Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russell

  I looked up. Just beyond the window, I saw a wooden club lifted overhead. Warned, Thompson ducked, and I lost sight of him after his shoulder drove his fist into the belly of the man who’d meant to brain him.

  “So, Miss Shanklin!” Churchill exclaimed. “Whom did you vote for?” He might have been speaking Chinese for all the sense this question made to me. “In the presidential election,” he prompted. “Were you taken in by the attractive Mr. Harding, as our Miss Bell suspected?”

  A brick shattered the windshield. “Debs!” I screamed. “I voted for Eugene Debs!”

  “Debs! Really, Shanklin, you surprise me. I took you for a sensible woman. You should have voted for Cox! He was a better man than Harding in every way, and he stood a chance of winning. You wasted your ballot on Debs.”

  “I did no such thing!”

  “Yes, you did. It was a foolish choice. A foolish woman’s choice!”

  “I am a woman, sir, but not a fool! My choice was just as valid as the next man’s!” I cried, flinching at the dent a truncheon made in the side of the car. “Eugene Debs spoke truth to power!”

  “He’s no better than this rabble. He is a radical and a troublemaker who deserved prison.”

  “He had every right to speak out against the war and the lies that got us into it. He is a martyr for the Constitution!”

  “Hah! He is a Communist and a subversive.”

  “He is no such thing! He was for racial equality and workers’ rights. He believed that all men are created equal—even if some of them are women! He believed everyone should have a voice and a vote, even Negroes!”

  “Even Arabs like these?”

  “Especially Arabs like these! It’s no wonder they’re angry! If powerful people won’t even ask what you want—it’s as if you don’t matter a bit. And that’s not fair, because we all matter the same amount!” I insisted, cringing away from the shrieking, gesticulating men I was defending. “President Wilson was right about that! All nations matter the same amount, even if they aren’t rich and powerful like Great Britain!”

  “Piffle.”

  “Don’t you ‘piffle’ me!” I said, infuriated. “You ask British airmen what they think, but you don’t ask Egyptians. That’s why they hate you. It’s—it’s like—like oatmeal!” I cried, my voice breaking on the word when a stone thudded onto the back window and came to rest in a spider’s web of crazing. “Oatmeal is a perfectly fine breakfast, but some people just don’t like it. It’s only good manners to ask! ‘Would you like some oatmeal?’ What’s so hard about that? Maybe they’ll say, ‘Yes, please.’ Maybe they’ll say, ‘No, thank you. I’d really rather have eggs.’ Or maybe they just want coffee! Well, then—that’s their choice! These men are throwing rocks because you think everybody wants to be like you and—and eat oatmeal because—because that’s what you want—”

  Churchill was grinning. I looked around and slowly became aware of shrilling police whistles, clomping boots, and a sudden relative quiet. Just like that, the riot was over, and I realized that I had been making an utterly incoherent argument about political rights and breakfast food at the very top of my lungs for some time now.

  Assured that Churchill was unharmed, Thompson and Davis conferred with the Egyptian police. Mr. Churchill helped me back up onto the jump seat and leaned over to remove a shard of glass from my shoulder, as though he had noticed a bit of lint there. “How is your dog?” he asked.

  Rosie was practically catatonic: trembling and panting, eyes half out of her skull. And those were not the only signs of her distress.

  “Oh, my goodness. Oh, I—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “She never—She’s always—Oh, Rosie, you’ve disgraced yourself! I’m so sorry, Mr. Churchill.”

  “Please! Call me Winston.” He pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped up the offending material with a flourish. “Quite a common reaction to combat,” he confided, and tossed the linen packet into the street.

  Up front, Davis and Thompson cheerfully compared contusions, swapping extravagant stories of earlier brawls they’d enjoyed. As we continued our drive, Winston sat back, thoughtful and removed. I murmured soothingly to Rosie, who buried her head in my lap and shook.

  When we arrived at the Semiramis, the car’s battered condition quickly drew a British crowd. Performer that he was, Churchill regaled the assembly with his version of what had happened, making it all seem like a grand day out. Drawn by the excitement, Lawrence appeared at the hotel door. In three quick steps, he was at my side. “Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice low and controlled. “Do you need a doctor?”

  “A doctor! Hah! She needs a soapbox! The woman could run for Parliament!” Churchill cried. “Thompson was punching faces and young Davis here was breaking heads with a wrench. And there sat Shanklin: a pillar of moral strength, lecturing me on constitutional law and Arab suffrage!”

  “That’s not how it was,” I told Lawrence shakily.

  “Battles are always better in the telling,” he said with a wry smile that did not change his eyes. “Do you want to come inside, or would you like to go straight on to your hotel?”

  “Back to the hotel, thanks—”

  “Nonsense!” Churchill shouted. “She’s been eaten alive by savage Egyptian mosquitoes. No argument, Shanklin! Quinine water is your only hope. Someone get this woman a gin-tonic!”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” said Lawrence. “You’re very pale.”

  “You should thank her, Lawrence,” Churchill cried. “I’ve decided your friend Feisal can have a kingdom after all. Gertrude! Wilson! Our Miss Shanklin has given me the solution to the election problem in Mesopotamia. Take everything but oatmeal off the menu! They’ll choose what we want them to have.”

  For the next few hours, Winston kept my drink topped up during the general merriment he made of our adventure. I was briefly aware that he was eliminating the emptying glass that might have warned me of overindulgence; very soon, it didn’t seem to matter. I rather liked the taste of the gin and tonic, and began to feel quite gay. The terror of the riot was swept aside by conviviality, and everyone was being so nice to me! For the first time in my life I began to understand why people enjoy drinking. Barriers are dissolved. Conversation is easy and unexamined. Nothing you say seems stupid, and everything seems amusing. No wonder gin parties were all the rage back home!

  I had a vague impression that Lawrence was keeping an eye on me. While I do not remember getting into the taxi with him, I do recall his tolerant chivalry when I warned him that I was probably going to be sick. The colonel snapped an order to the driver, who pulled to the side of the road halfway over the Gazirah Bridge. Lawrence got out, opened my door, told Rosie to “Stay!” and steadied me on the way to the railing, where I abruptly contributed to the general fetidness of the Nile.

  “Oh, good Lord,” I gasped, hilarious and horrified as I took the handkerchief Lawrence offered. “I just puked in front of the Uncrowned King of Arabia.”

  “My dear Miss Shanklin,” Lawrence said with a gallantry I have never forgotten, “I was an undergraduate at Oxford. Believe me: I’ve seen worse.”

  VOMITING WAS ONLY ONE OF SEVERAL ELEMENTS I left out of the tale I told Karl at breakfast on Tuesday morning.

  It was just as well that he was away from Cairo until late Monday night, for I had spent the whole of that day nursing a sunburn and a gin headache that seemed hardly less incapacitating than the malaria that tonic water was meant to prevent. Perhaps to distract myself from my own misbehavior, I spent many of those wretched hours in contemplation of Thompson’s suspicions about Karl Weilbacher. At the very least, I had to admit that Karl might be using me as a conduit for information about the conference Lawrence was attending.

  And so, between bites of breakfast eggs and toast, I did my best to make amusing anecdotes of Sunday’s adventures, telling Karl all about Winston painting the pyramids, and the riot, and the hilarious drinking that followed, but slyly withholding the slightest mention of Colone
l Lawrence. This was, I’m ashamed to admit, a test like the ones that Mumma often set me when I was young.

  Such tests were by their very nature covert. When I passed, there was no reward; when I failed, silence was my only clue. Mumma was never a particularly chatty person, so a heavier quiet might go unrecognized in the beginning. As the days went on, however, it would become clear even to me that I had failed her in some way. Belatedly, I would rack my memory. Was it something I’d said or neglected to say? Was there some forgotten chore or promise? Or something more, something worse? How long had I been oblivious to her dismay? Feeling myself the most wicked of daughters, I would creep into her office late at night and ask, “Mumma, please, what have I done?”

  She would look at me with those sad eyes and that brave, unmoving face. “I shouldn’t have to tell you, Agnes. If you loved me, you would know.”

  With no clue as to the nature of my offense, I could only redouble my efforts to please and hope to be restored to Mumma’s good graces. Eventually she would signal the sufficiency of my penance with a gift of heirloom jewelry, perhaps, or a china figurine. “This belonged to your grandmother,” she’d say. That closed the matter in her books, but for me? Always, always, the sword of silence hung over my head. It wasn’t until after Mumma died that I began to wonder why she hadn’t simply told me what she wanted. Why did I have to guess and grovel and work my heart out for some trifling object like a porcelain lady with a parasol? It made no sense to me.

  Well! My years at Murray Hill School had taught me that a child can’t correct something if he doesn’t know it’s wrong. That’s like expecting him to learn to spell when his teacher won’t mark his papers and keeps the dictionary hidden! And the Great Influenza had taught me how suddenly life could end, how quickly people could disappear from your life, how important it was to say what you mean and mean what you say. If ever I came to care for someone, I vowed, I would never waste our time together with guessing games. I would speak my mind aloud and clearly.

  And yet there I was, setting Karl a secret test every bit as subtle and underhanded as Mumma’s: If you love me, you won’t ask about Lawrence.

  At each turn of my story, I braced myself for Karl’s comments, dreading the moment when he would bring up the colonel’s name. And was Lawrence there that night? Karl might ask casually. What did he do then? To whom did he speak? And what did that person say?

  Told of Churchill’s tedious monologue on painting, Karl shook his head. “I said I was not inclined in his favor. Now I am against him. He sounds a self-satisfied bore.”

  And of the riot: “He put you at such risk! Ach, Agnes! That is unpardonable.”

  Then: “Now I think my opinion must change a bit. How clever he was to distract you from the danger!”

  And: “No, I understand perfectly what you meant about the oatmeal. When Germany or Belgium or France seize colonies, the intent is to gain wealth and power. The British believe they are doing a selfless service when they impose their empire on others. They are always surprised when their generosity is unappreciated, but to be frankly conquered is less demeaning, I think.”

  Then: “Yes, yes, the British set great store by gin and tonic, but I am not so certain. Were you feverish yesterday? Are you entirely well this morning? I must say, your sunburn is quite charming, but if you feel ill, you must tell me at once. I know excellent doctors here in Cairo.”

  And finally: “After such an experience, perhaps Rosie will never again set foot in an automobile. I hired a taxicab for the day. What do you think, Rosie? Are you brave enough to go for another drive?”

  At the sound of her name, Rosie pricked up her ears, and when the word “go” was uttered, she snapped to attention with a whine of anticipation.

  So there! I told Sergeant Thompson in my imagination, for Karl had passed the test he didn’t know he was taking: he had not once mentioned Colonel Lawrence.

  And I? I was as serene and naive as a child pulling petals off a daisy. He loves me, he loves me not…He loves me!

  The morning was cloudless, as all mornings in Cairo seemed to be. The weekend heat had moderated delightfully. Rosie and Karl and I were all in high spirits as our hired car conveyed us along an excellent highway that paralleled the eastern bank of the Nile.

  Egypt dominated the known world once, Karl remarked, but in the millennia since, it had always been on the receiving end of empire. The land along the Nile had been overrun by foreigners with a regularity not unlike the river’s yearly flood. “Nubians, Assyrians, Persians,” Karl listed as we motored along. “Greeks and Romans. Arabs and Ottoman Turks. The French. The English. In the Old City, you can stand in one place and see evidence of five great imperial epochs.”

  Our driver pulled over a few yards from a stepped entrance to a walled enclave where tourists milled near a narrow gate. We made our way through groups of English ladies wearing sun veils and carrying linen parasols, and German hikers in full white shirts sporting short trousers that showed their knees. There was even an American woman wearing knickerbockers and flat shoes who was describing her house in Santa Barbara with a carrying voice that made me cringe. As usual, we foreigners were mobbed by entrepreneurial Egyptians shouting their offers.

  “Buy wood of wonder-working tree!”

  “I show you where Pharaoh daughter, she find Moses!”

  “I show where Holy Virgin, she hide with Christ child!”

  “Two thousand years temple for saints!”

  The other tourists engaged a guide or stuck close to a Cook’s tour group and entered the city through the gate, but with a few words of Arabic, Karl let the Egyptians know we were not in need of their services. At worst, these “guides” would rob us, he told me quietly. At best, they would lead us to a smelly crypt or dirty cellar that might well be two thousand years old but of no particular significance.

  Their stories were all nonsense as well, Karl said, and he treated the natal narratives of Moses and the Christ child with the same blithe disdain I felt for wonder-working trees. “‘I found a baby in the river!’ ‘A god visited me in the night!’” he said in a high voice, mocking such explanations for untimely births. “And then we have the opposite: when a wife drops an inconvenient child down a neighbor’s well. ‘Gypsies stole my darling!’ ‘Jews used his blood for matzoh!’” He shook his head. “What a lot of trouble such women cause!”

  I shushed him, concerned that he might offend others. “Are you an atheist, then?” I whispered, and I admit that I felt a small thrill simply saying a word I had never dared to apply to anyone, let alone a friend.

  Karl threw back his head and laughed, blithely unconcerned. “I am an avis even more rara,” he told me merrily. “I am a realist. And you know what they say, don’t you? Birds of a feather…?” He looked into my eyes until I blinked and looked away. He laughed again, though not at all in an unkind way. Rather, his devil-may-care amusement made me feel that he had seen the person I kept hidden even from myself, and that he approved of her and would be happy to see more of her if she dared reveal herself.

  With Rosie bounding ahead at the end of her leash, he led me toward a hill just outside the walls, and if I was a bit winded when we achieved this minor pinnacle, the view itself wholly took my breath away. To the west, across the apex of the Nile Delta, a buff-colored floodplain stretched toward the Gizeh pyramids and beyond. Due north, we could make out the green European enclave on Gazirah. To the island’s east lay Cairo: spiked by minarets, bejeweled by tiled domes, dotted with dovecotes, immense and golden in the morning sunlight.

  “Memphis is the earliest of the five cities you can see from here,” Karl said, pointing toward the pyramids. “It was founded perhaps four thousand years ago. The remains of the city itself are not much. Mostly they are covered by palm groves, but you can see there an enormous statue of Ramses II and the necropolis at Sakhara.”

  “Sakhara! That’s—Winston invited me to go there next Sunday! Although given what happened the last time he invited
me somewhere…”

  “Ah, well, I think you must go, Agnes,” Karl said reasonably. “I believe you shall be safe there among many tourists. Ordinary Egyptians are very eager that business not be interrupted by the unpleasantness of politics.”

  Near us, forming the western corners of the Old City walls, were two towers. Cylindrical and huge, they were constructed of bricks that were flatter and longer than any I had seen before. “They are Roman,” Karl said, “part of a fortress established about two thousand years ago. The fort itself lies above an even older city founded by the lawgiver Nebuchadnezzar. Down there?” he said, indicating the tourist entrance in the Roman wall. “That was once a water gate. The Nile used to run right along here, but its course has shifted since the time of the Romans. Their fort was built by Trajan about the era of Jesus.”

  He turned westward and looked across the river toward an island. “That building on the point houses a Nilometer. Before the dams went in, the Nile would swamp this whole valley most years. When it retreated, the soil it left behind was very rich. Since ancient times, a Nilometer has measured the flood. If the river rose high, there was a festival of thanksgiving to the gods. If it was low, the priests would pray very hard because the crops might fail and there would be famine.”

  “The seven lean years,” I said, remembering Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. “That was when the Hebrews first came to Egypt.”

  “Yes, and four hundred years later, Moses said, ‘Let my people go!’ But there is an ancient Egyptian version of the Exodus as well,” Karl told me. “In their version, the Hebrews were not merely numerous but also tempted good Egyptians to apostasy. The Yahweh cult was an affront to the gods who ruled the Nile. And so? The floods failed. Catastrophe! In the Egyptian story, Pharaoh told our leaders, ‘Take your people and leave!’ He tried many times to kick us out, but we Jews refused to go because Egypt is so lovely. Finally it was necessary to drive us away with chariots.”