Countdown in Cairo

Part Two
THIRTY-ONE

Within two hours she saw the topography of northern Africa for the first time. She recognized the contours of the Nile Delta where it met the sea. Far away to the east she could see the ancient land where the Suez Canal had been built a hundred and fifty years ago. Beyond, also within her view in the distance through the hazy sky, she could see the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, the land of so many of the Bible tales of her youth.

For much of the flight Alex had been prowling through files on her laptop and poking through a phrasebook of Egyptian Arabic. Now she leaned back from the window. A strange feeling was upon her, accompanied by a poignant memory.

When Alex had been in her midteens, she had been too good a student for her own school system. One thing had led to another, and she had been sent away on a full scholarship to a private boarding school in Connecticut where she was allowed to excel in all her studies, particularly languages. The summer after her junior year she had won an internship to work in France, and off she had gone again, full of adventure and naïveté, and hiding within her a heavy element of fear and intimidation.

She had been away from home before but had never been so far away, never on another continent and immersed in another culture. Additionally, it was one thing to have excelled in French in the classroom, quite another to be smacked down in it in real life.

She had flown from New York to Paris. Her first night in Paris passed safely and securely. She had registered in advance at a student residence in Paris and had hung out with some other Americans. But the next day had been different. She had taken a train deep into the center of France, a single girl of seventeen traveling alone, with one cramped bag of clothes, three hundred dollars in cash, and a single credit card that would max at five hundred dollars.

She had been scared and had felt lost and vulnerable. She asked herself why she was doing this, whether this was what she had really wanted, whether it might have been easier and more pleasant to have just spent the summer hanging around her mother’s home in California.

On the southbound train, Alex fell into a conversation with an older French woman, a woman old enough to remember the world war in which, fifty years earlier, she said, she had lost her husband at Dunkirk. The old woman befriended her, even gave her some fresh fruit from a basket. They both descended from the train at Saint Etienne and said their good-byes. The old woman, whose name was Marie-Claire, gave her a hug, and Alex reciprocated. Marie-Claire felt frail and bony in her grasp and almost unsteady when Alex released her. She reminded Alex-distantly and in spooky kind of way-of her own late grandmother.

Alex had to find her way on foot to a local youth hostel, where she would stay overnight, and then the next morning take another train to the Camargue region where her job awaited her.

She walked down some questionable streets to get to the hostel. She took the wrong route twice and was corrected twice when strangers answered questions. When she arrived at the hostel, early in the evening, it was not the nicest place. Peeling walls, worn linoleum, dim corridors that reeked of age and abuse. Worse, the hostel had been overbooked and there wasn’t a room for her. There wasn’t even an extra bed in the dormitory. The staff wasn’t entirely helpful, and to top it off, the phones weren’t working.

She was near tears. Had the trains been running, she might have turned around, retraced her route to Paris, then to New York, then home to California. Who could blame a frightened teenager for wanting to go home?

She sat in the lobby and tried to evaluate what to do. Several minutes later, a young man came over to her and sat down next to her. He was very slight of build, with a mocha complexion. In French he started a conversation and asked what nationality she was.

“I’m American,” she said in French. “From California.”

“My name is René,” he said. “I’m French, but of Tunisian origin.”

He smiled and tried to speak English with her, but his was limited, so their conversation ensued in French. He was eighteen and had technical training in computer engineering, he said, mostly self-acquired. He had enlisted in the French Air Force, he said, l’armee de l’air, he proclaimed proudly. This was his final evening at liberty. The next day he would take a train in a different direction and travel onward to Nantes in west central France for six weeks of basic training. It was his hope to eventually see the world, to be posted in someplace exotic like Polynesia or Martinique where the French maintained bases. He added that it had always been his dream to visit America, as well.

Alex joined him for dinner. They had soup and bread and cheese in the hostel cafeteria. She waited to see whether the hostel keepers would find a place for her. But while her conversation with René played out in the forefront of her mind, in the back of her mind her worries accelerated.

What would she do? Despite the kindness of the old lady on the train and the gentle amity of René this evening, she had never felt so homesick in her life, so cut off from everything she knew. In her stomach was a knot that wouldn’t untie.

After dinner, there was a change at the concierge’s desk. The new man told Alex that the phones were up and running again and they had called everywhere, including local homes that might take in an overnight border. But it was early summer and there were no beds to be had anywhere within a hundred miles. Nor was there any way for a single girl traveling alone to get to anywhere else. And it was against regulations for anyone to stay in the hostel’s lobby or office area.

There was still some daylight remaining. In midsummer in the south of France daylight remained until almost ten o’clock. Alex walked outside the hostel, stood in the street and tried to decide what to do. She noticed that across the street there was a small Catholic church. It was white stucco with peeling green paint on its front door.

Alex walked to it. She tried the door but it was locked. When she turned around, however, she was surprised to find René standing very close to her.

“I heard what’s happening,” he said. “You can have my room for the night.”

She was shocked. “That’s kind of you,” she said. They spoke in French, and at this time in her life, hers was halting. “But you’re about to go into the military. I couldn’t possibly take your room for the final night.”

“I wish you would,” he said.

“Where would you go?”

“I have a backpack. I can sleep in the park. Among the hobos,” he said with a smile, “among les clochards. It will be an adventure. I’ll be gone before dawn as long as the police don’t catch me.”

“No, no,” she said. “You mustn’t take such a risk for me.”

“Then let me sneak you into my room and we will share it,” he said.

Her expression must have conveyed her confusion, appreciation mingled with anxiety and suspicion. He sought to defuse it. “I warn you, there is only one bed. It is very narrow and there is no space on the floor. But I will be honorable.”

She searched his eyes. Sometimes, she thought, angels take strange forms.

“All right,” she said.

They returned to the hostel. A friend created a distraction for the concierge and Alex darted down the corridor to René’s room. The concierge either didn’t see her or chose not to.

The door to René’s room was unlocked and the room empty. He followed a minute later, closed the door and locked it. The room was tiny, maybe eight by ten, with a nightstand and a bed, just as René had described. Barely enough room for two people to stand up together, much less lie down together.

The shower and bathroom facilities on the corridor were communal. They took turns so that Alex could have privacy to change and so that he could too. Awkwardly, at 11:00 p.m., they turned off the single room light and lay down together, Alex between the wall and René’s body. Around her neck, Alex wore the small gold cross that her dad had given her years earlier, the one she had eventually lost in Kiev. She knew René had noted it, but he said nothing about it.

A moment passed. They both started to laugh at the preposterousness of the situation. Then they started to talk about their homes, their families. They discovered they were both only children raised by a single parent. René had been raised by his very strict father, who worked in a factory. His mother had deserted the family when he had been five. René had been raised as a Muslim but had fallen away from his faith, perhaps as a reaction to the strictness of his father’s Islam.

“What would your father say if he knew you were here, lying in bed, with an American girl?” Alex asked.

“Oooh!” René answered quickly. He laughed and pointed to his lower backside in the dim light. He furiously waved a finger to indicate that he didn’t even want to think about what would happen. He made a moaning sound over the beating he probably would have received. “But my father and I do not agree on many things,” he said. “It is one reason I am going away and joining the armée de l’air. It doesn’t mean I don’t love him or respect him. It only means we disagree.”

After hushed conversation of nearly an hour, fatigue rolled in upon them. Alex taught René some words and phrases in English. Hello. How are you? Good-bye. Good luck.

René reciprocated with some useful words in Arabic.

Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.

Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.

“If you greet most Arab people in their language, you break the ice,” he said. “They will trust you more and treat you with a genuine smile,” he said. “Assalamou Alaekom means ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ in Arabic. Another word is Ezzayak, said as a question. It means, ‘How are you?’ Learning a few Arabic words will always make a difference.”

“Assalamou Alaekom,” she tried, laughing, garbling it.

“Assalamou Alaekom,” he corrected. It quickly became a joke between them. They laughed until she felt herself drifting, trying to stay awake but no longer able. The last thing she remembered was René saying something to her that she didn’t understand. She was too tired.

The next morning she awoke with a start. It was 8:00 a.m., and she was alone on the bed. She looked everywhere in the small room. René was gone and had taken all his things. She waited for several minutes to see if perhaps he was in the shower or the bathroom. But no. He was gone.

She pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans. She snuck out of the hostel. The new concierge on the morning shift gave her a cursory glance but said nothing. She went outside into a warm summer morning. She was still unsure what to do, whether to go forward with her trip or go back to America. The knot had returned to the pit of her stomach, and she again felt alone, sad, and vulnerable. She had made one friend, or thought she had, and now he was gone too.

The door to the church was open across the street. She had time. She wandered in. There were a few older people sitting in various pews. There was stained glass at the front, a hundreds-of-years-old depiction of Jesus raising his hands to God.

Alex sat for a moment, then closed her eyes and said a prayer. She wanted wisdom. She wanted guidance. She wanted to know how to proceed. She opened her eyes.

Nothing much had changed. She stood, bowed slightly to the cross at the altar, turned, and walked back toward the front door.

She was near her decision. She would return home. The loneliness was too much.

Then something caught her eye.

In the back pew, among the old people she had walked past was the lady from the train. The old woman smiled at her and raised a hand. She signaled Alex to wait, as if she had something to say.

Outside, Alex waited. The old woman came out of the church a few seconds later.

“Today you will continue on to the Camargue?” she asked, recalling the previous day’s conversation.

Alex hesitated. “Yes. Yes, I think so,” she said. “Unless I change my mind and go back to Paris. I’m thinking about-”

“No, no, no!” the old woman said sharply. “Il te faut continuer, ma chérie! You must go on. You must stay with your plans. You are young and pretty. The world is big and wonderful and waits for you. You will make many friends. You are a blessed person, I can tell.”

“Merci bien,” Alex said.

“If I had a gift, I would give you one,” the old lady said. “But I am old and not well off. So I don’t.”

“I think you just did give me a gift.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remind me so much of my grandmother. It’s almost as if you’re her.”

The old lady laughed. “You flatter me,” she said.

“My train leaves in an hour,” Alex said. “To the Camargue. Thank you.”

“Good luck to you,” the old lady said. “May God always bless you.”

They embraced again. On her way to the train station, Alex stopped by a small grocery store. From a cheerful shop owner, she bought fresh bread, a packet of cheese, two apples, and some bottled water for the train ride. She had an eye out for René but did not see him.

On the train through the French countryside, in a compartment that seated six, she wondered what guideposts, what angels, had been on earth for her. Across from her sat a mother with a boy of about ten. They were French of Sudanese origin, Alex learned as a conversation developed.

Alex tried her next phrase of greeting in Arabic. They smiled and responded with kindness. Alex engaged the boy in a casual conversation and eventually traded one of her apples for a pear while the mother smiled. The sun was brilliant outside, and there were new vistas beyond the train windows that she had never seen before. She sat in rapt attention and watched a new part of the world unfurl before her young eyes.

She felt older this morning. More confidant. Her French was coming more easily. She realized that she was a more confidant young woman this morning than the frightened young girl she had been twenty-four hours earlier. She would never, for example, have traded the apple for the pear a day earlier; she would have been too withdrawn. And she also suddenly realized that the knot in her stomach was gone. Oddly enough, it had disappeared when she was walking back up the short aisle of the church in Saint Etienne, when the old lady raised her hand and signaled her.

Now, a dozen years later, her flight from Rome leveled out. It followed the Nile River and finished its descent toward Cairo International Airport. Alex stared downward and again surveyed the ancient landscape, almost able to taste the millennia of history that lay along the river. Distantly, southward, beyond Cairo, she thought she could see the Pyramids of Giza.

Alex guessed that the old woman might well have passed away by now. She wondered what had ever happened to René, whether he ever visited Martinique or Polynesia or America. She could never remember his last name and wasn’t sure that she had ever known it. But she recalled the first three words of useful Arabic that he had taught her.

Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.

Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.

Well, she mused, you could live your whole life bracketed by those thoughts.

And she wondered whether that whole experience with René in the hostel and with the lady on the train and in the small church, whom she might also never see again in her life, had prepared her for this trip to Egypt more than any other single experience in her life.