodically as I remembered more and yet more women I wanted to bring them home to.

Finally we had an opulent stack as well as an assortment of Tshirts, all tribal designs from the Red Sea, for my husband and children.

I opened my wallet. It was empty.

“Cash machine downstairs. I will show you,” the young man said.

“It won’t work,” I said. “I’ve tried, but the machines are all in Arabic.”

The second man in the shop, who had been folding scarves all this time, turned around. “Let him take you to the machine,” he said. “I know your problem. This machine will work.”

I looked at him; impossibly, he seemed familiar.

“I don’t think so,” I said doubtfully. “My code is my cat’s name. I only know it in English.”

“Trust me,” the second man said. He was, I suddenly registered, incredibly handsome, with curly hair graying at his temples, a shadow of beard on either side of his sculpted jaw, and breathtaking, light green eyes. There was something else about
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him, but I didn’t know what. Nodding toward the younger man, he said, “He’ll walk you down to the machine and bring you back. It will work, I promise. You can leave your bags here.”

“Okay,” I said, not quite persuaded, but hypnotically willing to do whatever the second man said. I left my many bags in a heap on the floor of the shop and followed the young guy through a maze of streets, turning again and again. Finally he waved his hand in front of himself to urge me forward, and stopped: There was an ATM machine with a keyboard in English.

I collected my cash, and we returned to the shop.

“It worked?” the green-eyed man asked.

“It worked,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Your cat’s name,” he said, shaking his head in mock dismay, amused.

“I know,” I said, feeling exquisitely ridiculous, smiling as well at myself.

“What
is
your cat’s name?” he asked.

“Minerva.”

“That could be your problem. You should have named it Athena.”

I got it, then, who he was, or who he reminded me of—the Roman, one of the earliest Fayum portraits, painted when Ovid and Augustus Caesar were alive. Though the portrait was of a man in his virile prime, his mummy, when examined, turned out to be that of an old man with a white beard. The Roman had lived for many years after his portrait was done.

“And what is your name?” the green-eyed man asked me.

“Kate,” I said. “What is yours?”

“Well,” he began, clearly pleased with himself, “my name is Hussein. But I got so tired of jokes about Saddam Hussein, I gave myself another name.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“Franco,” he replied.

I laughed. “One dictator to another,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, grinning. “Nobody gets it.”

We started talking, then, about politics. He asked me where
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I was from in the United States, and how I felt Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing as governor of California. Like everyone I met in Cairo, he hoped the American people would elect John Kerry. I told him of my husband’s writings about conflicts in the Middle East, and I told him about my children. The shop was his, he told me, and he had learned to speak English from his cus-tomers over the years.

The young merchant stood patiently by. I got out my wallet to pay.

“What more would you like?” Franco asked me. “You have gifts for your husband and your children and the children of your friends. What about for you?”

I realized he had listened to everything I’d said in his shop. I felt utterly relaxed, truly enjoying myself. “I don’t need anything more,” I said. “I’ve got everything I want.”

“You can’t leave Egypt without something to remember her by,” Franco said. “What about a Bedouin blouse. You should get something beautiful for yourself.” He turned around and picked up a thick cotton blouse delicately embroidered at the neckline and sleeves. When he turned around again, holding the blouse out to me, all I could see were his eyes. Not emerald. Not peridot.

Not Nile, that green. Celadon?

“What?” he said finally. I realized I had been staring at him, staring at me.

“Oh, nothing,” I said, scurrying for cover. “Just—thank you.” I felt my face turn hot. But I couldn’t stop myself; I looked up, again, at him.

The room suddenly contracted, electric.

“Something is happening here,” Franco said quietly, almost whispering to me. “Have tea with me. I know you are married.

Let’s have tea, keep talking.”

“I can’t,” I said, feeling dangerous. I glanced at my watch, a reflex. My god, it was already six o’clock. I had to pack, I had to go to the airport. “I really can’t,” I said. “I have to leave.”

“Then come back tomorrow,” Franco said. “Meet me for tea tomorrow.”

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“I can’t,” I said. “I’m leaving tonight. I’m going home.”

“Tonight?” he said. “But—we should have tea.” I was dimly aware that there were other people in the shop, somewhere far, far away. Franco looked at me, his eyes penetrating. His counte-nance softened, earnest. “There is feeling here,” he said, his voice low.

I couldn’t speak. He was right, and I knew it. I fumbled with my purse, standing on a precipice. He was unbearably handsome, charming, witty, funny. “I know,” I said. “And I really, really have to go.”

“You really, really have to go,” Franco said, his voice yielding. “I know.” He laid down the blouse, unfolded.

“May I take a photo of your shop, at least?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Of course,” he said, and I got out my camera. “Here,” he said, calling to a little boy who had been wandering in and out of the shop. “You can take a picture of us.” I gave the little boy my camera and showed him how to press the button firmly. I stepped back. Franco stood next to me, pressing two fingers lightly into the small of my back as the little boy squinted into the viewfinder.

Two fingers.

Nothing happened. No click, no flash.

“Press harder,” I said to the little boy. Franco’s fingers on my back. I could feel them through my sweaty shirt.