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Weekend in Alexandria

Maria Golia

It wasn't the first time I'd ridden the Cairo-Alexandria train, although years had passed since these fancy first-class cars had been added on. The television monitors were all broken (thank god), the windows smeared with the mucous of avid farewells and children that came too close to the glass; the compartments were chilly and reeked of sock. Over time I'd developed hypotheses regarding the crust of neglect marring nearly every surface the eye beheld, from sidewalk to rooftop, in Cairo. At first I blamed the heat and the dust. My theories covered everything from climate to disillusionment and political deceit. My most recent one had to do with the Nile floods, made obsolete by the Aswan High Dam in 1972. Without the floods to wash things clean each year, they only received a sad daubing. It was as if everyone was waiting for the dam to burst, to return to the natural order of things, to be cleansed somehow and renewed.

It was the weekend of Coptic Christmas and the train was crowded with Alexandrians visiting family for the holiday, amongst them a Coptic priest who asked if the place beside me was free. Indeed, as a foreigner I'd been left companionless, though every other place in the train was taken except the one beside a rather stout munaqaba, or fully veiled and gloved Muslim woman, intent on reading the Qur'an. I invited the man, who introduced himself as Father Maximus, to have a seat. He offered the formula greetings which I returned, with special mention of the coming feast. As he settled into the chair I caught a whiff of incense and noticed a patch of what looked like powdered sugar sparkling in the web of his beard.

For a while we traveled in silence until the man selling tea made with thermos-warm water passed down the aisle. I'm not sure why I asked the priest to join me for a cup. Perhaps living so long in Egypt I'd absorbed the reflexive generosity of my hosts; in fact I felt little like talking. I needn't have worried since Father Maximus did most of it. I got him started with a remark that I'd been to see the paintings recently restored in the Monastery of St Anthony, and I asked him the name of those 13th century figures, the ones with the heads of animals reminiscent of the pharaonic gods. He said they were called "the four living creatures" and that in a vision Ezekiel saw them carrying the throne of God.

By the time the train reached Damanhour, we'd finished our tea and exhausted several subjects, including the locust swarms that had invaded Cairo the previous month. We'd even had a chat about Flaubert, whose Temptation of St. Anthony the bishop had heard of but declined to read. Having warmed to my companion I hovered between the desire to discuss metaphysics and my curiosity regarding a recent incident in Cairo where a married Christian woman was allegedly kidnapped and required to convert in order to marry her Muslim abductor. Although the story was unlikely, since conversion for Copts is no simple matter, the news swept the city before appearing in a variety of versions in the local press.

The problem was that if you asked a Muslim for details, you might have heard that the woman was not kidnapped but enamored of her Muslim colleague to whose home she went unbidden. If you asked a Copt, the woman was a loyal wife wrenched from her hearth and subjected to any number of outrages. The truth, according to Father Maximus, was compelling enough. The story had gained momentum because the woman was given in marriage by her family to a priest (celibacy is not a requirement of the order). He was far older than she and had recently lost both legs as a result of advanced diabetes. What's more, the woman and her erstwhile Muslim abductor were apparently in love. Far from being forced to convert, she was attracted not only to the man but his religion. He was devout and sometimes gave the call to prayer at a local mosque. It was said he had a very fine voice, which allegedly enhanced the woman's feelings and raised a debate amongst local clerics as to the level of musicality appropriate to prayer.

I commented that it seemed reasonable enough, her attraction to another man, given the reduced state of a husband she hadn't chosen in the first place. Father Maximus attributed it to the woman's "spiritual confusion" and told me they'd "found a place for her" in the Syrian Monastery at Wadi Natrun.
-- You mean a cell? I couldn't help inquire.
-- Is that what you call it? The priest smiled, stroking his beard.
We said our farewells at the Sidi Gaber station, where Father Maximus disembarked.

Ten minutes later we reached Alexandria. I paused to allow the munaqaba to pass ahead of me, but her girth and lack of peripheral vision (she was veiled to the eyelids) caused her to stumble as she entered the aisle. The Qur'an she held in her hand fell to the ground and I bent to pick it up when a foot darted out from her drapery and was placed nimbly on my hand.
-- Don't touch it, she said, it's sacred.
She removed the foot (wearing a purple sock and a white tennis shoe) and recovered her Qur'an. When she rose we stood together, face to face, or rather face to hood; she was rather tall.
-- But thank you anyway, she said, and I felt she actually smiled before leaving the train, though I couldn't be sure through the veil.
I managed a nod as I watched her disappear in the crowd on the platform. I wondered at my foolish tendency to treat munaqaba women as if they were all old and handicapped.

Alexandria was blustery and smelled of roasted peanuts. Night had fallen, a cold, sharper dark than the one in Cairo, which is always rounded with a little haze. My hotel room on the Prophet Daniel Street was high enough to catch a glimpse of the sea on one side and the minaret of the mosque next door. I didn't have much time before the piano recital I'd come to attend. The pianist was Faris Habachi, the twelve-year-old Egyptian prodigy who I hoped to interview after his performance.

The auditorium in the Alexandria Library was full to bursting, except for the front rows cordoned off for local dignitaries. The library director arrived with two bodyguards, the minister of culture with four. There was a commotion in the back of the theater and I recognized the shapely head of the son of the president, who I wouldn't have taken for a classical music buff. In all events he advanced with his entourage of sleek corporate types to the front seats. At precisely nine o'clock the library director took the stage and began a long and nauseating litany of thanks to the various powers that be, including the ones seated before him. Then he said a few words about the miraculous talent of this boy from a humble Coptic Alexandrian family, the first piano prodigy Egypt ever produced, proof of the cultural renaissance the country was experiencing under the enlightened administration of etc. etc. Finally the house lights dimmed to black. When they came up the child was standing with his hand on the piano, stroking it slightly as if to subdue it.

Egyptians are a sentimental, histrionic people. They stood to welcome their native son with thunderous applause and rapturous cries. The child, with a longjawed, sallow face and a fine mustache, stood his ground and hardly blinked his startlingly gray, dark-lashed eyes. Then he flashed a brilliant smile, beginning with the curling corners of his mouth, expanding to reveal gapped teeth and stretching into deep crevices that foretold manhood and old age. His smile was so forthcoming that for a moment it seemed his skull would burst through it; he wanted to give us his all, the smile said, and would have gladly accompanied us happily through to death had we but asked him.

The crowd surged as if he'd granted them redemption. Some of the wealthy women in the front threw flowers. In the midst of it his parents arrived, along with a grandparent in a wheelchair and several siblings or cousins. The boy took a rose from the floor and walked to the edge of the stage to hand it to his mother, a trim and sedate woman surprisingly past middle age. Someone behind me heaved a sob. I remarked about the boy's poise: he walked erect with his left hand held loosely behind his back. While formal in posture, his body nevertheless suggested a barely contained mobility, like it was secretly dancing. It was nearly a half an hour before people dared to begin sitting down; to do so prior would have been tantamount to treason.

Faris played Ravel that night, Gaspard de la Nuit, a technically daring, emotionally sophisticated piece for any mature pianist, much less a twelve-year-old. The choice of music was a nod to the Francophile community that had supported the boy in his studies abroad, since he'd attended the local French school. The Ravel was in fact chosen by his British music instructor, Neville Rush, who happened to be a friend of mine. I will not elaborate on the brilliance of Faris's performance; it has been widely commented upon by those more expert than I. But I will say this: he played like one dispossessed, a blank receptacle to be entered and left at will, or endowed with any talent he wished; the boy was oddly gifted. His performance, however éblouissante, was nevertheless eclipsed by events later that night, which prevented me from carrying out the scheduled interview and indeed might have cost me my life.

At the concluding measures of the music's last movement, the president's son left his seat with his guards and companions in front and behind him. Seconds later Faris sounded the final chords. They were left to reverberate for a charged instant before the roar of applause -- and something else. I'm not sure why I'd risen to leave on the heels of the bigwigs, perhaps to avoid another half hour of tedious clapping, but the fact is I reached the lobby in time to see the president's son clutch his shoulder and fall, his bodyguards wrestling an armed man to the ground. A gun had fired very close to my head.

I managed to exit before the mad crush that swept the men carrying the president's son (looking somehow both shocked and composed, clutching a folded handkerchief to his left upper arm, the blood seeping between his long slender fingers) like a wave into the street and an awaiting vehicle.

I turned left onto the cornice, striding hard until a break in traffic allowed me to cross to the seaside to walk and think. It was then I realized that the thwarted assassin had been wearing purple socks and tennis shoes. I'd seen them plain as day -- what were the chances? But what difference would it make if I told the authorities about the munaqaba on the train, a story that would be extremely complicated and probably end in my arrest? How would it help for them to know? Indeed, why would I want to help anyway? The president's son, after all, had survived. No point in setting the hounds on some poor citizen with probably a very sound grievance. There were millions like her; it's a wonder some great head wasn't shot once a week. Besides, how could I be absolutely sure, under the circumstances, of the exact shade of those socks or the model of the shoe? It had all happened so quickly.

That settled that.

I joined Neville and several Alexandrians later that night for a drink at the Cap d'Or; everyone needed one. They were held up in the library auditorium until after twelve. People were guardedly excited about the events of the evening, wishing to neither dismiss nor give them more than their due. To have been overly concerned for the president's son would have seemed suspect, suggesting either sycophancy or schadenfreude, and in all events involvement in something that, ultimately, did not concern them. But you could see uncertainty in their bleary eyes. Neville's Alexandrian friends were elderly and had had a hard night. We said our goodbyes quite early.

By morning I'd forgotten their names and recalled only a good-natured frowziness. The thing worth remembering was that Neville had promised me an appointment with Faris Habachi that day. I never slept more than five hours, even if exhausted. At seven I had a cappuccino and croissant at Pastroudis and scanned a paper whose headlines were about the shooting. The streets were quiet, the people lying low to see what might befall them, having failed to protect the first son on his visit to their city. There was a man on the street selling slices of palm heart. He'd carved the meter-high pillar of palm into a ziggurat and gave me a few slivers off the top. Palm heart has the color of ivory, the texture of snake and the taste of paradox: it is richly austere and crunchy as hell.

Neville arranged our meeting at the Café Delice. I was a bit late and crossing Saad Zaglool square caught sight of them. Neville was gesticulating and the boy nodding distractedly while looking off towards the sea in my direction. I caught his eye and he held it as I approached, or perhaps he'd spotted me first and wanted to take me in. He rose when I reached the table, gave me a surprisingly large, chapped and nail-bitten hand and greeted me in comfortable, Egyptian-accented French. I kissed Neville and sat between them, congratulating the boy on his performance.
-- But it is terrible what happened to the president's son, the boy said, with reflexive solicitude as if the person in question was an old mutual friend.
-- Don't worry, I don't work for the government, I told him, provoking a faint, uneasy smile and a sidelong glance.

I wanted to examine the boy and those clear, grey eyes more closely (he was taller than he seemed on stage, and unbleached by the spotlights his features showed signs of fatigue and a precocious physical maturity). Fortunately, Neville claimed some minor errand and left us, saying he'd be back in a half-hour. He was actually gone for two, but the time vanished in conversation with Faris, whose sensibilities, while not "adult" per se, transcended age and appearance, not to mention experience. More than a musician he was himself a fine-tuned instrument bent on communication -- which meant an uncannily casual understanding of one's clumsily hidden intentions as well as the ability to transmit volumes of information about what he thought or felt, almost involuntarily.

I began with a comment on his effect on the crowd:
-- You know they rely on you, the Egyptians, for their pride.
-- Do you want me to say I can save them?
-- No. But can you?
-- As you know, we are not interested in music here so much as dancing.
-- Do you dance?
-- Have you seen Michael Jackson?
I smiled but could have sworn that the thought of him dancing, no, transportedly grabbing his crotch in the manner of the American pop star, did not originate in my own associative mind but was presented to me by his.
I cleared my throat and summoned the waiter. I thought I'd order cake and see how he ate. I recognize this was a way of regaining control, but I needed time to pause and catch my breath. He was alive, our young Faris, strangely alive.
When I asked his opinion of the Alexandria Library, he said
-- The past is beneath our feet. Who knows who will be walking on our heads one day?' And he raised an upturned hand to the columned façade of the old bourse building beside us, then brought it down again, signaling its descent into rubble along with everything else.
-- So do you want to stay in these noble ruins, or live somewhere else?
This made him laugh, but then he looked at me, squinting earnestly, and said
-- You know, I'm actually almost fifteen, by my own calculations, not twelve.

Jaw-first, he leaned across the table to examine my reaction. I noticed signs of an early beard on the broad hollow planes of his cheeks. I played his revelation way down.
-- You know how it is in Egypt, mothers lose track of the years, municipalities lose birth certificates... if they say you're twelve you might as well be.
-- It isn't that. They lied -- to make me more of a child phenomenon -- as if I weren't prodigious enough!
-- They wanted to get more mileage out of you, that's all; they're the world's greatest negotiators. I wouldn't take it personally.
-- Precisely! They're negotiating the truth.
-- And why not? It's all they've got to bargain with.
-- You're doing the same thing. But you know what I mean. It's that no one believes anymore, he said, gripping the table.
And I gathered that what vexed him was how truths are lost in confused interpretations of inauthentic interactions. No one believes anymore in what one feels or who one is or who the other might be, or in the things that one knows but never says.
He went on, picking up the track of my thoughts:
-- That's why I play music, though I might have been a scientist or a politician. Because it's the quickest way in.
-- But into whom? Are the people who come to piano concerts the ones that interest you?
-- It's not for them but for me. This is how I reach for now; I'll find other ways later on.
He sat back in his chair, legs bobbing on jittery heels.
-- You certainly play very well. Where will you take it? Do you think it will ever bore you?
-- I may still achieve more technical facility if that's what you mean. My rough edges, as Neville calls them, will be smoothed out soon enough. Then I'll be like this harbor in a summer calm.
And for starters, he stopped bobbing his legs.
-- Do you have a girlfriend? I asked.
-- No, but I've met someone nice, he said with what I took as an invisible nudge.
-- Come on.
-- Really, I've read all your books. You have a peculiar wisdom.
-- Thanks a lot.
I said it wryly but felt absurdly flattered. Neville must have passed him my trilogy about Cairo which had caused a bit of a stir a few years back.
-- I like the Coptic woman who has an affair with the Muslim, he said, bouncing around in his chair as if it had started vibrating.
-- It happens. God has nothing to do with it.
-- I know. I'm god.
That was a good one. I gave him an up-from-under look from over my teacup. He was smiling with the corners of his mouth again and positively glittering.
-- No kidding? How do you know?
-- Because everything is here because of me, just because I can see it. And it disappears each time I blink my eyes.
-- Me too?
-- You first.

Just then the waiter brought our cakes, an exasperating interruption compounded by the arrival of Neville looking flustered, his glasses splotched with a light rain. The boy was still watching me as I stood suddenly to leave, my inner editor having indicated that this was a good place to cut.
-- Don't stop looking until you can't see me anymore, I told Faris.
-- I won't. You'll have to take over after that.
-- I'll try.
Neville's attentions were torn between the strawberry tarts on the table and the fact of my precipitous departure. I said I would call him next week in Cairo and glided away.

Instead of walking towards the beckoning sea, I obstinately turned into the Prophet Daniel and wandered to the Greco Roman Museum. Aside the mummified crocodile, an old and trusted friend, I saw human faces everywhere, carved from stone, wood, ivory and bone, and peering from the disintegrating weave of ancient fabrics. I visited the mosaic women, the ones with their eyes opened very wide. I tried their gaze on for size and it seemed to work some physiological magic. I tried to maintain the gaze in the museum gift shop, located in a courtyard littered with fragmented statuary and a few Byzantine lions. They were selling life-size inflatable gods, plastic ones, including Ibis and a handsome Anubis. I thought of getting one for Faris but resisted the whim. It was one of those things it would be better to tell someone about than to do. I caught myself formulating a new encounter and admitted he hadn't left my mind since we'd parted. I noticed my eyes had narrowed back to normal. I reflected amusedly on the possibilities of Faris Habachi as god, and they widened again. I spent the afternoon and much of the evening transcribing our conversation in my hotel room.

Midnight mass at St. Mark's seemed more like a house party than a religious ritual. The crowd of perhaps several thousand flowed in and out of the church, milling around outside for the duration of the ceremony. Because of the large attendance men and women intermingled rather more than usual since they ordinarily occupy opposite sides of the church. The proceedings were in fact amiably casual, lacking entirely in the pie-faced reverence that dominates this sort of thing in the West. While some people bowed their heads in worship, others chatted and visited or talked on mobile phones. Children ran in the aisles or slept in their parent's arms, only to be awakened for Holy Communion.

White-robed, bearded priests in starchy peaked cowls clustered in the recessed central knave of the altar like surgeons around an operating table, preparing the Eucharist. Amongst them, I recognized Father Maximus. Now and then they lifted shiny vessels above their heads, to the drone of an insouciant liturgical chant, part punk, part Hindi pop, but nasal and insistent. At the end, a grinning bishop passed along the centre aisle ecstatically splashing the congregation with holy water that he scooped from a bowl and jettisoned incisively over upturned heads and hands.

I spotted Faris's mother in the crowd, though the boy did not seem to be present. I introduced myself as a friend of Neville's and she said that he'd spoken of me and thanked me for my interest in her son. She was a neat woman of medium height, simply dressed in a skirt and matching jacket. She wore her salt and pepper hair at the base of her neck in a bun. She had apparently had Faris when she was close to fifty.

I asked her what her son was like as a child but gleaned little enough from our conversation which proceeded along the blandest lines. She told me he was quiet, never cried and only began speaking at the age of four. His sister, who married early, had already left the house before he was born. In fact Faris called her "tante." The only item of interest was Faris's aversion to fruit. "As a child he couldn't bear to be in the same room with an orange," she told me. I said that it must have been hard. On the other hand he had a passion for pomegranates and spent hours dismantling them. After he'd filled a bowl with the glassy red seeds he liked to sprinkle them with sugar, she told me, and eat them one by one.

We were joined by Father Maximus, who greeted the woman warmly and welcomed me by name. Before he could inquire, Mrs. Habachi told him that Faris had left the ceremony after taking communion; he had to prepare for a Christmas recital in Cairo to be attended by the Coptic patriarch himself. Her only fear was that it might be cancelled due to the unfortunate events at the Alexandria Library.
-- Never mind, Father Maximus reassured her, that affair has been settled, haven't you heard?
We confessed that we hadn't.
-- Do your recall the story we spoke of on the train, he asked me, smiling mildly, the one about the priest's wife?
-- Yes, of course.
I was anxious for him to go on, but he was interrupted by the arrival of a group of well-wishers and a small boy saying he was wanted in the refectory. Nor did Mrs. Faris's curiosity extend past the assurances she'd received that her son's concert would take place unimpeded.
-- I'm glad, she said to me, he was looking forward to it. It's his birthday you know. He'll be thirteen.
This was imparted without a trace of disingenuousness, but I couldn't conceal a look of incredulity having learned the boy shared the same stars as Jesus Christ.
-- You mean he was born on the Nativity?
-- Why yes. He came as such as a surprise to us, she sighed, glancing up at the sky.
-- He's a surprising young man.
-- We are blessed.
-- Indeed, we are.

I would have returned to Cairo that night had there been a train, but ended up on the one at nine in the morning. The early fog merged with the black smoke of burning rice husks as we passed through the Delta, or what was left of it, patches of vibrant green between tightly packed brick hovels. When we stopped in Tanta I bought several newspapers from a boy in a yellow windbreaker bearing the word "serendipity" in machine sewn letters on the back.

I was astonished to learn that the French, English and Arabic dailies all linked the failed assassination of the president's son with the errant wife of the crippled priest. They said her lover was behind it. By some accounts, he'd acted alone, the shooting his spontaneous, visceral response to his perceived loss of face. The government should have spoken out against the slanderous accusations of kidnapping and forced conversion to vindicate both his honor and Islam's. But elsewhere it was suggested that the attack was well planned, a fact known to the authorities, who used the juicy sectarian scandal to conceal a more ominous truth. This being that a militant network was active in Egypt and growing in strength and ambition. As evidence, one editorial pointed to the subtlety of the rebuke: targeting the president's son represented a far crueler blow to the ageing president than the loss of his own life. Finally, the back page of the state-owned English weekly featured a profile of the Christian woman and a photo of her at her husband's bedside. A highlighted quote read, "By the grace of god he has forgiven me."

The papers, I reckoned, would be full of this sort of thing for a week or two, until another item took its place and the events, as they'd happened or as we thought they had, receded into the fictive pool of shared memory. Faris, at least, was real and so was Cairo. I was home by noon, when the sky went dark with clouds. With a little luck, it might just rain.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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