To satisfy my hosts, I sing a Japanese nursery rhyme that involves more chanting than singing and has lots of hand motions to draw attention away from my voice. Soon everyone is waving their hands over their heads and exclaiming with me in Japanese, “Uh-oh! The turtle is falling down!” Then I remember that the Japanese word for “turtle” is pronounced almost the same as the one for “the Lord,” and that many a missionary has perplexed his Japanese congregation with long, impassioned sermons on “Our Savior the Turtle.” I can’t help wishing I’d picked a luckier song.
When I start to nod off, I’m shown into a room barely large enough to hold the family’s bows and arrows and spears, propped against a wall, and a stained, child-sized mattress that smells of urine. How did they get a mattress up here? Did the mother carry it with a tumpline? I consider covering it with my rain poncho so I won’t have to lie directly on it, but decide this might be impolite.
Instead, I sit down and unzip my backpack, unsealing the ziplock bag that holds my peanut-butter-and-crackers, the one food I don’t want to share. I’ll need all the energy I can muster to cross the mountain tomorrow.
As I quietly chew my snack, I listen to the people in the next room talking and laughing. I’m reminded of lying in bed at my grandparents’ farmhouse in West Virginia, listening to the voices of grownups telling stories around the woodstove. My sisters and I didn’t know our grandparents, our aunts and uncles and cousins. We’d been raised in Japan. Although we understood English, the Appalachian cadences rising and falling in the next room sounded to us like the language of a foreign tribe. Yet it somehow comforted us that there were grownups talking around the fire. We didn’t hear the words, just the reassuring rhythm of their voices.
When I sweep the crumbs of my subversive peanut butter snack into a gap between the floor planks, a pig below the house squeals with delight, but the voices next door don’t pause. Thank goodness, no one suspects.
Curling up into a fetal position, I fall asleep to the voices of my hosts, mingled with the soft sound of rain on thatch, until I’m back in the toy jeep with my sisters. We descend into a wooded valley where pythons and tigers fly at us, but we know they won’t really bite because it’s a magic forest. Then we’re no longer in the jeep but climbing a stone staircase up into the sky. Somewhere in the ascent, my sisters vanish, and I turn into an adult. At the top, I see the white columns of an American courthouse, but before going inside, I pause on the steps to look down at the way I’ve come. A woman lawyer in a white powdered wig comes and stands beside me.
More to myself than to her, I say, “I’ve come very far. All the way from the Kingdom of the Elephants through the Valley of the Enchanted Forest.”
“What are you talking about?” she demands, raising an eyebrow in disbelief as a cloud bank moves in to obscure the view.
I point indignantly to the ground below, outlining my very path with my finger, but she doesn’t think there’s anything there but clouds. The more she doubts my story, the more I believe it, until I’m shouting in her face, “I know the way I’ve come!”
The next morning, on taking my leave of Memnahop, I offer money to my host father, who refuses adamantly, then I press a can of sardines on the mother. Both she and her husband smile goodbye, still furrowing their brows.
As a cuckoo-dove coos overhead, the girls and I thread through dripping shrubs and disappear into a dark, muddy montane forest behind the village. The rain has just stopped, and cool morning mists are rising. Nigel warned me not to attempt the mountain if the ground is wet. What could he have meant? Even in the dry season, it rains at least once a day. I doubt that there ever comes a day when the ground isn’t wet.
Termite mounds and tall, pale pink orchids rise from the forest floor. In the thick underbrush, long vines lie among the rotting leaves, coiled like snakes, ignoring the girls and springing up to slash my legs and trip me. I become totally absorbed in watching my feet. Whenever I fall, all five girls turn and stare in disbelief, exclaiming “Sori!” and then seeing that I’m not hurt, dissolve into giggles.
My guides haven’t brought any drinking water for themselves. Perhaps they assumed that my little canteen would hold enough for six, for soon after we leave Memnahop, Sipin begins to complain to me in Pidgin that they’re thirsty.
I remember Nigel’s advice: “Don’t shortchange yourself on water. Believe me, your guides can function on little or no water—they’re used to it—but if you run out of water, you won’t make it to Bimin.” After what happened to my Oreos, I’m afraid to risk the girls’ draining my canteen. So I don’t offer to share. Still, I feel guilty. How could my guides have guessed I would want the canteen all to myself? Probably they had no way of imagining how much fluid a big, sweating American would need. Likewise, I fear, they probably have no idea how firm a foothold I’m going to need to bear my weight in the dangerous place.
After we’ve walked steadily uphill for an hour, we reach the spot where the mountain rises abruptly before us, an almost vertical wall of foliage. The sight of it makes my heart race with fear. “Mi kisim wind fustaim” (I’ll rest awhile), I announce, and sit down on a fallen log. Ana, the smallest and most ebullient of the five, starts to scale the mountain, grasping exposed tree roots and outcroppings of rock, gliding from handhold to handhold with the lightness of a butterfly, but Sipin calls her back. With a wry smile, Ana sits down and speaks animatedly in her soprano voice, while the others laugh.
I’ve come to the wrong place, I think, looking up at the cliff face. I don’t belong here. I should have gone to the steppes of Tibet, to those vast, open solitudes where lamas march for days and nights without stopping, their minds drawn inward, their gaze fixed far off into space, their hands absently clutching their magic daggers, their steps springy and rhythmic. Since I’ve rarely been present in my body for longer than a few minutes at a time, what the heck am I doing at the base of this cliff?
To quiet my heart, I look away from the cliff into the woods we’ve come from, thinking of last night’s dream and following it like a winding forest path, following it into memories of an enchanted childhood.
I’m four years old, standing in the middle of an intersection in Fukuoka, Japan. Buses and bicycles rush past. I don’t know where I am, but I’m not afraid, just tired and thirsty and ready to be found. Confident it will work, I sit down on the curb, my chin in my hands, and sob. I can’t tell if I’m managing real tears or if my cheeks are just sweaty—it’s one of those hot, muggy days when you can see steam rising from the pavement—but anyway, two men in business suits stop to ask what’s the matter. In minutes, I’m sitting atop a police station desk, surrounded by smiling men in gold-buttoned uniforms who ply me with sodas and sweet-bean pastries. I won’t talk. Though the police chief, his voice gentle, almost motherly, is reading me a list of all the foreigners in Fukuoka, pausing after each name, I make no response. He’s already been over the list twice, but I pretend not to recognize my daddy’s name so I can stay lost a little longer. Whenever the fun seems about to end, I thrust forward my lower lip and let it quiver, which sends one of the junior officers running to buy more sweets.
Maybe I didn’t imagine it. Even though it seems unbelievable to the American I’ve become, a lawyer who can’t see past her little cloud of “rationality,” maybe I really do come from a children’s paradise. Maybe I did grow up in a place where I could trust any stranger on the street to bear me safely home. I think of Takeo Doi, the Japanese psychiatrist who said in his Anatomy of Dependence that his society values amae, the passive, trusting love a child has for adults, rather than the self-reliance prized by Americans. I recall his theory of how a stunted amae can block a person’s spiritual growth, and now I wonder if there may be something to it.
Ana starts up the mountain first. Corin goes next, looking over her shoulder and motioning me to follow. My body tenses. I reach up and clutch a small spur of rock. Lifting my foot to the nearest tree root, so high it feels like stepping into the cab of a s
emi, I pull myself up. I take a second giant step. A third. This root snaps. I tumble about 10 feet, hands grabbing at branches too thin to hold me.
“Soh-oh-oh-oh-ree,” sing the girls in unison.
For a minute or two, I lie where I’ve fallen, rocks digging into my back. Then I rise unsteadily to my feet, breathing hard. I feel as though a cold fear is rushing into my chest like sudden gulps of Arctic air.
After the girls huddle and regroup, we start again. This time Sipin climbs just ahead of me to point out the best roots and rocks, instructing in Pidgin, “Put hand here” and “Put foot there,” while Corin hovers beside me to tap my hands if they try to stray from the correct placement and Ana and Dani follow to supervise my feet; Soriben carries my backpack. Last night’s rainfall has left the handholds and footholds slick, some of them covered with a red lichen that crumbles when touched, others crawling with ants.
So this is “bushwhacking,” I think. That word has always conjured up to me images of a solitary Jungle Jane slashing her way through the bush single-handedly. But on this trip, I seem to be growing more and more helpless. What’s happening? It’s as if my five little guides have subtly changed and become older than me. Come to think of it, maybe bushwhacking really is about asking for help. Considering that most jungles already have people living in them, what’s the point of going it alone? To avoid having to share my supplies, perhaps. Or to avoid saying thank you. I try to think back to when in my Americanization the emotion of gratitude became linked with shame. It was not always so.
At every ledge, I stop to kisim wind, not wanting to risk exhaustion, which might cause me to lose my grip and fall. Since I can’t understand Sipin well enough to be sure how far the next resting place is, I treat each one as if it’s my last chance. To pass the time while I sit and pant, the girls kill frogs with a slingshot and laugh as Ana sings and tells stories, her arms akimbo, her face alternating between deadpan and imp. She never misses an opportunity to crawl out on a tree limb overhanging a precipice and hang from her knees, just to make me gasp with alarm. Always in motion, often impatient to go, Ana has to be restrained by the others until I catch my breath.
As we climb higher, lowland shrubs give way to rhododendrons with brilliant red star-shaped flowers. Because of the perpetual shadow cast by the bushes and ferns that grow horizontally out of the mountainside, everything stays wet, even after the sun rises to midmorning strength. My leather boots feel unsteady on the slippery rocks and roots. The girls, however, never slip; the toes of their bare feet splay out to grip the tenuous footholds with the assurance of fingers. Scampering up and down the mountain wall like spiders, my guides dance around me on that nearly vertical face to position themselves where they can help. Although none of them have worked for a foreigner before, they sense what I need. To them, I must seem like an overgrown baby who has to be taught how to crawl. Below me, Dani and Ana, the tiniest of the five, sometimes catch my feet to stop them from sliding, and it startles me to feel my weight held so firmly in their delicate hands. I begin to think of my guides as possessed of superhuman strength.
We come to a very broad ledge where we sit and look back at green mountains, one after another. Above the mountains lies a thin ribbon of white sky, and above that, deep violet is turning to black. I try not to think what this might mean. A solitary casuarina tree clings to the cliffside just below where we sit, its flat-topped shape like a candelabra without the candles, reminding me of the squat, typhoon-twisted pines of Fukuoka. I gulp some water and offer Sipin my canteen, letting the girls finish it.
We resume our climb with Sipin just above me, looking down and pointing toward the next foothold like a beckoning angel in a William Blake drawing. I keep my eyes on Sipin’s face. It is calm but intent. I feel oddly detached, as though my slow progress up the slick mountainside is a minor part in some allegorical drama. Step by step, root by root, handhold by handhold, I seem to be ascending a dream-staircase, stairs so real they fuse with the mountain. “Put hand here,” Sipin says, and my hand closes over the next tree root before she finishes her sentence. “Put foot there,” she says, and my foot is already reaching for the next knob of rock. Somehow I’ve adjusted to the girls’ rhythm, or they to mine, all six of us climbing in slow motion like legs of a single spider. To my surprise, I no longer want to be anywhere other than where I am at this very moment.
I forget to be afraid. It isn’t that I’ve conquered my fear; I simply believe in my guides. In their own element, these five little girls, who seemed shy and awkward on the school ground yesterday, now seem so wise and self-possessed, so infallible, that I obey them without fear or question. Perhaps I’m learning, as if for the first time, what it means to trust and follow.
At the top, I pause for a few breaths of damp, icy air, my muscles trembling with relief, my feet balanced uncertainly on a narrow ridge of earth. I look down, but all I see is white. We’re inside a cloud. Yet I am certain of the way I’ve come.
COLLEEN KINDER
Blot Out
FROM Creative Nonfiction
O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them [when they go abroad]. That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not annoyed.
—Quran 33:59
YOU CAN PRETEND you’re in a tunnel. You can make believe you have on blinders. You can stare 100 yards in the distance at a random point. You can walk with urgency or purpose. You can look prickly or preoccupied. You can wear an iPod. You can make a cell phone call. You can fake a cell phone call. You can write a text message to no one.
These are the ways foreign women get down the street in Cairo. These are the tricks they share, the ways they teach me to “beige out,” as one woman put it, to fog up the glasses, whenever outside. Outside is the sphere of Egyptian men. Men run markets, crowd alleys, fill every subway car but the very middle one, marked by a huddle of headscarves. Females are scarce on Cairo’s streets, and those who do appear seem hurried, like mice suddenly exposed in the middle of a room, rushing for cover.
I’m a journalist, here for just one month. The only thing I have to do inside is write about what I see outside. In short: I can’t coop myself up in Cairo. My very first day, unsure of Egypt’s codes, I played it safe and tied a silk pink scarf around my face. In the mirror, I looked like a little girl dressed up as the Virgin Mary. Covered, I felt safe but no less overwhelmed. On too many streets, mine was the lone headscarf weaving through tight teams of men. Their stony gazes felt like scorn.
I ditched the headscarf once I met American women living in Cairo. Covering my head wasn’t necessary, they laughed. People knew I wasn’t Muslim. I was obviously a Western woman, and, yes, that meant unvirginal here, and, sure, that aroused disapproval—all of which I should get over, quickly, and just focus on getting down the street.
I get down Suleiman Gohar Street by staring hard at middle distance. Sometimes, I practice the Arabic words for “left” and “right”—shmal, yamin—to the rhythm of my footfalls. And sometimes, in the blur of my peripheral vision, I catch sight of a black ghost—an Egyptian woman draped from head to toe in dark fabric—and I wonder what it’s like under there, dressed in niqab.
The niqab is a headdress that covers not just the hair, but the face, ears, and neck. Paired with a long black tunic, the niqab leaves nothing exposed. A narrow, tight-threaded grille covers the eyes. The woman underneath can see out, but no one can see in.
Controversial in the West, the niqab was banned in France, seen as a means of repressing Muslim women—“a walking jail,” said one French politician. That was my first read on the niqab; I felt sorry for the women in that brutally hot costume, imagining possessive husbands and overbearing fathers. But the Western objection to the niqab presumes that being seen is a freedom women desire. After walking alone as a blond, nonvirginal, youngish woman in the streets of Africa’s most densely populated city, where almost everyone is a boy or a man, and looking, visibility is
the last thing I desire. The niqab begins to tempt me like a secret passageway—a way to be outside without actually being seen. At the end of a month in Cairo, nothing sounds more liberating than erasing myself from this place.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” says Maryanne, a horse rancher who raised two children in Cairo, when I ask her to venture out in niqab with me. Years ago, she had this idea herself—she and every American woman in Cairo, it seems. I proposition teachers and journalists and a belly dancer from Los Angeles, and discover it’s a common fantasy; a few women have already done it. “You feel like you’re getting away with something you shouldn’t get away with,” says Abby, a foreign correspondent. Egyptian women, I hear, have their own history of mischief in niqab. Women cheat on exams in niqab; women cheat on husbands in niqab; some prostitutes go to work in niqab.
Kate is the only person who tries to talk me out of my plan. The editor of Egypt Today and an American whose expertise is Muslim culture, Kate is worth listening to. She argues that even women in niqab get harassed, treated like meat, ass-grabbed. That’s not the point, I tell Kate. I just want a break, I say, a break from being so seen. I want to hold Cairo in my gaze.
There’s a place in this city where I long to do the looking. Every Friday, there’s an outdoor market—a teeming antique, junk, and exotic animal market. In guidebook write-ups, there’s usually a warning for Western women (e.g., “be accompanied by male friends in order to feel more at ease”). This is where I want to pass invisibly, I tell Kate. At the great Egyptian souq.
“But you don’t speak Arabic,” Kate says. She’s worried someone will try to converse with me and that my silence will give me away.
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