"Have you had any news from him? A letter?"
"No, nothing," she said, leading me into their house. "Nothing at all. The last time we had news of him was when Ismail came back two months ago."
"Ismail's back?"
"Praise be to God." She smiled. "He's back in good health and everything."
"Where is he?" I said, looking around. "Can you send for him?"
"Of course," she said. "He's just around the corner, sitting at home. He hasn't found a job yet — does odd jobs here and there, but most of the time he has nothing to do. I'll send for him right now."
I looked around while I waited. Something seemed to have interrupted the work on their house. When I'd last seen it, I had had the impression that it would be completed in a matter of months. But now, a year and a half later, the floor was still just a platform of packed earth and gravel. The tiles had not been laid yet, and nor had the walls been plastered or painted.
"Hamdulillah al-salama." Ismail was at the door, laughing, his hand extended. "Why didn't you come?" he said as soon as the greetings were over. "You remember that day you telephoned from America? Nabeel telephoned me soon after he'd spoken to you. He just picked up the phone and called me where I was working. He told me that you'd said that you were going to visit us. We expected you for a long time. We made space in our room and thought of all the places we'd show you. But you know, Nabeel's boss, the shop owner? He got really upset — he didn't like it a bit that Nabeel had got a long-distance call from America."
"Why didn't Nabeel come back with you? What news of him?"
"He wanted to come back. In fact, he had thought that he would. But then he decided to stay for a few more months, make a little more money, so that they could finish building this house. You see how it's still half finished — all the money was used up. Prices have gone up this last year, everything costs more."
"And besides," said Fawzia, "what would Nabeel do back here? Look at Ismail — just sitting at home, no job, nothing to do…"
Ismail shrugged. "But still, he wanted to come back. He's been there three years. It's more than most, and it's aged him. You'd see what I mean if you saw him. He looks much older. Life's not easy out there."
"What do you mean?"
"The Iraqis, you know." He pulled a face. "They're wild — all those years of war have made them a little like animals. They come back from the army for a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on the streets there at night. If some drunken Iraqis came across you, they would kill you, just like that, and nobody would even know, for they'd throw away your papers. It's happened, happens all the time. They blame us, you see. They say, 'You've taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while we're fighting and dying.'"
"What about Saddam Hussein?"
"Saddam Hussein!" He rolled his eyes. "You have to be careful when you breathe that name out there — there are spies everywhere, at every corner, listening. One word about Saddam and you're gone, dead. In those ways it's terrible out there, though of course there's the money. But still, you can't live long out there, it's impossible. Did you hear what happened during the World Cup?"
Earlier in the year Egypt had played a soccer match with Algeria, to decide which team would play in the World Cup. Egypt had won, and Egyptians everywhere had gone wild with joy. In Iraq the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who lived packed together, all of them young, all of them male, with no families, children, wives, nothing to do but stare at their newly bought television sets — they had exploded out of their rooms and into the streets in a delirium of joy. Their football team had restored to them that self-respect that their cassette recorders and television sets had somehow failed to bring. To the Iraqis, who have never had anything like a normal political life, probably never seen crowds except at pilgrimages, the massed ranks of Egyptians must have seemed like the coming of Armageddon. They responded by attacking them on the streets, often with firearms. Well trained in war, they fell upon the jubilant unarmed crowds of Egyptian workers.
"You can't imagine what it was like," said Ismail. He had tears in his eyes. "It was then that I decided to leave. Nabeel decided to leave as well, but of course he always needed to think a long time about everything. At the last minute he thought he'd stay just a little bit longer…"
A little later we went to his house to watch the news on the color television he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case in the center of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage from Jordan: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in jallabeyyas, some carrying their television sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part.
There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the television set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. But there was nothing to be seen except crowds. Nabeel had vanished into the pages of the epic exodus.
DANCING IN CAMBODIA 1993
ON MAY 10, 1906, at two in the afternoon, a French liner called the Amiral-Kersaint set sail from Saigon carrying a troupe of nearly a hundred classical dancers and musicians from the royal palace at Phnom Penh. The ship was bound for Marseille, where the dancers were to perform at a great colonial exhibition. It would be the first time Cambodian classical dance was performed in Europe.
Also traveling on the Amiral-Kersaint was the sixty-six-year-old ruler of Cambodia, King Sisowath, along with his entourage of several dozen princes, courtiers, and officials. The king, who had been crowned two years before, had often spoken of his desire to visit France, and for him the voyage was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
The Amiral-Kersaint docked in Marseille on the morning of June 11. The port was packed with curious onlookers; the city's trams had been busy since seven, transporting people to the vast, covered quay where the king and his entourage were to be received. Two brigades of gendarmes and a detachment of mounted police were deployed to keep the crowd from bursting in.
The crowd had its first brief glimpse of the dancers when the Amiral-Kersaint loomed out of the fog shortly after nine and drew alongside the quay. A number of young women were spotted on the bridge and on the upper decks, flitting between portholes and clutching each other in what appeared to be surprise and astonishment.
Within minutes a gangplank decorated with tricolored bunting had been thrown up to the ship. Soon the king himself appeared on deck, a good-humored, smiling man dressed in a tailcoat, a jewel-encrusted felt hat, and a dhotilike Cambodian sampot made of black silk. The king seemed alert, even jaunty, to those privileged to observe him at close range: a man of medium height, he had large, expressive eyes and a heavy-lipped mouth topped by a thin mustache.
King Sisowath walked down the gangplank with three pages following close behind him; one bore a ceremonial gold cigarette case, another a gold lamp with a lighted wick, and a third a gold spittoon in the shape of an open lotus. The king was an instant favorite with the Marseillais crowd. The port resounded with claps and cheers as he was driven away in a ceremonial landau, and he was applauded all the way to his specially appointed apartments at the city's Préfecture.