“Tombs, yes, yes, tombs good. Eh…” the old man looked confused for a moment, rubbing the sharp ridge of his nose. “Valley of Servitors?”
“Yep, that’s the place.” I scooted my bag next to the small table that held an ancient cash register, well away from the guy in black who was still at the front of the shop, now squatting next to a box that apparently held a bunch of tools. I looked around, figuring I might as well get my shopping for Mom and the others out of the way while I waited for the gropers outside to get tired of hanging around. “So you sell, what, antiques and stuff?” I looked into a tray of beaded necklaces next to the cash register. “Jewelry is always a good gift choice. Everyone likes jewelry.”
“Yes, yes, Valley of Servitors! You come here,” the little old guy said in his dusty voice, pointing to the far corner with one knobby hand while waving me toward it with the other. “You come. Valley of Servitors.”
“You have some replicas of stuff from the Tombs? Like statues and jewelry and things like that? I know they’ve found a lot of things there in the last few years. Mom would probably like something like that because it’s from the area I’ll be working in.” I put down a pretty pink and red bead necklace and followed him to the back of the room, sneezing a couple of times at the dust his caftan stirred up as he hobbled down the aisle. There was one dim bare bulb in the middle of the small shop that didn’t do much to shed light in the corners, which probably did a lot to explain the old guy’s squint.
“Valley of Servitors,” the man repeated, stopping in front of an old black bookcase. I looked. On the shelves was a pretty motley collection of items—a small brown stone Sphinx that was missing a leg, a papier-mâché King Tut’s golden mask, a couple of dingy blue scarabs, three amber and gold bead necklaces hanging from a rickety wooden stand, and a dirty black bracelet stuffed behind them.
I fingered the bead necklaces, trying to see how well they’d clean up. My mother liked amber; maybe a necklace would make a good gift from Egypt? “Um…how much are they?” I asked, pointing to the necklaces.
“How much, yes, how much. Valley of Servitors, how much. Yes.”
I sighed, almost too tired to care. My T-shirt was glued to my back despite the fact the sun had gone down. Little rivulets of sweat snaked down the back of my neck, slid down my spine, and joined their brethren captured in the waistband of my jeans. I was sweaty, lost, and had already yelled bad things at people my first hour in this country. Rifling through my mental files labeled Things I Had To Learn Before I Got on the Plane For Egypt, I trotted out the pertinent phrase for how much is that? “Bikam da?”
“Bi-kaem?” The old guy rattled off something.
I pulled out the letter from the Dig Egypt! people that had the hotel name and address, and a pen. “Can you write it down for me? I’m not very good at numbers yet.”
He wrote down the number fifty. I looked it up on the list of currency conversions Rob had printed out for me before I left home. Fifty Egyptian piastres was a little more than eight dollars—well within my souvenir-buying budget, but Mrs. Andrews had told me how much fun she had bargaining with people in the stores, and said it was expected by the shopkeepers.
I grinned at the old man and crossed out the fifty and wrote ten.
His eyes lit up as he made a clicking sound with his tongue, tipped his head back, and raised his eyebrows. “Not enough! Not enough! Valley of Servitors. You see. Rekhis. Very cheap.” He scratched out the ten and wrote forty.
À la Andrews, I tried to look like I was so shocked by his price I’d rather staple my fingers together than pay what he asked. “Too much! Too expensive. Let’s try twenty.” I wrote the number down below his.
He opened his eyes really wide and slapped his hand up against the side of his face, which I assumed meant he was ready to beat himself silly before he accepted that price. His gnarled, twisted fingers grabbed my pen and wrote thirty.
I pursed my lips and looked at the necklaces, fingering the little money I had changed at the Paris airport. Thirty piastres was about five bucks. “For all of them? All three? Oh, shoot, what’s three, hang on, let me look it up…talat! Talat necklaces?”
He shook his head, saying, “Wahid, wahid,” as he scooped up the black bracelet and plopped it down in my hand, his elderly, arthritis-riddled fingers having no difficulty in quickly extracting the thirty piastres from the money I held in my hand.
I looked down at the ugly bracelet sitting on my palm. It was of some sort of black stone, with a small blue bird-shaped blob on the top. “Hey, wait a minute, my mother likes amber, I want the amber necklaces!”
“You take, very good. Valley of Servitors.” He hobbled toward the front of the store, ignoring me as I followed slowly behind him desperately thumbing through the Arabic phrasebook in hopes it had “I don’t want this ugly bracelet, I want the three pretty amber necklaces, instead” as one of their translated phrases.
“Look…um…what’s the word for old guy…”
I looked up from the phrase book just in time to avoid running into a tall black shape that said, “Effendim.”
“What? Oh. Thanks. Effendim, sir, I want the necklaces—hey! Where’d he go?”
“In the back. Hassad is very old.” The guy in black with the long hair turned to look at me. He was a little taller than me, and although he had dark hair and dark eyes like the guys outside, there was something different about him. For one, he obviously spoke English (with an accent, but it was a cool accent), and for another, he looked at me differently. The guys outside, even the older men, looked at me like I was a cherry on top of a sundae and they wanted to lick the whipped cream off, and how creepy is that? But this guy, he just looked at me like I was nothing different from any other girl. And he didn’t stare at my boobs, which was a really nice change.
Until I thought about that.
Why wasn’t he looking at my body? Was I that repulsive? Did he think I was too fat? Even guys who thought I was fat liked to look at my boobs, but not this guy. Oh, no, Mr. Sexy-as-sin with his long braid and his muscle tee and nummy brown eyes just looked at me like I was no more interesting that the ugly bracelet that was glued to my sweaty palm.
Sigh. Some days life just wasn’t worth the trouble of chewing through the leather straps on the straightjacket.
GUY DISSES GIRL—SHE DIES DAYS LATER, ALONE, UNLOVED, LOST IN A STRANGE CITY OF WHIPPED-CREAM LICKERS
The cute guy in black was still staring at me as if he could barely stand to look at me, so I made an effort to drag my mind from the picture of me lying dead in a gutter, and thought instead about how nice it would be to see him staked out spread eagle in the desert, naked, covered with orange marmalade and a thousand hungry ants.
I especially liked the naked part. “Hassan is old? You’re kidding. So that white hair and doubled-up walk and knobby hands weren’t just a clever Halloween disguise?”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” the guy asked. I changed the marmalade-eating ants to snapping turtles.
“It’s called irony. Evidently you’ve never heard of it.” I pocketed the bracelet and grabbed my bag as I gave a little mental shrug. The first guy I meet in Egypt who doesn’t try to grab me, and he’s a few walnuts short of banana bread. Just my luck. I started to sidle around his big black-clad hunkiness toward the door, planning on making my escape. Maybe the bracelet would clean up and Mom would like it even if it wasn’t amber?
“I’m quite familiar with irony,” the guy said in a stiff voice. “I’m also familiar with the fact that Americans think nothing of insulting elderly people. What you said was rude and discourteous.”
Rude! Discourteous! Polite little old me? Piranhas! Now he was covered with marmalade—no, gravy—and piranhas. Yeah, I know, there are no piranhas in the desert. You have your fantasies, and I’ll have mine.
I stopped and gave the guy a narrow, slitty-eyed look of utter scorn. “How can I be rude and discourteous to the old guy if he wasn’t here to hear me say it? And what does
being American have to do with anything?”
“I didn’t say you were rude to him, I said you were being rude and discourteous. There is a difference. Or don’t you understand irony?”
“Oh!” I dropped my bag and marched the three steps over to where Mr. Handsome stood looking all hot and droolworthy…and annoying as heck. I poked a finger into his chest. “Listen, buster, I’m all over irony! I’m the most ironic person you have ever met! I am irony! So put that in your water pipe and smoke it!”
“I don’t smoke,” he snarled.
“Yay you!” I said, and decided that although this guy had obviously provoked (polite and totally courteous) me, I wouldn’t lower myself to his level any more. I lifted my chin, shot him a look that said the piranhas were accompanied by ravenous bears, and spun around to get my bag and leave.
“Typical American know-it-all,” he said.
“Now, that I am not going to take!” I grabbed my notebook from the duffel’s side pocket and yanked the pencil from my jeans. “I want your name!”
He crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his head to the side in a move so smooth, he could have been the poster boy for Smug Incorporated. Even with all that smugness, I couldn’t help but notice that he had some hieroglyphs tattooed on his left bicep…a very nice bicep. I had the worst urge to just run my fingers over it…eek! What was I thinking? Bad Jan!
“You want my name? You want me to marry you?” His gaze skimmed me from dusty tennis shoes to my jeans, up to April’s Big Apple tee, my chin, my lips (thinned in annoyance), finally ending at my hair. “Tempting as that is, I’m going to take a water check.”
I blinked a couple of times. I do that when I need to think. I think it’s the fanning process of my eyelashes that pushes more oxygen to my brain. “Water check?”
For the first time since he entered the room, his smug self-assuredness dropped a notch. Instead of feeling superior about his mistake, though, the self-consciousness that flashed in his eyes did something funny to my stomach. “That’s not the right phrase?”
“Close. I think you mean rain check.” His shoulders stiffened as he gave a sharp nod. I felt a brief pang of something, a little spurt of empathy that had me adding, “It’s a weird phrase anyway. I mean, what exactly is a rain check? A check made up of rain drops? Too strange for words.”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me.
“And as for the marrying comment, which was so off base, I just meant that I wanted to know your name, so I could include it in my scathing article about rude Egyptian guys start leering and touching you the minute you get off a bus.”
“I’ve never been leered at when I get off the bus.”
“Whoops, there goes my spleen, you’re so funny I just laughed it right up and onto the floor. You’re not a girl, Mr. Comedian.”
“And you most definitely are,” he answered, and for a second, just for a second, his eyes dipped to my boobs.
“I saw that! You stared at my chest!”
His eyes snapped up to meet mine. “I did not stare at your chest—”
“Yes, you did! I saw you!”
“I did not stare.” His jaw tightened for a moment. “I might have looked quickly, but that was all.”
“You’re a boobmonger, pure and simple. Oh, don’t give me that outraged look, I’ve met guys like you before.” That wasn’t strictly true, but hey, I didn’t know this guy. I didn’t have to tell him everything!
He was silent for another few seconds. “You are a very odd girl.”
“And you’re gorgeous and sexy and the most annoying guy I’ve ever in my life met, and I have five brothers, so I know an awful lot of annoying guys. Right, if you’re not going to give me your name, I’ll just make one up. How do you say ‘boobaholic’ in Arabic?”
He rolled his eyes.
I looked around the shop for inspiration, but didn’t find anything in English. A glance out the doorway at a ragged, dirty yellow banner hanging by its torn corner across the street was a little more promising.
“Khan al-Khalili. That sounds smug and arrogant like someone I could name.” I made a note of the name, stuck the notebook back into my duffel bag and slung the bag over my shoulder.
“Khan al-Khalili is the name of the bazaar,” the guy said. “My name is Seth Tousson, if you insist on knowing, and I was not staring at your…uh…”
“You’re a dawg, pure and simple,” I answered as I started toward the door, chin high in the air, trying to squelch the part of my mind that said I was just as bad as he was. While I might not have ogled him, I did think about running my fingers over his biceps. I suppose that qualifies as a quasi-ogle.
“A dog? You’re calling me a dog?”
I turned back, biting my lip. Seth’s voice sounded really angry, like I had said something horribly insulting. Everyone from Mom to Mrs. Andrews stressed how important it was that I be respectful and polite while in Egypt. I suppose calling someone a dawg wasn’t technically respectful, but it wasn’t that bad. I mean, let’s face it, most guys are dawgs!
“I said you were a dawg. That’s D-A-W-G, not dog.”
He just stared at me like I had monkeys crawling out of my ears.
I waved my hand around like it would help me explain. “A dawg is…well, in this case it means a guy who likes girls. A lot. A flirty guy. A player, you know?”
“Player,” he repeated, his dark eyes blank for a second, like he was thinking hard. “I know what a player is.”
I was willing to bet he didn’t, but figured if I told him what it meant, I’d be back in the land of rude and insulting, so I let it go. “okay. You know, you speak really good English. Did you learn in school?”
“No,” he said abruptly. “I’m not a dawg.”
“Oh, then you don’t like girls…oh. Sorry.” Whoops! Could I put my foot any further in my mouth? “I think I’d better be going.”
“Wait,” Seth said, his black eyebrows pulled together as he grabbed my arm.
I pretended that my mind wasn’t going totally girly at the fact that he was touching me. Especially since he wasn’t into girls.
“You said you were writing an article…you are a reporter?”
I smiled at his puzzled look. “I am a journalist, yes. That is, I’m going to be one, just as soon as I sell a couple of my stories and the papers realize how good I am.”
“And the story you plan to sell is about how rude you think Egyptians are?”
My chin lifted at the tone in his voice. It wasn’t nice. “Think? I’ve probably got bruises on my arm from where I was grabbed! And that was just in the first five minutes! Yes, I’m going to write about how I was groped the second I got off the bus.”
His gaze zipped down me again, this time quickly and without stopping on my boobs. “You are dressed inappropriately for a female. If you were harassed, it is your own fault.”
“Oh!” I gasped. “Inappropriately? Me?”
“If you’re going to visit another country, the least you can do is learn enough about it to be respectful of its culture,” he snapped.
“I did learn about Egypt, that’s why I’m wearing jeans instead of shorts, and I’m wearing the loosest top I have. Just how am I dressed inappropriately?”
“Your arms are uncovered,” he answered. “And your hair. Women here have both covered as a sign they are modest.”
“Modest my butt! Mrs. Andrews, the principal at my school, told me about her trips here. She says women are subjugated and don’t have the same rights as the men, and aren’t allowed to do a lot of things by themselves. That’s not modest, Seth, that’s…that’s…” I dug around in my mind for one of the phrases that April tossed out during her women’s rights phase. “…female oppression in a male-dominated patriarchal society frightened of feminine power!”
He looked a bit surprised by my words.
“What’s wrong, Sphinx got your tongue?” I asked sweetly.
“No, I’m too polite to say what I think, but
since you asked, I’ll tell you,” Seth answered. “What you see as oppression, women in Egypt feel is a sign of social status and a rejection of Western culture in favor of their own.”
Excellent! My first day in Egypt and already I was having deep, meaningful conversations about important social issues, the kind real journalists have all the time. All I needed was a few more of his comments, and the article would sell itself. I slapped an outraged expression on my face. “Oh, so you’re an expert on what women feel?”
“No, I’m not an expert.” He looked like he was grinding his teeth even while he spoke. “I’m simply pointing out that as is typical of Americans, your insensitivity to a culture other than your own blinds you to—”
“Insensitivity?” I interrupted him and gave him a really quality glare, the kind I usually save for my brothers. “Now I’m insensitive as well as immodest? Gee, thanks a lot. For a guy who admits he’s not an expert on women, you’re sure awfully full of opinions.”
He was grinding his teeth, I could see it as a muscle in his jaw flexed. “I did not say you were immodest. I just explained to you why you were treated as you were.”
“Right. So, in other words, although you’ve accused me of bashing your country and your culture—which I haven’t, other than pointing out that the men here seem to think nothing about invading personal space big time—you’re doing exactly the same thing by accusing me of being insensitive.”
“You are impossible!” he said a low, hard voice, his eyes going all black and glittery.
“And you’re a great big hairy tyrannical, dominating dictator who wants to oppress me, which, I can tell you, is not going to happen in this or any other lifetime!”
Eyeliner of the Gods Page 2