The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  I nodded. I’d have to think about that.

  I FIDGETED in the morning soundscape of Uzbek snores.

  The girls came to attempt a rescue; outside of town, colorful wooden boats with outboard motors and captains for hire lined the beach, and Maral haggled for one to take us to nearby Hengam Island. The boatman pushed his ship into the surf. Dolphins chased us as we got close.

  A couple of miles over the water from Qeshm, some of the area’s first inhabitants live in thatched huts and sell handicrafts to passersby. They looked African and wore brightly colored and patterned clothes that would have befit a Pakistani wedding. Elsewhere, the dark sand on sheltered Silver Beach glittered with mica. Except for the dolphins that circle playfully around the island, tiny Hengam also seemed like a place the rest of the world had just let be; aside from the septic tanks and we tourists with our cameras and the concept of tchotchkes, almost nothing spoke of modern times. One moment, Maral remembered that Hengam might be outside the area authorized by the stamps in our passports, and cautioned us to keep our voices down. If there were any overzealous police, we might have been accused of encroachment into other Iranian territory.

  Qeshm is one of the poorest parts of Iran, and Hengam is one of the poorest parts of Qeshm. It seemed as if the country’s indigenous had been ignored by every larger social order they are technically a part of. For us, if we were illicit in our presence on the island, it was lucky—it was a place we could be ignored, too.

  Maral’s sister’s friend Azade was the most vocal opponent of the hijab women are obliged to wear in Iran, and when she saw the beautiful beaches surrounding the island, she cursed both the Iranian government and Islam for preventing her from sunbathing.

  The effortless beauty of the island made it easy to ignore everything we weren’t seeing. “Azade said Hengam has the highest female suicide rate in Iran,” Neal told me as we got back in the boat to leave. “Rampant poverty and polygamy.”

  We parted ways with the Persians on the beach, and hired a fifteen-dollar taxi to take us the length of Long Island and back, about an hour and a half between the farthest points. We blasted Jennifer Lopez music videos front and center on a screen above the air conditioner. The car shook in sync with JLo’s hips.

  We drove past the mangrove forests like Venetian neighborhoods, canals of hara trees sprouting their yellow blooms from the sapphire bay. We felt the paved road turn to dirt, on the rocky red hillside along the dusty road from Dustku to Salk. We coaxed the driver on, despite the machine gun he charaded with his hands and worried eyebrows. We found the Ghar Namak, the Salt Caves most locals know but have never visited. Cavernous walls marbled in red and brown swaths, dripping with pure white salt stalactites like an old freezer, and heaping piles of salt crystals on the ground. Across the flats, water pooled into a tiny Dead Sea, seeping back into a cave. The driver was mystified as we shucked our shirts and shoes and ducked inside to float.

  The bottom half of Qeshm was quiet, gorgeous, and we roared through it. At sunset, we found ourselves at the dry dock of a dhow yard, long wooden beams resting on the dirt. No power tools in eyeshot, we climbed the fifty-foot ladder up and over the bulwark onto the deck of a gorgeous ship. I was sure of it: these were the guys who made Noah’s ark.

  The expanse looked back over the empty island. A dark man pulled up below on a motorcycle and sputtered away, and we were alone at the stern of an incomplete boat drinking in the sherbet skies.

  At the Hotel Diplomat, we gave the cabbie nearly all of our remaining rials. The hotel staff on behalf of the police asked the driver where exactly we had gone and what we had done. Our Uzbek roommates welcomed us as if we had been gone for days, and as if we had known each other for years. Our day trips were incomprehensible to them. And when they greeted us with their only two salutations, we never had answers: “No problem, no problem,” they would say, in the space hello might have gone. At other moments, they were more existential: “Where are you?” they said, standing face to face. Some moments, I felt that was a decent question.

  IN THE MORNING, the biweekly plane wasn’t there. With a flash, the fabricated stresses became real ones, and we were trapped, too. We didn’t know if the delay would mean another week on the island, or more, and the truth of the place began to trickle out and into us.

  With no money, we had lost the major advantage of being American in a place where nationality is meaningless.

  All it took was a moment of being stuck, and in a flash, I was aware how much I had forced greatness on the place: As if my life purpose depended on it, all strangeness I labeled unique, and uniqueness meant discovery, which was good. The mundane was proof of normalcy, which was good. The flight delay was a welcome beat of adventure, which was great. I multiplied local kindness into sainthood. And if I was frustrated, I would frame it as my fault, a lack of forbearance; or I might blame a deviant individual who I plucked from representing the place.

  In Damascus, I had celebrated street-stand juices as if they negated the war. Facing the muzzle of a Kalashnikov in Karzai’s driveway, I made sure there was good where danger could have been. Was my maddening day with Marwan in mosquito-haunted Lebanon all my doing, or ours together? As if only positive prejudice could counter the negative, I moved fast, flitting across The Middle East in a blur of novel inputs. But when the rush slowed . . . when boredom hit . . . there was no stimulation to keep my gaze from the messy, the stupid, the bad. The shuttle to the airport continued not to arrive. It was nerve-racking—and if my nerve had fractured, I might have seen the place the way everyone else saw it.

  Masha was coming soon, for a winter break visit from law school, and she could bring me home with her. That felt like exactly the wrong direction. I needed some other way in . . . some way of seeing and being where I didn’t need everything to be great.

  And then, only twelve hours behind schedule, the shuttle came and took us to the plane. And the Yak-42 dropped us in Dubai after thirty-four minutes, and I lacquered “Iran” in the bright polish of memory.

  FROM: MASHA

  RE: (NO SUBJECT)

  SAT AT 5:48 AM

  I have had the EXACT same worries. . . . I used to worry so much about not being able to imagine my future, I was sure I would die young. Maybe that’s why I’m scared of death. And now I can’t see ahead either, I cant imagine . . .

  CHAPTER 11

  |

  EGYPT

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  IWAITED FOR MASHA in the shadow of the Great Pyramids as the last weeks of my job contract waned. I was quitting.

  I needed to move—even though by that point, I had honed the performance of diligence to where I was able to show up to work about forty-five minutes per month, rushing through the two buildings on our campus with a phone to my ear, jabbering as if I were under-pressure-but-handling-it (and that’s why you hadn’t seen me), as if I were too-busy-to-talk-but-I’d-sure-love-to, and catching eyes and smiling to nip suspicions in the bud.

  I could collect Indian food and the company of good friends and a paycheck all by direct deposit, and I still itched. I had shot out from Abu Dhabi because I wanted to feel the world’s heartbeat. I was close enough to hear it pounding, but too far to feel it, to know how or why or what that meant. I had told the Abu Dhabi rabbis I’d work on self-transformation toward a better me, but it was the region that was transforming, and I was unsettled enough to face the fact that I hadn’t found any deeper understanding of what the world was going through—as if I weren’t a part of it.

  Iraq gave me the fire for Iran, but Iran pushed me toward anything—everything.

  Slowly but surely, as I ran away only from what I knew, with little motive but lusting curiosity, I made the classic young man’s mistake seeking a place to put himself: I lost sight of the thing I sought to place.

  Revolutions had raged for a year. Protests exploded. I had watched friends studying in Cairo evacuate while blood hit the stree
ts. The next month, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, known as the SCAF, dissolved the parliament and suspended the constitution. Hosni Mubarak, the domineering president since 1981, who had been angling to bequeath the democratic post to his own son, was dethroned.

  But—fairy tales never seem to hold up in the epilogue. As quickly as the army had come to give muscle to the voice of the people, they pivoted to squeeze the people with the same force.

  Soldiers and civilians clashed; the army killed hundreds, injured thousands. The Friday protests ran under the banner of the “Second Revolution.” As it had been in the first stages of the uprising, Tahrir Square was ground zero and a symbol of something larger. It was a simple calculus: The larger the crowd, the more powerful the message. The SCAF forced the area clear the only way they knew how, but crowds returned and grew with determination. Coptic Christians and Muslims united against a clear common enemy. Again and again, Cairenes would insist on the force of the protests by invoking the fullness of The Square.

  Now, the parliament had been reestablished, and elections had begun for its seats. In a month, guidelines for the presidential elections would be released. There was an atmosphere of cautious hope, of the kind that still smelled of gunpowder.

  MASHA. AFTER ALL OF THIS TIME APART, I would be traveling alongside the girl I felt closer to than anyone in the world. Months and months had passed easily when I had accepted our physical distance as a fact of life, but now that I knew she was coming, I was desperate for her. The combination of probability and proximity hijacked my centers of self-control. Nearer and nearer a border, I ached for the other side. Nearer and nearer in time to her arrival, I pulsed with impatience.

  Her flight was delayed an entire day because of blizzards in America. I remembered that snow still existed—and then raged at it for keeping us apart. It was only a day’s wait, but adrenaline had made each second an hour, and each hour like a maximum sentence in the solitary confinement of my own stifled excitement. Like that, I thought in overly dramatic sentences. Like that, I surged with a child’s restlessness.

  I needed her to come and understand me. Egypt was a place where our reasons for coming would overlap—maybe she’d be close enough, then, to understand my other reasons, to see why I needed to crawl around the world’s heart. Maybe she could explain it to me, help me, save me, bring me home.

  Soon, she was there, and we were there together—two kids in a triply discounted luxury hotel, in a city visitors had deserted, looking out over our balcony at the last standing Wonder of the World.

  AT THE GATE to the pyramids, the teller was convinced enough to sell me a half-price student ticket for my expired-but-dateless French étudiant card. The ticket taker refused to accept it. I protested. He grumbled something so unintelligible it could only have one meaning, and I handed him an extra ten pounds, relieved. He still blocked the way. I protested. Frowning, he moved. It was like a game of chicken—his hands were dirty now, and confrontation would do neither of us any good.

  Four-hundred miles south, throughout the magnificent tunneling stairwells in the tombs of Luxor’s Valley of the Kings, watchmen peeked out from behind the curtains of the off-limits chambers. Most were no different from the splendor of the three millennia-old passageways we had come from, lined with hieroglyphs still vividly colored with triturated gemstones, but the draw of the velvet rope was too strong, and so we ducked under.

  “Take photo,” invited the nervous guard. Photos were absolutely prohibited inside all of Egypt’s monuments. We did. They came out terribly. The guard coughed on the way out and we shook a bill into his hand. He wouldn’t call after us—and we didn’t look back to see if it was enough, clomping quickly down toward the sarcophagus of King Tutankhamen, where we would do all of this again.

  So long as the bakshish is received as satisfactory, though, everything feels less scummy. I didn’t feel like the magnanimous colonist, the chalky Sahib, the khaki-clad lord of the bush—I just felt more complete, unashamed, like I had successfully completed a social transaction: expectation, execution, satisfaction. Not, as it usually goes in Egypt: expectation, attempt, expectation, rationalization, supplication, dismissal, resentment, dissatisfaction, discombobulation. A dash of nausea.

  I WAS TRYING NOT TO idealize anymore; every interaction was not caked in charm. There are opposing sides and disguised agendas and feelings of success and satisfaction to be won and lost—it was less a game than a battle. To our antagonist, ten pounds is dinner, or five lunches, or three keffiyehs, or shisha and tea and two coffees and another tea. To us, then, it was a principle and a precedent.

  It was nicer to offer than to be taken from, even if it was all the same in the end; it was simpler to adhere to some constant standard than to be hostage to mood and guilt, in the murky middle ground where there is no force and only feeling.

  “Give me whatever you like,” we heard from cab drivers after long drives, or boatmen who accepted anything silently. Oh, the onus!

  Hospitality could take turns, too. A glass of tea offered, putting us at ease. Then, perhaps, a charge: betrayal. When money was caught sneaking into innocent interactions, we’d lose our trust, and for this, the next innocent vendor felt the brunt of our retaliation. Knowing that we were often seen less as guests than as opportunities, I could never process this place in the same way again. I began to shun connections I might have embraced naively before. Sometimes we rejected interaction all together, and floated through ancient cities in total detachment.

  Later, we developed a technique: in the cliffs of Deir al-Bahari in Luxor, outside the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut known as the “Holy of Holies,” there are gift shops. Dozens of them, with proprietors who cry like bees: “Pashmina, alabaster! Sir! Best price!” It was too much. We started yelling—not at anyone in particular—like recently escaped crazy people.

  “AAAAHHHHHHH!” we said.

  The shopkeepers stared, slack-jawed and silent.

  VERY QUICKLY, our mental energy for constant bargaining ran out. We’d escape the crush of the capital to somewhere less famous for its Things To See. Fish, we had heard, was great in Alexandria.

  A first-class ticket was only seven bucks instead of five; the deals felt good and we felt okay taking them. So when a cab offered to take us instantly from where we stood to the sea, for only triple the price of a pair of tickets—no schlepping to the station, no waiting—we jumped. I lugged a wheeled duffel bulging with a backgammon board and an open bottle of Kazakh vodka into the taxi. For 130 miles, we’d be relieved of all hassle.

  At the limits of twenty-two-year-old imagination, this was the best of all possible worlds, and there was something beautiful about that perfect convenience: a con-venience is a “together-coming” of things. I often found it worth the price of forty teas to feel, just for a moment, that everything had come together.

  In the cab, we were a willing audience to a lecture on waxing techniques and romance. Drivers loved to broach topics with us that might have been more questionable with local fares—marriage, sex, cosmetics. Maybe the same conversations took place with Egyptians in the backseat, but it seemed more likely that our foreignness invited discussions of love and pudendal grooming.

  “We make ‘sweet,’ the Egyptian woman,” said Muhammad, explaining halwa, in one of its varieties. Halwa is the name of both a dessert (made from sesame paste), and a natural wax. The wax is made from boiled sugar and lemon juice, spread on hairy body parts and then yanked away.

  “Any supermarket, you go inside and tell him I need sweet, she bring you sweet. The lady, most of the lady she do this. She get out all hair, leg hair, pussy hair—everything. But she didn’t,” he said of his long-distance American inamorata. “It’s like, ‘What’s this! Why you didn’t get it out?’ She said, ‘No, that’s my hair! I like!’ ”

  That was only the beginning of his disenchantment. “Most of the time she ring me, ‘How are you I love you. Come to me.’ ” He was not the only one he knew getting cal
ls from Kentucky. Other Egyptian men got calls just like he did, he said, from tourists who wanted to take home more than memories—then packed a bag, went to the airport, and left. He felt the pull, too. “This time, not a lot of business, not a lot of tourists. I want to leave Egypt. But I didn’t want to go there with her. I didn’t want to live my life with her.

  “I wake up in the morning, I see ugly face. Also, I didn’t like American—the black. I like the white, nice hair, nice eyes, like romancy lady, not too fat. Fat for the women not good, my friend—you understand, not make you happy.”

  In the end, there was no enchantment at all. The longing caller in the faraway land had none of the things he wanted—except that she was far away. (Just as Muhammad predicted, Masha would see many couples at airport check-in in this narrow category: black American women and Egyptian men. The women were large, the men small. No children. Multiple carts piled with luggage.)

  Masha and I took all this in. She was more open, more reactive, more willing to laugh. She was comfortable. I hesitated to react for fear of affecting what he was about to say. She was transparent. But mostly we made noises only to keep him speaking, smirking at each other when he said something unseemly.

  I still rationalized forgiving him his type (“not black”) because I still wanted to listen with ears that didn’t dislike him. Muhammad was on the darker side of the average Egyptian. He was ethnically Bedouin, “from the desert,” descended from the traditionally nomadic Arab tribes that have adapted with varying degrees of friction to urbanizing societies across the Sahara and Arabian deserts. “Romancy” whiteness was an ideal, like something out of the airbrushed magazines I remembered my Tunisian Arabic teacher showing us.