Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russell

  I didn’t catch his last word, but I confess: I supplied my own.

  With that, he left the cart and disappeared inside the Continental, returning presently with the news that Miss Bell had been as good as her word. At her telephoned request, my room was ready; the deposit paid to the Semiramis would be forwarded to the Continental by the local Cook’s branch office.

  When I tried to thank Colonel Lawrence, he giggled again—this time, I gathered, to indicate the absurdity of gratitude for a small service willingly undertaken. A bellman appeared to transfer my luggage from cart to lobby. Lawrence apologized for leaving me on my own. He had to return to the Semiramis “before Gert sorts out Mesopotamia on her own,” whatever that meant.

  There was the dragoman to pay. He wanted ten piastres, given the extra trouble he’d been put to, but we settled on eight. When I turned to say good-bye to Colonel Lawrence, he was already halfway down the block, apparently intending to walk back to his hotel. Farewells, I was to learn, were a nicety the colonel frequently found dispensable.

  Rosie was indeed made welcome, even though she chose to relieve herself just outside the entry. (“Better out than in, madam,” said the very dark gentleman who whisked away the evidence.) A few minutes at the desk, and two bellmen were assigned to ferry my things up three flights of stairs and down a quiet, carpeted corridor at the end of which was an ornately carved door. This was opened to reveal a high-ceilinged and airy room. “Will this do, madam?” I was asked.

  “Oh, yes!” I breathed. “Oh, it’s perfect. Thank you.”

  With Rosie in my arms, I stepped outside through tall French doors that opened onto a little private balcony overlooking a formal green garden. The first brilliant stars had begun to appear in an ultramarine sky. Palm trees slanted on the horizon, black against a tangerine sunset.

  “Look, Rosie!” I whispered. “We’re in a Palmolive ad!”

  While I stood rapt and idle as a princess, my things were unpacked and hung up or folded neatly into drawers. Feeling quite worldly and experienced, I waited to tip the gentlemen until their tasks were completed to their own satisfaction.

  Alone at last, I peeked into the bathroom and was delighted by gorgeous cobalt tiles, a deep copper tub, and thick white towels stacked high on a shelf. I served Rosie a drink from a china whatnot dish and ran a bath for myself. She wriggled under the bathmat and fell asleep while I soaked in pleasantly tepid water.

  Refreshed, I made a call downstairs to inquire about room service. I was informed that Miss Bell had already ordered a supper to be delivered to my room at eight-thirty, but that it was ready to be sent up right away. Minutes later, it arrived on a rolling cart, complete with a plate of meat scraps and a bone for Rosie. There was even a stack of newspapers to lay out for the dog afterward. It was a very nice gesture, and I thought better of Miss Bell for it.

  Thus a day that had begun in heat and noise 140 miles north, in Alexandria, ended as I slipped between crisply ironed sheets in a quiet Cairo hotel. Rosie nosed beneath the light cotton coverlet and corkscrewed round and round, all the while producing the wheezes and mutterings peculiar to dachshunds attempting to get comfortable for the night. At long last she settled and sighed and slept. I expected to do the same momentarily. I was as tired as I had ever been in my life: the journey, the heat, the novelty, the anxiety, the bliss of arrival! But sleep would not come.

  Instead, the scene at the Semiramis played over and over in my head. Humiliation is not the same as embarrassment, I realized. If you know yourself to be clumsy and never pretend otherwise, you might well be embarrassed when you trip over your own feet upon entering a room, but you won’t be ashamed. You can laugh at yourself and shrug the embarrassment off.

  Humiliation, by contrast, does not merely require open recognition of an acknowledged foible. Humiliation is public exposure of some secret vanity. You might gaze into a mirror holding your head just so, and your eyes sparkle at your own best self. Then perhaps you leave a bathroom at college, for example, thinking that you really look rather nice this morning, all things considered, only to overhear someone remark, “Good Lord, if I looked that bad, I’d never go out in daylight.” You discover that not even your own modest opinion of yourself is shared. You are not merely homely but also deluded, and vain, and ridiculous. That is humiliation.

  And someone had lied to me, but who? Colonel Lawrence or Miss Bell? Was it a short-legged dog or a bare-limbed woman who had aroused such animosity? Was the lie a kind one, told to spare my feelings, or a harsh one, meant to cut a potential rival who had dared to be friendly with Miss Bell’s own dear boy?

  Or had each of them told me a part of the truth? Certainly there was something about Lawrence’s tone that might have implied, Yes, I was lying about why the doorman blocked your way, but I found a perfectly good explanation that saved your pride, and that’s merely good manners, don’t you agree? And perhaps Miss Bell had provided accurate information about local custom, even though she chose to do so in a way that seemed calculated to inflict as much mortification as possible.

  You should have known better than to dress so immodestly, Mumma said. None of this would have happened if you’d just stayed home, where you belong.

  It doesn’t matter, Mildred told me. You’ll probably never see those people again. Just wear that nice silk cardigan when you go out. Or the navy linen jacket—that goes with everything.

  Exhaustion eventually claimed me, but during that first night, my sleep was disturbed, perhaps by some unfamiliar sound outside. I rolled over in bed and saw—silhouetted by moonlight—a man standing calmly in my room.

  Frightened out of my wits, I screamed and sat up, clutching at the covers, and struggled to turn on the bedside light.

  By the time I found the switch, the intruder had disappeared into the darkness. With my heart beating violently, I expected help to arrive at any moment. But the minutes passed. No one came, and this upset me more than the initial fright. I had screamed for help! And no one came!

  “Why doesn’t anyone ever come?” I wailed aloud.

  Rosie awoke at the sound of my voice, and only then did I realize that she’d been fast asleep. How on earth could she have slept through the shriek that still echoed in my own ears?

  Still terrified, I lay back, torn between the utterly convincing nature of my experience and indisputable facts: neither hotel staff nor other guests had arrived to investigate my loud distress, and Rosie had missed the entire drama, if drama it had been.

  My pulse slowed. Reason reclaimed me. I eased out of bed, pulled on my robe, went outside to the balcony. Serene starlight revealed nothing of note in the blue-shadowed world beyond. I quietly closed the French doors against a chill that had crept across the desert and traveled along the Nile. Rosie watched me curiously from beneath a fold of sheeting.

  This is an ancient place, I thought, getting back into bed. There are souls here who cannot find their way.

  It was utterly unlike me to think that way, but I swear that’s what came to mind. From my present vantage, that dream makes perfect sense, but at the time? I shook off the unease and settled onto the pillow.

  “A late supper’s nightmare—that’s all,” I told Rosie. “A bit of Mr. Scrooge’s undigested cheese. It was a dream. Just a silly dream…”

  LIE DOWN WITH DOGS, rise up with fleas,” Mumma used to say. She was referring to moral corruption that came of falling in with bad companions, although she also thought that people who let their dogs sleep indoors were asking for trouble.

  Ah, but those who lie down with dachshunds rise up with smiles, even if their own night’s sleep has been disturbed. Dachshunds are structural comedians; their very existence is a cause for amusement. In the full light of morning, I awoke to the spectacle of Rosie lying flat on her back: pointed nose in the air, stubby forelegs folded demurely across her chest, hindquarters sprawled in lewd abandon.

  “Trollop! Just look at you,” I murmured, stroking her belly. “No wonder Arabs think short
dogs are odious.”

  Waking, she rolled over. Yawned, her long tongue unfurling like a paper noisemaker. Stretched, a two-part motion: first fore, then aft. A cylindrical shake from one end to the other, and she leapt into my arms, all exuberance and kisses, as though we had been cruelly parted for days, not sleeping in the very same bed all night long.

  Someone just outside my door must have heard my laughter, for there was a tiny knock and a piping voice. “Walk you dog, madams?”

  I pulled on my dressing gown, lifted Rosie, and opened the door to a small boy wearing a barely respectable white cotton shift and sandals. This little capitalist held up a worn leather leash, probably scavenged from some European’s trash. “Yes, madams? Walk you dog?”

  Rosie customarily barked at strangers, but perhaps she did not yet consider the hotel room entirely her own. And this child had, after all, uttered a magical word. She looked at him and then up at me, trembling with anticipation. He said ‘walk,’ Agnes.

  “How much?” I asked.

  We quickly brokered a price and I attached his leash to her collar. Before I even learned the boy’s name, he and Rosie raced down the corridor toward the stairs.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose I simply presumed that the concierge had sent the boy. When he and Rosie failed to reappear by the time I’d washed up and gotten dressed, dreadful possibilities began to occur to me. Was this how poor Egyptians obtained meat—by walking foreigners’ dogs? What if the boy held her hostage and demanded a ransom? What if the doorman of the Semiramis had sent the boy here to execute the offensive animal? That was absurd, but still…

  Idiot! I thought. Why didn’t you call the desk clerk before sending her off with some little stranger?

  Five more sickening minutes, and I left the room, hoping at every step to hear a child’s pounding footfalls and Rosie’s scrambling scamper up the staircase. With no sign of them three flights down, I was close to frantic as I approached the concierge. “Sir, I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I began, embarrassed at the quaver in my voice.

  Just then I heard a deep male voice cry, “Ein Wursthund!” right outside the hotel door. There was a stream of delighted German followed by a question in Arabic that was answered by the boy, who entered the lobby and lifted his chin toward me.

  The German gentleman appeared with Rosie draped happily over one strong forearm. He was a rather handsome person, quite tall, and broad in the chest. My age. Perhaps a bit younger. When he saw me, his smile widened beneath a luxuriant mustache, and he leaned over to place Rosie on the floor.

  Crying “Woo-hoo!” she sprinted across the lobby and pirouetted at my feet as if to say, Look, Agnes, look! I found us a new friend!

  I picked her up, careful to bend at the knees, and straightened just in time to see the gentleman hand the little boy a coin and dismiss him with a word or two in Arabic. “You are English, miss?” the gentleman inquired cheerily with a slight but pleasant accent.

  “American,” I said.

  “You must forgive my forwardness, Miss—?”

  “Shanklin.”

  “You see, Miss Shanklin, I had a dachshund when I was small, just the same as your—?”

  “Rosie.”

  “Such memories your Rosie brings me! My Tessa was just the same,” he said again, astonished by this coincidence. “Black and brown with markings just the same.” He held out his hands with a pleading look, begging for the opportunity to hold Rosie once more. Disarmed, I passed her to him, and the hussy allowed herself to be transferred without a struggle.

  “She is a vamp,” the gentleman said with mock disapproval, as though reading my mind. “My Tessa was the same. But I forget my manners as well.” Rosie looked put out when he offered me the hand that had been stroking her long back. “Permit me to introduce myself, Miss Shanklin. I am Karl Weilbacher. Please,” he urged, extending an arm toward a sunny room just off the lobby. “You must allow me to buy you and Rosie some breakfast.”

  This meal was included in the price of my accommodation, or it had been at the Semiramis. Uncertain if the same arrangement obtained at the Continental as well, I turned toward the desk clerk to inquire.

  Herr Weilbacher must have misread my hesitation. “Please, Miss Shanklin, I assure you that my intentions are entirely honorable.”

  The notion that a man’s intentions toward me were anything else seemed improbable but intriguing. I tried to think if I was properly attired for a meal in public, and yes—even preoccupied by Rosie’s fate, I’d taken time to select the longest frock Mildred had allowed me to purchase and had pulled the navy jacket on over it. I wore neither gloves nor hat, but I could feel the marcelled wave that Antoine had created swagging low and becomingly over my wayward eye. And I was in Cairo! I was far from home, you see, and free from all my own ideas of myself. It seemed just possible that—

  “Not another thought,” Herr Weilbacher declared. “Please, do me this favor,” he pleaded, looking sweetly sad as he added, “It has been so long since my Tessa has been gone from me.”

  When I agreed, his face lit up. Chatting cheerily, he led me to a dining room ringed with ferns and orchids where gleaming silver and cut glass on white linen caught the glorious morning light. The waiters all seemed to know Herr Weilbacher, and if they were unenthusiastic about Rosie’s presence in their domain, his good humor—and perhaps a history of genially distributed tips—overcame their dismay.

  “Now, what would you enjoy for breakfast?” he asked, rubbing his hands together with anticipatory relish.

  “Anything, as long as it’s not oatmeal,” I said and listened, dazed, as he ordered for us while keeping up a steady stream of amiable small talk. Soon a team of waiters delivered large trays bearing tea and coffee, and boiled eggs, and rolls with butter and marmalade, and sausages, and oranges and melon.

  I thought it was all delicious, but Herr Weilbacher’s face twisted as he chewed and swallowed a forkful of meat. “This is not so good as our sausages at home,” he told me in a low voice and then explained, “Like serious Jews, Muslims eat no pork and so: there is rarely any sausage worth eating in Egypt, not even in hotels that cater to Europeans. This sausage is fit only for dogs.” His face lit up again. “But we are in luck: here is a dog!” he cried and slipped a tidbit to Rosie.

  “Oh, don’t feed her from the table,” I objected.

  “It is only a tiny piece,” he said, winking. “When I was a boy, my brothers and I fed Tessa, just so.”

  “But didn’t she learn to be a beggar?”

  “Of course, but she was very adorable,” he said with a shrug and a look that asked, Why should we resist?

  His face was remarkable, capable of all sorts of vivid, interesting things as he spoke. Straight and serious one moment, crooked and amused the next, his expression changed as quickly as his topics, which were as varied and light as clouds racing across a spring sky. He was so interested in me and Cleveland and how I’d come to be in Cairo—why, before ten minutes had passed, he made me feel as though having breakfast with a German gentleman in an Egyptian hotel was the most natural thing in the world for a lady from Ohio.

  “And where is your home, Herr Weilbacher?” I asked.

  “Please,” he said, buttering another crusty roll. “Call me Karl. I am from Stuttgart, in Württemberg.” When I grew thoughtful, his mobile face quieted. “You are thinking: he was the enemy.”

  “Not at all!”

  He smiled at my lie, and I looked down at my plate. “We Germans are not all the same,” I heard him say in his resonant, musical voice. “Germany has a north and a south as your country does, Miss Shanklin. We southerners are quite a different breed from Prussians, who love war and wish to rule.” He leaned over the table. “The kaiser came to Stuttgart when I was a child. My friends and I threw stones at his parade,” he confessed merrily. “In the beer hall, men gave us boys pretzels when we sang silly songs or recited a rude poem about the kaiser.”

  “I know ju
st the sort of boy you must have been. I was a schoolteacher,” I said, and began to speak about my students back in Little Italy. I meant to tell him about how hard they studied and how quickly they learned English, but Herr Weilbacher seemed so curious, so sympathetic…

  And the truth is, I can never seem to stick to a subject, as you’ve probably noticed, and I really do apologize for that, but everything always seems so connected to me! Anyway, before long I found myself recounting my struggles with resentful, bitter parents, frightened by their children’s success. Americanization was a Faustian bargain for such immigrants, I told Herr Weilbacher. Yes, their children could go to public schools with no bribes, no fees, and no questions asked, but American tuition was paid in estrangement. Daughters told mothers that they dressed funny, they cooked funny, they talked funny. Sons stayed out late and went to dance halls, and quarreled with their fathers over who would keep the money earned from after-school jobs.

  Fed up, the parents would decide enough was enough. A father would appear at my classroom door. Hat in hand but defiant, he would declare, “My kid don’t wanna go to school no more.” Listening to those men, you’d have thought their sons and daughters wished for nothing more earnestly than to work for a pittance in a steel mill or a laundry.

  “And the children stood there, dying inside,” I told Herr Weilbacher. “I could see it! The boys would hang their heads. The girls would weep. I could do nothing, and it just broke my heart—because honestly? What the father meant was, I’m losing my power. I am diminished every day as this child grows more knowledgeable—”

  I realized suddenly that Herr Weilbacher, so charming and chatty before, had fallen utterly silent.

  You simply cannot see it when you bore others, Agnes, Mumma whispered. He doesn’t care that you were a schoolteacher. My land! He’s only being polite to sit with you at all, and here you are with your crossed eyes, braying about immigrant children. You’d drive gentle Jesus to drink, Agnes. Honestly, you would.