by Mona Simpson
We sat politely in the still living room on fancy maroon velvet couches with gold tassels, our hands folded, looking different places in the room. She smiled at me every few moments. She was a large-featured woman and yet there was something delicate about her facial attentions, like a very fat woman balancing on tiny feet. Then, a long time later, the girl skidded in, calling back and forth in avid musical conversation with a boy who might have been her brother but didn’t look like it. He stood before the woman, probably his grandmother, hands at his sides, chin tipped down awaiting orders. More fast pointed Arabic spewed. I rested with the ease of understanding absolutely nothing.
Then the boy turned so he was facing me and said, “I know little English.”
“Oh, good,” I said, too loudly. “Are you learning in school?”
“Yes,” he said. “School.”
“What is your name?” I said.
“My name is Nauras Awafti.”
I stuck my hand out to shake. “My name is Mayan Atassi.”
“Mayan. Yes. Is ver many here,” the boy said.
The grandmother, who sat at the edge of her couch, head cocked, as if by listening with full and complete attention the translation would come to her by itself, finally became impatient and pulled the boy to her by the back of his shirt. He then turned and translated for her. She fired questions at him hard and fast. Then he swiveled back to me again and she smiled, all her teeth showing, some not white, her old plump hand lifting to wave at me.
“I am American,” I said. “My mother is American, my father is from here. Egyptian. He grew up next door. My father is Mohammed Atassi and I came here to find him.”
“Mohammed, ah yah,” the old woman said, her head going up and down slowly as if, on a string far away, her mind was a kite searching high mountain grasses for something lost.
The boy translated.
“He left my mother years ago. I haven’t seen my father—Mohammed—since I was twelve years old.” Here I marked height in the air with my hand. “Around your age.”
He turned and translated this to his grandmother, who kept rocking her head up and down, mouth closed, a sad expression like a slim nude woman on her face.
“I wonder if you, if your grandmother, knows where he is.”
Here he grinned largely. “She no my grandmother,” he said, as if this were a hilarious mistake. He giggled, translating to them. I hoped to hell she was not his mother, I kept looking at her, calculating. No, she couldn’t have been. “She my grandmother sister,” he shrieked. “My grandmother upstairs.” He pointed to the ceiling.
The old woman grabbed his collar again sternly to get him back down to business.
He wheeled again towards me. “What?”
“Does she know where my father is?”
She shook her head so I knew my answer before he even translated. Then she spewed a long trailing scarf of words, all the while shaking her head. The nude woman in her face knelt down.
“You come all the way from America to find him?” the boy said.
“Yes,” I said and she heard me too. She closed her eyes and kept shaking.
“He hasn’t been there for a long time,” she said, through him. “No thirty years. We never seen him again. She says he be somewhere in America. But his father die. Next door here. And he not at funeral. We never seen him. And you have bad luck, because they live there next door. Tarik’s wife and daughter. But they go for two month already to Americas.”
America. I was astonished. “Where in America?” I said.
She shrugged.
“She says she don’t know. But she think Californias.”
I looked to my left a second. The little blond girl had been sitting the whole time in a big chair, her arms clutched to the armrests, her round legs ending in blunted sneakers, staring up at me, the American, rapt.
Then the boy said my father’s mother was very old but still in the house next door and would I like to go and meet her.
I thought I’d heard the translation wrong. “Yes!” I said. “Yes!” My other grandmother.
Then the boy said his great-aunt would like to invite me to eat a meal with them first. She stood up, with her huge knees facing out, bent them, pliéing, lifting and spreading her arms to encompass the room. I recognized the woman’s repertoire of gestures then. They belonged to a clown. A fat clown. I liked her very much, I appreciated her exaggerating courtesies, but I wanted to go. I tapped my watch and pointed at the house next door. I was sick of people, even Egyptians, even neighbors who saw my father once thirty years ago, and I didn’t want more of strangers and kindness and dust. I had a grandmother locked in the house next door.
I still thought I might have misunderstood. But the old woman rose now, negotiating her weight around the furniture, swiveling, motioning me with a plump, fluid wrist to follow. The kids stood on either side of me, looking as if I were the strangest being they’d ever seen. We went through a mint-green kitchen that looked like any old-fashioned one at home and out the back door. The backyards went far. Three goats stood there facing us. There was a chicken coop too, with loud dirty white chickens. Behind the yard and a shed was a field, just weeds and nothing for a long time until you saw a stand of olive trees down the hill, and I knew my father must have grown up running there. From a eucalyptus tree in the backyard, an old tire hung and the lawn was worn smooth under in a grassless strip. If I could have proven he wasn’t here, that would be different. Sometimes I wanted the world to be plain.
I could have stood and watched there forever, the way the sun hit the backyard flat and orange, somehow level with the ground. But the woman was entering the house’s back screen door and I followed. And then we were inside. First a cellar of some kind, full of vegetables and fruits in clear jars, and cans with faded labels. Jars of honey and vats of olive oil and sacks of grain. I understood now: everything was magic to me here. It wasn’t just food. This was the first room I came to here. I picked up a jar of olives; they were put up that way still on their branch. You could see the twig floating in the tea-brown liquid.
The woman stopped and tapped at a jar with something inside it like yellow peanut butter. Her lips opened on her teeth in a large expression urging for meaning. “Mohammed,” she said, and moved a hand on her ample belly.
The boy translated. “He like that. For meal. Want to eat. Every day.” I didn’t know what it was.
Then we walked into a kitchen that looked like it had been remodeled twenty years ago, all in matching black and white checks. The bottoms of the cupboards were scalloped. It looked clean and plain. I liked the house. Then to get to the stairs, we passed through a living room that was large and carpeted plush emerald green and had fancy satin and velvet couches and chairs. Gold ropes stopped off certain portions of the room. There was an old inlaid chess table and brass trays; they looked Middle Eastern. But the mahogany console stand holding an RCA color television could have been anywhere. There were chrome-framed pictures on a shelf and I stopped to look. Several of the photographs seemed to have been taken at a wedding, the bride a full, young, curly-haired girl who looked nothing like me, and my father was not there. There were eight pictures of that same bride sitting in her flower-decked throne and in each one she was wearing a different dress. The old woman shook her head sadly, with raised eyebrows. “Mohammed, no,” she said.
We climbed upstairs, the children ahead. The woman ascended slowly, holding the gold velvet rope that served as banister. On the first landing, there seemed to be a family room, with another sofa and chairs, a bookshelf, a standing globe and corridors leading to bedrooms. We started up the second stairs. Near the top, the woman called the children back near us. She explained something to the boy and he ran ahead, two steps at a time, arms scissoring with purpose.
Then we entered the top room. A young woman with her hair held back pressed by us out the door. She stood holding one elbow. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform with a long zipper. It was a wide, low-ceilinged pink-a
nd-white room in the eaves. Outside, eucalyptus leaves fingered the windowpanes. The room was full of roses, their petals falling on tabletops, on the floor, on the lush satin bedspread from the night table. And there she was, rising from a chair with great effort, collapsing down again, an old woman with a very lined dark face, a mouth large as a harmonica, with many teeth and a puff of white hair. Her eyes were clear blue. She was large and short.
“Momo,” she said, her whole face crumbling over the words. She hugged me and she smelled a way I hadn’t ever known an old woman to smell, warmly sweet like caramel. After a while, we sat in white satin cushioned chairs and the boy translated between us. She had a clear sad look when she shook her head after the boy asked if she knew where her youngest son was. She had not heard from him for ten years, she said. Her eyebrows lifted and her large mouth formed a beautiful shape. She told the boy she had not seen him for almost twenty. Her hands lifted in front of her and I went close and knelt down so she could hold my face.
She told us that when my father was a boy, he always liked the animals. He was always out in the air with the animals. I asked if he had been smart. She shrugged herself up, frowning, then slowly nodded her head, like, I suppose so. Sure.
I moved to the small attic window. From there I could see the field and the goats. My father had run there, just a boy like any boy. There was a muddy pen. A sandbox. The woman from next door tilted her head and made a gesture that we should let the old woman rest.
I knelt to kiss her good-bye. We were walking out and the woman called us back in words I didn’t recognize. She’d lifted herself up and got to a bureau. From the top drawer, open now, I saw a thousand things—threads, thimbles, scissors, papers, cards, scarves, veils, stockings, lipsticks, jewelry, but from one place she extracted a tiny photograph, about an inch square, black and white with a white ruffled edge, of my father.
She gave it to me and I closed my hand around it. I didn’t let myself look at it really until later. In the cellar again, the woman from next door gave me the jar of what my father had liked. She pointed to the ceiling.
“From her. She wanted to you,” the boy said.
BEFORE I LEFT I gave the boy the scrap of paper where the woman in the office with the parrot had written out my address. “So you can come visit me in America someday,” I said.
“Enshahallah,” he said. He copied it down in his house and ran back with it so I still had mine anyway.
I asked him what that word meant in Arabic. I’d heard it all around me.
“God willing,” the boy said. “In Egypt no thing for sure. Everything enshahallah.”
Then I asked him what my name meant.
“Is name like all other names, you know, but here is very common.”
Oh. I’d always been told it meant light.
“I thought it meant light.” I looked around at the sky.
“No, no. Nora means light.”
“What about Amneh?” I thought it meant to wish.
“How you say. Believer.”
I hoped all of a sudden that Ramadan was still outside in the car and that we could drive back to Cairo now and he would rub my back and that then I could fly home into the dawn. I just wanted to leave. This was enough. It was good but I needed to rest. I felt like a person who had thrown a diamond ring down off a bridge and watched it disappear into the dark water and now it was over, I’d lost the gamble, he’d eluded me this time forever and I wanted to go home. But I felt calm. I didn’t care anymore. I’d had my Arab experience. It was too much for me all at once. And as I looked around me up at the tall slow trees with regret, I knew I’d be back here too, another time with different reasons.
The car was there and they walked slowly with me to it. I opened the front passenger door and the old woman rapped her knuckles on the window of the backseat and pointed.
I shrugged. “ ’S okay.”
Ramadan, who had just woken up, slumped over the steering wheel a way I hadn’t seen him. He looked up from his dropped head like a yoked animal. The old woman kept rapping, she seemed upset. Ramadan then pointed to the back. I got out again and went in the back. I didn’t get it or care, but I wanted to go. I rolled down the back window and looked for a moment at the house and the yard beyond, the three goats, their black heads, the shimmering yellow-green weeds of the plain field. It was as shabby as my grandmother’s house, the land as old. I was sad for how many different lives there were to live and we only got once.
RAMADAN EXPLAINED WITH THE GUIDEBOOK. The word he pointed to was “rich” and he looked at me, nodding his head. He said the word, “rich,” repeating to memorize. I kept shaking my head no. He persisted. The wind tore through the open windows. My mother had always told me we were royal. I laughed. 34 Shahira Miramar was a good house, but anywhere in the world, it wasn’t royal. At one point we stopped I didn’t know why. There was a small stand of trees by the side of the road, dusty olives. Ramadan got out and then I heard in the dry quiet that he was peeing. Below him was an old stone amphitheater. I came up behind him, toppled him, and we lay there an hour on the cool stone, laughing, toying, I hurt my back once on a eucalyptus button.
“Greco-Roman,” he said, pointing to the stage below. It was a small, perfect tiered circle. It was easy to believe in the life there once.
“Arabs have everything, huh?”
“Me no Arab.” He tapped his chest. “Egyptian. We have got Pyramids. We have got antiquities. History. This be in Germany, a whole room glass. Here—” He made a sound letting air out of his mouth.
When I put my underwear on again, the good ones, drops of blood trickled to the cotton, staining like a watercolor. I found the last scrap of paper from my wallet, where the woman in the office with the parrot had written that I was looking for my father, who might be here in Alexandria, and that I hadn’t seen him for seventeen years. I gave it to Ramadan. He read it, it seemed to take a long time.
His face took on a new cast from underneath and then he lost the plot of his smile. His hands stayed on the wheel not playful anymore.
I showed him the word in the book that means airport. I made wing motions with my arms, pointed at myself—“Me, America.”
We drove a long time keeping the silence and then we were there again in Cairo. On the way to the airport, he drove through a lush district of mansions on the Nile. They had the domed towers and minarets and columns and mosaics of mosques. They looked a thousand years old, older. These were the royalty of Egypt.
“Heliopolis,” he said. He stopped before one mansion and pointed. “Omar Sharif.”
At the airport, he came inside with me. I studied the English TV screen. There was a flight at eight o’clock tonight. It was only three. He took my hand and I followed him to a phone booth. He was carrying my pack again and it felt easy to let him. It was a regular modern phone booth. He lifted a book, paged through, found a spot and showed me. I remembered from his hand that Arabic scans from right to left.
His hand brailled over the whole page. “Atassi,” he said. “Atassi. Atassi. Atassi.”
I smiled and shook my head. It was too late for that now. I was finished with something. I wanted home. We spent time close in that phone booth, I sat on his lap, we decided with the watch. Back here at six-thirty for customs and security. Now, we’d eat. Eat, we could mime. I didn’t want to close the book over the page of Atassis. He ripped it out, folded the paper up, and put it in my backpack, zipped the zipper. And then he drove me to a low neighborhood of two-story buildings, tenements, with children playing in the bare street. It was a small restaurant, underground, and we sat cross-legged on the floor. The tablecloths looked clean, many times washed. A short-stemmed pink rose leaned in a tin can on our table. Two of the petals, cleft in the center, had fallen to the cloth. The light from back and front of the room came in slanted and he ordered in Arabic and I sat low, against a pillow, and we looked at each other and sometimes smiled, sometimes not, but we stopped trying at all with words. And after time, t
he food began to come and make our clock. Olives and new cheese, then kibbe, then I think what was my father’s layered pancake with different butter and burnt sugar. It tasted honey and deep caramel and rose water. I handed him a pencil and paper for the name. “Fatir,” he drew and whispered it.
Then we used the guidebook. He pointed to his chest and showed me the word “poor.” I smiled a little, embarrassed for him. He didn’t have to ask me. I’d already decided to give him all the money I had and only save back twenty dollars for the bus into New York. He pointed to himself again, then made wing motions, then said, in an accent I’d never heard say the word “America.” He pointed to me and I smiled. None of this seemed to matter. I gave him my address, he put it in the little bag he had around his neck where he kept money, clasping it shut again. He took my left hand and banded a cleft rose petal over my third finger. I knew before the book. “Marrying,” he said. I got up to leave. He was so young, I was thinking.
It was still light when we walked outside again. I wanted to buy a souvenir, I didn’t know what. There was still more than an hour. With the guidebook I showed him the word for bazaar and shrugged. We began walking and I followed him and then we were in a district of close streets and corners and brown buildings and smells of burning meat and then we rounded a corner and there was a square filled with market stands and around the sides were the neon-lit fronts of casinos.