The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

“And see I like the other one, the Englishman,” my grandmother said.

  “We’re never the same,” Gish said.

  “Well, it’s a good thing we’re not.”

  We shared a big paper pail of buttered popcorn and an orange drink with crushed ice. Some other children had to be taken home, they cried of boredom. My grandmother and I sat, transfixed, the moment we saw Omar Sharif, and camels and the desert wind of fine sand. I knew it was supposed to pertain to me somehow, it seemed important and solemn, a glimpse behind a veil of something that was always there and I didn’t know. It was my one-afternoon chance to see and judge whether it was good or bad, this being Arab.

  Maybe my father did look like Omar Sharif. I couldn’t really remember.

  Years later, I saw Funny Lady in California with my mother and we both took Omar Sharif’s side, against her.

  We felt badly, later, when his career fell apart. “I even wonder if he’s still alive,” my mother said once. He was never in anything anymore.

  Most of being Arab I learned from the movies. I taught myself what morality I own, brick by brick. There was no rule book bible to hand me. We were nothing. My parents thought everyone else in Wisconsin was old-fashioned. They slept late, tangled under huge white sheets, Sunday mornings while church bells pealed into our bare, wooden-floored apartment. I was allowed to eat oranges from the refrigerator.

  And my grandmother never taught me how to think. I was someone else’s child. What she did mostly was show me things. That was how she spent her life herself. Seeing, as she would say, what there was to see. Even the things she grew in her garden, half were wild like rhubarb. She cried easily, she paid attention to children, asked whether our shoes were too tight or whether our teeth hurt or whether we were warm enough at night or needed another quilt. My grandmother had several pairs of rubber boots and was always happy to give me one. But I never saw any thread of sex in her. Her husband was dead and buried before I was born.

  Maybe that was what I was flying here for. For sex or the seed of that in me, darker confidences. All I remember of my parents together was that apartment—the billowing curtains, dirt scattered from a potted plant by the floor of their bed, the taste of citrus peel on my gums. I was coming here for legs and for feet bold and unashamed of themself, the flurry of hands before faces near veils, the strike of gold in a nose, lashing a neck from an ear, that music I didn’t yet understand. Something.

  My mother was sick. She knew things but they were mixed in her, like bees or plaster letters of an alphabet strewn in drawers. She was not ordered enough to spread her apron over her lap and teach me. She owned a mouth of sex in her but it frightened me. I had seen it open in her too early in bad ways.

  I went to the bathroom. Airplanes, like woods and I supposed the desert, made you aware what it was to be a woman and not a man. In woods, you hovered and crouched over a tangle of panties. There seemed something strong and proud about a man peeing in a ditch, singular, statuesque, unafraid. I rinsed my face. I looked bad. Sometimes I remembered what I was doing and I felt like a wan stretched girl, searching the world grimly for her father who kept eluding her, while he lounged somewhere, Persian, tasting, lips curled up petallike to receive some imagined sweetness, like a cloudberry.

  Maybe by the time you find the person, they are beside the point. You’re not even sure you still want to anymore.

  When my father was a boy in Egypt, during World War II, local papers flubbed. “They stayed”—he smiled all knowing when he told me this—“too local.” He told me these things at my grandmother’s linoleum kitchen table before he left. “The only real news,” he said, “came from London.” But my father was the youngest son of a rich man and so, at age eleven, he owned his own transistor radio. Huna London, the announcer said, in important tones and my father said those two words, Huna London, on all the momentous occasions of his life.

  Huna London, he remembered saying to his bride the day he married my mother. “Huna London,” he whispered to her again the night of my birth.

  “Can I get a transistor radio?” I asked him that evening at the table, but my mother told me hush. It was still light out there often, when we sat down for supper, just dusk on the tops of the fields.

  There were three really good families in Alexandria, my father said. The Rifais, the Higazis and us. We are Atassis. Not only were we Atassis, but my grandfather was the richest of all. At one time, he owned more than half of Alexandria. He controlled the price of wheat in all of Egypt. “He’d get up in the morning and decide, ten, fifteen, eight, and that would be it,” my father said, his hand high in the air, one finger pointing. “And he really did bury pots of gold under the ground, in the dirt, somewhere on his land.” He told me that same night that we were descended from the great prophet Mohammed.

  “You are Mohammed,” I said.

  They had all laughed at that.

  And now I was flying to the Land of Atassis with a passport that called me Stevenson. I imagined a pale pink ribbed desert strewn with huge silk slippers with toes that curled and pointed up, light green, yellow, minty blue, faded red.

  I wondered what my father had made of that poor kitchen table in Wisconsin, the plastic napkin holder, the plates given away free, one with each tankful at the gas station, the rumble of the highway at the edge of our land. I was used to being poor. I grew up there. I grew up a way I’d by now learned to call poor, though at the time we never believed ourselves that, only that the table was our table, the plates our plates, what we ate, our supper. And we knew the land was ours.

  Now the notion of a rich grandfather didn’t exactly thrill me. Once, when I was little, I talked to that grandfather through the black telephone in the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen and he promised to send me a sheep. I didn’t know how the sheep would arrive. In a crate? In a box? Would he have holes to breathe through and hay to sleep on and feathery grass for him to eat? Years peeled by and my sheep never arrived. I’d forget him for a while, but never completely. “Oh, lookit here, comere, Mayan,” my grandmother called once, years later. I was curled over the kitchen table making my magnet, studying the library book already years out of date, but we didn’t know that then. I got up and went to the living room where she stood by the window, holding the curtain. There was a full storm, snow-flakes dense in every inch of air. We watched the tiny mail cart jetting through the snow like a motorboat and the small man in his cap, standing out for just a minute to snap open the jaws of our mailbox, stick the mail in and lift a mittened hand to my grandmother—and for all I knew to all the others on the street who spent the storm day at their windows just waiting for someone to appear on their lonely road. It seemed the people there owned endless time, time to wait and wait. It never occurred to me that my grandmother watched for the mail like that for any reason but the arrival of my sheep.

  My father remembered sleeping among sheep on summer nights, his head on their sides, their hearts knocking close beneath the skin, their deep animal smell, the reverberations of their baaing, ten times, no, one hundred times stronger than a cat’s, he said. He rode out into the desert on camels with his father and they slept on the sand in tents pitched by the Bedouins. For breakfast, they made him, the boss’s son, his favorite food. A kind of thin fresh bread, cooked like a pancake on what looked like an upside-down Chinese wok. These they would spread with good rich camel butter and then sugar and then another layer of the same until it was high as a wedding cake and they’d cut you a wedge and you could see all the layers like rings inside a tree.

  But that’s probably all gone now, I thought. I doubted the Bedouins, whoever they were, did that anymore. Like the encyclopedia said, they probably lived in city slums, which was too bad for me. I’d always wanted to taste that bread.

  Even at the time my father told me, I wanted to know more. “But dad, what is a Bedouin?” I asked, at the kitchen table.

  “Shh,” my mother said. She nodded with her chin. “Listen to him. Don’t interrupt with
your voice so loud. They’re like Gypsies,” she said.

  I asked the question again louder, almost shrieking.

  My father turned to me nice, as if it were the first time he noticed anything. My grandmother moved silently through all this, by the stove. When he was there, she hardly ever talked.

  “Oh, sweetie, Bedouin is like a job description. They’re nomads. They go from place to place on the desert, following sheep.”

  That was, of course, before he left. He leaned his face down close to me that night. “So remember your dad was a big shot in Egypt, Mayan,” he whispered, flashing the smile he was, at least to me, famous for.

  I had not seen my father for sixteen years, maybe seventeen. For some reason I went back and forth between those two numbers like rocking on heels, is it sixteen or seventeen, as if that would make some huge difference.

  Childhood nights sleeping under a deep sky, rich with stars, his ear resting on the warm jiggle of a sheep’s sheer belly, the moving mass, an occasional low tremolo sound, the sharp dark smell. Those were my father’s nights. He had had time in his life. I had had my nights, too. I slept outside once with my cousin, biting the white ends of long weeds, the first time we admitted his family and all the families we knew were different from my mother. Later, I slept outside with Stevie Howard. I had my nights and days. Our whole family did—only they weren’t together with each other, and the people we lived them with were ghosts now. We each kept our own memories privately.

  A voice rippled over the public address system, first in fluid, lush-voweled Arabic, then in accented English, and finally in French, saying we must prepare for landing in Cairo and fasten seat belts.

  I closed my eyes and did what I was told. The plane all of a sudden seemed old, the round of the wing a dull cleft silver, the plaid seats made long ago, and I felt again how no one knew I was here, no one, and if the worst happened now, I would have gone as my grandmother did leaving none of the ones I’d loved anything in my own handwriting. I didn’t even have a will and I should have. I for sure had no money now, but I’d want certain people to have certain things. People like Emory, whom no one would remember.

  The plane shuddered and fired and buckled like the last writhing moments of a birth. I squeezed the armrests of the seat and then we were there on the ground, still bouncing, the engine’s roar louder, the wings outside beating up and down hard but all of a sudden we were slow and even, going forward on land. Planes seem the same everywhere but they aren’t. This one had a smell like an animal, something alive.

  I unbuckled the seat belt, took my backpack down from the overhead. This was the least I’d ever packed for any trip. I had just these clothes I was wearing, another white shirt and black pants, the two heavy books and my money. All the money I had left at all. This was not a trip or even a vacation, but a mission. Or an errand. I wanted to go to that one house in Alexandria, that was all, and then come home.

  In the close line pressing out of the plane, a foreign smell rose up, like intensified paprika or cumin. We climbed down the silver metal staircase and onto a tarmac. The air tasted warm, with a thread of eucalyptus. In the distance, flat yellow and brown land ended with a line of cypress. The green of the palms seemed darker here, older, tinged with gold. They seemed to vibrate in the trembling air. And the sky was a different blue. It was light but not pale, a dense, sunshot blue, clear with a few far clouds. It was good.

  I walked into the airport, plain signs etched in calligraphy, white on black. Hundreds of people moved on the ground. There were black veils, white veils like billowing curtains. Some veils went halfway down the back like nuns’ habits, others were light little things, barely covering the face. Some women looked hidden and foreign and unrecognizable, but others wore it like an adornment, another accessory of fashion, the way the truly stylish use glasses—something to be accommodated and sighed over in the temporal glissening effort to be beautiful just now, here, on this modern, crossed, still man-run earth.

  I put my pack down a second on the hard cement and just stood there. A scarved woman in white brushed by, her feet articulate in sandals. There were soldiers around, young boys in dusty black uniforms and cracked boots, carrying long guns. The cypress in the distance looked solemn and old. I knew, right away yes, this was a place. It was good. Outside the glass doors, chances smiled everywhere out of signs, many in English. I could see the desert on a two-day camel excursion, the Norman ruins, mosques. I could tour Cairo. The Pyramids. The Suez Canal. Antiquities. The Nile. One sign claimed Egypt owned four of the seven Wonders of the World. My pack leaning on my knee, I yearned for a moment to just go to the university. I imagined domed towers and minarets, Ottoman caliphs and formal Alhambra gardens all with the timeless lazy bookish peace of a university anywhere. That hurt to even think. All of a sudden, I missed home. Home for me was abstract, but it still existed. There was no house full of things anymore—there wasn’t even room for me to stay in my mother’s apartment. Home for a single person living in a city was different. It was two friends, my same pizza place, the faces at school and work. You were less independent really than a settled person in one house with a family, who could leave and go anywhere and with one phone call, get it all back.

  For me, the real shrine of France was the living, cafe-noised, kid-ridden Sorbonne.

  Still, this was different, this wasn’t a foreign place to see like that. This was a place I was from. My mother told me I had been conceived in a resort hill town in Lebanon. And I had my mission or errand, whatever it was. The nine teen-hundred-dollar errand. I could bear to think that here. Here I could even bear it to be nothing. The way the air tasted and the sky went back and back, I could look at the good chance I was a fool and laugh. Maybe that was what Egypt was for: to give me back my sense of humor. That’s what I would have if, at the end of all this search, I saw nothing. But how would I know it was the end?

  Some kinds of confidence I did have. For example, backpacks. I believed I started leather backpacks. First I had had one and people stopped me on the street asking about it and now everywhere you looked, people had them, even here, by the counter, a woman in purdah.

  I picked up mine and went to look for a driver, guidebook open in one hand, like any tourist. I didn’t care how out of it I seemed. I was. And I wanted to make it to Alexandria tonight and get myself in a hotel there so I could find Shahira Miramar Street the first proper thing in the morning.

  “Wel-comb in Egypt,” a large man said.

  Egypt, that first brass afternoon in spring, may have been the most stylish place I ever saw on the earth. Nobody had ever told me about the cars. The cars were old German and American cars from the 1950s and ’60s, black and rounded. They honked, shined everywhere and I found a driver to Alexandria with my guidebook propped like a piece of music between two pronged fingers, a rabba lad aal budAlexandria. Alexandria was a long way—two guys turned me down before this one. He was handsome and young, with many teeth, and he had a dry grassy smell the closer I stood to him. We bargained a price in dollars, I had to get pounds still. He knew almost no English. He had a book. I sat in the back of the old Mercedes on deep leather seats made soft with time and watched out the rolled-down windows as we left Cairo in a circle like a maze and drove north into the horizon of cypress, eucalyptus and olive trees. It was good.

  “I know no many words,” he said.

  I pointed to his head and said, “Head,” then to his hair and said, “Hair.”

  “I know, I know,” he said.

  There was so much sky. All the ground and trees, people and even buildings rose about an inch and the rest was sky. It was February 24. I wanted to remember the day. I lay my head back on the seat and the smell of earth rolled over me. This wasn’t desert like I’d expected. It was dirt, not light sand, but the vegetation was different, scarce and somber. Ragged trees moved slightly in what there was of wind, and they seemed to whine and creak, we don’t have to us what we once did. There were date palm and eucalyptus,
sycamore. Closer in, there were acacia, juniper, jacaranda and grass.

  I felt looser in my clothes when I couldn’t see Cairo behind us anymore. We were on an old road. The structures you saw in the distance here looked small, made of concrete and mud. A rich weedy taste came in from the air. I thought of my father and how, even though he was a boy who grew up here in this old, slow country, he’d moved in suits and silk ties all over the world, it sounded like. This was a place with its own smell where you’d take the city off and put your real clothes on, loose and cotton. The States, Italy and Paris and Greece on the way back from the Cairo Caper, and who knew where else how many times. And I’d traveled, too. I’d driven cross-country a lot of times, I had my college summer in Europe, all of us now, even my grandmother’s friends in Racine had been around the world, but do we, any of us, love more?

  Maybe that was the first mistake: leaving. I’d always followed the career of Yasir Arafat. I read an interview in Playboy magazine once where he was laughing and saying he almost came to America. “I was accepted into the University of Texas—I think it was the University of Texas,” he said. “Anyways, I didn’t go.”

  Seeing out the windows, shacks and stands of trees, camels became horses, familiar already, made one piece settle in place right like something lost from a puzzle. If this was Egypt, maybe that explained Wisconsin. His existence there. On the road ahead of us I saw a small wet lake and then a brown mountain, which disappeared when we came close. I’d been told about mirages, in school, when I learned the word, but I’d never seen one. This landscape made mirages. Maybe it took a desert, I thought, to produce them. Once in a while the driver turned to me and we’d try to talk but it was too hard so he’d fall back to his driving, which he did with an evenness and a happy hum that seemed odd and discordant as si tar music and with a vague smile meaning I didn’t know what but which seemed to move through a sort of plot sequence and I’d rest back on the seat, thinking how I’d like to sleep with this boy just once just tonight in my hotel room and wondering if I could, how this worked and whether I should give him money and how if I did, this was so foreign no one would know. No one ever. The rest of my life no one would know.