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.”
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