The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  “Hello,” she said in a musical voice, putting down the phone. “My name is Rania.” She was dark-skinned, wide-eyed with an extremely full, flower-shaped mouth. She sounded younger than she looked. She could have been anywhere in a decade.

  “I’m Mayan Atassi.” That was the first time I’d said that since before Ted Stevenson broke our names and then disappeared back into randomness. “I’m looking for someone Egyptian,” I said.

  Just then the parrot flapped its long wings and squawked. She laughed. “Egyptian. Let’s see. Professor Nawafi is,” she said, “but he’s on leave in Paris this year.”

  “You’re not?” I said.

  “No, I’m from Lebanon,” she said. Lebanon. I’d always been told that I was conceived there. In a resort town in the mountains. My whole life I’d heard of Beirut and how it was the Switzerland of the Middle East and long after 1970 my mother kept talking about Lebanon as a neutral country where everyone kept their money because they never took sides in any war.

  “Do you know Arabic?”

  “Yes, mmhm. Can I help you somehow?”

  I began to explain.

  My mother used to say she never wanted me to be alone with my dad. “He could have you on a plane to Egypt in fifteen minutes,” she’d snap her fingers, “and they’d have you married off and swelled up pregnant at fourteen.” She always said pregnant with a spit in her voice as if she almost liked the thought of them ruining me. “That’s what they do to girls over there. Girls are nothing.”

  “What about … going to college?” I’d said.

  “College, in Egypt?” she said. She burst out with a bad, bitter-rinded laugh. “Forget it.”

  I’d sort of wanted to go except for college. But I was afraid to be pregnant like that, young. When I was a little girl in Wisconsin she’d always told me I would go to college. “You’ll go to Radcliffe,” she said. “Don’t you worry, when the time comes, you’ll get in. I know people. You’ll get in, you’ll see.” When she made promises like that, her eyes filled to the surface as if the part of her that wished crossed the part of her that lied and gave a certain kind of smiling face with tears, like a rainbow.

  I hadn’t thought about her saying those things in years but I’d believed her, in a way, until I saw Rania, in front of me, a beautiful statistic. A Lebanese woman my age, not pregnant, hovering over a handmade birdcage. She told me she was working in this office while going for her master’s at night in educational psychology. She’d married an American, a doctor. I looked at her ring closely now. It was dark gold, the diamond capped on either side by bright blue-green gems cut in squares.

  Her husband’s parents had been foreign service. “He was my gym teacher,” she said.

  I could have gone to my father after all. Even if he had stolen me, I would have lived.

  But he didn’t want it enough. When my mother, holding the phone, her toe bobbing the whole weight of her shoe, said in a kind of tilting tease, “I’m not letting her alone with you,” he must have just said okay.

  He didn’t fight.

  On three sheets of paper, Rania wrote the Miramar address, my address in New York and a little paragraph I dictated saying who I was and that I was looking for my father whom I hadn’t seen in years and his name.

  I opened my wallet and slipped these three papers in the deepest part. They became treasures. Rania asked me if I would come back when I returned and tell her what happened.

  I was halfway down the hall, a clean echoing hall of black tiles, and then I ran back. “Rania, do you know what the weather is like there?”

  She stepped out from behind the desk. She was a plump-cheeked woman, big-breasted, wonderful-looking. “Nice. Perfect. Like your San Francisco.”

  I WAS A SECRET. I was on an airplane flying to Cairo drinking vodka and no one knew. I’d landed in London and switched planes. I’d packed in an hour. I had the same message on my answering machine I always had. It didn’t say anything about being gone.

  I’d called Stevie from the airport and he was sleeping and I kept talking until he sounded alive because I couldn’t let him call me back later. He could probably hear them announcing planes around me, but I couldn’t tell him. It was one of those weird talks where he was tired and muffled, and I didn’t want to say what I should have said but I couldn’t get off the phone either, so I just kept blabbing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well, I’m lying in bed here. Helen’s in Chico. Visiting her grandmother. Um. What’s up with you?”

  “Oh, nothing. I mean the same.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m going away for a few days. Week maybe.”

  “Where?”

  “Where? Uh, the Cape. I’m, in fact I’m at the airport now. I need some scenery, you know, the beach. I got hungry for a lobster. I should go to Egypt someday. Check out my roots.” I laughed a little, but coming from me he knew that wasn’t just funny.

  “You haven’t given up yet, have you?”

  “I try to. I don’t think I can.”

  “Well, hold off until they straighten things out over there. It’s not a very safe place to visit right now. And it’s waited this long, it can wait a little more.”

  That did it. Then I knew I wouldn’t tell him. This was no finding-my-roots trip anyway. This was in and out. Go to Shahira Miramar Street, see if he was there, if the house was still standing, then come back. That was it. No scenery. I’d be home before anyone knew it and then I’d tell them.

  Then they were announcing my plane. I counted on him not being able to hear the words. They said them first in English, then in Arabic. We had to get off the phone. I prolonged it, like a kiss.

  “You know you’ve been a great friend always you know. I wish I’d been better when we were younger but I couldn’t be closer to anyone now no matter what.”

  He had no idea why I was saying these things and I expected him to say yeah, yeah but instead he seemed to really like it, and sort of rise up, like a person when you’re bending down to kiss him lifts up not only his head but his whole back and shoulders and stretches his neck to meet you.

  Now on the plane I wished I’d told someone.

  This plane was like any plane except that I kept ordering vodka. I ordered another one even before I emptied the first little bottle. I didn’t want to be without. The belly of the plane shuddered under a cloud and so I saw nothing but white vapor and then it was all water, the blue a grayish dull color with ribs like I imagined on desert sand.

  The vodka made the ride different, slower. Wings out the window rounded old-fashioned, plain nickel silver.

  Here I was going to Egypt. That was my mother’s worst threat always, he’ll get you on a plane to over there in no time, he could put you on a plane in fifteen minutes and once they’ve got you there … The way she warned had a sock in it, a real menace. She felt a little shudder of pleasure imagining me ruined, had by them. What was that in her? She had all the other too, kindnesses, many-colored.

  But I was a grown-up now and being pregnant didn’t seem only shame. It appeared even beautiful, a common thing. It was strange outliving the life with my mother: I was forever discovering little things I believed and assumed that were not true. Pregnant was not always ruined. Anyway, I might never be able to get pregnant, I remembered, and that was because of me.

  I knew nothing. An Egyptian father and no words except what I’d learned so far on the plane from my Arabic at a Glance phrase book.

  There weren’t many Arabs in America. Not a popular minority. On all the forms you filled out where it gave some kind of advantage to minorities, they listed about seven different kinds with little boxes for you to check, and Arab was never a box. I guess they considered it just white. Or other. Being Arab was not something you’d want to right away admit, like being a Cherokee or Czech.

  Though this was a turn and even a fight against my mother, I was sitting in her seat, the one she always demanded on airplanes and arranged for me, whe
n she flew me home alone from wherever she was so my grandmother at age sixty and seventy had to drive one hundred miles to fetch me in godforsaken places. My mother always picked the best seats the way someone would pick the best part of a chicken and reserve it. She insisted, we had to sit over the wing. And here I sat, the proud steel below me, cutting the air with its round blunt blade, the slow fire of gaskets under, and here in the murmur of the plane it was not quite like other regular planes either, some of the passengers were veiled and the stewardesses themselves spoke with accents and everything looked modern and semiprofessional but had the slight ragged edges of the third world, a better taste in the food, something older and scant and closer to the ground and real animals of the world.

  I wondered what Egypt would be. I thought of patterns of sand on deserts, the skin of bare feet, veiled women stepping off camels, how their hands moved. It was supposed to be a modern international airport. I knew nothing. I didn’t know if it would feel absolutely foreign or just like anyplace now.

  It was something—this—that might stay whether I found him or not, this being Arab, half Arab, invisible in the world.

  Not a popular minority. Not a popular name. Not a swell guy.

  No good, I could hear Jordan saying and shaking his head. No good, Mayan.

  Anyway, there I was on the plane, an American wearing heavy black-framed sunglasses with the E volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica open on my lap, reading the history of Egypt. I was reading about the Pyramids. After this came the I volume for Islam.

  I’d always been suspicious of ethnics. Especially those who, like me, didn’t look it. I looked it a little, but not enough that I couldn’t have been anything else. A Jew for instance, which to many Americans was like the absolute opposite. Indian maybe. Most darker Americans look like they could be a couple of things.

  “I’m more Arab than you are X,” I’d said a hundred times. That’s how I used it. To prove the other person and I were, both of us, nothing. I had a perverse streak. I liked to topple people’s pride.

  “Shht, quiet,” my grandmother would say.

  I liked to call people on their lapsing moments of ethnic identification. I always felt surprised after, how touchy they were. I was quick to point out to friends that their great-great-uncles may have died in Stalin’s camps, but they themselves only roasted marshmallows at summer camp. I wasn’t nice. But I couldn’t resist. I believed those veils were fake and I loved the tearing off of them. Now I wondered, Were everybody else’s ideas this suspect or only mine? Now it seemed I’d just been jealous. If I couldn’t have that, no one should.

  My father hadn’t taught me any Arabic. I knew more about Egypt from my mother than from him. Even when she was married to Ted and we lived in the house on Carriage Court, she would sometimes make kibbe with lamb and pine nuts. She was always looking for a good yogurt culture.

  I read Egyptian history in the E volume. The American Civil War produced a boom in Egyptian long-staple cotton during the 1860s. A century later, in Wisconsin, all my mother’s and her sister’s monogrammed blouses, in pink-and-white and yellow-and-white pinstripes, were made from Egyptian cotton. See, she’d say, over the ironing board, showing me the fine sheen. Napoleon’s wife opened the Suez Canal in 1869.

  I thought my father was already here by the time of Nasser’s coup in 1952, but I wasn’t sure. He met my mother in 1953 during the burning of Cairo. I stopped for a moment and looked out the window at the loft white cloud thin as pulled cotton, and thought of the great cities that had been burned. The burning of Atlanta, the burning of Moscow and the burning of Cairo. Hiroshima. Dresden. Berlin. I would like to have been one of the architects of reconstruction. I’d read about a painter in Beirut who only painted the central market as it was before the Civil Wars. He talked about the Poles rushing into their own archives before the German occupation of Warsaw, to steal the city plans they would need to rebuild.

  My mother was pregnant with me in Egypt when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. When I asked her why she flew home when she did, sometimes she said it was so I could have the very best medical care anywhere, in Wisconsin, and other times she pulled her top lip down and serious, as if how could anyone be so dumb to ask, and said, “Well, the Suez Canal Crisis.” My grandmother said anyway she couldn’t eat the food there.

  My father had left us in 1961 as the United Arab Republic fell to ruin. The year of Israel’s grand victory in the Six-Day War, my mother and I flew out to Los Angeles where my father and his new wife, Uta, took us to Disneyland for two days. We both had go-go boots then and white fishnet stockings. The summer of 1970, when Nasser died and Sadat became president, my mother and I took the biggest chance of our lives and drove to California in a Lincoln Continental we didn’t own so I could become a child star on television. A year earlier Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO and a year later Assad took over Syria. In 1973, we lived in Beverly Hills and didn’t even read the newspaper, so the Yom Kippur War was over before we even heard about it. My grandmother died in the same year that Israel invaded Lebanon.

  My mother had always followed the career of Cleopatra. We knew that she made a bed of rose petals for herself and Mark Antony and that she bathed in milk. I once asked my mother why she didn’t name me that, Cleopatra. She shrugged. “I guess I thought you were a boy,” she said. We both believed that the greatest career a man could have on the earth was to be something royal or a genius or the president. For a woman, it was to be a beauty.

  Most of the names in the encyclopedia meant little to me, except they sounded something like Atassi. I read once about a Palestinian terrorist named Abu Leila, which meant Father of Night, and I wondered if my father could have been like that. He could have gone back. Maybe he did. When I was a child, he told me once, “Mayan, if I’d stayed there, I’d be running the country now. I had everything there for me, a great career waiting. One of the best families. Connections, everything.” That was before he left us in Wisconsin.

  I gazed out the window again, into the gauzy nothing. The encyclopedia was all fact, things hard to picture. The Ottomans built three major railways and paved roads just before World War One. Tuberculosis is prevalent amongst the Bedouins in the desert and in city slums. The Suez Canal construction began by peasants using spikes and baskets, peasants who were drafted into service. Under “Culture,” they listed the Egyptian National Library, Egyptian Museum, Institut d’Egypte. I read about Misr studios and Egyptian General Cinema Corporation. A radio program Voice of the Arabs. Under the other Arab countries all they could mention was that Jordan had had a resurgence of folk dancing in recent years and that in Damascus there was a waxwork museum.

  I loved the names: Port Said, Port Wish, the Big Bitter Lakes, Small Bitter Lakes.

  “Hardly a day passed during 1975 and 1976 without a battle somewhere in Lebanon.” I was in college then, working for the food service. My father was already gone from Montana.

  Islam means Surrender.

  Vodka made me drifty. Outside the plane was battened in white. It swerved and bumped. I didn’t trust enough to sleep. The metal seemed fragilely hinged.

  Once in a school Christmas play I had to read a part from the Bible and I said Syria wrong, I said it like diarrhea. My mother and grandmother were both sitting in the audience and my mother winced.

  “Why did you get that wrong? You know how to pronounce Syria, you’ve heard it all your life. Syria.”

  I shrugged to her but the reason was because Carl Otter, who was Joseph, had read first and he’d said it that way. That was the same year my mother wanted to forget about making me a costume to be Mary and just send me in a long white muslin caftan she had from Egypt. “For Mary?” my aunt accused. My grandmother and aunt had planned for me to be in royal blue velvet. “Well, that’s what they wear over there,” my mother said. “Might as well be realistic for once.”

  Even though this was all against my mother, the whole trip, I hadn’t thought about her until now. The
n I felt terrible then for not calling her. What if I died? She’d never know, she’d put together the few facts, geography, and make it all worse than it was. I was taking off on a lark, flying on money I didn’t have, a baffling, staggered self-indulgent search that would benefit no one probably, not the poor, not the damaged, only me at best, and so far I was worse for it. But it was something I had to do, anyhow, the way people become addicted to an abiding pain. The way my grandmother, once she’d laid out the cards for solitaire, had to play the game out and finish.

  MY COUSINS AND I had been taken to see Lawrence of Arabia when it came to Racine at the Coliseum Cinema. Tickets were sold in advance for the matinee and Gish, in a long dress with a stylish jacket, ushered us to front seats. During those years, Gish was still trying to meet someone. “Where better than the movies?” she’d say. We reserved those seats with our coats, then ran back to the lobby for popcorn and candy. We stared at the bigger-than-us posters.

  “She’s part whatever he is, isn’t she?” Gish asked my grandmother. Gish had never had children and she didn’t fully believe that we could understand English, being the size we were. When she spoke to us directly, she used the minimal vocabulary she used with her cat.

  My grandmother shook her head, “Yah-sure, from the dad.”

  “Does she feel part from over there?”

  “I don’t know,” my grandmother said, looking down at us. “Do you feel any of that, Egyptian?”

  I shrugged. “No,” I said.

  “Well, watch and see if you think this fellow looks like your dad any. I think he’s a real handsome fellow, this Sharif.”