David and Barclay visited a café that existed as a few silvery tables beside the street. People smoked water pipes as if they were meditating. Every ten minutes or so, an old man, thin with white hair and brownish teeth, popped out to see if anyone wanted tea or tobacco.
Dr. Ali had them taste koshari — a delectable mix of lentils, rice, chickpeas, pasta topped with fried onions and zesty tomato sauce. Sophia and Rami insisted on pastries from an excellent bakery nearby. They were sudden friends that represented the fate and fortune of travel. “You see this lovely woman, Sophia, well she used to be a singer and belly dancer,” said Rami, uncrossing his legs under the table.
“She was very well known – yes, famous,” added Dr. Ashraf Ali, who used his title with everyone but his intimates.
Rami, chubby with black hair and mustache, was the most animated of the group and taught the Americans to curse in Arabic. The way he laughed and hugged Sophia had David pondering their friendship. Was he a former admirer, now a lover in the twilight years? Did they all meet at the same time each night?
“We like hearing what you say,” said David, sitting straight on the chair, reminiscent of his posture on the horses they had ridden the day before.
“I’ve been around the Middle East and France,” said Dr. Ali, who tended to be well dressed and rumpled like a wedding photographer; “I have fond memories of Paris. Two weeks there.”
“I never travel far,” Sophia said with her head swaying; “Now, too old.”
“No, you seem so young,” said Barclay; “And you’re still the most, most beautiful.”
“Shukran. I am young! They crawl like bug.”
While Sophia hugged Barclay, Rami gave a whole-body laugh. The old man came out again and handed a cube of tobacco to Rami, now drifting in and out of the conversation. David and Barclay took a few puffs. It smelled fruity and the bubbles of the waterpipe percolated larger as David and Barclay grew accustomed to it. Dr. Ali asked Barclay if she liked ancient Egyptian art. Yes, she did, especially the Amarna Period. With her blue eyes and blonde hair under a baseball cap, he said she was very American.
Only days before, David had met her on Santorini, an island crowded with seekers of sun and stone. So, it was ironic that he knew Barclay only a little better than the three Egyptians. Since David was a child, since he could put his finger on a spinning globe, he had wanted to travel to Greece and Egypt. Equally so, he could not imagine another woman he wanted to travel with – a kind of miracle that they were in the same spot in the cosmos.
“Travel is wonderful, like a dream. Later on, I’ll take you to see a mosque. You haven’t seen one, right?” said Dr. Ali, cutting the fatir, a glazed cake. “I don’t eat this often, but this is a special occasion. Not every day we entertain exotic people like you.”
“Every day is dessert day, a special occasion, for you,” Rami said to Dr. Ali, tapping the latter’s shoulder.
Dr. Ali shook his finger at him. Rami had stopped puffing, as if time itself stopped, and reminded David that if he wanted to see Naguib Mahfouz, the great chronicler of Cairo, he had to go to the Ali Baba Café, near the Egyptian Museum, at 7:30 a.m. the next morning.
“You can see him, talk to him, he’s friendly. Tomorrow, you’ll see him. What did you do today?” Rami asked.
“Barclay, want to come tomorrow?” David asked.
“That’s too early,” she announced.
David drank mint tea while Barclay told them about the ride to the pyramids. Sophia put another tablespoon of sugar into her tea. He imagined the camels, horses, guides and the vast triangles carved in the sky. Sophia threw some food to a cat hiding behind a streetlamp. A taxi crawled down the street and the driver happened to be looking for the same hotel named The Hatshepsut – with elegant, faded rugs and an old parrot — where David and Barclay were staying. It was a dark street except for a few café lights and the tobacco pulsating like fireflies. Across the street, some guy yelled toward Barclay and David – “Iraq is very powerful. Beware.”
There was a bazaar nearby, stretching for many blocks, where people sold records, underwear, papyrus paintings, food, tires, Korans, perfume, incense, lamps, jewelry, teeth. It was the busiest place imaginable – supervised anarchy, with the police lurking. Barclay and David had gone there the first night; they were surprised at the crowds and the way people focused their attention on them, and that people ran alongside the moving buses, jumping on board, vanishing into the throng.
“The guide waited for us while we went inside the pyramids. It was really hot, you had to crawl through these lilliputian passages,” said Barclay, her hand levitating.
“Good, good,” said Rami.
“Years ago,” Sophia began saying with a sweep of her arm, “long years ago, running in the desert, we loved.”
“When I was young you could climb to the top,” added Rami. “We had races. Cairo was quiet then. Now things are going to shit, excuse me, and this whole region is in a bad state.”
“There’s a lot of antiquity to see in Cairo,” said Dr. Ali. “You don’t have to go to Luxor. Save that for next time.”
“If we’d gone, we wouldn’t get to see all of you much,” said David, but he was also thinking about Luxor.
“So, the guide invited us to a friend’s store,” Barclay said. “As soon as we entered, we were treated like royalty and the guy announced himself as, ‘King of the Bedouins.’”
“Only the king?” Rami asked.
David continued, “He clapped his hands twice like in the movies, and his son hurried in with tea. He had us try twelve fragrances.”
“You run out of skin,” said Sophia, touching under her light blue eyeliner. She adjusted her purple head scarf.
Dr. Ali smiled as he told them they’d made an easy escape from the perfume seller. David remembered the guide, sitting on a couch with his rusty hands bringing the teacup to his mouth. “Kwais te,” he had said. Later the guide looked remorseful as if to say he was sorry to bring them there, and really said nothing the whole time in the tent-like store festooned with tapestries.
Barclay finished the story and David showed them the brochure from The Thousand and One Nights Flower Extract Palace with its many teas: Altar of Roses, Black Narcissus, Jasmine, Lotus, Queen Cleopatra, Omar Sharif, Frankincense and Myrrh, Scent of Araby…
That evening, after they left the café, they walked around the kaleidoscopic streets of Cairo. They went so far that they had only a faint idea how to return. Only a few landmarks did they remember: a bank with a French facade, a bronze monument of a man with a moustache, a juice stand, then it all became a jumble, and they ended up in Old Cairo. They saw the high ghostly walls that Saladin had built, but they didn’t know this until Dr. Ali later told them.
They went down a few decrepit streets, more like alleys, and saw a slaughterhouse with puzzle-like flesh chunks hanging from a telephone pole. They passed cafés where men puffed smoke in that carved out private world — they looked up and then returned to smoking. A few holy men walked single file on a narrow sidewalk. Pungent aromas and spices aroused their senses. A young boy was selling mounds of grapes and they worried about him and bought some. David asked Barclay if she wanted to continue. “I guess,” she said, then kept walking as if compelled.
In the hotel room were two beds with lion paw legs, mirrors festooned with rosette woodwork, high ceiling with two tired fans, a nonworking phone, a large Egyptian Mamluk rug with rectangles and circles of blues, gold, green, pink, orange, purple – and a dark center.
Barclay said her legs were worn. It had been tiring to walk around, to explore the layers & recesses of the city. She had arrived in Greece a week earlier and was still getting used to the time zone. He had been traveling for weeks around Europe, ending up in Greece and now Egypt, and he was exhausted from the traffic, crowds, heat.
He looked at the ceiling fan. His eyes were too tired to read — he had brought a book on Egyptian mythology – nor did he want to leaf through her magazines or art history books. Now, like desert flowers, everything was dwindling, and he thought about the island of Santorini and how he had met Barclay there. The height of imagination was simply true.
***
On Santorini, he rented a motorcycle. Barclay rose with him, squeezing his ribs, as they went over bumps or around curves, always with the blue water glowing innocently. David’s sun-damaged hair fell into a mess. A donkey, like The Fool in the Tarot Deck, looked down from the mountain. Beaches where nude bathers rejoiced to Dionysus stretched black along the water. An old couple followed their sheep – a life of following sheep. Caught in that ancient world of water and cliff, they rode fast around a curve; she asked him to stop because the roof of a church emerged. It was a shrine with gold behind one of the windows, cut into the mountain. Its dome roof seemed part of the road. A few crypts, the sacred space of death, sliced into the cliff side.
Tangled in the exhilaration of the moment, they climbed down below. There were openings through the rock. David went lower, putting out his hand. Like actors on a set, they were blind to danger, to falling far below.
Rocks rolled off into the abyss. The water swallowed the rocks, as Charybdis had swallowed Odysseus’ boat. Finally, they reached a plateau and could hardly go up or down. She slid down the rocks. The water churned hundreds of feet below. They grabbed each other and fell to the ground. For some reason, it was never mentioned again, this finger of danger, this siren call to the rocks.
David looked away. He poured her a glass of water, putting it next to the art nouveau lamp of gold & blue, the colors of Tut’s mask. The fan moved in a slow whirl, like in old movies. She glanced at the lamp and turned the switch. During the night, she paced the room. He said nothing. (Later he learned that she had recently ended a bad relationship back home in Iowa).
Next day: Saqqara. They called a cab early. The driver, a relaxed man who sometimes glanced into the rearview mirror and smiled, left them off near the Step Pyramid of Zoser. The driver parked, leaned against the car and read a paper. On the way to the Tomb of the Apis Bulls, a man on a camel rode alongside them and insisted they needed a ride. When they realized they preferred walking, he said, “Desert out there. It will swallow you dead.”
Through darkness they went downstairs. The guide said, “I’ll turn on the light.” And suddenly, the cave bared its gifts. Nothing seemed more alive than this place of the dead. They walked down vast corridors; on the flanks sat black sarcophagi with hieroglyphic etching.
The guide suggested they descend into the lower niche. “Indhar.” They gave the guide two Egyptian pounds as another group, with child-like glee, walked into the entrance. Once outside, David and Barclay walked amidst rows of columns. A dog sat on a column with his snout protruding. Barclay wondered aloud how it got there.
“Haven’t I seen this in a mummy movie?” he said.
“The dog’s staring only at me.”
Barclay suddenly vanished with the camera into a room with colored hieroglyphics. She was finally enjoying the trip. An old couple at the site shook her hand.
In the evening, they visited the café and met Dr. Ali, Sophia and Rami, who continued their decades-long conversation. Rami, as usual, was smoking, and his bulging eyes seemed involved in the respiration. “Masa el-khair,” Barclay said to the old café owner. “Shay, please.”
He smiled and nodded: “Hello to you, tea always!” He wore the usual white cotton and filled the cups and placed napkins.
They enjoyed fatir, baklava and tea. With glazed eyes, Barclay seemed to stare at everything.
“I eat pastry once a week,” Dr. Ali said.
“Once a day,” Rami said, smiling, with a side glance at Dr. Ali.
Sophia patted Dr. Ali on the back. “Professor – he loves sweets.”
***
Thirty-five years later, David was cleaning a closet and the photo fell from a dusty book. A street photographer, for one dollar, had taken the photo of David and Barclay. David found Barclay’s email online and wrote to her. They both taught at college. They reminisced about their three Cairo friends and the usual things that represent time passing.
Richard Marranca has been fortunate to have stories in The Raven’s Perch Magazine, DASH, Coneflower Cafe. The last nominated one of his stories for a Pushcart Prize. Richard has a collection of interviews, essays & images coming out this year called “Speaking with the Dead.”
