Fastest Service in Egypt? Organ Removal

Despite the rather preoccupying pain in my side, a droll thought occurred to me as I waited outside the As-Salaam Hospital emergency room: I had actually had an easier time communicating with the staff here in Cairo than with the heavily African-American staff at the Brooklyn Hospital Center right down my block in Fort Greene last year. To be fair, my visit to the latter had been for sudden loss of hearing in one ear, which may have had an effect; but linguistic comparisons aside, As-Salaam Hospital looked all-around cleaner and less chaotic then the zoo at the BHC. I tentatively relaxed.

Then my summoned boyfriend Aaron wheeled in, looking much more worried than I had yet allowed myself to get. He had originally guessed that the odd pain in my side might be appendicitis, and had no doubt been working himself up about it all morning while I stubbornly prepared to have a normal day at class. A stop by the university clinic had however revealed that such was not to be:

“So it might be appendicitis?”
The doctor shuffled papers and blinked at me with the lackadaisical expression that was to define my day of seeking diagnosis.
“Well . . . either it is an appendicitis . . . or it is something else.”
“So I should go to the hospital.”
“Yes . . . you will go to As-Salaam Hospital, in Mohandisin. A very good hospital.”
“Okay . . . and um, when should I go?”
“Oh . . . right away, of course . . . But do not worry!”

So it seems the Egyptian tradition of sugar-coating, the culture of ma‘lesh (meaning both “Sorry about that” and “No big deal”) extends even to the realm of medical emergencies. Perhaps it is very American of me to want to hear a suitable degree of urgency in the voices of my caretakers, but I found this persistent nonchalance quite unnerving.

Of course Aaron’s presence in the waiting room shattered the outer defenses I had summoned up in my solitude. I crumpled into his shoulder and sniffled. Fortunately, we didn’t have too much time for boo-hooing because they called my name almost immediately.

A skinny, mustached doctor offered us chairs and, gathering that we were American, began questioning me in clipped, business-like English. I didn’t protest; this was no time to show off. He then became the second of what turned out to be many medical employees who needed to press down on the sensitive spot on my abdomen just to make sure it really hurt. In this and in all following check-ups, there was no ritual donning of hospital robe; indeed, there was no removal of clothing at all. When I moved to pull down my skirt he nipped it in the bud: “Ah ah ah! That won’t be necessary.”

Still making no certain proposals as to what might be causing the pain in my side, the doctor dismissed us to get a blood test, which required another hour’s wait, and revealed nothing. Befuddled, the doctor called in his senior (both in age and mustache growth). Taking a more jovial approach to his foreign charge, Doctor Number Two (Bushy Mustache) addressed me in Arabic. When I responded, First Doctor (Skinny Mustache) did a double take.

“But . . . you speak Arabic?”
“Well, yes, I just . . . I’m not at my best today,” I accompanied this excuse with a broad gesture that I hoped would express my general state of disrepair.
“Lovely! Let’s speak Arabic then,” tinkled Bushy Mustache, and escorted me to the bed to run the same series of pokes and questions, now bil-'arabiyya. As I responded in kind, Skinny Mustache quipped to Aaron that I spoke Arabic better than English. It may indeed have seemed so, since somehow speaking about such personal things as your insides can be easier when concentrating on relaying it in code. Bushy Mustache decided that I needed an ultrasound, although I had sworn before Skinny Mustache’s doubtful eyes that I was not pregnant or suffering from any venereal diseases.

The giggling gatekeeper of the ultrasound room let us in after another hour’s excruciating wait, throughout which she provided mild entertainment by flirting with a lone older man, also ostensibly "waiting" although for no apparent reason. The ulstrasound medic did not see fit to remove any of my clothing for the ultrasound either; instead, his young female assistant pulled back both shirt and skirt as far as possible without revealing anything PG-13, then tucked a white towel modestly around my waist. Woe betide the loose woman who dares to show her panties during her ultrasound! Not here at As-Salaam.

To our partial relief, the ultrasound revealed nothing decisive as to the source of the pain. However, we were not yet free: leave from the ultrasound wing was only granted upon receipt of ones “official” folder of internal photographs. We had seen multiple exemplars painstakingly assembled by Giggles and her ever-shifting Girl Crew; although as far as we could tell this task consisted only in a bit of cut and paste, the artistes performed it with evident pomp and relish. My file was no exception. Giggles laid out her implements (photos, scissors, gluestick) one at a time, chattering away all the while with the omnipresent Lone Dude. Snip, snip. I felt each unskillful clip as if nicking away at my now very besotted nerves. Snip, snip. My appendix is going to explode! Let me do the arts and crafts for the love of Allah!

Oblivious to my mounting ire, Giggles abandoned the task entirely to exchange travel agent numbers with Loner. Rather than stop the conversation to expedite this process, the blithe pair continued their banter, such that the digits botched and piecemeal in its midst required multiple repetitions. I watched the glue dry on the back of one of my pictures. With the slowness of a sleepy or perhaps disabled child, the charged receptionist resumed her snipping, noticed the dried glue, and in bewilderment laid her work aside once again, just in time to intercept a phone call (“Izayyak? Winta izayyak? Al-humdu-lillah, al humdu-lillah, izayyak inta, ‘amal eh? Al-humdu-lillah, kwoyiss . . .” and variations thereof, forever).

Just when my will to restrain myself from ripping the photographs away from their incompetent captor had dwindled almost to nothing, the final piece appeared: a printout from the ultrasound medic, which apparently had been the hold-up all along. Oops. Sorry I hated you, Giggles. We made good our escape.

Back downstairs with my new photo album, we still had no conclusive evidence of what might have gone wrong in my lower right abdomen.
“In this case,” mused Bushy Mustache with a whimsical smile, “I suppose we cannot rule out appendicitis.”
“So it is appendicitis.”
“Well . . . probably . . .”
“And what does that mean? I need surgery? When? Here?” By this point I was finally in tears, surrounded by the quizzical faces of B. Mustache’s team.
“Hmmm, yes. Do not worry. Why are you worrying? Do not cry.”

Still smiling pleasantly to himself, Bushy Mustache began dialing up surgeons’ numbers. Each contact triggered the obligatory litany of greetings, queries after children and wives, a few inside jokes, and ended on a ma‘lesh, sorry, no can do. But somewhere in this light-hearted chattering Bushy found his man, and sent me off to be admitted.

“You must not worry,” he implored me once more. “He will do a lathroscopy, an exploratory surgery to see if the appendix is really the problem. If it is, we take it out, khalass!”

And if it isn’t? “Exploratory” surgery? I have never before had any kind of surgery, much less an ambiguous reconnaissance mission of my still mysteriously embroiled organs.

Fortunately, I was so glad to be done waiting that I didn’t really care. One Egyptian surgery, coming up. In the meantime, I discovered that my otherwise impeccable hospital room had no toilet paper.

***

Nasim Gerges, my surgeon, strode in flanked with assistants (admirers? minstrels? there were a lot of them). Tall, clean-shaven, and clad in a black button-up shirt, his presence demanded confidence and credibility. Upon a brusque reprise of the now-familiar jabs to the abdomen, he declared that indeed I was suffering from acute appendicitis and must be operated upon at once. He swept from the room with an order that I must not eat or drink. Someone handed me a hospital robe and told me to suit up.

All systems finally appeared to be “go,” but by this point the director of my Arabic program and my friend Justin had arrived, and much fretting and catching up ensued. After a whole day of waiting around, I had at last slowed my nerves to a less excitable pace. However, someone behind the scenes must have turned the green light on the As-Salaam staff, because suddenly we were the obstruction to progress. The nurse who had given me my robe and cap poked his head into our room for the third time, only to find me still in street clothes gabbing with my visitors.

“Yella! We’re ready!”

Wow, I guess he’s serious. I donned the hospital robe with characteristic lack of skill and hoisted myself onto the waiting mobile bed.

Perhaps the responsibles at As-Salaam Hospital had not bothered to measure the actual width of their hallways and elevators before ordering the wheely beds, because we had quite a rugged ride to the operating room. A fellow at once tall and roly-poly had gotten the job as transporter, and he navigated my unwieldy vehicle as well as he could. After each big bump he would grunt or ask if I was okay, then interrupt himself to intone, “Bismillah alrahman alrahiiiiim” whenever we passed through a doorway. I could not decide whether I found this reassuring. Once we were on less treacherous ground, he began to chat down to me with warm, fatherly interest.

“Amrikiyya! Wi tikkalammi il-‘arabiyya!”
“Yes, I am trying to learn Arabic.”
“You live in Egypt then? How long have you been here? Almost six months! Well my dear, you must go out, must see Egypt! Egypt is beautiful! What have you seen in Egypt?”

One would almost think he was reproaching me for wasting my time in this boring old hospital when such marvels awaited. I began telling him about my trip to Luxor and Aswan to reassure him, but he had worked himself into high fervor and cut me off.

“Ah, Luxor! Wonderful, isn’t it wonderful? But there is so much more! Hurry, you must get out and see Egypt!”

I tried to express enthusiasm and promise to fulfill this vague task from my prostrate position on the bed, now being wheeled into the operating room proper. My escort’s jolly face was joined by a team of others, peering down and murmuring until they realized I could understand.

“An American who speaks Arabic! I don’t believe it!”
“And look at her, what are the men supposed to do with her around? She’s zay al-amar, lovely as the full moon!”

Since I had not eaten all day, was suffering from an unprecedented pain in my side and was dressed all in white, this traditional idiom had probably never been truer of me. I gave my admirers a wan smile. Still exclaiming and gossiping about their exotic patient, they transferred me onto the operating bed and began to examine my abdomen. A robust, grandfatherly fellow, introduced to me as Sharif, fingered my navel piercing.

“Eh da, what is this? This needs to come out.”

I began trying to unscrew it, and explained that I had never tried to remove it before. Members of the surgery team took turns leaning in to peer at this latest evidence of American oddity. I joked sheepishly that it had been a sort of eighteen-year-old rebellion thing. Well, now it was rebelling against us. Sharif boomed that I should relax, he would give it a try. He brandished his thick fingers and began twisting.

The crowds were starting to turn on my raciest piece of jewelry. The surgery needed to begin; this little thing wasn’t expensive, was it? Couldn’t we just cut it off? But Sharif, now deaf to them in his determination, renewed his efforts. When at last he held the little bugger aloft, I fear his colleagues did not empathize with his sense of triumph.

“Ha HA! Who got it out? Sharif got it out! Miss Anna, I expect you’ll be needing me when the time comes to put it back in! Either way, look: she’s got the incision already for us in the right place!”

I laughed and liked Sharif a whole lot. The next thing I remember they were showing me my appendix.
“They put it in a kohsery container!” I heard someone guffawing. Figures.

This is koshery, a popular Egyptian streetfood that comes in a distinctive plastic bowl.
While many disagree, I think that an infected appendix thrown in this putrid mix may even constitute and improvement.

Back upstairs in my room, I tried through a haze of drugs to assure a full room of well-wishers that I felt great, then (rather stupidly) to wrestle past Aaron to get a drink of still-forbidden water. Then they were gone and I was left starring in my first but strangely familiar hospital-room scene. Dripping I.V.; iodine-stained-sheets; fading in and out. You know, Bushy Mustache was right: what was I so worried about? Maybe Egypt isn’t so different. They seem to have figured out surgery, anyway; nothing to turn one’s nose up at.

Throughout the night, a veritable gaggle of adolescent-looking nurses filed through my patchy consciousness, changing my IV bags and asking me how I was doing. Then suddenly, two of them doubled up to oust me from my bed so they could change it. I could barely move. They shoved me into a chair and proceeded to turn the bed-making into a doozy of a brainteaser. Then they urged me to use the bathroom, a trip that I pointed out with a mute gesture to my arm would require unhooking the I.V. After some whispered conferring, one of them unscrewed the tube strapped to my vein. I watched with some interest as blood began immediately to spurt from the opening. After a few more moments’ flutter and argument, my ladies-in-waiting stanched the flow and I hobbled wordless into the bathroom.

Moments later, one of them bustled in and proceeded to fiddle with my arm tube again and tie a clean hospital robe on me before I could rise from the toilet. Throughout these exchanges I made a futile intra-lingual sounds of surprise and objection, but I didn’t really seek to protest. The Egyptian health care system had gotten me this far, after all; I may as well see it through to the end.

But as those bickering youngsters jerked my bleeding arm back and forth, I couldn’t help but surmise that the folks down at As-Salaam Hospital have some details to iron out. I hope they do; I may just want to come back next time I need a shotgun surgery.

Madam Afaf Strikes Again

When the landline rings at 8 a.m. on the 2nd of the month, one can be fairly certain who’s calling.
However, I feigned delighted surprise through my morning gravelliness to hear Madam Afaf, our landlady, on the other end.

“Izzayyik?”
“Winti izayyik?”
“Al-humdulillah, bikhayr!”
“Al-humdulillah.”

As the cordialities unfurled and ran their normal gamut of repetition and variation, I began to prepare myself for the inevitable question. Where was the rent money? My answer: Tomorrow. But it turned out Madam Afaf had other fish to fry.

“Habibti, you speak such good Arabic. Listen: a man will be coming around to take the census,” she began. “He will want to know how many people are living in the apartment and who it belongs to.”

How sweet of Madam to make sure that her half-wit foreign tenants got an advance warning to reflect on these puzzles. I eagerly solved them on the spot to put her soul at ease:
“Well, there are still just three of us . . . and the apartment belongs to you.”
Not so fast. As it turns out, all is, as usual, not as it seems.
“No, no habibti . . . Tell him, this apartment belongs to Mohammad Fahim, but he is traveling and you are guests in his home.” She spoke as clearly as possible. I was not to fuck this up.

Huh?

“Do not say you are residents. You are guests. He will be traveling for a few months, then he will be back.” I detected a shade of affected conspiratorial hush.

Duh, okay. My sluggish morning brain, fully charged with the task of linguistic decoding, did not manage to articulate any of the rather obvious relevant questions regarding this enigma (e.g. Who on earth is this absent and endlessly generous Mohammad Fahim?). Instead, I repeated back the command to her evident delight, as if we had plotted out this grand government trumping (or tax evasion, or whatever) together. Well, lucky you, Afaf. This one follows directions. As our chat was going quite swimmingly so far, she threw out what she now staged as an incidental interest: our paying the three months of rent we owed her.

Last time we had been late too. I had explained to her that as soon as my other roommates returned from America we would pay immediately, to which she cooed that she certainly hoped so, or we would have to leave the apartment at once. Madam Afaf doesn’t mess around. Then she showed up a day before we had agreed upon, only to be greeted at the door by one of the Italian boys I had met in Dahab and was harboring during their stay in Cairo. Shirtless and singing, as was his wont, Umberto slung the door wide, then ran off to fetch me with his tail between his legs. By the time I got there, Afaf had already turned on her heel and informed me primly over her shoulder that she would return tomorrow. Now, she implied when I protested, I was quite ostentatiously indisposed.

The next day as she sat in our de-Italianoed and re-ladied living room, I blubbered an explanation for my rambunctious and plentiful male company, but the impeccable, fashionable-purse-clutching Afaf seemed unfazed. Her voice still honeyed beneath what just might have been a derisive curl of her lip, she prounounced,
“Inti hurra.”
"You are free." You are free to commit whatever sins you want on the old-lady couches I bought for your apartment.
“As long as you give me the money!” she snipped, then forced an accompanying gale of titters at once both girlish and shrewd, in which we were invited to join. The fat wad of bills exchanged hands amidst this eruption of shared mirth.

This time around, I offered my landlady yet another viable excuse: I had been in the hospital getting my appendix out and hadn’t left the house all week. Madam Afaf was properly horrified and pledged readiness to bring me anything I might need. I assured her that I was well taken care of, that I had a substitute family (Aaron-the-Supermom, for those that know him) here in Cairo and would be just fine.
“But I’m a mother too,” she reminded me, in her sugariest tones. Right, Mama Afaf. As long as we give you the money.
What bothered Afaf most in my tale of woe however was not that I had had emergency surgery but that I had not thought to have her brother, my upstairs neighbor, do it.
“Why did you go through all that trouble? Doctor Sharif was right upstairs, he could have taken care of it right away!”

I have visited Doctor Sharif’s drawing room, in search of a cure for a nasty, face-deforming bugbite. I do not remember seeing sufficient machinery for removing an appendix. Rather than pursue her logic on this one, I decided to simply express my confidence that had I thought more quickly before mincing off to the hospital, Doctor Sharif could have performed an exemplary surgery. His devout sister agreed whole-heartedly. Once again, family connections trump all other rationale. Was I not as good as Doctor Sharif’s territory, living as I did in such convenient range?

The rent now decisively relegated to a comfortably auxiliary role in our conversation, we agreed in passing that I would leave it downstairs with Nabil, tomorrow at 4. We said a cheery goodbye amidst her refrain of “Alfi salaama”s to quicken my healing. It occurred to me as I puzzled through this new shade of sketch shed on our habitation of 40 Sharia‘ Mesaha by the mysterious Mohamad Fahim that I might ought to work my way deeper into Madam Afaf's enigmatic ring, and further master its accompanying rules of etiquette and trickery. For the discussion effecting the retrieval of my security deposit will require an epic performance indeed.

Rock Like an Egyptian

It struck me as a bit strange that Egypt’s most famous pop-rock group, Wust el-Beled (Egyptian slang for “downtown”) would elect to perform at such a stiff venue as the Gomhoriyya Theater. They looked a bit out of their element scattered across the wide stage, playing for an audience trapped in plush folding chairs. What I did not know, until later developments in their set prompted Aaron to inform me, was that a member of Wust el-Beled had recently made a public announcement: his commitment to Islamic morals no longer allowed him to play in venues serving alcohol. Which narrowed down their options to such elegant joints as the Gomhoriyya Theater.

To be fair, the theater’s old-timey sophistication could be interpreted as “hip” if you were looking for it. And many attendees of the Wust el-Beled concert probably were: the high percentage of baggy pants and funny hats and the lower percentage of veils marked a significant divergence from the style of the Cairo masses. However, as I noted the prevalence of English smattered stylishly across their conversations and the decidedly expensive look to their digs, I gathered that these fashion plates had most likely not drawn inspiration to embrace a bohemian lifestyle from a sparse and humble upbringing; no, much like Williamsburg’s “trust-fund hipsters,” most of these cats had probably inherited their access to coolness along with the many privileges of belonging to Cairo’s richest, most Westernized, and incidentally smallest social class.

Fashionable youngsters aside, the large number of elderly concert-goers sparked my curiosity. Do Egyptian music groups tend to cater to all generations, or do these folks simply have season passes to the Gomhoriyya? Either way, their visible enjoyment of the music attested to their capacity to enjoy Egypt’s latest brand of “cool.” And as I was to find out, Wust el-Beled is geared to please adherents to all manner of musical tastes.

The band boasts seven musicians, appearing to range in age from twenties to forties (it’s hard to gauge age around here – people seem to go from nineteen to fifty in one fell swoop), and in skin tones from olive-toned white to dredlocks-black. Wust el-Beled’s three guitarists affirm the Egyptian scene’s adoption of the guitar-heavy ratio ubiquitous in American rock groups. The remaining breakdown: an‘oud, a kind of Oriental lute, an electric bass, two percussionists and a vocalist, although one of the guitarists actually did more of the singing. Half of the group arrived late.

Together they struck a portrait that invoked at once a jam band and a traditional Oriental ensemble. They wore casual clothes, tee shirts, jackets, and jeans, and with the exception of the bongo-player, remained seated and concentrated throughout the performance. The frontman, if he could be interpreted as such (criteria: best-looking, highest voice, most convincing sneer), muttered commentary into his microphone between every song while the members conducted extended whispered conferences about what they might play next. From time to time the audience laughed and someone would shout out his commentary. A group of girls called out his name (Ismaïl) and squealed at the boldness of their anonymity as he squinted into the dark with a permissive smile. As the evening advanced and the band’s conduct less formal, shouted requests for favorite tunes grew more insistent. Basically like a regular rock concert.

Well, sort of. I quickly discovered that Wust el-Beled exemplifies the modern musical identity crisis. They covered styles ranging from Latino rock (inspiring Aaron’s snide nomer “the E-gipsy Kings”) to reggae to schmaltzty Arab pop to traditional Oriental pieces. However, it still came as a surprise when, toward the end of the first set, an upbeat number melted into a meditative and all-too-familiar drone. Is it? could it be? It is:

“Allaaaaaaaaaaaaahu akbar.”

The crowd went wild.

A long, brooding piece followed, in which singing members of Wust el-Beled showcased their prowess in ululation. The concert had transformed in full into a traditional interaction of performer and participant characteristic of Oriental musical occasions. These occasions are of course not concerts, but usually family or community celebrations in which all present have a role to play and certainly join in on the chorus. Yet at the same time the battling soloists and the varying responsive cheers also invoked the interaction at a jazz performance. Either way, I am no expert in Islamic law, but I know that in its most severe interpretations there was some bit about “no music for pleasure,” much less perversion of the fatiHa in rock and roll concerts, however devout the rockers. Such considerations did not seem to concern the members of Wust el-Beled or their fans, who were eating it up.

In the midst of this sacred moment, a rather comical parallel occurred to me, with a Christian rock show I had attended in high school. The concert took place in St. Cloud Technical High School’s South Auditorium, and featured a group of my classmates who called themselves “Manna-fest.” Beneath their searing electric guitars and pounding bass lines, one could make out such inspired rhymes as “Oh baby you know whenever you’re in danger/you’ve got a friend who was born in a manger” and the like. At the conclusion of the show, one of the musicians invited all willing audience members to come up to the stage and welcome Jesus into their hearts, to the accompaniment of a last, heart-wrenching number. Crowds of demonstrative teenagers swarmed to the front of South Auditorium, nno longer the territory of discordant pep band concerts but rather a holy space bathed in the stagelights’ divine beams. Tears flowed and enthused avowals fought to pierce through the amplifiers’ combined roar.

I permitted myself to imagine the corresponding scene in the Gomhoriyya Theater, should Wust el-Beled so invite their fans. They did not, of course; true to its schizophrenic character, the band soon abandoned the sacred section of its concert for more love songs and a crowd-pleasing “Free Palestine” ballad (“You can steal houses/You can steal land/But you’ll never ever steal a nation”). No, unlike Manna-fest, Wust el-Beled did not seem interested in making their religiosity the main event of their performance. To my knowledge, this particular form of inspiring the young faithful, the religious rock concert, remains foreign to Islamic culture. But seeing those hip youngsters grooving to the call to prayer in the same breath as bopping to romantic reggae and rocking out to free-Palestine, one has to wonder whether such developments are much farther off. Perhaps the conservative mullahs issuing futile fatwas against music would change their tune if they could see the extraordinary effects of the religious rock concert. I may just pen a letter to one of the usual suspects with a translation of that exemplary and compelling Onion article, “That Teen Jesus Rally Totally Rocked” to get ‘em thinking. Although the idea of Christian teeny-bopper evangelism spreading throughout this already rather troubled land does not exactly seem like a step forward. Best leave the rock concerts with a tuneful and tasteful half-time prayer break for now.

Of Jews and slips and healing cracks: Addendum

A world-renowned professor from the St. Anthony’s College Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University delivered a series of lectures on British Imperialism in the Middle East on a visit to the American University in Cairo. Doubtless familiar with the intellectual climate awaiting him, the professor must have designed his comments accordingly. He divided his lecture equally between Transjordan, Iraq and Palestine, outlining the developments in each between 1920 and 1948, all the while providing juicy anecdotal details both cheery and chilling. The professor minced no words regarding British violence and greed in each case, nor did he bypass the opportunity to draw parallels between their policies and practices then and America’s today. But he also managed to lighten the load by slipping in priggish quotes from British missives with tongue appropriately in cheek (e.g. a message sent to Transjordan’s King Abdallah to inform him that Britain viewed his recent activism in the newly founded ‘Istiqlal (Independence) party with “grave displeasure”).

After the speaker brought his lecture to a polished close, the emcee invited the audience to pose their questions. It was the first time I had attended an academic lecture in Cairo, and I awaited the scholarly commentary with curiosity.

A woman raised her hand and took the microphone. After tapping it and giggling for a few moments, she asked, in broken English,
“So do you really think that Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11th bombings?”

My respect for the professor’s professionalism multiplied tenfold when he did not snort or laugh right in her upturned, lipsticked face. My boyfriend Aaron, the professor’s onetime student, has often referred to this unwavering poise, so characteristic in fact that it has led both admiring and resentful colleagues to compare him to Gilderoy Lockhart, the fulsome phony teacher/celebrity in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. His chiseled features, self-assurance and affable manner had affirmed these allegations in my mind from our first encounter; his grace in fielding the questions of this crowd was to reveal him as a veritable paragon of public composure. Without missing a beat or dropping his smile, he reasoned that since Osama bin Laden had declared himself responsible for the attacks and no one had found any evidence to the contrary, one can hardly question his guilt.

The woman, unsatisfied with his brevity, persisted: “Well have you seen the movie Fa, Faaren, Farheit 9-11? What do you think of that?”

Mutters spread throughout the room. The professor’s smile widened, and he assured her gently that he thought the movie provided interesting commentary on the decision-making of America’s current administration. Apparently under the impression that she and this nice man had established heart-to-heart status, the woman opened her mouth to pursue her chosen line of conversation, an initiative that the emcee mercifully quashed by filching the microphone. I examined the crowd in an attempt to assess other reactions to this little performance. To the naked eye, the participants resembled those at any academic lecture; patchy rows of aging academics of furrowed brow and eccentric attire, along with a smattering of the long-haired and/or -skirted variety as well as the buttoned-up and trimmed variety of grad student. Surely this woman must have tagged along with a friend, unaware of the customary etiquette at such events.

The following two questions, regarding specifics of pre-1948 Israeli land purchase in Palestine, reassured me somewhat as to the preservation of studious decorum. Then the middle-aged Egyptian woman next to me banished such hopes.

“So what is your opinion of the number six million, the supposed number of Jews killed in the ‘ho-lo-caust?’” she raised her fingers in exaggerated mock quotation marks. I sucked in my breath. She plunged ahead. “My son, a few years ago, he wrote a paper on the ‘ho-lo-caust’ and he did lots of research on the number of Jews in Europe at the time of World War Two. He checked lots of sources, archives . . . and . . . and, well, enough to be certain that there were never more than hundreds of thousands of Jews in any European country.” Someone stop her! Is this actually happening? “And the total number they found was no more than one, maybe two million. So what do you think of this number six million?”

The professor gave a slow, inexplicable nod and paced for a moment before placing both hands on the podium and replying with unaffected decisiveness,
“I do not dispute that number, and I refer to the Holocaust with a capital H, without quotation marks. Of course we cannot know the exact number of all who were killed, but that is not important. Maybe it was five million, five hundred thousand. Maybe it was six million, two hundred thousand, I don’t know. But I do know that it was a human tragedy, and I question the motives of anyone who tries to dispute the figure six million.”

My neighbor, however, was just getting warmed up. “But not only Jews were killed! Many others! Minorities, Christians . . . you know, probably Muslims too! Where are they in the six million? Why six million Jews?”

The professor attempted to reiterate his position but she railed on:
“I am not denying anyone else’s tragedy . . . but why exaggerate it? Why is the number so sacred?”

Other voices began to chime in and she continued her harangue even after the emcee finagled the mic away from her. As the conference room teetered toward mayhem and she lost her soapbox, the woman began to lean across my lap to snip along to the Egyptian girl next to me with haughty conviction. She was completely unmoved by the professor’s response, as she was by the plea a young Egyptian man directed toward her, that denying another’s human suffering in order to take revenge on one’s own was not the way forward. She continued to grumble “Mish aktar min itnayn milyoon” (“no more than two million”) with self-righteous shakes of her fat head. I wanted to slap her. I limited my reactions to a series of stifled noises in my throat.

The hijacking of the discussion was complete. The professor submitted to a pelting of questions spiraling downward toward the One: do you think Israel has a right to exist?
• Why must the Jews insist on having their own country? No other religion has insisted on having its own country! This is discrimination! In Islam we do not have this discrimination! (They had clearly managed to forget their Muslim brethren in Pakistan, a country which, as my Pakistani friend pointed out after the lecture, was founded precisely to be an Islamic country.)
• Why must the Muslim and the Jew be enemies? The Muslim and the Christian are not enemies.
• When did America get involved with Israel?
• Did any countries fund Jewish immigration to Palestine pre-1948? Who? Who is to blame?

The professor reminded his interrogators of various historical details politely to debunk the portrait of religious alliance and adversity taking shape between their comments (i.e. the Crusades) and observed that he in fact did not specialize in this area. A moot point in the present company, it would seem. And no one protested; on what grounds could they do so, within the usual confines of lecture etiquette? Would it not constitute a kind of surrender to stoop to the level of these uncouth maligners? Where would one start, anyway: “Your behavior is inappropriate. Please allow us to return to the subject of this evening’s lecture, or leave,” to say nothing of, “If you continue to belittle the massacre of a people who, perhaps unbeknownst to you, has many representatives in this lecture hall, someone may well get up and pound you and I will let them.” So no one said anything at all. The Jewish attendees sat silent with everyone else.

Now, the last thing I want to do here is use this occasion for an opportunity to support or challenge my own views on Israel-Palestine. Like the Oxford professor, this piece of history is not my area, and there are enough blind duelers on this battleground as it is. And as disturbing as I found this discussion, I have heard many a university lecture discussion in the states dominated by the strident voices from the other side of the issue, which make equally chilling comments regarding the Palestinians. This was simply the first time I had witnessed the extent of anger and denial reached by the opposing narrative.

Strange though: I felt hate in that room; but I also felt enjoyment. After all, nothing feels good like reciting a well-loved and oft-repeated line of argument with which you know your company will agree. None of these people are terrorists or active radicals as far as I know, nor are they Palestinian or necessarily invested in the Palestinian cause in anything but word; they are well-dressed and educated Anglophones, out on the town to participate in the popular debates of their day with a famous foreign professor.

It still chills one to the bone however, that this relished repitition could make a woman numb to the mass killing of innocent people. When the discussion finally ended, I found myself edging around my neighbor in order not so much as to brush her, so great was my revulsion. Moments later I saw her hugging and kissing friends and tinkling away about the everyday, which I found equally jarring. Must I succumb to this epic pettiness as well? Must I blame her for her attraction to this tempting grab-bag of powerful and popular things to say about a controversial issue that does not put her in political danger in her own country? Can I fault this woman personally for her participation in this national pastime?

In lieu of pursuing answers to these questions, I have made a mental note to self: when you are lecturing at AUC in twenty years, unless the tragedy of Israel-Palestine has been resolved, try to pick a topic like “migration patterns of tropical fish.” I’ll check out a book on that today, and read that instead of watching the news.

Now Open For Comments!

In the latest revelation of my technological inaptitude for the genre of blog, I realized that I had to press a special button in order to open the blogoforum (hey, "blog" is a legitimate prefix now, right?) for commentary. The button has been pushed. The floor is yours, and I apologize for the delay. I had started to wonder why all my trusty critics had laid down their arms . . .

Sinai, Part Two: "Zay al-Atrash fi az-Zaffa"

Mohammad, one of the many young men hanging around our desert camp with no clear role or employment, agreed to take Sarah and me to a Bedouin farah, or village wedding party taking place near where we were staying in St. Catherine. On the way over, we had chatted as if we were all pals of the same age on the same page; you know, discussing our trip in the desert, whether or not I would marry Mohammad . . . the usual stuff.

Suddenly even this tenuous delusion of normality vanishes. Mohammad pulls his truck up next to the women’s tent of the farah and dismisses us.

“Here you go,” he tells us. “You will stay with the women. The harem. Listen, they’re welcoming you.”

Sure enough, waves of ululation emanate from the sea of seated women. Hundreds of eyes fix on us from their black frames. Welcome? I decide to take his word for it. Sarah and I disembark and approach the tent. Mohammad, our one connection to this massive family affair, drives off to join the men elsewhere.

As we draw near, hands begin to reach out to us, and a low chorus of “ahlens” rises from behind veiled mouths. The voices sound warm, and the kohl-rimmed eyes squint up at us in what looks like friendliness, but without smiles I still feel unsure. We grasp hands with each and exchange “ahlens,” moving down the line without aim until one anonymous handshake pulls us into the fray. Children stop in their tracks to stare at us, and whispers precede our steps between the seated figures. We smile with exaggerated warmth to make up for the uncertain expressions of our company and continue to pick our way through. I spot an open space and we sit, where bug-eyed little girls surround us within seconds. We greet them and introduce ourselves. Confused by our strange accents but too curious to give up, they answer our questions and continue to stare. I smile as big as I can in their solemn, inquisitive faces, and hope to convince them without words that I am a nice, normal girl who just so happens to talk funny and look radically different from everyone else they know. Try as we had to dress modestly for the occasion, we look around and realize that we have failed: although both clad in long sleeves and skirts on this ninety-five-degree desert day, our bright colors blare amongst our black-clad peers. The younger girls wore multi-colored hand-me-downs, but all the married women (roughly age twenty and up) blended together in a black wash of capes and scarves. Then, Sarah’s realization:

“Dude, I’m wearing the man colors.”

Her white shirt and skirt / new periwinkle Bedouin scarf combo had seemed suitable that morning, but now we saw that her attempt to wear her most Bedouin-friendly outfit had backfired in the most obvious way possible: only men, and all of the men, wore white and periwinkle. We stole uncomfortable glances at the white-and-periwinkle assemblage in the man tent. Oops. Yet another casualty of the fact that we only ever get to interact with males. Worse still, the playful, hippie-cool way that Sarah had slung the male headscarf around her waist probably offended Bedouin sensibilities even more than the misplaced colors. I attempt to salvage the situation and confide our error to nearby ladies.
“We just realized that these colors are only for men . . . we are sorry . . . Next time we will know better!” They laugh and tell us not to worry. Each asks us our names and where we’re from. I introduce myself as “Hanna,” hoping to cause less confusion than the first-person-pronoun-sound-alike “Anna,” but unwittingly pronounce it the opposite of the Arabic way, “HANna” instead of “HanNA,” so the name got whispered about and discussed anyway. Sarah, as usual, received surprised and delighted recognition for her name, which she merely pronounces in the Arabic fashion, “SAHra.”
“HER name is Sara too!” bursts out one of the girls, nudging a smaller one who hisses “Ssshhhhh!” and cowers in embarrassment. “This is an Egyptian name. Why do you have an Egyptian name?”
Sarah and I have long since abandoned attempts to explain that one could likely find Sarahs in most parts of the world. Such efforts always fall upon deaf ears; Egyptians seem to prefer leaving the pleasant conundrum of this blond, American Sarah to their imaginations.

By the time we have exchanged names with all the girls in our vicinity, a new row crowds in front of the first, the littlest ones hopping right into our laps. The lull of repeating our information over and over and the constant stream of new brown faces begin to blur the names together: Hanaa. Huda. Aziza. Salwa. Iman. Samra. Sara. Hanaan. Karima. Fatema. Some get bolder and start asking more questions. How old are you? Are you married? Most look surprised when I reveal my spinsterhood, unmarried at twenty-four. Sarah has kept up her charade as a married woman all summer, and has a ring to prove it. However, the notion of a husband far away in New York while his wife capers about foreign countries dressed as a man ends up sounding just as puzzling.
“You are married? Where is your husband?”
“Do you have children? Why not?”

Some, including Nabil, have expressed doubt that we uncivilized Americans understand the difference between “(haram) boyfriend,” “engaged,” and “married.” Sarah had told him many times that Jeff, the love interest that visited her for a week, was her husband. He reacted with incredulity, then joy, his opinion of her much augmented. After the visiting husband disappeared, Nabil immediately asked Sarah when we could expect the first baby.
“Not yet,” she confessed.
“But why?” he pressed, baffled.
“Well . . . he’s in New York, and I’m here!”
“But he was just here for a visit. Sooo . . .” Nabil makes abdomen-bound gestures, indicating that a week’s visit provided ample time for a man to inseminate his wife. Indeed, why else would he visit? Since Nabil’s wife and family live in a village hours away from Cairo, I suppose this method of reproducing is familiar to him. Sarah’s excuses must have made him suspicious, because he later approached me to clear things up.

“Are you married?” he wanted to know.
“Not yet, not until I finish my studies,” I gave my standard answer.
“And Sarah. She is married?”
“Yes, Sarah is married, al-humdu lillah.”
“But she is married or she is just engaged?” he pursued, eyes narrowed.
“Married, since a year ago. You have met her husband, right?”
“Yes. I have met him.” Whew. He’s on to us.

The girls at the farah do not pose further questions as to Sarah’s married life, however. They show more interest in our jewelry, of which they fondle and inquire after each piece. If they recognized a Bedouin piece, they wanted to know where we had gotten it and how much we had paid. For objects of unknown origin, they wanted to know from what country they came, who had given them to us. I found myself recounting the histories of my signature lavish jewelry collection with great animation and embellishment. To my surprise, they took more interest in the beaded bracelet my sister Emma had made than the necklace she had brought me from Peru, since it looked Bedouin. I was asked to affirm its origin multiple times. By later in the day I had understood that jewelry always provided one of the first objects of interest and exchange between women. More specifically, one should come to Bedouin engagements ready to part with any item she may be wearing, save perhaps her wedding ring. Even the oldest women reached out of their cavernous cape sleeves to finger my rings and bracelets. I would try to follow suit, but if I allowed my eye to linger on an object, it was immediately and irrevocably foisted upon me. The little girls and old ladies that eyed my Great Aunt Flo’s silver ring with covetous interest must have thought me quite dense not to have taken the cue and handed it over, but I stood strong. In the end, I managed to get off okay: minus two bracelets, plus one ring and one necklace. Fair’s fair.

Sitting with the women in the tent however, we have not yet reached the point of exchanging gifts and continue exchanging information. An older girl leans through the little ones to introduce herself. Aziza, aged twenty-one, already married for almost a year. She wears a long black cape with red trim and a black knit scarf pulled across her face. Brown henna coats her fingernails. She sounds friendly but again, without her mouth I remain a bit disconcerted, since the intensity of her stare hits me ten times harder isolated that way. Mouth or no mouth, I reckon that as far as she’s concerned I may as well be from another planet: flowing golden hair in broad daylight, skinny as one of their ten-year-olds (at twenty-one, Aziza had already begun to look quite matronly), a bright pink skirt, unmarried and unattached, and saying that she had wandered all the way here to Egypt just to learn a different language. Aziza digested all of this with no comment however, instead deducing that I must find this whole spectacle new and fascinating. Perhaps caught up in the sudden discovery of her novelty in the eyes of this outsider, she grabs my arm.

“Would you like to see the party?”
“Er, yes, is this not the party?” I try not to sound horrifically stupid.
“No, no of course not. This” – she gestures across the seated figures – “is just so we can greet one another.” Was she giggling behind her veil?
“Ah. Well then, yes, of course I want to see the party. I have never been to a Bedouin party before.” I give a disarming smile for both of us.
“You will come with me, in a little while.” She informs rather than offers.

I squeeze her arm and say thank you. Her insertion completed, Aziza turns back into her circle of peers and the little girls close in on us once more. Soon the real reason for the gathering becomes apparent: a foray of men arrives carrying large silver platters of something edible. As far as I can tell, it looks like the rice from the day before. The women have shifted into circles into which the messengers deposit the platters. Sarah and I find ourselves in one in which no platter has yet arrived. Mutterings arise among the women and the eyes on us make me fear that our circle has been somehow singled out for punishment due to inclusion of whiteys. Fortunately, these worries dissipate before breaking into a full-out confrontation when a platter arrives at last. If we had been the cause of its tardiness, this did not discourage the women from insisting that we eat first, faster, and more than everyone else. The contents of the platter could best be described as Bedouin grits: sticky starchy something or other speckled with brown grease. It was quite bland and we weren’t very hungry, but we assured them all that it was delicious. I asked Aziza if she knew how to make it too and she said of course, with no small degree of pride. If the men in ‘Aid’s village had looked amused at our attempts to eat with our hands, the ladies tittered outright. I tell them that it isn’t that strange for us, that there are some American foods that one eats with the hands as well, but there must be something fundamentally wrong with the way I go about it because merry eyes remain fixed upon me for the entirety of the meal. In retrospect, it occurs to me that it must be my insistence upon licking my fingers after each bite that does me in. They seem to just wait til the end, which I suppose makes more sense; my incessant finger-licking must strike them as persnickety and useless. I must observe, however, that they looked pretty funny too, grabbing big handfuls of gritsy goo and stuffing them under those masks. Not a shining moment in Oriental feminine mystique.

After the male messengers returned to clear the platters, Aziza announces that it is time to go. Where? We haven’t a clue, but we get up and follow her, a gaggle of awed little girls on our arms, at our sides, and in our wake. Newcomers appear and ask the same questions, often getting interrupted by our longer-standing fans. The few facts about ourselves that we have provided glimmer around us in a confused game of telephone.

“They are from America.”
“HANna and Sara (yes, an Egyptian name!).”
“No, Anna and Sara.” (I had accidentally given my real name a few times.)
“They live in Egypt.”
“Twenty-four and twenty-five.”
“The bracelet is from her sister. Her sister in America.”
“She has three sisters.”
“No, three brothers!”
“She is married, but no children.”

We trundle thus across the village, looking down as we pass wandering men. I wonder what they think of their daughters’ and sisters’ new charges. It occurs to me that I am unsuited to any of the present categories of female. Although older than Aziza, I probably have more in common with the teenagers. However, due to this perceived peerdom, the teens seemed shyer around us, which left us with the little girls. I alternate between feeling tall and ungainly or skinny and runty, both versions clad in scandalous bright colors.
“Can you dance?” the girls want to know. “Do you prefer Bedouin or Khaliji (from the Gulf) dancing?” Um. My belly-dancing course last year at Union Square seems worlds away. The notion that one would learn to dance by “paying money” to “take lessons” “on the way home from work” would no doubt strike these ladies as absurd. So I just said no. “You have to teach me,” I tell Aziza, whose eyes twinkle out at me in response.

Upon entering a cement-block house, our guides scatter and shed layers of modesty. New ranks of women surround us. Ahlen. Ahlen wa sahlen. We shake hands and ride the current to a back room from which dance music blares.
We crowded into the dance room, which was smaller than my bedroom and populated by at least forty females. A massive boombox surrounded by sticky tapes sat on a dilapidated dresser standing in the corner. Older women line the walls, with an inner ring of seated children demarcating the dance floor. This leaves only enough space for about three girls to dance, but turn-taking appears to be the norm anyway. Those not dancing clap their hands and let loose the occasional ululation. A song ends and an older girl who looks like Aziza only in a tight-fitting gold top and casually slung headscarf, barges from the dance floor through the crowd to man the station, intercepting requests and yelling back commands. Sarah and I plaster ourselves against the back wall, next to the black-veiled, baby-toting mothers, in hopes of establishing our position as observers.

Not to be. “Dance, dance, dance!” plead all of the girls, tugging at our hands. “Ru’si, ru’si, ru’si!” was to become the phrase in Arabic we heard the most often that day, with “Ta‘ibti? Ta‘ibti? Ta‘ibti?” (“Are you tired? Are you tired?” etc.) a close second. Resistance is futile. We allow our waist-height charges to drag us into the ring. The Aziza look-alike, who later turns out to be Aziza without her face scarf and cape (embarrassing . . . but really, how can one tell?), lunges to our rescue and starts laying out the moves. We try to imitate her, but pale in the shadow of her aggressive femininity. Her arms and hands trace suggestive circles around her pulsating shoulders and bosom, her bare feet skip and kick beneath undulating hips, her eyes fix us with a saucy self-possession. All eyes follow our interpretations of this example. I imagine how my skinny, jerky version of this sensual performance must look to them. Were they laughing behind their veils? Were they wondering how two grown women from this rich foreign country had gotten this far without learning to dance? I wonder if they pity us, or take pleasure in their evident superiority in this domain. No matter; if only in the interest of entertainment, our lacking in grace posed no obstacle to the general commitment of our hosts to keep us dancing. The staunch ring of bodies around the dance floor frustrated any attempt to escape. Bolder partiers, mostly the younger girls, begin to take turns challenging us to hip-wiggling duets. Those little vixens-in-training showed no restraint. Their lips fixed in impetuous confidence and their eyes fixed on us, they set their bony hips whipping back and forth with the mechanical speed and intensity of a washing machine. Some have tied scarves around their hand-me-down jeans, or around their t-shirted shoulders. They are hot, and they know it. I shake it back the best I can, to their squeals of delight. We lean into each other and away, alternately grinning and exchanging sultry glances. The older women observe this interaction from the wings. Do they resent our domination (albeit forced) of the dance floor? I shoot them smiles that I hope convey a rueful yet enthusiastic appreciation for their party. Their eyes twinkle back. I think they like us.

I notice a lone boy of about twelve years, dressed, of course, in the same outfit as Sarah, enjoying the proceedings. Seated in a chair at the outskirts of the circle, his eyes devour the spectacle with obvious pleasure. Just as I am beginning to wonder what the cutoff age may be for male inclusion in female gatherings, a furious grandma answers my question. She storms out of nowhere, grabs the errant spectator by the ear and drags him from the room. This punishment does nothing to dilute his impish grin, which pops up moments later at the room’s one tiny window. Apprehended once more: another old woman slams the shutter on him, and the temperature in the room quickly rises. A slight scuffle of window opening and closing ensues. Sarah and I continue our enforced performance. Since the handful of favored songs, each at least seven minutes long and based on the principle of theme-and-variation, has by now begun its second rotation, we have our moves all ready. More specifically, we are ready for Aziza’s moves, which include hefty hip-wallops at choice cadences. After the first few sent us sailing into the human wall, we now slap ‘em right back at ‘er. At last, Aziza declares that it is getting hot and suggests that we take a break. She leads us into another room, where she flops down on the floor and leans against the wall. We do likewise. The room slowly but surely fills with staring girls. Silence reigns.
“Do you wear any makeup?” Aziza studies my face.
“No, not usually . . . I don’t really know how to put it on.”
“I will do your makeup.” She commands a girl to fetch her bag, still considering my naked features with bemused inspiration. Her messenger reappears within moments and the artist sets about her work.
“I am doing the bride’s makeup tonight,” she boasts, fishing out a palette of colors I can sooner picture in a pack of highlighter pens than on a human face. I elect not to voice this observation to Aziza and surrender myself to her vision:
“Mashi, al-fanaana,” I say. “Alright, Miss Artist.” This sarcastic linguistic performance tickles Aziza, who repeats my words under her breath, chuckling. “Mashi, al-fanaana. She actually knows all of these words. How about that . . .” As she continues to murmur about me in the third person, it occurs to me that she likely does regard me as more doll than person, which would explain the shamelessness with which she applied magenta eyeshadow to my lids. She painted my face with decisive strokes, blending the edges with her thumbs. To her credit, the color matched my inappropriate bright pink skirt exactly. I look out of my new magenta eyes at Sarah, who is suppressing laughter. Not so fast, Atwood: Aziza has the same medicine for you. A few expert strokes later, our faces match both my skirt and each other. We thank Aziza and bask in the admiration of our company.
We soon discover that Aziza’s vision extends beyond the makeover.
“Would you like to dress up like a Bedouin girl?”
Small messengers scatter to amass black frocks and Aziza’s firm hands tie us in tight: an over-cape snapped up to our throats and black-knit scarves wrapped first around our heads, then across our noses. I feel like I’ve been gagged. The girls breathe oohs of admiration, or perhaps surprise: wow, just one black scarf and these two weirdos actually look normal! Aziza stands us up against the wall for pictures. We try to pull her in and she reels back.
“Not me, ma‘lesh,” she murmurs. “Mamnoua’ for us, photography. Forbidden.” Ah. We thank our lucky stars that we had not busted out the camera while in the dancing room, unwittingly transforming our companions into sinners with one fell click.
After our photo shoot, Aziza hustles us back onto the dancefloor in our new garb, no doubt eager to show off her handiwork. You’ve got to be kidding, grumbles my sticky, sugar-infused body, already sweltering under the black polyester cloak. But she is not kidding; in we go. The eyes register surprise, and perhaps laughter. I force one little girl to admit that we looked prettier before.

***

“So where would you like to travel, if you traveled?” I seize another quiet moment with Aziza to extract more of the personality behind the cloaked dancer.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really work like that here.”
“Yes, it’s very different. Hard for me to understand.”
“Here, you see, women don’t travel by themselves. Once you get married, you stay in the house and you are in charge of your house. The man brings the money. This is how it has always worked here.”
“There are some families like that in America too.”

Other women begin piping up with questions for us. How long have our people been in America? What is our heritage? Is it cold in America? How cold? I fear my enthusiasm may have clouded the clarity of my answers, but my audience did not seem to mind. They hold on to my every word, then whisper amongst themselves. Aziza takes particular delight in our performance, and from time to time murmurs under her breath, “What fun . . . this makes me happy, talking to these girls.” I squeeze her arm, then offer her two of my small beaded bracelets that she had been admiring. Her joy soon transitions into speculation, and she voices her even greater appreciation for my earrings. I manage to escape with them, especially since we have to leave the farah rather suddenly. Mohammad appears out of nowhere and says yella. He wants to take us to another wedding, his aunt’s, where the dancing and name-memorizing and fending off of single sons and brothers would (and did) begin afresh, where we can allow swarms of new women to coo over us and little girls to wrap our faces in various forms of coverings, shrieking with glee (all convinced that we looked much more beautiful that way), where we can try to avoid more sugary tea . . . Sarah looks a bit cross-eyed at this prospect and I feel woozy, but there is nothing for it. We try to infuse our now hurried good-bye to Aziza with compensatory affection, promising to come back later that night if at all possible.

“You won’t come back.” Aziza has already turned away from us and corrects us in a flat voice. “You won’t ever come back. You will stay there.” Our protests fall on deaf ears and we can do nothing more but follow Mohammad. Aziza does not watch us leave.
Back in the truck, Mohammad resumes his usual flirtation, the separate tents and flocks of black veils all but forgotten. He turns to me with a grin.

"You liked the farah? So when are we getting married?"

I had told him earlier that I would on no account marry him unless he could come up with ten good reasons. And maybe break off his current engagement.

***

After another three hours of dancing, either in intense duos with little girls or in awkward, bird-like mating sequences with Mohammad's unmarried cousins (most of whom looked younger than me), the crowd suddenly mobilizes. Sarah and I find ourselves squashed into one of the many vans promenading through the streets of Saint Catherine in the zaffa. In this part of the wedding ceremony in which all members of the party drive around hooting and hollering and honking their horns in a rhythm three months in Egypt has forever engrained in our heads: "Beeeeeep, Beeeeep, Beep-Beep-Beeeeeep!" Zaffas are in fact so loud that they have made their way into a popular saying: "Zay al-atrash fi az-zaffa" means literally "Like a deaf man in a zaffa" and metaphorically, "one who has no idea what's going on." It occurred to me as we clamored through the serene desert village that the proverb had rather coincidental significance for Sarah and I in that moment. As my head pounds under the eight-hour attack of dance music and squealing little girls, I worry that it might become even more relevant.

The ladies surrounding us ululate in intersecting streams. Since I do not know how to ululate and have no gusto left for the night, I simply compliment the woman next to me on hers. She laughs, denies it, then pauses and thanks me. Perhaps they do not see ululating as a skill at which one can excel. In the back, a pre-adolescent boy leads the troups in a number of chants, some of which involve shouting "Allahu akbar!" As our dilapidated van hurtles through the desert night and the chorus of voices thunders back to his shrill crowing, it occurs to me that the outfit would fit right in on an American newscast or movie about the Middle East. Beware, the terrorists are running amok in the night with their women and children! Little would the apprehensive viewers know that we were in fact just on our way to the third wedding celebration taking place that summer night in Sinai. "Allahu akbar!" I chirp back with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. Man, these people's appetite for partying puts this American girl's to shame. Sorry, Mohammad, even if I wanted to marry you, I don't think I'd have the energy for another one of these to-dos any time soon.

Sinai, Part Three: Biwan

“BiWAN. Bye-wan. Buy one.”

It took a few times before I discerned this command, but now it has become the obligatory refrain in the beach cafes of Dahab, where bedraggled Bedouin girls prowl with plastic bags full of their handmade jewelry amongst reclined tourists, vulnerable in their decadence. If from your sprawl you catch their eye, you’re in for it.
“Hi. Wheroo from? America?”
“Bonjour. See vous play, parley-vous fransay?”
“Buon giorno. Compra un regalo.”
Sarah and I wish we only spoke Estonian. We wave them away: “La. Khalaas. Khalayna.” Fat chance. Despite the variety of languages in which they can greet you, they seem not to understand “no” in any.
“Come on. Wheroo from? France? Deutsch?” a persistent preteen in a magenta veil hounds us.
“Musr.” I answer with the impudence I feel she deserves. To my dismay, she replies in a bored tone,
“Ahhh, Musr. You are an American who come to Cairo for study Arabic. I know many like this. They all come to Cairo for study and come to Dahab for vacation.”
So much for novelty. Our saleslady has seen it all. I give in and talk to her. Her command of English (perhaps stupidly) astounds me. She speaks with lazy, natural inflection, more self-assured than I may ever be in Arabic. I tell her so.
“Yeah, but I don’t learn English from school. I learn it only from tourists, from you. This the best way for learning languages. Come on, biwan. Buy one.” She leads her younger sidekicks in a chorus of suggestions. “You got sister? Brother? Mother? Buy one for everybody, everyone you know. You got husband? That you husband?” She gestures to a group of Egyptian men sitting nearby and raises her voice. “Tell them to buy you one.” The men glance over, amused. Great. Attention.
“No, no thanks, we don’t want any. We already bought some, look.”
“It’s not fair. Buy more. Where you get that?” the girl grabs my hand and examines the ring given to me by an elderly woman at the farah. “That’s not real gold. It’s no good.” Her companions lean in to sneer at the no-good ring.
“Maybe not, but it was a present.” I smile and take on a matronly tone with the little snot. “When someone gives you a present, you don’t say, ‘That’s not real gold, that’s no good!’ You say ‘thank you.’”
To my consolation, these words resonate with the jewelry critic, who nods sagely. “Yes, when someone gives you a present, you say, ‘thank you.’”

This turns out to be the high point of my interaction with the trio. Their demands abate somewhat, but they refuse to go away. When Sarah tries to repeat her lack of interest in their products, the ringleader clips her off,
“We’re not trying to sell you anything now. We just want to talk. What languages you speak? Fransay, Deutsch?”
Sarah, visibly riled by the cheeky linguist, gives her a haughty response in German. One of the younger girls then pipes up, displaying her capacity in the same tongue:
“Fuck you.”
“What?” Sarah is flabbergasted.
The little girl reiterates the curse with zest, a toothy smirk smeared on her face.
“That is a naughty thing to say! Don’t you go around saying that!”
The Germanophone bracelet-seller looks pleased with herself. I try to change the subject and ask if the girls are sisters.

“No way,” affirms the oldest. “We just do business together. We don’t like each other. I don’t like her, she don’t like me.” She gives one of the other girls a slap for emphasis. Geez. How much of this is just part of the act? The dissonance between the girls’ demure dress and their crass speech and behavior starts to upset me. When I realize that I wish they would just sit in their photographable villages and look cute, I upset myself even more. Finally they go away, the eldest dealing me a last blow by asking if I am pregnant. No, just bloated from all of the stupid potatoes and grits you people eat, I want to hiss, but instead I just lie back on the cushions in the sun and try to forget her. After all, the money that got me here makes me by definition a bigger bitch in their eyes than they could ever be in mine, right? And I have the advantage of chalking their unfriendliness up to their abject misery, so I can’t really stay bitter. Still, I missed the adoration of the girls from the farah. I guess it all just depends on the context in which you meet. Maybe if we had met these girls at a party they would have been just as enchanted with us; but I suspected that little girls raised in Dahab got over any initial fascination with foreigners before they learned to speak under this regimen. We have reached the hyper-developed edge of Sinai tourism; our guidebook had promised that weary travelers could “escape cultural immersion” in Dahab and relax in an Western environment, artificial but well-preened. Indeed, like most endeavors to this effect in Egypt, Dahab’s palm-tree-shaded restaraurants with their obsequious servers and obnoxious dance party music have succeeded in becoming “more West than the West.”

***

Our second run-in with the Dahab Souvenir Force gets off on a better foot, since Sarah resolves to buy something.
“BiWAN. Biwan. Hello. Look, pretty.”

I shoo them away, but Sarah looks both of the itinerant salesladies in the eye and tells them in Arabic, “Mashi, I am going to buy one. One. Not more. Wahid wa bas, khalaas.”
“Mashi, but look how pretty, don’t you have sister? A mother? A husband?” the two little girls give me up for dead and surround Sarah with sparkling beads in five seconds flat. “Bussi, helwa. Mish helwa? Bussi bussi . . .” The little girls are younger than those from the previous day and more willing to abandon their harsh English speeches to entreat us in their own language. I lean in to help Sarah decide and we echo them, yes, helwa owwie, ooo. The girls get our names, which we have now learned provide them with a potent weapon: they understand and manipulate the increased difficulty one has in refusing someone who calls him by name. One feels almost robbed hearing one’s name whisked off by those little voices: “Sara, Sara, my friend . . .” Their names: Nadia, the elder and more garrulous; Selwa, her younger and longer-haired companion. While Nadia focuses on Sarah’s progress with her wares, Selwa makes repeated efforts to induce me to join the buying frenzy. I resist. After forced wearings of the bag’s entire contents and much deliberation, Sarah selects a red beaded necklace and a bracelet. The girls award her the right to select one gift for her pains. It seems the Bedouin system always operates on a “buy one, get one free” system.

Sort of. After Sarah chooses her present, the givers inform her that she now owes them a present. While she flounders in her bag for an expendable item, I come to the rescue with a known winner: my mechanical pencil. The girls pounce upon it with avid fascination. I manage to wrest it away long enough to show them how to press the eraser to make the lead come out, a miraculous act that both girls repeat with fierce concentration. I suspect that in their care my pencil will not be long for this world, but a present’s a present. Sarah at last comes up with a gift suitable for the girls: her Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Pocket Phrasebook. However, she lays out some conditions first. She opens up the book to the English-Arabic glossary in the back and points.

“Can you read this?” she asks. “If you can read it, I will give it to you.”
I see Sarah’s logic; although I imagine she did not really want to part with it, she had concluded that its potential benefit for the girls in their sales exploits made it an ideal offering; that is, if they could read it. However, that Sarah dared to suppose that Nadia and Selwa might renounce their right to the shiny little book based on such a trifle struck me as absurd. They snatch the book away and start flapping through the pages with a recklessness that makes me wonder if they have even handled a book before. I decide that beyond all reasonable doubt the girls cannot read any Roman characters, but it matters little; the book entertains them as an object and there will certainly be no taking it away from them now.
Sarah continues to press them: “Can you read this?”
Nadia flinches. “Yes . . .” She draws her finger over the words, but remains silent.

Selwa, still wrestling with the mechanical pencil, announces, “Watch, I can write Mohammad.” She flips savagely through the book looking for an open space. Sarah opens her mouth to protest but we see that it is too late. Selwa flattens the book open and bears down so hard on the pencil that the lead keeps collapsing back into its tube. But she writes it: Mo-ha-med, in shaky, squarish Arabic script. She sits back on her heels to admire her handiwork, and appears satisfied that she has proved her literacy as far as any reasonable person could require. I praise her penmanship. Sarah, indulging a rare mood of linguistic pedagogy, writes their names in the back of the book in both English and Arabic, then makes them a chart of the English and Arabic numerals. Nadia and Selwa snatch the book back and forth and quarrel over who would take it. They too wandered Dahab together only on business; the end of the day meant dividing up the booty, both cash and presents. Our begging them to share has no effect.

“She lives over there, I live over there,” explains Nadia, pointing in vaguely different directions.
“You can go to each other’s houses,” I suggest.
Nadia pouts and turns to Sarah. “You don’t have another one like it?”
Then the girls come to a solution: since the truly precious part of the book in their eyes seems to be the page with Sarah’s number chart on it, Nadia sets about trying to reproduce it on the next page. After completing her jumbled version, she begins to tear it out.

“Nonono!” Sarah cries, her ownership of the book still too recent to witness its destruction without protest. The girls do not seem to heed her distress, but rather grow restless with the book’s strong binding and give up the task. Selwa satisfies herself with removing the plastic cover instead. Bedouins seem to have a very hands-on approach to everything. I try not to think of it as animal-like; they are very little girls. At last they deem the transaction complete and traipse away, after encouraging us to reflect on other possessions we might consider gifting. Sarah and I realize later that we had engaged in another inadvertent “Orientalist moment:” white man gives savages tool to worldy success, a primitive English primer. Oops. Heh heh. We lean back and exhale. We were just trying to play along. So much for “no cultural immersion in Dahab.” Time for a well-earned nap.


Not so fast: Selwa and Nadia reappear within minutes, perturbed by a piece of pending business: I had given them a present, and they had not offered me one. They spread out their wares once more and the process begins afresh. However, there is no more talk of us buying anything; we have passed that level. Instead, they revert to the dynamic of the girls at the wedding. Nadia curls up next to Sarah and starts playing with her hair. Selwa grabs my finger and ties colored strings onto it to make me a personalized bracelet. She braids with firm, rhythmic jerks, reminiscent of Aziza’s makeup application and Amal’s veil-tying. Her eyes narrow in concentration and her face sets into lines of tan, grey and black. Selwa is eight years old and not a big talker. I study her tiny body, folded in next to mine. Ripped jeans embroidered in gaudy flowers reveal skinny brown knees; her hair ripples in snarls of the same tan and grey of her face over hunched shoulders. I want to give her a compliment, anything to make her smile, but can’t articulate a single one to this solemn, scraggly artisan. I continue to ask her questions instead, which she answers in monosyllables. Then she takes a turn with the interrogation:

“Do you know how to pray?”
Huh? Selwa repeats the question, her eyes still focused on her work.
“Well, yes. Maybe not the same prayers as you, though. You see, I am Christian, so we pray differently.”
This response seems not to register with Selwa.
“No, I mean do you know how to pray. The prayer.” She begins to intone the Muslim fatiha, then tries a different tack. “Do you know the Qur’an?”
I doubt that I “know” the Qur’an in her estimation, so I attempt to remain noncommittal lest I be asked to display my knowledge.
“Um, I have a Qur’an. I have read parts. But it is very hard for me, since it is in Arabic.”
Selwa considers this in silence then declares, “You must learn the Qur’an. It is the word of our God, the merciful and the compassionate.”
“I will try to learn the Qur’an one day,” I promise. “But I think it will take me a long time.” I doubt Selwa captures the extent of this understatement. Not to be detracted, she resumes her original inquiry.
“So do you know how to pray?” In the face of my persistent vagueness, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
“Repeat after me. Bismillah al-rahman al-rahiiiiiiiim.”
I repeat as best I can, although Selwa’s murmured renderings defy syllable discernment. She takes me through line by line, then demands that I repeat the whole prayer back to her. Er. I admit to her that it takes more than one go to train a heathen. Maybe I should write it down?
Nadia interjects in Selwa’s missionary project from time to time from her perch behind Sarah. Without pausing in her braiding, she warns her younger mate of various practices that their home-training in Islam has revealed as haraam, such as writing down prayers for foreigners. I do not catch everything, but gather that God has a bone to pick with foreigners, especially those who speak English.

“So you don’t want me to teach you a Christian prayer?”
“Mamnoua‘, forbidden!” Selwa and Nadia reject my offer in unison.
“Fine, I won’t teach you. But it’s a nice prayer. I learned it from my mother, just like you learned yours.”
“But God doesn’t like the foreigners’ prayers. He doesn’t like foreigners.”
“How about you Selwa, do you like foreigners?”
“I like them all right, sometimes. But God doesn’t. Rubbina mabiyhubbahumsh.”
“Does that bother you? Liking them when you know God doesn’t?”
Silence.


Okay, okay, I get it. I wish I could go to the source and hear the religious lessons these girls received from their mothers. It saddens me that the little girls from the farah had probably undergone similar instruction at the hands of theirs. Those friendly ladies who told us we were “so beautiful, zay al-‘asl” must actually have been thinking to themselves, “These floozies may be pretty, but that won’t get them too far with You-Know-Who.” Depressing. I decide at least to achieve some degree of respectability in the eyes of my present company, and commit myself to writing down the prayer for my later ardent study. Selwa dictates a second time. Fortunately, her limited reading skills prevent her from detecting the imprecisions in my rendering. As we finish, a new gaggle of girls descends upon us. They peer over my shoulder at the scribbled prayer, still twittering “biwan biwan,” but distracted by the obvious rapport between their mates and these generous foreigners. Selwa and Nadia show off their gifts; protests and demands abound. Sarah and I extract ourselves from the imminent brawl with verbal and physical difficulty. I feel bemused but a bit shaken by my encounter with the bracelet-seller-turned-missionary. After all, if Selwa had succeeded in giving me the gift of Islam, how could I have repaid her? On second thought, I’m betting that in a pinch Selwa would gladly accept a few more mechanical pencils in exchange for her soul-saving. When someone gives you a present, you say “thank you.”

Standing in Line

I dodge parked and moving traffic and sidewalk-sitters, and squint through the noonday sun in an attempt to distinguish the line in front of Shuruq from the surrounding crowds of men. Damn. I am in for it.

My use of the term “line” here is meant in bitter jest, of course. There is never a “line” at Shuruq, or any establishment of its kind. Instead, the patrons heave themselves into a squirming mass of limbs, pressing against the counter and waving pounds in the faces of the adroit but constantly swamped sandwich artists, shouting “Mohammad! Mohammad (the Egyptian equivalent of “Hey you!”)!” Only the most aggressive and persistent will receive sandwiches. Knowledge of this requirement brings out the most aggressive and persistent in all of the patrons; having shuffled off the coil of manners and personal space, each clambers over the others as if groping for the one lifesaver tossed to a score of men overboard. The workers intercept their cries for help in the order they overhear them, and sandwich descriptions echo down the line: “Wahid ta‘amiyya, itnayn ful bi bid! Talat ta‘amiyya wahid baba!” For a girl with clear notions about what she wants and doesn’t want in her sandwich, this raucous telephone system poses a formidable challenge. I have taken to repeating the words to myself on the way, in hopes of pronouncing them with confidence and clarity at the crucial moment: “Wahid sandwich ta‘amiyya bi baba ghanou wi salata. Wahid sandwich ta‘amiyya bi baba ghanou wi salata.” Of course, the overwhelming pressure of the described context usually trips me up and I botch it, or they misunderstand and give me two sandwiches, one with ta‘amiyya and one with baba ghanoush. In short, you have to really want that sandwich to brave Shuruq. And if you succeed, your efforts are rewarded with a delicious pouch wrapped in a piece of scratch paper (often still with names and dates scribbled on it), costing you between half and one Egyptian pound or about fifteen cents. It is worth it. I live on those things.

Still, usually I go to Shuruq with Aaron and let him brave the mosh pit. He has the advantage, besides being male, of standing at least a head taller than most Egyptians, which enables him to stretch his handful of guineas right to the source even from the margins. But this time I face the trial alone, and begin to doubt immediately that I will be able to acquire a sandwich. I do not want to crush my body in there the way they are doing because that would be haraam. The unusual presence of a foreign woman at such close range has already attracted its due attention. Like a row of dominoes, heads swivel, abandoning momentarily their mission to catch the eye of the foremost sandwich-maker in order to ogle me. One submits me to such a flagrant mental undressing that I ball up my fist and almost say something unpleasant, but then realize that the ranks have closed in behind me and there is no telling how long we will have to remain in this proximity. If I make a scene, chances are at least some of the men will take my side; but it would push my much-needed sandwich even farther into the uncertain future as the current brawl transformed into a different kind of brawl. “Wel-cohm in Eeegypt,” the creep purrs with a big smile. I press my lips together and look at the ground. Asshole. Stop staring at me. I can’t keep averting my eyes forever or I will not get a sandwich.

Fortunately, my faithful patronage of Shuruq has not been for nothing. One of the employees picks me out of the crowd (not that doing so can have been very difficult) and catches my eye. “‘Ayyiza eh?” he calls through the din. I muster my assertiveness.
“Wahid sandwich ta‘amiyya bi baba ghanou wi salata.”
“Wahid sandwich ta‘amiyya bi baba ghanou wi salata.” He repeats it back to me, then shouts it behind him and turns to the next customer. Now comes the faith-based part of the process, in which you trust that somewhere amidst the relentless contrapuntal litany of orders, yours has lodged in the mental list of at least one of the employees, who will eventually reach it through his unobvious logic and make it like he always done. I wait. The men ogle. The sun bears down. The boy who originally took my order tells me “Da’i’a wahida,” which translates literally as “one minute” and pragmatically as “uh oh, still have to deal with that girl.” I force a smile and stretch a guinea to him through the bodies.

I wonder if the workers ever get afraid back there; after all, the entire enterprise takes place within the confines of a hallway-shaped room full of steaming pots and pans. What if the counter gave way and unleashed the seething heap of men upon them? I can picture it now: the tumble of bodies against the makeshift countertop sends platters of shakshouka and baba ghanoush splatting onto the floor and the fallen, that fat guy in front of me will whack the formidable steel vat of ful (an Egyptian specialty: a paste of fava beans cooked to a mud-like consistency in huge, jug-like pots) on his way down and knock it askew, thus overturning its steaming, muddy contents into the fray. Someone’s cigarette, flicked free of its consumer, will land in the bag of papers attached to the wall and catch flame. “Allaallallalllah!” the writhing victims of poor organization will shout, shoving to break free of the cess pool of ful. That’ll teach ‘em to stand in a line, eh? However, imagining this scene does not bring me the hoped-for vindicitive diversion, as I realize that in fact it does not constitute such a far cry from reality. So why don’t I just go to one of the many establishments on the block adjacent to the American University that cater to Westerners? Western environments seem to inspire Western behavior, and so far Aaron’s hypothesis that the presence of a cash register inspires line-formation has held true. Not only do the customers stand in lines, but also they belong to both genders, and eat pretty salads and sandwiches on plates delivered by obsequious waiters who are happy to beguile you with the few phrases they imagine are English. So what if it costs thirty times as much? Had I not just concluded that week that the best way not to get angry over inexorable cultural differences is to avoid the situation altogether? To this effect I have even started wearing headphones in all public places, a practice I have always ridiculed, simply to drown out the constant hissing of my uncouth admirers. You invest in your sanity.

At last my sandwich appears at the end of a disembodied hand reaching through the tangle. I grab it, seized with the instinctual fear that one of these fellow feeders might get it first, and disentangle myself. The package feels heavy. I open it and sure enough, there are two sandwiches. I do not scream on the outside, but register the unladylike observation, “You’d think after all that they could get my FUCKING order right, those CRAZY, OBNOXIOUS, DISRESPECTFUL....” and so on. I slump into a chair, resigned to eating the separated contents of the sandwich I had ordered. I peek into the first one. Ta‘amiyya and baba ghanous. I peek into the second. The same. “Mohammad” had not messed up. Mohammad had given me two sandwiches just to be nice. He felt sorry for me. He empathized with me, an American girl in a too-short skirt, carrying her laptop and asking for an abnormal sandwich in the hostile and homogeneous territory of working-class Egyptian men. I taste my remorse in every bite.

Sinai, Part One: Cowboys of the East

“Wait, I think that’s my camel,” Faraj interrupts himself, breaking off mid-tirade and pulling over into the gravel. He squints out the car window at a group of unmarked dromedaries ambling across the plain. I wonder both how he can tell his camel from the others and what his own personal camel might be up to erring twenty miles away from its owner’s workplace.
“That’s him all right.” Faraj confirms. “But he’s on vacation,” he answers my question before I ask it. “Camels need at least three months off every year, or they go crazy.” He takes another look at his vacationing camel, then squeals back onto the blacktop.

I had arranged with Faraj the night before to set Sarah and I up with a desert safari. As usual, the Mohammad had not needed to go to the mountain: Faraj had appeared at my side unbidden, no doubt tipped off by the grapevine go-ahead. “I hear you want to take a desert trek. Where do you want to go? Here, come show me on the map.” As I traced vague trajectories, he set me straight: “Look, I have twenty-five years of experience in this desert. You can go by what you have in your book there, but they don’t know everything. Just leave it up to me, I will make sure you see the most beautiful parts of this desert.” Faraj was not the first local to try to take our plans in hand. But he had a presence that demanded respect. Rather than the slight, often reclining frame possessed by his fellow Bedouins, Faraj had the build of a northern woodsman. He stood half a foot taller and had chest and arms twice the circumference of the mean, and the bristling black beard and sideburns that wreathed his jaw gave his face a more rugged air than the traditional Bedouin moustache. In place of the usual periwinkle headscarf, he wore a black-and-white checked scarf slung around his neck, revealing a curly black mullet. To my amusement and comfort, I found both mullet and scarf reminiscent of my own rural countrymen. Faraj, Cowboy of the Wild Wild East. Best of all, Faraj spoke clear, easy-going Arabic, his Bedouin accent closer to fusshah than the Cairene dialect. And to my delight, he addressed me as an equal, never doubting that I understood. This was a welcome anomaly in the tourism industry, where adherence to the lingua franca of broken but persistent English overrides most attempts to speak the local tongue. Faraj was chill. Faraj was cool. I liked Faraj. So I agreed. But the next morning brought to light that in fact all of Faraj’s Jeeps were either in use or out of order, so he offered to place us in the care of a friend (a network that ten minutes’ stop-driving through St. Catherine proved to include the majority of Sinai’s population). We were to connect with this friend at a meeting point of undisclosed nature about fifty kilometers away. After a quick grocery trip in town in which Faraj selected and bagged our every need with expert nonchalance, we hit the desert highway.

***

Faraj settles back into his regular cruising speed at 160 kph and expounds upon his knowledge of camel psychology. “It’s true you know,” he continues with mounting emotion. “Camels need three months of vacation per year. I know. I’ve had a camel go crazy on me before. It happens quickly, from one day to the next. The camel snaps, then he’s ruined forever. Khalaas. It’s a sad thing, a crazy camel.”

I did not doubt Faraj’s sincerity on this point, but I also gathered after a few moments’ conversation that he took great pleasure in deeming things and people “crazy.” Perhaps he just likes to say crazy: “Majnoooooon!” “Majnooneeeeen, kullUhum!” (Crazy! Crazy, all of them!) He soon extended his three-month break requirement to all things that work, even cars: “If we gave our cars three months of vacation a year, they wouldn’t break so easily! They would last for years, like people!” We didn’t say so at the time, but the way Faraj drove his might well drive it majnoon in the near future. Faraj moved on to claim that all people living in cities were also majnooneen, since they never took any vacation. By his estimation, living in a city was tantamount to loss of human nature. He declared himself incapable of bearing more than three days of oppressive city life at one time.

“Here in Sinai, we don’t need any of that. We need the desert, the wind, the sun, each other, that’s it. I grew up in a village you can only climb to by camel, there’s no road. I used to come down only when I had to. But now they’re trying to control our land too . . .” I began to recognize the tirade as Faraj’s speech genre of choice. He moved the eye of his verbal storm from topic to topic, each villain some threat to the freedom of the Bedouin people. He held the Egyptian police in particular contempt.

“It’s majnoon, all of these checkpoints fencing off our land, all of these majnooneen who treat us like criminals as if they had some greater right to be here. Idiots, all of them! They have no respect for this land or for the Bedouins. I hate talking to them. Before I say anything they already act like I’ve done something wrong.”
By this point I have discovered the rewarding practice of one-upping each of Faraj’s outbursts, which never failed to draw his booming repetition and agreement. I throw out a goodie:
“They’re the criminals! But they’re official criminals, paid off to carry out the government’s crimes.”
“Exactly! Official criminals spreading the government’s corruption! Suddenly their word is law, the majnooneen!”
“Corruption always comes from the top! What can we do about it?”
“Exactly! From the top! Bizzzubt, we can do nothing.” And so on. Between the two of us we could have led a good anarchy rally.

Faraj manages to contain his rank hatred when conversing with the majnooneen at the three checkpoints deemed necessary for the tiny village of St. Catherine. He rolls down the window dutifully to the posse of white-uniformed goons staffing each one and answers their numerous questions with terse self-assurance. His condemnations resume seconds after each exchange.
Once on the highway, Faraj began to alternate between demagogy and pedagogy, pointing out features of the Sinai desert. After a few minutes I could distinguish the two principal plants of the Sinai: the siyyal (acacia tree) raatam (a bush with fern-like upward thrust branches. I asked if the washes of shining black rock came from extinct volcanoes.

“No, from water,” he informs me. “All of this used to be covered with water. You know, back in Noah’s time. You know the Prophet Noah, right? Just kidding. No but really, it was covered with water.” I sense that his long experience giving desert tours has precipitated a wealth of half-true myths with which to entertain his charges. Noah? Why not. I did see definite remains of rivers and rivulets in the now hard and broiling rock. Our guide that afternoon would also make constant reference to the Sinai desert’s watery past, to which it owed its rich plant life. I jot everything down in my travel journal, and try not to feel self-conscious about the likelihood that Faraj’s former students engaged in the same activity. I wonder if he has constant déjà-vu. I wonder if all travelers, no matter how engaged and inquisitive they try to be, now appear the same to him: rich, self-indulgent seekers of the Other, no doubt brought on by city-life-induced craziness. Unsatisfied with our own lives, we rely on foreign, ostensibly more “authentic” experiences elsewhere in order to accomplish such vague and self-centered goals as “broadening our horizons” or “seeing how the other half lives.” For one so committed to the preservation of the elements and simplicity in one’s life, such an endeavor must appear pretentious at best, prying at worst.

If the monotony of my company bothered Faraj, he seemed to have his method of dealing with it. He begins to rant about the evils of introducing foreign plant life to the Sinai. I relax back into my conversational role, I too resigned to revert to method rather than attempt to make full sense of my relation to Faraj in that moment. Our mutually supportive call-and-response harangue had begun to gather steam when he took an abrupt turn down a sand path and ground to a halt in front of a small assemblage of tents and cinder-block houses. I felt a pang of consternation at the imminent change of society. I had grown used to Faraj. Faraj was my teacher and my friend. I buck up and face our greeting squad, a herd of children already peering in the car window, the bolder ones saying “haylo, haylo.” Faraj sweeps us past them into a half-tent, half-hut where an older Bedouin man stokes a fire. He rises and greets us, then shows Sarah and me to a mattress against the wall where we were to sit and consume tea as fast as they served it to us. Beyond this development, no further move is apparent. We sip and try to make out the information that Faraj and the man are exchanging. They speak in low and hurried tones, and I can only discern the words “Jeep,” “sahara” and “farah,” the word for wedding party. Faraj must be passing on news of the farah the next day. He had told us about it too, and said he would make sure we got to go to part of it. The party apparently started that night, and would continue all the next day. What else passed between the two men I could not decipher. I try to stay alert in case anyone addresses me.

Soon our role in the social gathering becomes clear. A little girl appears and begins laying out an assortment of scarves and jewelry. Her mother hovers near the doorway, presiding over the transaction from afar. The girl turns to her when we ask to lower the inflated prices. When she refuses, Faraj sticks up for us. “They aren’t tourists,” he murmurs. “They live here. They study Arabic.” I smile at the woman, attempting to assess her reaction to this disclosure. This is difficult to do beneath the black veil covering all but her eyes, which are sizing me up a second time. It occurs to me that contrary to what I might like to believe, my cultural engagement represents no good news to her. She would no doubt prefer a million times an indifferent foreigner, fresh off the plane and ready to spend money, over a kid wearing a Bedouin scarf the wrong way and eking out “salaam ‘aleykum.” Gag me, she must be saying behind her curtain. Just buy something and go away. We do buy something, although at close to half the original asking price, and think we have fulfilled our duty when two new families arrive with identical wares and begin hurriedly spreading them around us. It is disgusting of me to say, but the whole encounter resembles a kind of feeding frenzy: we are the carcass thrown among hungry animals, with only enough meat on us to feed the fastest and cleverest. The latecomers must have received a silent dismissal from Faraj or the man at the fire, because they slink off without a word. The few lingering children receive a harsh reprimand from the fire-stoker and scatter. I hope we have not sown seeds of bitterness among the village families. Perhaps they can share the forty-two Egyptian pounds we contributed to their cause? I have no idea whether Bedouin villages operate on a communal system or not.

The women and children’s role in the “welcome” concluded, men of all ages begin to gather around the fire. All wear identical white ankle-length tunics and periwinkle headscarves (one of which Sarah had just purchased). Each sneaks looks at us and returns our salaams, some showing more entertainment than others at our command of Arabic. We lean against our wall and wait, feeling conspicuously white and female. Eventually a platter of rice with a small pile of salad (tomatoes and cucumbers) in the center appears and the men flock around it.
“Come, come eat,” they urge us, leaving at least half the circle open for us to occupy. They dig in, balling up the sticky rice with their fingers. We follow suit, which incites a low ripple of laughter. A boy appears with two spoons, but we refuse.

“We can eat as you do,” I insisted. But we must not have been doing it right, or the sight of foreign girls eating with their hands cracked them up because the chuckles continue throughout the eating occasion. The rice is delicious. We say so many times.
Then, yella, says Faraj. This is ‘Aid. He introduces us, we think at random, to a young man crouched by the fire. Um, ahlen, we say. He nods, barely looking at us. Okay. Faraj loads our belongings and all other desert-trekking equipment into the back of a pickup truck and then gestures to the front seat. ‘Aid reappears and slides behind the wheel. Ah. Somehow I had thought that Faraj was to be our right-hand man and guardian throughout the expedition. I guess I don’t understand Arabic as well as I thought I did. Sarah and I look a bit dubiously at the cramped front seat, but of course have no choice. We cram in. My years of yoga come in handy as I eke out a way not to straddle the gearshift or sit in anyone’s lap.

***

‘Aid is a whole different animal from the garrulous Faraj. He speaks only when spoken to, and gives brief, simple answers. I make scattered attempts to engage him in these halting conversations, but focus the majority of my attention on devouring our surroundings with my eyes. The Sinai desert changes colors every few minutes; other-worldly rock formations surge from the sand, acacia trees twist upward at their feet. We had left ‘Aid’s village, Arda, around noon and shadows were scarce. About three minutes off the blacktop, our truck gets stuck in the sand. ‘Aid spins the wheels furiously and refuses our offers to get out and push. His solo efforts finally succeed after a few uncomfortable minutes of rocking back and forth in our rut. We praise his technique and brace ourselves against future employments of it.

After a twenty or thirty-minute drive through sandy passes and spiky mountains, ‘Aid grinds to a halt in the shade of a large rock and announces a break. A break already? Well, I guess we kind of are already in the thick of it. He pulls out mattresses from the back of the truck and proposes tea, which we decline. He shrugs, then plops down and lights a cigarette. Unsure of what should be done on such a break, we wander around the rock a couple of times, then follow his example and sit in the shade. Silence roars. Sarah, as is her default, hunkers down for a little shuteye. She stretches out with her new Bedouin scarf over her face to protect it from the flies. I take out my notebook and draw. As I sketch the rock formations in front of us, I wonder as I had with Faraj if we are typical or anomalous charges for ‘Aid. Was he used to tourists who ignored him and talked to each other? Or who made more efforts to talk to him? Clearly, he barely spoke English, so if he had had friendly experiences with tourists they would have to have been Arabic-speaking, maybe other students like us. I wanted to be a unique person for ‘Aid. I did not want him to look at me as yet another installment in his monotonous professional life. Although, all things being equal, taking forays into the desert he loves does not seem like a job that one should complain about. Not that ‘Aid was complaining; if anything, he looked pretty content stretched out on his mattress with a cigarette. But he seemed much more interested in playing with his fancy cellphone than in talking to us. After a quarter hour’s pause at least (all of these time estimations suffer from the utter impossibility of quantifying time’s passage in the desert), he speaks for the first time, and reveals the actual purpose of the stop: for us to climb the dune in front of us and take pictures. At our leisure, he stressed. The sun is still high in the sky, so you may want to wait. I wonder how long he reckons we would have to wait before any real change in the position of the sun took place. I decide not to find out and announce that we will go right away. We wave to him from the top as planned and he drives around to the other side to meet us. The sun burns my feet so badly on the way down that I start screaming. I stop abruptly as my arrival at the bottom of the dune reassures my (if altered) survival, but my heart continues to beat at irregular speed as we drive away. I try in vain to shake the scalding sand out of the holes in my sandals.

Our next stop is a well, consisting in a plank-covered hole in a stone with a bucket next to it.
“Come, we are going to clean off,” ‘Aid explains. We follow him and stand on the rock as he sends the bucket down on its rope. As he pulls it back up, he beckons to us to come closer. He dumps the first bucketfull over our scorched feet. Heaven. We sigh with relief and exclaim over and over again how beautiful water is. It works out, actually: the primal nature of our experiences suits our primitive capacity of expression. He draws up bucket after bucket and empties them over our sandy legs and hands, and at last gestures for us to bow our heads and douses the sweaty napes of our necks. We gasp with pleasure and surprise at the cold, and ‘Aid smiles perhaps for the first time. Our wet faces glisten in the sun, our laughter tinkles in the silence and for a moment I can imagine that we are a band of naughty preteens escaped down to a nearby lake for some aquatic flirting. I offer to do him the same favor, but he declines; we stand by while he rinses the same body parts in the same order, then fills up a few empty bottles to use for cooking later. He refuses all help.

As the day continues, I grow more and more determined to reach ‘Aid in some way. He only addresses us by suggesting that we stop to take a picture whenever we declare something beautiful (about every forty-five seconds). “Tsawwarou? Tswawwar?” At first I always decline, in hopes of refuting his apparent belief that our kind regard the world as one big, personalized photo-op. But eventually I give up and agree to let him stop, thus precipitating the play-by-play photo coverage Sarah and I now possess of our day in the desert. Let him think we’re like everyone else, I admonish my smarting pride. And be honest with yourself: you did not come to the Sinai to convince the Bedouin people that not all tourists are the same. You came to take pictures, if in a somewhat figurative sense. Let it go. ‘Aid does not care if you are a typical tourist; ‘Aid is glad you are a typical tourist. So you should not care either.

'Aid

***

That said, I daresay ‘Aid started to warm up to us after awhile. As the sun droops lower and the temperature cools, the desert appears to catch fire, glowing red and orange. This evidence of passing time grants our outing an unspoken resemblance to a roadtrip between friends, and Sarah and I begin to take turns singing our favorite tunes. The guarded distance preserved between us by his silence paradoxically stanched any bashfulness that might otherwise have prevented our adhoc performance in front of a strange man. If he intended to treat us as anonymous picture-taking weirdos from another planet, we may as well seize the opportunity to act as goofy as we pleased. After belting a few selections from Ani DiFranco and co., I turn to ‘Aid and ask him to sing something for us. He hesitates, our freedom from bashfulness apparently not having reached him yet.
“Come on,” I encourage him. “Sing. Anything. Do you know how to sing?”
That does the trick. “Of course,” he scoffs, and clears his throat to prove it. He reflects for a moment, and then begins to croon in a low, wavering voice. I repeat “Allaaah, allah,” at what I hope are appropriate cadences as I have heard done in other Arab musical performances. Encouraged, ‘Aid begins to warm up and settles into a more driving melody. Sarah and I clap our hands and he joins us when the terrain allows. Once I capture the melody I oodle along in a mixture of nonsense syllables. We trundle along, our voices bouncing and rattling to the rhythm of the road. The next time we get stuck, ‘Aid lets us get out to push. I guess that privilege only comes with the extension of trust (or with the relinquishing of pride).

This surrender to team spirit does not extend much further however; ‘Aid remains loath to allow our participation in the remainder of the night’s preparations. We thus dawdle about as ‘Aid collects dry wood for the fire, and later as he sets up camp, which in fact consisted of little more than the fire, surrounded with our mattresses and boxes of food supplies. ‘Aid squats and busies himself first with the fire-building, then with the making of yet another round of tea, then with vegetable slicing, then with cooking them. Feeling useless, I insist upon making the accompanying salad. Unfortunately, by this time the sun has gone down and I discover that I possess little talent for slicing tomatoes without a cutting board in the dark. ‘Aid watches my progress, his face expressionless. Wow, I could not possibly be a more annoying charge. I take as long to cut the tomatoes as he took to prepare the entire main dish, and manage to squash most of them in the process. He makes no comment, but I imagine that he secretly feels that he has taught me a lesson about imposing my involvement in the domain of his expertise. We eat in silence, but for our repeated compliments and his occasional encouragements for us to prove our appreciation by eating more.

The fire dwindles and the stars emerge in dizzying force, more than I have ever seen at once.
“Look, look at the stars,” ‘Aid urges us, the intensity of his voice suggesting that in the desert “looking at the stars” becomes an activity requiring greater concentration than we cityfolk were used to expending. We stare into the depths and silence creeps closer. Before I let it cover us for sleep however, I press ‘Aid with more questions. By this time, he has a sense of my linguistic appetite and has started offering bits of Bedouin vocabulary unbidden. But I have some deeper inquiries.

“Is it strange for you spending so much of your time with foreigners?”
‘Aid does not understand the question. After a few more attempts, he answers with his usual vague nonchalance,
“No, of course not. This is my work, I have done this for years. Sometimes I take tourists on long trips, a few weeks. It is normal for us.”
“But doesn’t it get boring for you, spending time with people who can’t speak Arabic very well?”
“Many tourists here speak Arabic, many of them are Arabs.”
“And you, if you could travel, where would you want to go?”
“I can’t travel, I don’t have the money. I would go to Saudi Arabia . . . Jordan . . . But I don’t have the money, I’ll never have it.” As usual, I am sorry I asked but am still interested by the answer. You can see Saudi Arabia from the coast of the Sinai, and ‘Aid can’t imagine having enough money to go there. I explain hurriedly that we would never have the money to travel either if the government did not give scholarships to people who study Arabic. Yeah right, he’s probably thinking, and he is right. Who am I to claim that we aren’t rich, as Sarah lies there with her iPod and I trill along about how much I love traveling. We are rich. We are paying ‘Aid enough for trucking us around and taking pictures of us for him to feed his entire village, an amount we might just as soon have spent on a night out in East Village, New York. I decide to shift the focus of our discussion from my implied riches.

“How is the tourist industry these days? Do you have a lot of work?”
“Enough, but not as much as we used to have . . . It comes and goes. But the best time for us was when the Jews were here.”
I hope that ‘Aid does not notice the thought-bubble full of question marks and various other keyboard symbols that pops up over my head. I try to suppress the astonishment from my voice.
“You mean . . . during the Israeli occupation of Sinai? You mean, that was actually a better time for you?”
“Of course, much better. There were many more tourists, from Israel and from everywhere. We always had work. And we were freer. The Jews just left us alone, and left the desert alone.”
After two months of putting up with Cairene Jew bashing, I wished Aaron could be there to hear this glowing report of his people. Perhaps I read into his words too much, but it sounded to me as if 'Aid regarded the Jews simply as another tribe, not a malevolent world power. After all, the Bedouins in theory recognize no nation-states, be they on contested territory or no. I do not press ‘Aid further on the subject however, by now understanding that ‘Aid really only has a couple of sentences worth to say about anything, at least to us. I lie back and follow the original instructions of our tour guide. Brighter stars twinkle in and around the gauzy white scarf of the Milky Way, the occasional meteor blinking on and off. I begin to hum, and when I stop ‘Aid takes over, his thin voice wavering above the crackling embers. I hum along with him until I tapers off and offers to show me the original version of the song on his cell phone. Sarah and I take turns admiring the handheld video of a Saudi singer, surrounded by female dancers in full “khaliji (“Gulfie”)” step, which as far as I can tell involves a lot of swinging one’s hair from shoulder to shoulder. I keep forgetting that although technically we are still in Egypt, these people have much more in common with the Arabs of the Gulf: their dialect, their tribal traditions, their dress. And in direct contrast to the insistent nationalism trumpeted by Cairo taxi drivers, the Bedouins rarely mentioned Egypt at all. When they did, they often seemed to equate “Egypt” with “Cairo,” as indeed many Egyptians do, which from the Bedouin point of view was in no way a compliment.

We drifted off to sleep to the sound of ‘Aid playing with the different ring tones on his phone. At least that is one pastime in which both Bedouins and Egyptians seem to take equal pleasure.

***

On the way back the next morning I run the topic of Israeli occupation past Faraj. What was the period of Israeli control like for you and your family? Better or worse?
“Far better,” he replies without hesitation. “With the Israelis in charge, we didn’t have any of these checkpoints. They left us alone. They let us rule ourselves. We didn’t even have paved roads like this then. See this road we’re on? It wasn’t there. We traveled by camel.” I empathized with Faraj, but thought to myself that he seemed to take a certain degree of pleasure in the speeds at which Sinai’s new highways allowed him to travel. I asked whether and how the Israelis had stationed governors or other officials throughout Sinai.
“Oh, almost none,” he furrowed his brow. “A few. Maybe five hundred policemen per thousand villagers instead of five thousand. Ha ha! Five thousand per thousand! Ha ha ha!” Faraj had really cracked himself up. I laugh with him, enjoying the light moment. Faraj, despite his laid-back character, did not laugh often. I can only think of two other times when he really let loose. First, when he at last attempted to include Sarah in the conversation. Unsure whether she too understood Arabic, he started her out with a freebie: he announced to her that the world was small and demanded her concurrence. She replied, in her first demonstration of spoken Arabic, “Maybe, but the plane is expensive.” This unexpected display of irony delighted Faraj. He repeated Sarah’s pessimistic innovation of the maxim many times over, chuckling. The other time occurred when I showed him the sketch I had done of ‘Aid in my little book. He squinted and leaned closer, then burst out in guffaws of recognition: “That’s . . . that’s ‘Aid! Ha ha ho ho ho!” The simple but faithful likeness of his colleague captured in the notebook of a young American tickled him mightily. He glanced back at the drawing a few times, still snickering, until I closed the book to return his attention to the road.

“We have secret roads now to get around the police,” Faraj confesses, pointing to an example on our right. “We have to. We just can’t tolerate crossing them every time. It’s better this way.” I should get some pointers from these guys on building secret roads; I could sure use one from my apartment to school that avoids all loitering men.

My experiences with ‘Aid and Faraj made me think about the possible levels of engagement for the Bedouins in the tourist industry. Somehow, Faraj had come to inhabit a kind of middle ground between tourist and Bedouin, possessing enough chat n’ charm to make our experience comfortable and enough gruff n’ grit to make our experience exotic. I wondered how long it had taken him to reach this level of mastery of this admittedly tricky industry (especially when dealing with snoopy tourists like me). Furthermore, I wondered how he felt about it. Clearly Faraj was a man of strongly held opinions, and I did not doubt for a second that he had one regarding livelihood based on the repeated enactment of pseudo-cultural experiences for foreigners. But is it even fair for me to project my own misgivings about the tourist experience onto the tour-givers? Might they not enjoy it, or at least not hate it? And since our money is providing them with a subsistence permitting for cell phones like ‘Aid’s, they can’t hate us too much either, right? Just because I insist upon torturing myself over the ethical and epistemological issues that tourism raises for me does not mean that they do. ‘Aid and Faraj have probably both forgotten me by now. Well, welcome to the most poetic advantage of affluence: the time and scope to get one’s panties in a knot. I suppose I should take to heart the message of these eastern cowboys: just listen to the silence, look at the stars, breathe the clean air of the sahara and forget the city. Otherwise you might end up as majnoon as an overworked camel.