Mother Nile Read online

  People walked the narrow rock-strewn streets, going about their daily chores, just as they did in the nearby high-rise slums, where sheep and goats poked their heads over the balconies between the banners of drying wash hung like welcoming pennants exhibited to greet a conquering army.

  Jumping off the bus, he walked under a crumbling gate, where a crowd watched two youths attempt to repair an aging motor scooter. He followed a narrow road deeper into the necropolis. Some of the mausoleums were locked, showing the attempt by some families to retain some dignity for their dead. In open spaces behind the mausoleums were gravestones marking sepulchres of families who could not afford mausoleums. Over each stone and mausoleum were faded markings indicating family names, dates of death, and, above these, a Koranic inscription.

  He remembered what his mother had said about the inscription above the entrance to the Al-Hakim mausoleum, “Come to my sanctuary.” Moving deeper into the necropolis, he soon realized that he was in an impenetrable vaporous maze. Even the brown Muquatt Hills seemed barely distinguishable in the distance. He wandered aimlessly, studying the inscriptions on the mausoleums.

  He moved through disparate groups of people. Goats, sheep, and dogs crouched near the walls, husbanding thin slivers of shade. Occasionally, he would glance inside a mausoleum where humans and animals crouched in the darkness. Once, a woman appeared with a battered pot of murky liquid, throwing its contents on the dusty road.

  Searching the faces he passed, he was unsure who he might ask. Finally, he spotted an older man in a red djellaba. He was not certain whether it was the color or the man’s lined and ancient face that provided the visage of authority.

  “The mausoleum of the family Al-Hakim,” he asked. “Do you know the way?”

  The man watched him thoughtfully, stroking his chin with inspective curiosity. Si sensed the look of a baksheesh solicitation and put his hand in his pocket.

  “Al-Hakim,” the man repeated, making much of the inquiry.

  “‘Come to my sanctuary’ is the inscription over the doorway,” Si pressed, looking for some sign of recognition in the man’s lined face.

  To spur the man’s memory, he extracted a roll of bills and handed him an Egyptian pound, knowing it was far out of line in terms of baksheesh value for such a casual encounter. He would have given a hundred times more for the correct answer. The man smiled, showing a mouthful of pink gum. His brown fingers scooped in the pound.

  Sensing someone nearby, Si noted that two young men had watched the transaction and were eyeing the roll of bills in his hand. He quickly thrust it into his pocket.

  “In that direction,” the man said with solemnity. “About a kilometer.” He pointed vaguely down a narrow road that threaded its way endlessly along the crumbling rows of mausoleums. When Si turned again, the man was gone.

  As he walked, he knew he was being followed. Turning, he saw a group of smiling teenagers in filthy patterned djellabas watching him, making no attempt to hide their interest. When he moved, they moved in tandem. The deeper he ventured into the necropolis, the more disoriented he started to become.

  “The mausoleum of Al-Hakim?” he asked a youngish woman.

  She held a naked baby on her hip. Flies swarmed around the child’s eyes, nose, and mouth. The woman made no attempt to shoo them away. He repeated his inquiry, but he could not resist scattering the flies on the baby’s face. The woman looked at him as if he were mad and flounced away, indignant.

  Stumbling into an alley of makeshift shops set up in the doorways of mausoleums, he saw a man slicing a carcass of bluish fly-encrusted lamb. A woman squatted in the shade of a broken wall near a pile of shriveled oranges. A young man scooped brown beans from a sack into a funnel of newspaper. Turning, he glared openly at his pursuers. They were relentless now. It was impossible to dismiss the growing sense of danger he felt.

  The sun rose higher through the smog and he felt it burn his forehead and nose. His T-shirt was soaked with perspiration and the dust began to cake on his exposed feet. He felt as if he were “it” in some bizarre game, the object of which was to taunt him with confusion and fear.

  When he turned a corner, they turned a corner. There were about six of them, stalking him. The danger was now as tangible as the oppressive heat.

  He was tempted to shout, “Bolis,” the Arabic word for police, but the lack of any authority and sense of anarchy were too compelling.

  The tug on his sleeve startled him. He had just flattened himself against a doorway, a futile action, since it seemed to make him even more conspicuous. People looked at him strangely. Every person in sight was a potential beacon. There was no way to lose himself, and the tug on his sleeve seemed like the first onslaught of his pursuers.

  He found himself looking into large luminous brown eyes set in a smooth coppery, high-cheeked face. It belonged to a tallish, slender boy with curly hair cropped close to the skull. Si grasped the boy’s upper arm, feeling the thin bones beneath the pajama-striped djellaba. His grip tightened and he was sure he was hurting the boy, who bore the pain without acknowledgment.

  “Follow me,” the boy whispered in Arabic. There was no time for any decision, and Si responded mechanically to what seemed like a sympathetic imperative. He released his grip and the boy flashed by, loping, graceful as a deer. Si’s reaction was mindless, automatic, and he followed the striped djellaba. It looked like a billowing sail in a heavy breeze.

  Giving himself up entirely to the boy’s whim, Si followed swiftly, turning, crouching, moving along a low wall of crumbling stones, then into another narrow alley lined with small mausoleums. The people he saw were always the same in texture, color and odor, as if the same group had been assembled and reassembled, like a traveling road show.

  His heart pumped heavily, spurred by the heat and exertion, but the boy was relentless, never pausing, never looking back, always that wisp of striped sail just ahead. Occasionally, he disappeared. But soon the tug on his sleeve signaled him, and they were off again, as if the djellaba sail was tacking on a spurt of strong wind.

  Time seemed suspended. The fiery disc of sun was paralyzed in space. The brown hills of Muquatt disappeared completely in a shimmering heat fog. The sliver of billowing stripes suddenly burrowed into a low tunnel, and Si followed without hesitation. It struck him suddenly that he was Alice following the White Rabbit. He smiled at the image.

  Crouching, he moved along the dark tunnel, which continued interminably, following the sound of the boy’s crunching step ahead of him. Then there was only silence.

  Hesitating, he lowered himself into a deeper crouch, testing the blackness with his hand, which he moved like a flap over his eyes. An acrid, dusty flavor coated his tongue and as he tried to swallow it away, a burst of light brightened the tunnel’s edge and he hurried toward it.

  The boy was sitting cross-legged in a vault lined with rectangular stones, the upper walls of which were lined with a deep shelf. A candle rested in a depression on the stone floor, feebly illuminating the small chamber. The boy, he realized, had fixed it up into a kind of all-purpose room with a straw pallet and a potpourri of cast-off household objects, a chipped plate, a dented metal cup, a battered basin, and a pile of dog-eared Arabic paperbacks. Si could not stand to his full height, finally squatting to face the boy.

  “This is my place,” the boy said, proudly. Si looked around, letting his eyes roam the squared walls, grateful now for the instinct that made him follow the boy.

  “Better for the living than the dead,” the boy said. Behind the words was a faint, lilting good-humored giggle. “Robbers have been pinching the bodies for years.” The space was obviously an abandoned sepulchre, the shelf reserved for bodies.

  “You live here?” Si asked.

  “Welcome to my house,” the boy said, his full lips curling over perfect white teeth. Si wondered if the boy was teasing him. But the boy’s good humor was disar
ming. Si put out his hand and the boy took it, revealing a supple strength.

  “Trouble was looking for you, my friend,” the boy said, releasing Si’s hand.

  “I wasn’t looking for it. I was stupid. Tempting fate. What would they have done?”

  “At best, a tap on the head and you would be parted with your wealth.”

  “Wealth?” He patted his pants pocket. He had cashed fifty Egyptian pounds out of his five hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, which he had pasted under the baseboard of his hotel bed.

  Suddenly suspicious of the boy’s motives, Si waited for the outstretched palm. He was being set up for some baksheesh, he decided. Nevertheless, he was grateful for the rescue. The boy was obviously streetwise, a survivor. In the candlelight, his face looked delicate, the chin rising gracefully from a perch above a swan-like neck.

  “I am an honest businessman,” the boy said.

  “That figures,” Si said, happy to have the transaction in the open. “Hell, kid, I’m grateful. I wasn’t getting anywhere.” He recalled his sense of mission. “I’m looking for the Al-Hakim mausoleum.”

  The boy grew thoughtful, rubbing his chin in concentration.

  “Al-Hakim,” he repeated. “Al-Hakim.”

  “‘Come to my sanctuary’ written over the tomb,” Si offered. Having seen the endless lines of crumbling mausoleums, Si was now beginning to despair of ever locating the place. Besides, he had no idea what he might find. Still, it was the only starting point he had.

  The boy continued to rub his chin. Then he nodded tentatively. “I might know it,” he said.

  “Might?” It seemed like a ploy.

  “On the western side. Closer to the hills.” The boy nodded, reaffirming his knowledge. “Many children. An old woman who cares for them.”

  Remembering the old man who had misguided him, Si was suspicious. The boy must have seen his doubts.

  “I live here,” he explained. “I know this place. I know the mausoleum of Al-Hakim. It is not as mysterious as you think.” He paused. “I will take you there.”

  “And how much will that cost me?”

  The boy stood up and paced the stone crypt. His height just missed the roof.

  “I work by a time factor,” he said solemnly.

  Si resisted a compulsive giggle. The boy seemed quite serious now, businesslike.

  “Like a taxi,” Si muttered.

  The boy nodded.

  “And the meter is running?”

  The boy stroked his chin.

  “Already you have engaged five piastres’ worth of time.” Si reached into his pocket, but the boy’s hand stayed him. “I trust you,” the boy said, smiling. Then he turned toward the tunnel exit, stooped, and was off again.

  Soon Si was once more following the moving striped sail, heading toward a dot of sunlight in the distance. The light was blinding and he had to press against his eyeballs with his fingers, opening them gradually to admit the piercing brightness. When he could see, he noted that the boy was waiting, his graceful neck twisting like that of a cautious bird.

  Moving with difficulty through the narrow crowded “streets” of the necropolis, they found little refuge from the relentless sun. There seemed no pattern to the boy’s journey. But then there was no pattern to anything in this place. Even the edges of mortality seemed frayed and illdefined.

  He found himself searching the faces of the women they passed, particularly those who might be about Isis’s age. But even the differences between various ages seemed blurred as well.

  They moved for what seemed an eternity. Occasionally, the boy would stop, survey a line of grim mausoleums, and move on. Si followed obediently.

  A visit to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library had offered some sketchy information on Muslim burial habits. Wealthier families built mausoleums over sepulchres, not only to house the dead but the living as well. Relatives paid their respects by visiting and sometimes spending the night. Many had paid caretakers to guard the mausoleums, but as the families died out, mausoleums were abandoned and quickly occupied by an army of dispossessed, impoverished settlers from the countryside, who were lured to the city by the promise of a better life.

  Now, the vast necropolis was a squalid slum, housing hundreds of thousands of people. The government, obviously beset by an impossible housing situation, looked the other way. Cairo had been built to house a million people, not the eight million who lived there now. To many, it was still, obviously, a burial place. But, to those who lived there, it was home.

  Si had looked into many of the mausoleum’s dark interiors crowded with people and animals. Ubiquitous, smiling, dark, flyspecked children and scrawny animals wallowed together on the stone or hard mud floors. Some of the mausoleums, oddly, had television antennas poking from crumbling rooftops, like rotting cornstalks in half-harvested fields.

  Incongruous as that was, the sound of blaring pop music—the Bee Gees, Si noted—screamed out from one of the open interiors. Was this the past or future? he wondered, spitting a wad of saliva into the brown earth as if to validate the present. Occasionally, Si sensed that the boy had made a wrong turn, retracing his steps. He did not let him out of his sight, fearful that he might never find his way out of this place.

  “There. That one,” the boy said, pointing. At the entrance stoop, an ancient woman in an incredibly filthy black malaya squatted, surrounded by a group of half-naked children. Ignoring them, Si moved closer and inspected the faded stone facade, his fingers tracing the Arabic words engraved there. His heart pounded as he saw the words “AlHakim. Come to my sanctuary.”

  The children reached out to touch his legs as he moved past the old woman into the dark inner chamber of the mausoleum. The boy followed. A drowsing old man lay in a corner, indifferent to their entrance. A young woman sat on the floor nursing a baby, while three preadolescent girls sat cross-legged on the floor weaving mats.

  Beyond, in another chamber, a group of dark adult male faces stared at a flickering television set on which a bearded, turbaned man read passages from the Koran. The faces turned toward him briefly, unmoved from their solemnity, and he felt the sense of harsh intrusion. Over everything hung the smell of rotted fruit, unwashed bodies, a persistent stink of body wastes and the acrid odor of hashish.

  The only alert eyes in the darkened hovel were those of the young woman nursing the baby from a flaccid breast. As the baby nursed, she patted its buttocks and smiled. Always the smiles. It was unnerving. What was there to smile about here?

  “Is this your house?” he asked the nursing woman gently, watching the boy’s face for signs of disapproval. In this atmosphere, he sensed, tone and protocol were important.

  She looked toward the drowsing old man, whose heavy lids occasionally opened, watching them with little curiosity. He was obviously ill.

  “Have you lived here a long time?”

  “Always,” the woman said, giggling suddenly, contemplating Si as if he were an idiot. Was this Isis? he wondered, searching the woman’s face for some characteristic feature of his mother. But her face was too dark, hinting at splashes of Nubian blood.

  “I’m looking for someone who lived here in 1952,” he asked politely. The question seemed ludicrous. These people had no sense of time. “She was a baby then. My sister.”

  The nursing child must have pinched the young woman’s nipple and she slapped its behind. It let go of the breast and squealed. She squelched it by stuffing the nipple back between its lips.

  “Ask the old man,” she said, pointing. The three girls weaving on the floor laughed, mocking him.

  Si squatted beside the old man and the boy did the same. The people watching television paid no attention. The sudden interest in him seemed to rouse the old man, and his wrinkled chicken-skin eye pouches opened to semi-alertness. Straightening a dirty knitted skullcap, he rose to a sitting
position and leaned against the wall.

  “Sheikh,” Si began, using the respectful word, watching the old head cock toward him. Si raised his voice. “Sheikh,” he repeated.

  The old man nodded. Si hesitated, annoyed by his own loud voice. The three weaving girls watched him, eager for the diversion. The nursing lady began a rhythmic slapping on the baby’s buttocks. From the other room, the monotonous recital continued.

  “Did you live here in 1952?”

  The old man frowned, but the expression in the eyes indicated that the man was quietly calculating. “Twenty-seven years ago,” Si added to buttress the flicker of recollection. The old man nodded. A group of children clustered in the doorway, watching them.

  “Do you remember a girl baby? Isis?” Si’s eyes, now accustomed to the dim light, watched the old man’s face. It was impassive, perhaps from habit. He shook his head.

  “My mother brought her here,” Si pressed. “Her name was Farrah.”

  Behind him, the old woman who squatted in the doorway seemed to stir, shifting closer. There was, he knew, an absurdity about the idea, a mad presumption that there was any reasonable connection between these people and what had occurred twenty-seven years ago. Still, he persisted. One had to start somewhere.

  Squatting there, Si watched the old man, uncomprehending, irritated by his invisibility. In the other room, the recital continued without pause. Even the children who had filled the doorway had wandered out again into the dusty sunbaked yard.

  “No,” Si mumbled. Something, indeed, is wrong, he thought.

  “If you know something, you are doing a cruel thing,” he said. But his voice was a whisper and he was certain the old man did not hear him. A wave of frustration overwhelmed him and he stood up.

  “Where the hell is that little bastard?” he shouted in English. The faces in front of the television set turned toward him, their features lost in the shadows.

  “You’re all assholes,” he said, as if he were intoning some abiding truth. “To accept this shit.” He whispered the last statement, struggling to tamp down his anger. He felt put-upon, victimized, by all of them, by this preposterous place.