by Zora O'Neill
Back at the hotel, Peter and I attempted a moonlight walk. On one horizon, industrial silos glowed orange; we headed the other direction, into a dusty field, squinting up at the hazy sky in search of stars. “I don’t know how you can like this place,” Peter said, kicking up a puff of sand with his foot. “You need more than rose-colored glasses. You need rose-colored cataracts.”
I gingerly skirted a withered garden plot. All the cultural tidbits I’d shared with Peter over the day seemed irrelevant here on this rough seam where civilization hit the desert. The problem wasn’t just the General, swaggering in and claiming the land. How was anything supposed to change or grow in this harsh environment? How could a revolution stay united amid such entropy?
Behind us, car wheels crunched in the driveway. People were bundling out of a caravan of SUVs, chattering excitedly and carrying bags and boxes. Two puppies raced in circles, barking.
The General spotted us and waved us toward the house. “It is my granddaughter’s birthday,” he said when we stepped, somewhat reluctantly, into the circle of yellow light. “She is four years old today. Please, join us in the Bedouin tent.”
Inside the black tent—“probably where the original Bedouin owners lived,” hissed Peter—the General’s son was fiddling with some electrical cords. In a minute, the film Mamma Mia! appeared, projected onto a white sheet. The irresistible beat of Abba filled the air, the General’s daughter passed around finger sandwiches, and four generations settled into the cushions, tapping their toes.
We took an intermission for birthday cake. The General, who had swapped his desert explorer gear for a festive striped shirt, personally delivered slices to us.
“So, are you happy?” he asked.
How had he known we were in a funk? Could he have noticed our discomfort when we arrived? Or Peter’s dismay after our stroll in the moonlight? No, the General had only literally translated a routine, casual question—Inta mabsoot?—that Egyptians use to ask how you’re doing. Whenever I heard it in Arabic, I did the same, which gave the question an existential gravity: am I happy, really?
I caught Peter’s eye, and he smiled over his fluffy white cake. “Aywa,” I told the General in my finest Coptic turned Ammiya. “We’re happy.”
Yet perhaps there was something deeper in the General’s question. Maybe he had meant it less for us than for himself, in this uncertain time. He had turned back to the screen, where Meryl Streep was frozen in midstep. “Whenever I feel depressed,” he said, “I watch this movie. And then I feel much better.”
Illuminating the House
Medo and I were late for lunch at his mother’s house. He had insisted on picking me up downtown and driving back to his house in Heliopolis, a few miles away but now approaching an hour in the afternoon traffic. He had settled his lanky frame in for the long haul, leaning way back in his seat, one hand draped casually on the steering wheel.
“Medo, how do you say ‘cool’?” We were in the habit of speaking English together, but I resolved to ask him for Arabic help. Slang was a gaping hole in my education, because for the most part, my Arabic teachers had been distinctly uncool. And what little I had learned from them had become irrelevant in almost fifteen years. This was a drawback to putting too much effort into Ammiya—unlike Fusha, it was always shifting.
“Gaaaaamid,” Medo said, drawling the word with appreciation. Nice—it meant frozen. So, not just cool, but ice cold.
“Know what’s gamid?” he asked, flashing his braces conspiratorially and raising his eyebrows above his black aviator shades. “The movie The Fast and the Furious. Whenever I watch it, I drive like crazy.” Medo had gotten his license only nine months before.
The traffic loosened slightly, and Medo weaved between cars. “Do they do this in America?” he asked. His hands still loose on the steering wheel, he was veering almost randomly and looking over to see my reaction. I willed myself not to grip the door handle. “Egyptians don’t believe in lanes!” He laughed as he settled back down, but his laughter had a bitter edge.
Medo and I had met because he was constantly reaching beyond Egypt’s borders. In Egypt, everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of a country fallen apart. He seemed to keep an internal balance sheet: reasons to stay, reasons to go. Cairo drivers could fit in either column.
“OK, so, gamid. Thanks,” I said. “And do people still say wi-nuss?” This was an emphatic expression my matronly Ammiya teacher had taught me my first summer in Cairo. Wi-nuss was an intensifier that meant “and a half,” as in, “This coffee is delicious . . . and a half!”
“No way! No one says that anymore.” Medo snorted as only hyperconfident youth can.
We entered a traffic circle, its center island crammed with notices for candidates in the upcoming parliamentary election. Hand-painted banners sagged down over photos of candidates, and posters were jumbles of words, names, and symbols. These icons, assigned more or less randomly to each political party, were meant to aid the illiterate in voting. They also added a surreal note to the campaigns: Vote Toothbrush! Up with Basketball Hoop! Support Bunch of Grapes!
Medo rolled his eyes as we inched around the circle. Even at this speed, the signs were hard to read. “This is a mess,” he said. “This is not how other countries do it. These things should be comfortable for the eyes.”
“So who are you going to vote for?” I asked.
“I don’t know—I haven’t registered yet,” he said. “I might not even vote.” The traffic stalled again. Since 1922, when Egypt gained independence from the British, the country had ostensibly operated as a democracy, but under each subsequent regime, elections had grown ever more symbolic and corrupt. Egyptians had long since stopped pretending their votes had any bearing on reality, and Medo was skeptical that the current revolution had changed the system. After another minute, he said, “OK, this might surprise you, but I’ll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood.”
All the other Egyptians I knew were firmly behind the secular reformers. Hassan, Moataza, even Hamdi, who had railed against Bassem Youssef and his satire, loved to mock the Islamists who were popping up all over the television, two weeks before the election. One night, when a prissy bearded man was lecturing on a TV talk show about the virtues of patience, Hamdi had shouted, “He must have zibeeb on his knees!” A zibeeba (raisin) was a dark forehead callus men developed, supposedly from praying; the mark had become quite popular in the past decade, though many Egyptians considered it an ostentatious display of piety, probably touched up with dirt or ash.
But as discontented as Medo seemed, he didn’t have the cynical edge of my older, secular friends—nor did he have the zibeeba that the secularists might have assumed any Brotherhood booster would have. “The Brothers deserve it,” he said. “They have been fighting for this for decades.” Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood was dogged and organized. Hamdi had shown me the slick brochures the group was distributing door-to-door. Its party, called Freedom and Justice, was assigned the inspiring ballot symbol of a set of scales.
After an hour and a half in the car, we pulled up in front of a school to collect Medo’s sisters, Sara and two younger girls. As he steered toward the curb, Medo showed his first flash of irritation with the traffic. “I hate being late,” he grumbled, his hand tightening around the steering wheel. “They shouldn’t have to wait like this.” I cringed, thinking of how late I had been to meet him and Sara at Starbucks.
Sara said hello as she climbed in, smiling shyly. Her younger sisters politely extended their hands in introduction. “I am Esraa,” said one. “And I am Yousraa,” said the other. The three girls, with their names spelled with the same trio of letters, were the Arabic root system in the flesh. Their names formed a matched set, a bit like the Arabic equivalent of Faith, Hope, and Charity.
At their building, we climbed a dusty, half-open stairwell to the apartment. Just as at the dentist’s office—and in al
most every building I had ever visited in the Middle East—the appearance of the entryway gave no indication of the quality of the interior. We walked into a spotless living room, set with curvaceous, gilt-edged, overstuffed furniture. This homegrown French-salon style was immensely popular in Cairo; Egyptians jokingly called it Louis Farouk, a nod to the glitzy tastes of the last king of Egypt.
When Medo had said, “Come to my mom’s for lunch,” I had pictured a kindly, gray-haired lady in an apron, rolling grape leaves with gnarled fingers. But of course Medo was much younger than me, which meant his mom was about my age. A pretty flower-print scarf framed her wide, brown face, and a navy-blue robe gracefully draped her sturdy frame. She embraced me warmly.
“Her name is Neveen,” Medo said. “In Arabic, you spell that the same backwards and forwards.” By now he knew I liked these details.
“You illuminate our house,” Neveen said by way of welcome. A lovely Form II hollow verb, I thought—from nara, to light up, made transitive by doubling the second letter in the root: nawwara. Then my mind went blank. Teachers didn’t use that fusty old Roman-numeral verb chart anymore, I’d found out from Dr. Badawi. And grammatical analysis was not a conversation starter. Desperate, I fished in my brain and found first-day-of-class basics. What were the objects in the room? What could I say about them?
“The cat beautiful,” I said haltingly, eyeing the fluffy white Persian on the seat next to me. Cairo crawled with tough street cats, but pampered house pets were not common; this one, sprawled on emerald-green velvet, was a living luxury. Neveen, perched on her own plump green chair, smiled. It was a start.
Above the sofa hung a finely rendered painting of a Chinese-style landscape on silk. “That beautiful too,” I told Neveen.
“She painted it!” Medo piped up from behind me. “And those too!” He pointed at other framed pieces around the room, delicate flowers and graceful willows. Neveen smiled again, but looked down at her hands.
“Mashallah,” I hurried to add, catching Medo’s eye.
He had taught me this phrase too—or rather, its significance. “You don’t believe in envy in America, do you?” he had asked, as though envy were some sort of universal force. “Here it is a big thing, a real thing. So we always say mashallah”—by the grace of God. Uttered after any compliment or mention of good fortune, the phrase dispelled envy and encouraged gratitude. Yet this simple bit of politeness had never come up in any of my college or grad-school classes; we had been too busy discussing grammar rules or social issues. After talking with Medo, I heard mashallah everywhere, punctuating every conversation. I hated to think how many social occasions I had blundered through, oblivious to the most basic ways of making a good impression.
Neveen led us to the table. As she introduced each dish, Medo removed the cover with a flourish: mahshi, tiny stuffed eggplants, peppers, and grape leaves; ru’a’, wedges of flaky pastry with meat; batta, roast duck, atop rice studded with duck liver and almonds; and mulukhiya, the essential Egyptian green, cooked up in a silky, garlicky stew.
In Hani’s class we had recently practiced the various ways of communicating preferences. “I love all of these foods,” I said carefully as I readied my knife and fork over my plate, “but duck is my favorite.”
Neveen clapped at my statement. “You express yourself very well,” she said with some relief. In the car, Medo had told me she was afraid we wouldn’t understand each other.
My expression of preference may have been grammatically sound, but in terms of eating a reasonable-size lunch, it was a terrible mistake. Neveen leaned over and put a whole second duck leg on my plate.
I ate enthusiastically as Neveen beamed with pride. But soon the girls had polished off their modest portions, and then Neveen was done. Medo too. The girls carried their plates to the kitchen, and before I understood what had happened, I was sitting alone at the table.
What to do? If I walked into the kitchen with my half-finished plate, would they shoo me back to the table with a fresh round of blandishments to eat? Would I look ungrateful? While I weighed my options, I ate a few more bites. I was painfully full, but, I consoled myself, I might never be offered such good Egyptian food again, and tomorrow I would be sorry I hadn’t eaten more. Finally Medo came to rescue me. “That’s fine,” he said gently. “It is not going to waste.” His mother had put in so much work for my visit—but really, a guest was an excuse to make a lot of food. The family would enjoy the leftovers for days.
Medo gave me a tour of the rest of the small apartment, and we all settled in the girls’ room, its walls a rich French blue that Sara, the eldest sister, had chosen. Over lunch, she had mentioned that she painted too, as her mother did. And now, while the rest of us sat on the twin beds, she pulled a stack of canvases from behind a desk and unwrapped the top one.
I was expecting something emotionally transparent, some expression of teenage drama. Instead, the canvas showed a lush landscape, with a bridge arching over a river and birds flitting in the sky. Sara’s teacher gave them paintings to copy, she explained, and graded them on accuracy.
How narrow my experience in Egypt had been, I saw, as Sara displayed each new landscape. In college and graduate school, I had surrounded myself with people like me: my age, my political leanings, my aesthetics and religious skepticism. Without knowing I was doing it, I had followed Dr. Badawi’s counsel, learning the language of one’s equivalent in the foreign culture—but if I had stayed in academia, I might never have stepped out of that comfort zone. Instead, in my new, admittedly scattershot approach to Arabic, I was so desperate to converse that I’d talk to anyone, even a guy half my age who loved Vin Diesel movies. And thanks to this, I had ended up here, with him and his delightful family.
Sara gently unwrapped her last, and favorite, painting. It was not a landscape like the others, but a Spanish dancer, her back arched dramatically and a scarf cascading off her shoulder. She showed me the photograph she had worked from, clipped from a magazine. It was a literal likeness, but Sara’s dancer pulsed with life.
“You have given your daughter your talent,” I said to Neveen, who sat on the bed opposite. While Sara and Esraa worked together to wrap up the paintings, Neveen and I chatted directly in Arabic. She had studied law and English in college, but because she was the only daughter in her family, her father had wanted to see her married and starting a family right after graduation. She asked if I had worked my whole life. “Between you and me,” she said wistfully, “I would have liked to have worked a little.”
The twilight call to prayer sounded outside the bedroom window. I looked up and remembered Sara and Medo and the younger girls—I had been so focused on understanding Neveen that I had briefly forgotten about them. It was time to make my goodbyes. Neveen presented me with one of her own paintings, a small flower on satin. “I have so many!” she said with a little roll of her eyes. The girls were putting on their white headscarves to say their prayers, and Neveen nudged Medo as he readied to leave with me. “You need to pray too!” she said. “Do it as soon as you come back.”
Medo escorted me to the bus stop—our long ride earlier had satisfied his driving urge. “How do you say ‘nap’ in Arabic?” I asked him as we walked. I’d spent so much time sleeping in the afternoon heat here, yet never learned the word for it. And I really needed a nap now, after my heavy lunch and sustained Arabic conversation.
“No special word in Egypt,” Medo said. “But I’ve heard Gulf Arabs say qailoola. Isn’t that a nice word?”
I said it back to him, relishing the delicate little coughing qaf at the start and the cute long oo sound, and we smiled at each other. Medo hadn’t struck me as the sort of guy who cared about the relative niceness of words, or how his mother’s name was a palindrome. Maybe every Arabic speaker had a little bit of that wordplay urge—or Medo was more my local equivalent than he seemed.
Graduation Day
Class with hani was fun, but by the fourth and final week I had slipped into old bad habits: arriving late, spacing out when Hani reviewed things I already knew, and generally failing to play along with the polite fiction of class conversation. On the last day, I shook Hani’s hand and took my flimsy “diploma” with relief to be done with the strictures of school.
Afterward, I wandered down to the Agriculture Museum, one of my favorite places in Cairo. It was a colonial time capsule, a museum that itself should have been in a museum, full of molting taxidermy, complex hand-drawn charts, and cobwebbed waxworks. Shuffling from vitrine to vitrine felt like browsing an archaic dictionary. One case contained all the varieties of bread made in Egypt, slowly turning to crumbs; another displayed wax models of thirteen varieties of pomegranate, arranged by size, each in its own pink plastic bowl. In front of a display of dates, I murmured their names, each as luscious as the fruit itself: wardi (rosy), zaghlool (squab), aboo taweela (big long guy).
I heard voices approaching. A family was making their way slowly along from the other end of the museum. We crossed paths in a room dedicated to cotton processing, and the three kids stared at me as if I too were an exhibit. Then we went our separate ways—they to the scale models of grain threshers, and I to the presentation of the Coptic months, each with a rhyming proverb.
A guard, an old man in a long galabia, appeared at my side and read for me, tracing the letters with a bony finger: “Toot, hat al-’antoot.” In Tut, the time of planting after the Nile’s ebb, bring the plow. “Baramhat, rooh al-gheet wi-hat.” In Baramhat, the harvest season, go to the field and bring the bounty. Then, as though picking up a conversation we’d left off an hour before, he told me he feared the new government would be no different from the old when it came to helping Egypt’s poor.
Near closing time, I walked out of the halls of eroding knowledge. It was a glittering, cool, and clear November afternoon, but I was overcome with sadness. So much had been lost, and was still being lost. In the twenty-first century, Egyptians grew only a few hardy strains of mango; bread now was mostly the standard, dark rounds sold by subsidized bakers, which was all anyone could afford. Soon Egypt’s rich variety—and all the words for it—would live only in this museum.