Mother Nile Read online

  When she emerged from her drugged kayf, he tried to ease the anguish with talk of the future.

  “When you get better, we’ll go to the Tut exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. The whole town has Tut fever,” he had told her that day. He had been surprised at the interest, but had postponed going himself for fear it would leave him unmoved.

  She smiled and nodded.

  “Egypt is in. Between Sadat and Tut, the eyes of the world are on Egypt,” he said.

  She looked at him for a long time, until tears spilled over the lower lids onto her cheeks. Coming close, he kissed her and gently wiped away the tears.

  “Isis,” she whispered, her lips quivering.

  “Isis?” The word was certainly clear. He had, by then, stopped explaining his name to others. Most people thought it had Greek origins. But Isis?

  Isis, he had learned, was the goddess of heaven and earth in Pharaonic times, wife of Osiris, god of the underworld and judge of the dead. It was Osiris who decided who would or would not have eternal life. He had always snickered at that. Osiris was the son of the sun god Ra, supreme arbiter among the bickering gods. Set was Osiris’s brother. Set murdered Osiris, cut him into fourteen parts, and dispensed the parts throughout Egypt.

  The fourteen parts signified the fourteen provinces of Egypt. But his beloved mate, Isis, was determined to put him back together again. She searched everywhere for his missing parts. But all she could find were thirteen. The missing piece was Osiris’s sex organs.

  They never found those. The myth always embarrassed him.

  “What a ridiculous name,” he had protested.

  “It is a necessary name,” his mother had said, which always puzzled him. Osiris and Isis were like two halves of a riddle.

  “I’m Osiris,” he reminded her gently that day, misunderstanding. He thought her mind was slipping and she had gotten confused.

  “My baby,” she said.

  His father was not in the room then. She started to speak, in Arabic. His father would not have understood in any event.

  “My baby, Isis,” she repeated.

  “I don’t understand, Mother.” He thought she was hallucinating. She had gripped his arm. Her fingers were like claws, digging into his flesh.

  The spring sun was setting, and the shadows were lengthening across the bed. The fading light made her gaunt face skeletal, eerie. She tried to rise from the bed, frightening him, since she was too frail and weak. The cancer had almost consumed her. Embracing her, he tried to force her down against the pillows. Oddly, her strength persisted.

  “What is it, Mother?” he cried, feeling the panic begin. He could feel death in the room. Looking into her eyes, he could see that they were surprisingly clear. Her gaze turned on him like a blinding floodlight.

  “You have a sister, Osiris.”

  “A sister?” Then it came to him.

  “Isis?”

  She nodded.

  The power of the revelation seemed to erupt inside of her. She was forcing it out of herself. Her chest was heaving with the effort, and her breath came in short gasps. She struggled to expel it.

  “In Egypt?”

  She nodded again. He knew she was dying now, but could not bring herself to go with this thing embedded in her.

  “I left her in Cairo, the City of the Dead. In the tomb of the family Al-Hakim. Come to my sanctuary.”

  “I don’t understand,” he cried, embracing her. She was gathering all of her strength as she tried to control her speech.

  “There was no other choice. He would have killed my Isis, my baby. So I left her with the woman in the tomb of the Al-Hakim family in the City of the Dead. ‘Come to my sanctuary.’ Above the entrance. It is written.”

  His mind was clogged with questions. But he dared not broach them. There didn’t seem time. She had begun to perspire, struggling for every moment of life.

  “She was born the first of December 1951 in Alexandria,” she panted. “Isis.” He felt her sinking. The sudden burst of strength was all she had left. Watching her face, he saw her lips open, her eyes narrow; an attitude he had never seen before, as if she were poised to spit out some horrible curse.

  “Zakki,” she cried, clearly, in a voice he had never heard, a curse crawling out of the smoldering pit of her anguished soul.

  Then she sank deeper into the pillows, slowly closing her soft lips again, forming a sweet, contented smile, while her eyes looked upward, sightless, into the void.

  “Mama,” he cried, embracing his dead mother’s body.

  Sometime later, he felt his father’s hands touch his shoulder and gently move him away.

  They buried his mother in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Brooklyn. It seemed an incongruous setting for her burial: dour pink Irish faces watching tearlessly as the priest offered the blessings of Jesus. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. The exit seemed contrived, fraudulent. For his father’s sake, he protested only in his heart.

  The Kellys had had little to do with her. Not that they hadn’t tried. But she was always that strange Arab woman that Tom had married. There was no enmity, only indifference. She had, after all, made Tom Kelly happy.

  They went, father and son, back to the apartment, feeling lost in the emptiness. She had not said much, but the presence of her love for them had filled the place. Si’s father brought out a bottle of whiskey and filled two tumblers. He picked his up, lifting it upward in acknowledgment of his son, then put it down again, unable to hold back the quaver in his voice.

  “She had no right to go first. You had no right,” he said to the walls. Si felt his heart break for him.

  “She was something,” his father said, when he had controlled himself, repeating his mantra. “We belonged to each other.” He lifted the glass to his lips and swallowed the liquid in a long greedy draught, his pale gray face flushing quickly.

  “She said nothing? She mentioned nothing?” Si asked. It was his litany now. He had told him about Isis.

  “Not one damned word.”

  “Why?”

  “Guilt, maybe,” his father said after a long pause, refilling his glass. “Hell, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’d love her any way, any time.”

  “All those years. Living with that.” They sat for a long time in silence.

  “She loved you, Si,” Tom Kelly said, his tongue thickening. “She wanted more kids. But it was just not in the cards.”

  “And she never talked about it? Hinted? Never spoke of her past life?”

  “It wasn’t important.”

  “But it was,” Si protested.

  “She just never mentioned it.”

  “All that brooding. All that kayf. It wasn’t emptiness at all. She was thinking about Isis. My sister.” He tried to drown the word with a gulp of whiskey, but it burned going down and he coughed, nearly spitting it up.

  After a while the alcohol turned his father maudlin. Si suffered it as long as he could, then went out.

  He never went back to Cornell. Instead, he roamed the streets and tried to cajole his father into not being dependent entirely on the crutch of alcohol. He didn’t help much.

  “How else can an Irishman drown his grief?” Tom Kelly had cried, pouring another deep drink, wallowing in the cliché.

  “She wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  “I know. You don’t know about love yet, son. It’s like belonging. Like your place.” Tears brimmed in his eyes. “I’ve lost my place. I’m nowhere.”

  Si reached out and touched his father’s shoulders. “You’ve got me, Dad,” he said, feeling foolish.

  His father nodded. Si knew it could never be same.

  ***

  He stood in line for hours at the King Tut exhibit. Moving slowly in the line, he listened to the effusiveness of those who viewed the objects. What right had they to comment, he told them sil
ently, maliciously? They have no connection with it.

  He studied the golden death mask of Tutankhamun, imagining the youth’s face stripped of its false beard of majesty. The slopes of the eyes, downward toward the flared nose, were outlined with thick black lines of eye liner. In their centers the upper segments of the pupils were lost in the upper fold of their almond shape. He knew those eyes. They were his mother’s. His own. He shivered and coughed to hide his confusion. The lips were wide, sensual. Like his? He was sure he was fantasizing, and he ridiculed himself and moved on.

  His namesake, of course, was there, in color photographs, a mummified figure, complete with striped headdress, greeting the boy Pharaoh in the glorious afterlife. He carefully read the text, explaining how the boy king was “given life forever and ever.” The idea moved him, and his knees shook. What was he feeling, he wondered. Kinship? The boy had died more than three thousand years ago.

  He bought a poster of Tutankhamun’s golden face, excited with a strange idea that had surfaced in his mind. He went into a drugstore not far from the museum and bought eye liner, pancake makeup, and lipstick. He could think of nothing else on the subway ride back to Brooklyn. He rushed into the apartment, unfurled the poster near the hanging mirror in the living room, and mounted it with clear tape on the wall beside it. The apartment was empty, although his mother’s presence, her scent and spirit, still seemed to permeate the place.

  Working carefully, through trial and error, rubbing off the makeup with a moist towel when he made a miscalculation, he applied the pancake and the eye liner until he had it right. Then he painted his lips lightly with the pink lipstick. Taking a dish towel, he fashioned a headdress as best he could. A reddish beam of the setting sun reflected itself in the mirror and bathed the room in a faint orange glow. The face in the poster was gold, which he could not match, but as the sun faded and his eyes probed the face in the mirror, he was sure that he could see the resemblance.

  “I am your seed,” he whispered.

  He studied this new face in the mirror for a long time, trying to create within himself that sense of kayf that was his mother’s refuge. But he could not find it. His mind raced with thoughts. Perhaps he had overintellectualized it. He felt embarrassed. Finally, he washed off the makeup, unfastening the poster and rolling it up again.

  ***

  When Si’s father came home, his eyes were rheumy with weariness, grief, and alcohol. They sat in the living room for a long time, not speaking, letting the darkness hide them, hoping that the woman, Farrah, wife and mother, would come back and turn on the lights.

  “I miss her, Si,” his father’s voice croaked out of the silence.

  “Me, too.”

  “She wasn’t talkative. I never really knew what she was thinking. But she was there.” He was silent again. “You know what I mean.”

  “And she never told you any of it?” Si asked, again. It was still incredible to him that she could live with him for a quarter of a century and tell him nothing about it, the old life. Isis.

  “It didn’t matter,” he said again.

  “Maybe because she bottled it up, it killed her.” He knew it was stupid when he said it, and it set off a long silent pause of brooding.

  “I’ve got to go there, Dad,” Si said. The pronouncement neglected all practical considerations. They hadn’t much money. Whatever his father had, had gone into his education.

  “Where?”

  “Egypt. To find…” His tongue seemed to choke him. “Isis.” The idea rose out of the depths of himself, surprising him as he had not been conscious of its percolation.

  “I knew you would,” his father said. “Maybe that’s why she told you and not me.” Did Si detect the faint jealousy? His father stood up shakily, and went to his bedroom, coming back with something wrapped in tissue paper. He unwrapped it and held up a gold coin on a thin gold chain. It was the thing she wore around her neck. It had become so much a part of her, he had forgotten to notice it.

  “She wanted you to have this.” He dangled it in front of him. “It’s supposed to be worth something. An old coin. She never told me where she got it, but she was wearing it the day I met her. She never took it off.”

  Si took the coin and rubbed it between his fingers, searching, perhaps, for some vestige of his mother’s old warmth.

  “Take it to a coin dealer,” his father said, sitting down again.

  “She wanted me to go, Dad,” Si said after a while. He was sure of that now.

  To his surprise, a Manhattan coin dealer gave him three thousand dollars, explaining that the coin might be worth more in the future, but was still fairly common, minted in the last years of the Ottoman empire, about 1912. Immediately, he rushed to the airline office, bought a ticket to Cairo, round-trip, with the return open, and applied for his passport.

  For the first time in a long while, he felt he had shed his ennui. He had never really come to grips with it, although he could sense the same affliction in many of his fellow students. Sometimes, he felt as if his whole generation was in a swamp of indecision, isolated, alone, like himself. A number of his classmates had taken refuge in some of the various cults that had sprouted up on the campus. He had resisted that as well, and all the other “-ologies” and causes that were then fashionable.

  Now, suddenly, his mother had given him a cause, a mission. To find Isis. But why? He decided not to answer that question. She wanted me to do it, he convinced himself, excited by the potential adventure, a search for something.

  “Don’t worry about me, Dad,” he told his father as they embraced at the airport. He could smell the whiskey breath. “And you take care of yourself.”

  “Be careful, Osiris,” his father said, turning away tear-filled eyes. He had never before called him that.

  Chapter Two

  His hand brushed the coffee cup, spilling the black liquid, rattling the saucer, and hurling him into the explosive present. He was conscious again of the amorphous movement of the traffic, human, animal, and vehicular. The cultural shock, he decided, was beginning to subside, and he began to individualize the images before him, recognizing bits and pieces of the helter-skelter moving mass.

  He observed how cabs, operated like jitneys, passengers solidly packed, were hailed. It was a precarious operation with hopeful riders lunging like fanatics toward the crawling vehicles without regard for personal safety. He observed, too, the methods of boarding the rattling ramshackle buses, few of recent vintage. A hand reached out to grip metal or human. Some people managed to insinuate themselves into the tightly packed mass. Others hung out of the doorless openings, while ragged kids in pajamas or djellabas hitched on the rear.

  Leaving five piastres on the wooden table, now bathed in blinding sunlight, he rushed headlong into the ant herd. The art of getting a taxi would take more practice, he decided, when his first three attempts ended in failure. He opted, instead, for the bus, one that headed vaguely in the direction that the concierge had described. His main landmark would be the Muhammad Ali Mosque in the Citadel, the highest point in Cairo.

  Grabbing a handhold on the edge of the doorless opening of the first bus he saw, he hoisted himself aboard, pushing himself into a stench of pulsating bodies. Fearful of being pushed into the interior, he hung partially outside, watching for the mosque. The bus lumbered haltingly through streets teeming with humanity. The bazaars were jammed, saleable goods lined up on the thoroughfares in patternless disarray. Over the stink of smog and food grown gamey in the heat, he caught the familiar whiff of hashish among the distinguishable effluvia. Even the odors were becoming individualized in his mind.

  Incomprehensibly, all traffic suddenly stopped dead in its tracks as a barefoot shepherd holding a withered stick herded a flock of sheep across the road, leaving a trail of black pellet droppings in its wake.

  Finally, the traffic moved again, and he noted that it was heading upward, sn
aking through the crowds, past dreary open storefronts, tiny dank coffee shops and cubicle factories where workmen, oblivious to the crowds, plied their various crafts. Bolts of multicolored cloth, throne-like chairs trimmed in gilt, hanging carcasses of lambs, blue and flyspecked in the sun, shared the narrow streets with halfnaked babies, sleeping dogs, goats, donkeys, and mothers whose heavy breasts nursed the eager mouths of their offspring.

  The mosque came into view, the tip of its dome glinting in the sun, as it towered above the brown formidable stones of the Citadel wall.

  Ahead, he knew, remembering the map, was the vast necropolis, the City of the Dead, just across from the old Roman aqueduct. He had no idea what to expect. Cemeteries to him were neat silent monuments to the dead, studded with polished granite stones, like the place where his mother was buried. He had learned that the population explosion had brought people from the villages into the city. Since housing was impossible to find, they had simply moved into untended mausoleums and had actually begun to establish some sort of living society among these relics of the dead.

  He saw it, stretching beside the wide road that ran parallel to the aqueduct, in the center of which ran a green electric tram, surprisingly modern, although already revealing the first signs of poor maintenance. As far as the eye could see, stretching almost to the foot of the high Muquatt Hills, their sides showing the stone cuttings of distant centuries, he saw long lines of attached mausoleums whose walls, neutered by time, crumbled in the mist of dust and heat.

  Puffs of smoke floated over the mausoleums’ domes, attesting to the existence of pulsating life within. The skeletons, he imagined, slumbering beneath the ground in their dark sepulchres, seemed incidental, intruders actually, in the mundane pursuits of the living.