Being Egyptian, Ihab mocked the Sudan with affectionate gusto, in the same spirit that he jeered at Egypt. His main objection was simple: ‘Because beeble no free!’
‘In America, beeble can kiss girl on street — no broblem. But in Egypt, in Sudan, I kiss girl and bolice come! They take me!’ He sulked, thinking about it. ‘They make a bad bosition for me!’
‘For kissing a girl?’
‘Is illegal. But not in America.’
‘You can’t kiss strangers, though,’ I said.
He wasn’t listening. ‘I want go to New Jersey! I want to be New Jersey man!’
A pretty Egyptian woman, traveling with an old woman who might have been her mother, sat in the seat just across the aisle.
‘Egyptian woman very sexy,’ Ihab said, in a confiding whisper, his mouth full of saliva. He shifted, canting his body towards me so that the woman would not hear and said, ‘She cut.’
I had a good idea of what he meant but pretended I didn’t, so that he would have to explain. This he did, first making a specific hand gesture, inserting a clitoral thumb between two labial fingers.
‘She cut here,’ he said, slicing at his thumb with his free hand.
‘Painful,’ I said. And what was the point?
‘No bain! She small — leetle. One week, one month maximum, she cut.’
Infant clitoridectomies were new to me but much on the minds of feminists in the West and the women’s movement in Egypt, as well. I asked the obvious question: What was the point?
‘Better for her — make her more sexy,’ Ihab said. ‘If she cut, she like sex all day.’
This conceit, echoed by some other men I met on my trip, went against all medical evidence, and was a bit like saying sex for a man was more fun if his goolies had been snipped off. I also heard the opposite and more believable reason: that it dulled the woman’s pleasure and made her faithful. Ihab was so rhapsodic on the subject he had begun to raise his voice, and I feared the woman might hear and be offended,
‘A woman who cut like this — you touch her’ — he grazed my leg with his knuckles — ‘she get so excited.’
‘Imagine that.’
‘American woman, no. But in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi — woman who cut, they get so excited if you just touch something.’ He smiled at me. ‘Touch feenga. Touch skeen.’
He showed me his hand and made the gesture again with his fingers.
‘When you blay in zees blace,’ he said, emphasizing his thumb, ‘she go crazy.’
Whispering the Arabic word for the procedure, he compressed himself and breathed into my ear, lest anyone hear this forbidden term, which was khitan.
And on leaving the plane his eyes bugged out as we followed the attractive woman and her mother, addressing the woman’s secret, roused and frisky, picturing in his fevered brain the thing he could not see, saying, ‘Woman with khitan, she more sexy.’
Coming from Hurghada, he knew a thing or two about women, especially foreign women. In his business, which was sales and marketing, he had many sexual proposals from visiting women — all Egyptians did. Visitors found them attractive. Well, I could vouch for that: the embankments of the Nile rang with the shrieks of Europeans being pleasured on board feluccas, indeed, the very name felucca had a sexual ring to it.
Ihab had had marriage proposals, too, from Russian women.
‘Give me an example.’
‘One woman. She want to make marry with me. But I marry already. I like my wife, I like my two kids. So why marry?’
‘I agree.’
‘But my wife so jealous.’
‘Mine too, sometimes.’
‘Yah?’ He seemed somewhat shocked. ‘Yours? Mine? So woman are all the same?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Almost the first man I met in Khartoum refuted everything Ihab said. He was a small thin man named Haroun, whom I met at the Acropole Hotel. From the outside, the Acropole was just another seedy building on a dusty back street of the hot city of broken streets and deep potholes. But the hotel had been recommended. Inside, the Acropole was clean and pleasant, marble floors and tidy rooms, run by a courteous Greek, George Pagoulatos, whose heart was in his ancestral Cephalonia but who had been born in Khartoum. Tell me what you want to do in the Sudan, he said, and perhaps I can arrange it. He kept his word. Because of George, all journalists and aid workers stayed at the Acropole. He was the helpful manager of the exotic hotel in the classic movie, and for much of the time I stayed there, life at the Acropole seemed like Casablanca without the alcohol. Not George’s fault: sharia law meant that alcohol was banned in the Sudan. There were no restaurants to speak of in Khartoum, so all meals were taken in the Acropole dining room, supervised by George’s cheerful Sicilian wife.
‘Take it from me,’ Haroun said, speaking of female circumcision. ‘I can tell you from experience that such women feel nothing.’
‘But they submit?’
‘They lie there. They have no idea what is happening. You feel a little silly if you are a man. And if you are a woman, I don’t know.’
‘So what’s in it for them?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, children.’
‘Egyptians are pretty jolly, though.’
‘They laugh, yes. Nasser said, “Our lives are terrible but at least we know how to laugh.” ’
‘They seem friendly.’
‘You think Egyptians are friendly?’ He looked at me as though I was off my head. ‘Their friendliness is fake.’
Haroun was as skeptical of the Palestinians as he was of the Israelis. He wasn’t fond of the Iraqis, but he didn’t like the Iranians either. ‘And the Saudis are just one big corrupt family.’
‘Arabs,’ he said, and showed his yellow teeth in a cynical smile and shrugged his skinny shoulders.
‘What would you call yourself?’
‘I am a Catholic,’ he said.
He was Jordanian, with a business in Amman, and didn’t have much time for the Jordanian royal family, either. One group of people had his total approval — the Sudanese.
‘Look how they greet each other,’ he said. ‘They embrace, they slap each other on the back, they hug and kiss. No other Arabs do that. They like each other, they are good people.’
‘Have you had any problems here?’
‘None.’
Khartoum, a city of tall white-robed men with thickly wrapped Aladdin-like turbans, and tall veiled women in bright gowns and black gloves, was a city without rain, wide and brown like its set of intersecting rivers. Khartoum’s tallest structures were the pencil-like minarets of its many mosques. The lanky shrouded inhabitants looked spectral, as people often do in glarey sun-dazzled places. There was no shade except the slanting shadows of the Sudanese. Their ghostliness was made emphatic by their shrouds and cloaks, even their heads loosely wrapped against the sun and heat, nothing showing except brown beaky faces.
The city lay at the confluence of two wide rivers, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, both of them very muddy, bearing silt from the south, coursing past earthen banks that were cut straight up and down because they had been chunked away by rushing water. The bushes beside both Niles were hung with rags and plastic bags, snared by branches in the flood. To the west, across an old British iron bridge, was Omdurman, where over a century ago General Gordon had been killed and decapitated by the Mahdi, whose great-grandson, Sadig el Mahdi, still lived in the family mansion by the river. Here the river was both Niles combined in a wide gurgling mud current, flowing north towards Cairo. To the northeast, in the industrial district of North Khartoum, Clinton’s rockets had fallen in 1998.
‘Five rockets — very sudden,’ a student in a group told me, pointing it out across the river.