by Maggie Downs
He says he’s okay, but his flat, dull tone belies his own words. He reports that my mom is fine and that she had a nice holiday in the nursing home. It’s not long before he excuses himself and I’m left staring at a blank, black screen.
That night, before I fall asleep, my side feels pinched, and my breath is strained. I can’t shake the nagging feeling something isn’t right.
I HAVE ONLY TWO HOURS OF SLEEP BEFORE JASON SHAKES me awake to board an unmarked van. We barrel through the desert in this chilly vehicle full of strangers, until it stops at the base of a mountain. Our trek to the top of Mount Sinai begins at 1 a.m., led by a Bedouin guide.
There are two routes to the summit. We take the camel path, a wide trail that snakes its way to the summit at a more gentle, gradual pace than the alternative, the steep 3,750 Steps of Penitence.
We walk for hours through the inky blackness of night, and it feels good. Hiking is where Jason and I hit our most comfortable stride, our feet moving across the ground one step at a time, slowly making our way forward. When his foot slides on loose rock, my arm instinctively juts out to steady him. When my lungs feel weak, he rests with me.
Together we pass Bedouin men, sprawled out on woven rugs, selling lanterns. A chain of camels follows behind us, some of them wearing brass bells that cut through the desert silence. We stop for several minutes in a small shelter, a cave carved like a deep trough into the gray mountain, where an old woman sells hot tea. It is cold, and the woman wraps us in donkey blankets as we thaw our fingers around the hot mugs.
The final push to the summit consists of 700 stone steps. There are many other hikers and pilgrims around us now. The old and weak dismount camels and then take the stairs slowly, lingering over each one. The young lean against boulders. Other than wheezy gasps for air, everyone is silent.
Jason and I make it to the top and find a flat place to sit. It has taken more than three hours to climb about three miles up this mountain—the second highest in Egypt—with an elevation gain of approximately 2,500 feet. The air is frigid, and we wrap our arms around each other. The sky is navy, and my breath forms little clouds.
When I was a little girl and attended church with my mom, I wrote letters to God during the service on prayer-request slips. But I didn’t hand these prayers over with the offering plate, like everyone else did. To me, nature felt like a more direct line to God. So I tucked my letters away and only handed them over later, when I was in my backyard or at the creek that gurgled through our neighborhood. I hid my prayers under stones; I tucked them into trees. I asked God to find my letters and answer me.
Now I’m at the peak of Sinai, the place where Moses is said to have received the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. If there is any place in the world where my words will reach God, this is it. I fold my hands together, and I wait.
This peak is where I silently pray—I ask for love and compassion, I ask for my family’s good health, I ask for my mom to be at peace. And then I express my gratitude: For this sacred night on a mountain with the man I love. For the people I’ve met along my journey and the radical acts of kindness I’ve received. For this earth that makes a full rotation every day and somehow always finds the sun again.
Dawn comes like a slash in the sky, as if a knife sliced right through a yard of dark fabric. As the rip of sky widens, revealing pastel orange, pink, and finally yellow, a deep hum begins, a sound both warm and resonant.
There is a small stone mosque and a Greek Orthodox church near the flat rock where Jason and I sit. The Muslim call to prayer and the Christian hymns begin simultaneously, creating a chorus of praise in an otherworldly harmony. It is an appropriate soundtrack to the morning, as the sun paints the desolate desert landscape below a dramatic pink.
I wouldn’t call myself religious, but I do say I’m spiritual, and watching the dark earth unfolding into a rich, vibrant world is something as close to transcendent as I’ve ever witnessed. No wonder Moses and God used this as their meeting point. This place feels like a bridge across time, a span between two worlds.
Jason and I continue to hold each other. My head rests against his chest, and he strokes my hair. I don’t know why I begin to cry.
A part of me must already know that when I travel back down the mountain, I will have left this sacred place perched at the edge of the sky—this pause between heaven and earth—to face cold reality. By the time I reach the lower desert again, I will have just two more days with my husband, my father will have sent terrible news, and nothing will ever be the same again.
DEATH
Bedenke dass du sterben musst. (Remember that you have to die.)
—German memento mori
Eat the Camel
EGYPTIAN TRAFFIC IS LOUD, FAST-MOVING, AND NONSTOP, separating me from the market where I can get food. I whip my head around, searching for a crosswalk, a traffic light, a traffic cop, even a traffic sign. Anything that will help me move from one side of the street to the other. But I’m staring down vehicular anarchy in a swollen city, where 22 million people stretch the limits of streets built for 4 million.
Somehow other people manage to navigate this mess. Men wearing airy galabeyas, women in hijabs, students sporting smart gray suits, and even children brave the road. They find a kind of harmony in the chaos, establishing eye contact with the drivers, walking at a steady pace—moving shway shway, slowly slowly, across one lane at a time—until they are absorbed into the traffic flow.
Just when I’m about to give up, I meet Rami.
“There is trick,” he says, standing along my right elbow. He is shaped like a stout light bulb, with a shiny bald head and wide smile.
“Really?”
He giggles. “Close your eyes and pray to Allah.”
With that, he takes my arm and pulls me into the current.
Afterward, we sit together at a street café, sipping mint tea in mugs the size of shot glasses and smoking apple-flavored tobacco in a hookah. Rami asks about my family, but I can’t summon the words to explain my story.
I just tell him that I’m backpacking.
When Rami invites me to stay at his family’s house in Giza, I say yes. I’m overwhelmed by his generosity—opening his door for a stranger on the street—but more than that, in a world that is infinite and strange and beautiful, I’m still searching for some semblance of home. Here is someone willing to embrace me as one of his own, and I’m touched.
I also don’t have anywhere else to go. New Year’s Eve is approaching, the hostels are booked, and my budget is too meager for the city’s pricier options. Just that morning a hostel owner said he was going to kick me out to make room for someone with a reservation. I was only in Cairo to see Jason off, and without him the city has a film of sadness.
After Rami and I pick up my backpack, we are met by Rami’s uncle, Sabar, a wiry thirtysomething. He arrives in a beat-up sedan and barely stops moving long enough to let us climb inside.
In a particularly congested part of the city, Sabar rolls down the window with a hand crank and plops a fake, magnetic police light on the roof. He presses a couple of buttons, launching an assault of sirens and flashing lights.
“Makes cars go away!” Sabar laughs.
With traffic, the drive from Cairo to Giza is fifty minutes. We get there in ten. Underneath a bridge, Sabar pulls over, and Rami and I continue navigating the maze to his house. I have been traveling alone for six months, so long gone into the world that I am no longer actively afraid of it; my body holds the same low simmer of fear here as it does at home, the ever-present anxiety of being a woman who exists. So I am not scared to go with Rami. But I am aware, always aware.
There is a lurching public bus, which takes us just a few blocks. Then we hop into a sputtering rickshaw and weave through traffic—this time scooters and donkey carts—down shadowed alleyways, behind rows of identical concrete buildings. Finally, Rami and I walk a little over a mile on roads too narrow for the rickshaw to negotiate.
The p
aths are made of compacted dirt, raised slightly above chunky sewage and stagnant water. Garbage clogs the canals, and dead animal carcasses rot on the piles of trash. Rami and I press on through clouds of bloated flies, past unmarked stores and cafés, through the smoke of burning rubber. I never see any street signs.
“Is okay?” Rami says.
“Is fine, is fine,” I say, keeping my doubts to myself. I have no cell service. I doubt there’s an internet connection for my laptop. Nobody knows where I am. I don’t even know.
FROM THE OUTSIDE, RAMI’S THREE-STORY HOUSE LOOKS abandoned. Stalks of rebar jut out from the top. Windows are broken. The front door is raised a couple of feet from the ground, but there are no steps to get there. I’m tall, and it requires a mighty stretch and Rami’s assistance to get in the door. We kick off our shoes and make two neat piles at the foot of the staircase.
The family lives on the second level. The concrete floor of the living room is draped with a rug so thin, it looks like a whisper. There is little furniture.
Rami’s mother has been expecting us. She greets me with two sheets of newspaper rolled into a cone. Inside are hot, fried falafel the size of flattened ice cream scoops, wrapped in warm pita bread. Oil soaks through the paper and makes my hands hot and greasy. The crust of each falafel is slightly burnt, which heightens the texture of the soft, warm middle. Flecks of parsley are so fresh they taste like the color green.
“Best chef in Egypt!” Rami beams, and I agree. It is the best I’ve ever had, and I’ve eaten a lot of falafel.
When I’m finished, Rami rolls the oily newspapers from our meal into a ball, along with some food waste, wilted vegetables, and bones. We carry it to the roof, where the goats live, and feed our scraps to the animals. Whatever the goats can’t eat—like an empty potato chip bag—is tossed off the roof, where it joins the other trash blowing through the streets.
It is dusk, and the street below is illuminated with few lights. A boy walks by with a burlap sack that squirms and whines. Puppies.
“Where is he taking them?” I ask. I feel my voice rise with notes of panic.
“They will drown,” Rami says. “But do not worry. Better to be dead than live in Giza.”
As much as I don’t want the puppies to die, in the ten years my mom has spent dying, I’ve grown to understand that ending life can be more merciful than letting it continue. Many times I wondered why my mom continued to survive, why her body pressed on without her in it, why we couldn’t let this vibrant, beautiful woman go with dignity instead of acting as bystanders to her decline. I’ve learned our culture is not necessarily one of compassion. We champion those who suffer, even while we don’t want to suffer ourselves.
It’s been one day since my mom was moved into hospice care, a fact I learned when Jason and I returned from our Mount Sinai trek. My dad emailed to say my mom wouldn’t live much longer.
He wrote:
Margaret, I didn’t want to tell you this on Christmas, so I waited a couple of days. Mom has taken a turn for the worse. About a week ago she started having trouble swallowing. We tried a medicine to encourage her appetite, but all it did was cause her to sleep. It was difficult to wake her up again, so we have stopped the medicine. I have no idea when the rest of her vital organs will stop working. Now you know. Love, Dad.
We decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t put my mom on a feeding tube, so it is only a matter of time before she succumbs to starvation.
Now my mom’s impending death feels like the traffic in Cairo. Chaotic. Daunting. I am unable to weave my way through the lanes, so far from finding footing on the other side. I ask my dad if I should come home, and he says I shouldn’t bother. She won’t know I’m there. She doesn’t know anything at all.
Rami abruptly leaves to meet friends, and his sister, Raina, is on the phone with her boyfriend. That leaves me with the matriarch, her three sisters, and an in-law, and none of them speak English. Rami’s mother turns on the TV and adjusts the rabbit-ear antennas until a show appears. Based on the dramatic expressions and swelling music, I assume this is an Arabic soap opera.
I watch the TV show this way, five women forming almost a complete circle around me, and still I feel alone. What I wouldn’t give to watch The Young and the Restless or Guiding Light with my mom again. I choke back a sob. One woman shoots me a stern look, raises a finger to her lips, and spits as she shushes. They scoot away from me, and there’s a hollow, lonely space where these women used to be.
WE SLEEP THAT NIGHT ON THE LIVING ROOM FLOOR, ALL of us jumbled together like a cluttered drawer of cutlery: Rami, his mother, her sisters, the daughters, some friends of the family, and the one in-law. We wrap itchy wool blankets around our bodies, burrito style. I smash one of my sweaters into a ball, and that serves as my pillow. Raina, next to me, curls under a tented blanket to talk on the phone with her boyfriend.
Mosquitoes hum near my ears, and bigger swarms swish the air around my head. I tighten the blanket around my face. Mosquitoes land on my cheeks. I pull the blanket tighter again, until only my mouth and nostrils are bare, and I inhale insects. They fly into my mouth and sting my lips. I pull the blanket over my head until I can barely breathe.
In the morning, my skin is swollen. My face, arms, and legs are covered with bites. I point to the hot, pink welts that line my limbs. The family shrugs. The mosquitoes did not touch them. Raina jokes, “Is because you are so sweet.”
I don’t have any lotions or creams to offer relief, and I don’t know where to buy any. The only medicine in my backpack is a small vial of sangre de grado, dragon’s blood, that I received from a shaman in the Amazon rainforest six months earlier. The dragon’s blood is the dark, red resin of a tree, said to be therapeutic for skin ailments and infection.
That morning, while my mother is in Ohio taking some of her last, ragged breaths on earth, I smear dragon’s blood on my body, staining my skin a menstrual red-brown. There are twenty-seven spots on my face, including three on my lips, seventeen on my left arm, twelve on my right. My legs are even worse, so gnawed that I lose count of the welts. Later I catch sight of my reflection in a decorative urn. I look bloody and beaten. I don’t even recognize myself.
Raina looks at me with dismay. She is a devout Muslim teen who dresses modestly in turtlenecks and floor-length skirts. But she is also stylish, donning a lacy tank top over her turtleneck, pulling on bright tights underneath her skirt, draping a decorative scarf over her plain, black hijab. And because Raina thinks everything is better with a little sparkle, she drapes layers of necklaces around her neck and slips stacks of glittery bracelets over her wrists. It looks like she purchases rhinestones in bulk.
Finally Raina says, “My mother is mad at you.”
“Why? What have I done?”
“You blame us for bites on your skin,” she says. “You think we are dirty. You hate staying with us.”
“No, I don’t blame you, and I don’t think you are dirty,” I say. “These bites hurt very much. I am in pain.”
“You hate us.”
“No, I don’t,” I insist. “I’m just sad.”
Raina suggests a shower to feel better, and those are magic words. It has been months since I’ve had the kind of shower I was accustomed to in the United States. Backpacking around Africa, I took a lot of bucket baths, which are exactly what they sound like—standing over a drain or on a dirt floor with a bucket of water, running a bar of soap over my skin, using a small cup to dump the water all over my body.
While eco-friendly and efficient, bucket baths are not enjoyable. Not the way I enjoy showers at home. I imagine the slap of hot water on my sore skin. Lathering my hair with shampoo. Letting the water stream over my head and face and shoulders, washing all the dirt and hurt away.
Raina tells me to be patient. The shower will be ready soon. The rest of the family has disappeared, Raina leaves the room, and I wait alone. After about an hour, Raina leads me by the hand into the bathroom.
The bathroom h
as a toilet, though it can only be flushed by pouring a bucket of water into the tank. There is also a bathtub, though it is filled with plastic chairs, boxes, and assorted dishes.
“Where is the shower?” I ask.
“Stand here,” Raina says, positioning me near the toilet. The floor is tile, slanted toward a single drain. Raina leaves the room and returns carrying a fat metal pot of water. She places the pot on the floor, shuts the door, and instructs me to remove my clothes.
“But shower … ?” I say.
“Here is shower.”
She balances on top of the toilet seat, holding a measuring cup with a long handle. One cup at a time, water is poured on my head. Each tiny cascade is near boiling, hot enough to make my flesh sting. All the while, Raina sings in Arabic. The tune is sweet and mournful.
“My mother is dying,” I say.
“Everybody dies,” Raina says; then she continues to sing.
“No, I mean my mother is dying. Right now,” I say. “She is in a hospital in Ohio. She might already be dead.”
“Everybody dies,” Raina says again. “Life is to suffer.”
“I thought I already lost her,” I continue. “But I was wrong.”
Raina dribbles shampoo on my head and combs her fingers through the ropes of my curly hair. Then, with a firm hand, she runs a bar of heavily perfumed soap over my body and rubs my skin until it lathers. When she rinses me, I am pink. I have never felt so naked.
After the shower, I towel off and dress. Raina takes me by the hand and leads me to her room, where I sit on a cardboard box. She combs the tangles of my hair and pulls it back into a taut, low-slung ponytail, then covers my head with a gray hijab. On top of that, she winds a purple silky scarf and secures the ends with a rhinestone brooch.