“L’amour toujour,” Bianca finally said. “That’s the name of that song. Do you know what it means?”
“No,” I said.
“It means ‘forever in love,’” she explained, somewhat dreamily.
“Strange song to play in a gladiatorial arena,” I remarked. “But then, if we had been surrounded by balconies of fans screaming for blood, I don’t think I would have noticed.”
She pushed back from my chest, but kept a hand out to steady herself. Finally she smirked and said, “We better get that Egyptian music back, or I’m gonna have a heart attack!”
Chapter 8. Catfish and Conquest
1
I don’t know what time we went to sleep that night, but I know damn good and well what time we woke up: 4:30 a.m., for a 5 a.m. departure for Cairo. Of course I was excited to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx, but what really impacted me was witnessing the living culture of the Middle East on that long drive.
Needless to say, it was hot. Without a cloud in the sky, the sun blasted down on the shifting sands of the Sahara, quickly reaching the usual 115 degrees of October. For the trip Bela had hired a local guide who was an expert on all things Egypt. He was a heavyset Egyptian with a flowing white beard and red cheeks. This Arabic Santa Claus excitedly shared with us the magnitude of the desert through which we drove. This corner of the Sahara had one of the only spots on earth where not a single creature lived, not one burrowing insect or even a microbe in the sands. Considering the dubious quality of the bus in which we crossed this most deadly of deserts, I thought perhaps he could have waited for that part until after we safely returned.
But the shiftless sands teased with snippets, and sometimes even pockets, of humanity. After hours of empty dunes, we suddenly came across a blasted tank. This, the jovial Egyptian with a belly like a bowl of jelly explained, was a remnant from the Six Days War with Israel. It was difficult to imagine how any strategic objective could be reached in such a remote and desolate area. But that was nothing compared to the ghostly city we encountered.
Surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of dunes and flat, baked earth, sat a modern series of apartment buildings. They were the same nondescript tan that everything in Egypt seemed to be, and rose easily ten or more stories high. There must have been two dozen huge, skeletal complexes, each with empty, gaping windows that promised a feeble respite from the destroying sun. The Saharan winds whistled through their openings ominously, moaning louder even than our wheezing air-conditioner. It looked as if someone had plucked a Soviet-era series of apartment blocs and abandoned them in the desert. I expected to see vultures and crows circling the dead city, but nothing lived here, not a forlorn palm or even a scratchy shrub.
What was this place, and how did it come to be here?
“This is where the people will live in twenty years,” the buoyant guide explained in Magyar, waiting for Bela to translate into Romanian for the guests. “Egypt’s population is booming faster than the government can supply housing. Here the people will live when they have filled the cities to capacity. Actually they already have, but as you can see, it is not yet ready.”
“Where is the water for these thousands of future occupants?” someone asked.
“Oh, there is no water here!” he laughed, explaining the obvious. “It will be piped in from the Nile. It will take another ten years at least just to bring the water. Only when that happens will the people be moved here.”
I seemed to be the only one onboard confused by this. Being American, I had difficulty understanding the idea that citizens would be ‘moved’ anywhere, especially when there was no promise of employment whatsoever. Because the entire passenger compliment of the bus had lived for decades under the Iron Curtain, however, they understood how true socialism approached problems.
I learned quickly what challenges Egypt faced when we entered the outskirts of mighty Cairo. The ditches lining the road were filled with far more than rubbish and tainted water: there were thousands of men, women, and children. For miles and miles we passed their crude huts cobbled together from discarded carpets and plastic, erected against abandoned tires and who knows what else. They drank and bathed in the water that ran beside the highway in open sewers and ditches draining into the Nile River.
These people were promised housing, but the government had yet to follow through, focusing first on those in the cities. Until then, they were denied homes, jobs, or education and eked out a living in squalor. This was the Third World, and it was without a doubt the most depressing thing I had ever seen in my life. At that moment I vowed to never, ever make the asinine complaint that America was turning ‘socialist’. Slippery slope be damned, I believed Americans would have to fall off a cliff before accepting that from our own government.
After seeing all that, I was not much impressed when we pulled onto Tahrir Square and stopped before the imposing Museum of Egypt. Well, until I stepped inside, that is.
Annually some two million visited the museum, which was constructed in 1897 with a staggering 107 halls. The ground floor held all the huge statues—those far too big to be transported anywhere else—and the upper floor housed the small statues, jewels, Tutankhamen treasures and the mummies. The seven main sections were divided in chronological order, from the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and Modern Kingdom, then through the Greek and the Roman days. The sixth section was devoted to coins and papyrus, while the seventh held the sarcophagi and scarabs. Add to that a photography section and a large library, and I simply had no idea where to begin. I had found the Garden of Eden in Egypt, not Iraq!
What really amazed me, though, was Bela. He had arranged for me a guide who spoke English. While Bianca and the rest of our group trailed off after him and our jolly old soul of an Egyptian, I had my own personal guide! I had never felt so lucky in my life. Bela, bowl-cut and all, was the coolest guy ever. George Clooney oughta give up now.
Abdul was a slender, youthful man who looked Indian to me, rather than Egyptian. He had learned English while studying in London, so he began with exceedingly proper grammar, “Nearly 2000 years before the Romans were building their first mud huts, the Egyptians were constructing pyramids and temples and dams of a magnitude most parts of Earth are unable to duplicate even today.”
“Oh, I know, I know!” I answered enthusiastically. “Show me everything!”
He smiled a well-groomed smile and said, “I can do so, perhaps more than you may think, my friend. I am an employee of the museum, and thusly privy to areas otherwise off limits to regular guides and tourists. Would you be interested in such things?”
I slapped my knee and said, “Well I’ll be a whirling Dervish!”
Hours later, my head was awhirl with all things Egypt and awesome. Perhaps the most notable sight was witnessing the restoration of an ancient sarcophagus. Actually, none of the original sarcophagus remained, and I gazed upon a modern coffin molded of solid glass. Curators were painstakingly lining it with the millennia-old gold leaf from inside a rotten, broken wooden sarcophagus found in the Valley of the Kings. While less than a third was yet completed, it truly brought home the magnitude of restoring items so absolutely priceless.
Afterwards Abdul gave me a lengthy tour of King Tut’s treasures, and my awe was reinforced tenfold. Seeing the golden death mask of the boy king that swept the entire world in Egypt-mania is hard to rival. But that evening, holding hands with Bianca and watching the sun set blood-red behind the Great Pyramid of Giza came close.
Bianca and I spent about two hours exploring the Giza Plateau. The three huge pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure sat before the noble and silent Sphinx. The Great Pyramid is far larger and more impressive than anyone can imagine until seeing it in person. It was cordoned off, which pleased me but no one else. Most tourists wanted to touch the fabled stone of the last remaining Wonder of the World. I did, too, but after seeing the damage wrought by eager tourists in the Valley of the Kings, I was happy to abstain.
But that wa
s only the Great Pyramid. Soaring right next to it, even higher up on the plateau in fact, was Khafre’s pyramid. Getting to enter that sure perked me up. Wheelchair accessible it was not, but fortunately everything else was attended to, including a system to keep the human sweat from damaging the hieroglyphs and paintings. Time flew by, and before we knew it the sky burned amber. The sun, now a crimson orb, settled behind the majestic black outline of the pyramids. It was time to go back.
When darkness closed in upon our trusty old bus, crude televisions were set up to show a movie which, to my dismay, was the Hollywood remake of The Mummy. It was funny, actually, because it was dubbed over in Magyar with Romanian subtitles. I was used to Dracula with a Hungarian accent, and now the Mummy, too? Midnight neared and we were still on the road. Most were snoozing in their seats, as was Bianca, until a comedy featuring the slapstick comedy of Mr. Bean came on. Her loud chuckles threatened to wake everyone. During a scene where Mr. Bean tripped over a skateboard while sneaking through a parking lot, she burst out laughing so uncontrollably I thought they were going to leave us in the desert.
2
Our last two days in Egypt were spent primarily on the beach. The long trip to Cairo had been fulfilling, but exhausting. After a recovery day of napping, laughing, and loving, we had an evening of bad Egyptian Cabernet and a night of stargazing. For our final day we spontaneously joined a small tour for snorkeling and a visit to a private island. Our transport was a moderately old, moderately nice yacht capable of holding about twenty people, though currently only toted half of that. We chugged away from the pier and plowed into the restless Red Sea.
The Red Sea was not red, of course, but was in fact the world’s northern-most tropical sea. It boasted some 200 soft and hard corals and was home to an estimated 100,000 invertebrates. I was excited to see some of them, but the extremely choppy sea had me concerned. We sailed for only about thirty minutes before stopping a hundred yards from a rocky, apparently uninhabited island in the Gulf of Suez. Even in the lee that the island provided, the surface was extremely choppy, so only six of us opted to hop in the water for snorkeling. After but five minutes of blowing the excessively salty water out of my snorkel, I wished I had been one to abstain from the excursion.
The water was actually some of the saltiest on Earth. Here, close to the Suez Canal and far from the moderating influence of the main body of the Indian Ocean, the salinity level was a briny forty parts per thousand. No doubt the gorgeous corals preferred it so, because some fifteen feet below the roiling surface was a gorgeous multi-colored labyrinth of coral, polyps, fans, sponges, and other locals. Unfortunately, the fish were as unhappy with the rough water as I, and thusly absent. I split off from Bianca to explore a huge mushroom-shaped rock formation that rose from the deep, but after ten minutes of gagging and spewing salt water I had had enough. I surfaced and looked across the tumultuous waves for Bianca.
After a minute I spotted her a ways away. She happened to surface as soon as I identified her. She spat out some water from her snorkel, then cried to me excitedly, “There’s a catfish here!”
A catfish. After all I had seen and experienced, I must admit that I was just not impressed enough by a catfish to struggle all the way over to her. Instead I returned to the boat and discovered that we had been the last two in the water. I joined a couple from France, and we sipped some delightfully fresh-squeezed orange juice with champagne. They spoke English, so we chatted about how we were just happy to be out and about, even if the snorkeling had been a mess. After another ten minutes, Bianca came surging over the landing at the back of the yacht.
She flung some water at me. “Why you not see catfish?”
“Bianca,” I said, wiping the brine from my face. “I grew up catching catfish. It couldn’t possibly be more satisfying than this juice. Or champagne, I might add.”
“Are you lying to impress me?” she retorted. “You no grow up catching catfish: you growed up in Iowa!”
“Yes, and we have plenty of catfish.”
She slicked her black hair back and crossed her arms beneath her breasts in a pose of complete defiance. The rocking ship seemed unable to affect that self-affirmed stance.
“With meter-long stingers and everything?”
“Yes, with stingers and everything. I remember once when we got home and were cleaning the catfish in the driveway, one of them stuck Dad. I almost caught him swearing, which was quite a treat for me.”
I took another sip, then realized what she had just said. “Meter-long stingers? What the hell did you see in there?”
“A catfish, bamboclat! You know, with the wings and the spiky-tail?”
I blinked. “You saw a sting ray? I’ve never seen a sting ray before. But… but you said ‘catfish’!”
“That’s how we say in Romanian. It translates as catfish.”
Suddenly the orange juice wasn’t so sweet.
Afterwards we beached the yacht beside others on the sand of the private island. It was not particularly large, but the white sands were clean and inviting. We played for a while in the waves among about thirty other tourists. I would pick Bianca up and toss her into the oncoming waves, and all such silly things new lovers do. What I found particularly amusing, however, was the Egyptian crew of the yachts. Four big boats bobbed beside each other, but all the crew had scrambled onto one to better joke and jeer at the tourists. The Egyptian men may not want their own women to be seen in public, even if covered head-to-foot in robes, but they still delighted in all the topless European ladies on the beach. I tried to get Bianca to doff her bra, but to no avail.
After a while Bianca and I wandered into the palms and found a big hammock to nap in. We snuggled together in the shade, our sweat and salt mingling. The sun was blocked by the palm trees above us, but it was still hot and humid. We drowsily reflected on our trip. More importantly, we reflected on our blossoming relationship. Despite the magnitude of what we had witnessed together, by far our favorite moments were the simple ones of togetherness, like that moment. It all went by in a blink, and we were sorry to see our vacation within a vacation come to an end. Alas, we cannot stop the sands of time from flowing.
3
Our vacation within a vacation was over. Even worse, the whole shebang was nearing its end. Our return to Brașov was a much faster flight to Bucharest and then a couple hours in the car, so no more autocar drama. We arrived at Strada Lâcramioarelor by late morning. After a relaxed meal of sharing food and stories, Bianca stood up and declared, “I have frogs to attend to.”
Curious, I followed her into the living room and saw laid out on the floor two huge, hard-shell suitcases. They were bright green. Defined by rounded edges and sloping angles, they did vaguely look frog-like. Beside them were heaps of shoes in all shapes and colors.
“I pack for up to ten months,” Bianca explained lamely. “Actually, one is mostly empty for return presents. Tomorrow I get my tired eyes cosmeticked and my claws sharpened. I need to look young for the guests.”
“And another round of potential suitors,” I noted wryly.
She did not seem amused. In fact, she seemed sulky. Bianca packed her frogs quietly at first, but as time ticked by, her moodiness grew to something else. Soon she was slamming clothes into the cases with force. I watched her unsuccessfully try to smash the same shoe into a frog three times before she finally hurled it away.
“See?” I teased. “Cobbling issues.”
Bianca suddenly whirled on me and snapped, “Why you do that?”
“What?” I asked, surprised at her vehemence.
“You make everything happy. I want to be angry—but you even make my anger turn to happiness!”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“I must focus on my real world,” she retorted. “My identity. My job!”
A sudden urge overcame me. It was tremendously foolish, but I simply couldn’t fight it. I stood up, stretched out my arms and dramatically preached, “Abandon your frogs
and anger! If you believe in the laugh, it shall set you free! Let me show you the way to eternal happiness.”
I held the moment—too long. My outstretched arms withered under Bianca’s glare. It was an epic fail.
“Don’t you mock me, rasclat!” Bianca screeched.
“I wasn’t,” I protested. “OK, I was. Sorry. It’s in my nature to combat sadness with humor. You’re not mad. You’re sad because you’re going away to the ships and I’m going back to America.”
Bianca sat heavily on the couch and hugged her knees. Finally she admitted, “I enjoy this warm feeling of being so deep and tenderly in love with you inside of me, but I try not to think about our surprising and progressive romance too much.”
“Well, then,” I said, no longer joking. “Let’s talk real world. How do I get a job on a cruise ship?”
Bianca stared at me incredulously for a long time. When she realized I was serious, her self-imposed winter began to thaw. Alas, reality squashed the blossoming hope.
“You can’t, of course,” she said simply.
“Why not?”
“Americans can’t handle ships.”
I bristled at her dismissal. Seeing my reaction, she quickly added, “Besides, you’re a computer guy.”
“A computer business was never my dream,” I scoffed. I sat beside her and explained. “When we saw an opportunity, my partner and I went for it. He was already a genius programmer, but I only learned computers because we needed a digital artist. Just a tool, not a vocation.”
Bianca looked unconvinced.
“Look, when my partner went nuts—and I mean that literally—he did more than trash three years of hard work. He trashed the lives of my team. Simply put: it hurts too much to use those skills. I don’t want to move into a cubicle anyway. Screw it. I’m ready for something different, something new, something wild.”
Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3) Page 13