by Noel Hynd
On the southbound train, Alex fell into a conversation with an older French woman, a woman old enough to remember the world war in which, fifty years earlier, she said, she had lost her husband at Dunkirk. The old woman befriended her, even gave her some fresh fruit from a basket. They both descended from the train at Saint Etienne and said their good-byes. The old woman, whose name was Marie-Claire, gave her a hug, and Alex reciprocated. Marie-Claire felt frail and bony in her grasp and almost unsteady when Alex released her. She reminded Alex-distantly and in spooky kind of way-of her own late grandmother.
Alex had to find her way on foot to a local youth hostel, where she would stay overnight, and then the next morning take another train to the Camargue region where her job awaited her.
She walked down some questionable streets to get to the hostel. She took the wrong route twice and was corrected twice when strangers answered questions. When she arrived at the hostel, early in the evening, it was not the nicest place. Peeling walls, worn linoleum, dim corridors that reeked of age and abuse. Worse, the hostel had been overbooked and there wasn’t a room for her. There wasn’t even an extra bed in the dormitory. The staff wasn’t entirely helpful, and to top it off, the phones weren’t working.
She was near tears. Had the trains been running, she might have turned around, retraced her route to Paris, then to New York, then home to California. Who could blame a frightened teenager for wanting to go home?
She sat in the lobby and tried to evaluate what to do. Several minutes later, a young man came over to her and sat down next to her. He was very slight of build, with a mocha complexion. In French he started a conversation and asked what nationality she was.
“I’m American,” she said in French. “From California.”
“My name is Rene,” he said. “I’m French, but of Tunisian origin.”
He smiled and tried to speak English with her, but his was limited, so their conversation ensued in French. He was eighteen and had technical training in computer engineering, he said, mostly self-acquired. He had enlisted in the French Air Force, he said, l’armee de l’air, he proclaimed proudly. This was his final evening at liberty. The next day he would take a train in a different direction and travel onward to Nantes in west central France for six weeks of basic training. It was his hope to eventually see the world, to be posted in someplace exotic like Polynesia or Martinique where the French maintained bases. He added that it had always been his dream to visit America, as well.
Alex joined him for dinner. They had soup and bread and cheese in the hostel cafeteria. She waited to see whether the hostel keepers would find a place for her. But while her conversation with Rene played out in the forefront of her mind, in the back of her mind her worries accelerated.
What would she do? Despite the kindness of the old lady on the train and the gentle amity of Rene this evening, she had never felt so homesick in her life, so cut off from everything she knew. In her stomach was a knot that wouldn’t untie.
After dinner, there was a change at the concierge’s desk. The new man told Alex that the phones were up and running again and they had called everywhere, including local homes that might take in an overnight border. But it was early summer and there were no beds to be had anywhere within a hundred miles. Nor was there any way for a single girl traveling alone to get to anywhere else. And it was against regulations for anyone to stay in the hostel’s lobby or office area.
There was still some daylight remaining. In midsummer in the south of France daylight remained until almost ten o’clock. Alex walked outside the hostel, stood in the street and tried to decide what to do. She noticed that across the street there was a small Catholic church. It was white stucco with peeling green paint on its front door.
Alex walked to it. She tried the door but it was locked. When she turned around, however, she was surprised to find Rene standing very close to her.
“I heard what’s happening,” he said. “You can have my room for the night.”
She was shocked. “That’s kind of you,” she said. They spoke in French, and at this time in her life, hers was halting. “But you’re about to go into the military. I couldn’t possibly take your room for the final night.”
“I wish you would,” he said.
“Where would you go?”
“I have a backpack. I can sleep in the park. Among the hobos,” he said with a smile, “among les clochards. It will be an adventure. I’ll be gone before dawn as long as the police don’t catch me.”
“No, no,” she said. “You mustn’t take such a risk for me.”
“Then let me sneak you into my room and we will share it,” he said.
Her expression must have conveyed her confusion, appreciation mingled with anxiety and suspicion. He sought to defuse it. “I warn you, there is only one bed. It is very narrow and there is no space on the floor. But I will be honorable.”
She searched his eyes. Sometimes, she thought, angels take strange forms.
“All right,” she said.
They returned to the hostel. A friend created a distraction for the concierge and Alex darted down the corridor to Rene’s room. The concierge either didn’t see her or chose not to.
The door to Rene’s room was unlocked and the room empty. He followed a minute later, closed the door and locked it. The room was tiny, maybe eight by ten, with a nightstand and a bed, just as Rene had described. Barely enough room for two people to stand up together, much less lie down together.
The shower and bathroom facilities on the corridor were communal. They took turns so that Alex could have privacy to change and so that he could too. Awkwardly, at 11:00 p.m., they turned off the single room light and lay down together, Alex between the wall and Rene’s body. Around her neck, Alex wore the small gold cross that her dad had given her years earlier, the one she had eventually lost in Kiev. She knew Rene had noted it, but he said nothing about it.
A moment passed. They both started to laugh at the preposterousness of the situation. Then they started to talk about their homes, their families. They discovered they were both only children raised by a single parent. Rene had been raised by his very strict father, who worked in a factory. His mother had deserted the family when he had been five. Rene had been raised as a Muslim but had fallen away from his faith, perhaps as a reaction to the strictness of his father’s Islam.
“What would your father say if he knew you were here, lying in bed, with an American girl?” Alex asked.
“Oooh!” Rene answered quickly. He laughed and pointed to his lower backside in the dim light. He furiously waved a finger to indicate that he didn’t even want to think about what would happen. He made a moaning sound over the beating he probably would have received. “But my father and I do not agree on many things,” he said. “It is one reason I am going away and joining the armee de l’air. It doesn’t mean I don’t love him or respect him. It only means we disagree.”
After hushed conversation of nearly an hour, fatigue rolled in upon them. Alex taught Rene some words and phrases in English. Hello. How are you? Good-bye. Good luck.
Rene reciprocated with some useful words in Arabic.
Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.
Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.
“If you greet most Arab people in their language, you break the ice,” he said. “They will trust you more and treat you with a genuine smile,” he said. “ Assalamou Alaekom means ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ in Arabic. Another word is Ezzayak, said as a question. It means, ‘How are you?’ Learning a few Arabic words will always make a difference.”
“Assalamou Alaekom,” she tried, laughing, garbling it.
“Assalamou Alaekom,” he corrected. It quickly became a joke between them. They laughed until she felt herself drifting, trying to stay awake but no longer able. The last thing she remembered was Rene saying something to her that she didn’t understand. She was too tired.
The next morning she awoke with a start. It was 8:00 a.m., and she was a
lone on the bed. She looked everywhere in the small room. Rene was gone and had taken all his things. She waited for several minutes to see if perhaps he was in the shower or the bathroom. But no. He was gone.
She pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans. She snuck out of the hostel. The new concierge on the morning shift gave her a cursory glance but said nothing. She went outside into a warm summer morning. She was still unsure what to do, whether to go forward with her trip or go back to America. The knot had returned to the pit of her stomach, and she again felt alone, sad, and vulnerable. She had made one friend, or thought she had, and now he was gone too.
The door to the church was open across the street. She had time. She wandered in. There were a few older people sitting in various pews. There was stained glass at the front, a hundreds-of-years-old depiction of Jesus raising his hands to God.
Alex sat for a moment, then closed her eyes and said a prayer. She wanted wisdom. She wanted guidance. She wanted to know how to proceed. She opened her eyes.
Nothing much had changed. She stood, bowed slightly to the cross at the altar, turned, and walked back toward the front door.
She was near her decision. She would return home. The loneliness was too much.
Then something caught her eye.
In the back pew, among the old people she had walked past was the lady from the train. The old woman smiled at her and raised a hand. She signaled Alex to wait, as if she had something to say.
Outside, Alex waited. The old woman came out of the church a few seconds later.
“Today you will continue on to the Camargue?” she asked, recalling the previous day’s conversation.
Alex hesitated. “Yes. Yes, I think so,” she said. “Unless I change my mind and go back to Paris. I’m thinking about-”
“No, no, no!” the old woman said sharply. “ Il te faut continuer, ma cherie! You must go on. You must stay with your plans. You are young and pretty. The world is big and wonderful and waits for you. You will make many friends. You are a blessed person, I can tell.”
“Merci bien,” Alex said.
“If I had a gift, I would give you one,” the old lady said. “But I am old and not well off. So I don’t.”
“I think you just did give me a gift.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You remind me so much of my grandmother. It’s almost as if you’re her.”
The old lady laughed. “You flatter me,” she said.
“My train leaves in an hour,” Alex said. “To the Camargue. Thank you.”
“Good luck to you,” the old lady said. “May God always bless you.”
They embraced again. On her way to the train station, Alex stopped by a small grocery store. From a cheerful shop owner, she bought fresh bread, a packet of cheese, two apples, and some bottled water for the train ride. She had an eye out for Rene but did not see him.
On the train through the French countryside, in a compartment that seated six, she wondered what guideposts, what angels, had been on earth for her. Across from her sat a mother with a boy of about ten. They were French of Sudanese origin, Alex learned as a conversation developed.
Alex tried her next phrase of greeting in Arabic. They smiled and responded with kindness. Alex engaged the boy in a casual conversation and eventually traded one of her apples for a pear while the mother smiled. The sun was brilliant outside, and there were new vistas beyond the train windows that she had never seen before. She sat in rapt attention and watched a new part of the world unfurl before her young eyes.
She felt older this morning. More confidant. Her French was coming more easily. She realized that she was a more confidant young woman this morning than the frightened young girl she had been twenty-four hours earlier. She would never, for example, have traded the apple for the pear a day earlier; she would have been too withdrawn. And she also suddenly realized that the knot in her stomach was gone. Oddly enough, it had disappeared when she was walking back up the short aisle of the church in Saint Etienne, when the old lady raised her hand and signaled her.
Now, a dozen years later, her flight from Rome leveled out. It followed the Nile River and finished its descent toward Cairo International Airport. Alex stared downward and again surveyed the ancient landscape, almost able to taste the millennia of history that lay along the river. Distantly, southward, beyond Cairo, she thought she could see the Pyramids of Giza.
Alex guessed that the old woman might well have passed away by now. She wondered what had ever happened to Rene, whether he ever visited Martinique or Polynesia or America. She could never remember his last name and wasn’t sure that she had ever known it. But she recalled the first three words of useful Arabic that he had taught her.
Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.
Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.
Well, she mused, you could live your whole life bracketed by those thoughts.
And she wondered whether that whole experience with Rene in the hostel and with the lady on the train and in the small church, whom she might also never see again in her life, had prepared her for this trip to Egypt more than any other single experience in her life.
THIRTY-TWO
Alex passed through Egyptian customs, then immigration. The Egyptian security officer scanned her passport. He waited for something on a computer screen, and so did she.
Whenever she traveled on a fake passport, immigration unnerved her. She watched everything the agent was doing and observed every facial gesture carefully. She even watched his eye movements as he looked at his computer screen. She felt her heart race and felt her blouse moisten with sweat.
Then the agent closed her passport, handed it back, and nodded to her. He smiled. “Welcome to Egypt,” he said in English.
Moments later, she retrieved her baggage from a clanking, outdated carousel and soon found a young man from the US Embassy holding a piece of paper with her new name on it. She approached him, smiled, and identified herself.
They shook hands. As it turned out, there had been one other passenger on her flight who was attached to the US diplomatic section in Cairo. He was a man about ten years older than she. The driver was also waiting for him. Once he had found both travelers, the driver took Alex’s bags and carried them to a waiting van.
“I’m Mo,” the driver said as they piled into the van.
“Short for Mohammad, I assume,” Alex answered.
“Mo is fine,” the man said without humor.
“Well, at least they didn’t send Larry or Curley,” the other traveler said sotto voce to Alex, who had to suppress a smile.
Mo and Cairo traffic were perfectly suited to each other. The ride into the city was crazy, with hyped-up drivers often passing between two other cars in the actual lanes, as a static-filled radio filled the van. It was not usual to be in a stream of traffic four-cars-across on a two lane highway at sixty miles per hour. Alex and the other American in the van exchanged another glance. She checked that her seatbelt was tight. The driving was worse than what Alex remembered from some of her trips to Central and South America. The only worse traffic that she could recall was during her trip to Lagos two years earlier, where there seemed to be no rules at all.
“I wish I had a helmet,” she said to the other man.
He laughed and shook his head.
“Me too,” he said. “And maybe some extra life insurance.”
Mo either couldn’t hear them or chose to ignore them.
The highway passed through several upscale blocks in the northern fringe of the city. Alex noted a number of satellite dishes on buildings, most of them looking as if they hadn’t worked for the past twenty years. Gradually the new buildings gave way to some very old ones, and she knew she had arrived in an ancient and picturesque city, a city she read about so many times in her life.
Cairo. Al Qahirah, as it had originally been called. The Triumphant City, so named for all the invading armies that had conquered it and then left, defeated by the quirky eccent
ricities of the city itself. The ancient was intermingled with the new on endless blocks. And even after the highway, traffic was a nightmare.
Their van pulled up in front of one of the better hotels, the Metropole Cairo. The Metropole was a bright modern building with several guards around it, many with heavy weapons. There was a display of foreign flags above the entrance arcade. Alex nodded a good-bye to the other passenger, and she stepped out. A porter picked up Alex’s one piece of luggage from the rear of the van.
Alex tipped Mo with an American ten-dollar bill. He grunted in response.
The Metropole stood impressively by the River Nile. The lobby was modern. It gleamed with new furniture and artwork in an Egyptian motif. Alex checked in easily, and a second porter took her to her room.
The room was a small suite, actually, more like a room and a half, a sitting area, and a sleeping area. It was thoroughly air-conditioned and had numerous amenities-multiple telephone lines, internet access, satellite television, a small refrigerator, and a polished marble bathroom with separate showers. It afforded a spectacular view of the Nile as well as a hotel pool. It was obviously designed for diplomatic and business travelers, a fine base for conducting business or exploring historic Cairo. She had heard the Metropole was considered one of the best business hotels in the Middle East, and her impression on arrival did nothing to undermine that premise.
She knew from her previous “official” visits to Nigeria and Ukraine that every US Embassy provided arrival kits for guests, including maps of the city and phrase books. She found such a kit waiting for her with a card from a political officer at the Cairo Embassy. His name was Richard Bissinger.
She knew from experience that the political officer was often more than simply that. For better or worse, Bissinger, or whatever his real name was, was her CIA contact.
On one of the maps was a notation as to where the embassy was. It wasn’t far. She had also noticed on arrival that the entire neighborhood was well policed, even beyond the weapons-toting guards that ringed the hotel. Also within the kit was a cell phone, new and presumably secure.