going. Just one line prompted smiles and a brief outburst of applause—criticized George Bush for having lumped together Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an Axis of Evil.
The Q&A session lasted longer than the lecture. Each questioner stood up, introduced himself or herself by name and profession, gave a formal ritual greeting, welcomed me to Alexandria, praised my past accomplishments, expressed fascination for my current project, then lashed me for a multitude of intellectual shortcomings and cultural misapprehensions.
One gentleman complained that he had looked me up online and read the same lecture I had just inflicted on the audience: “It’s four years old. Have you learned nothing since you first gave this talk?”
Siberell interrupted, explaining that he had invited me to give this particular address.
“Shukran, shukran,” said my interrogator. “Thank you, thank you,” said the interpreter. The man sat down and a lady in a floral headscarf stood up and repeated the ritual greeting and gratitude and fulsome praise, then laid into me. “How can you come to our country and expect to understand anything when you don’t speak Arabic?”
With deep apologies for my ignorance, I attempted to make a case, just as I had in my lecture, that language was not the lone means of understanding and that words weren’t always the best links between people. Human beings had other means of perception, and sometimes words got in the way. For me, I said, one of the delights of travel was that it brought my dormant senses alive. Suddenly in foreign surroundings, I could see and hear and smell again. And afterward, if I was lucky, I could write. Blank pages, I pointed out, were like blank spaces on a map. In both cases I was eager to fill them up.
“Egypt is not a blank space,” someone shouted.
“Of course not,” I apologized. “A poor figure of speech. I realize I’m bound to make mistakes and misunderstand your history and religion. But I’m traveling in good faith to see things for myself and to learn. I’ve read the Koran and I ...”
“You read it in English. That’s not the Koran. Only in Arabic is it the Koran.”
For more than an hour, their cavils crashed over me. Though nobody asked about orgasms and black women, I almost wished someone had. That would have been preferable to their accusations that travel was a species of colonialism, an exploitation of poor countries by privileged people like me. Wasn’t I aware that Egypt had been invaded in 1798 by Napoleon and subjected to cruel dissection by squadrons of French scientists? Had I never heard that the British bombarded Alexandria in 1882 and ruled the country afterward like a royal fiefdom?
To my astonishment, this rough and tumble Q&A ended with the audience surging forward for an up-close-and-personal rapprochement that made me suspect that their harsh questions had been as formulaic as their greetings. Like other academics I would meet, they seemed to believe that giving a speaker a severe going-over was a sign of respect. But now there came a laying on of hands, a kind of benediction, heartfelt invitations to tea, promises of hospitality, requests for my e-mail address.
Although they had listened to me in translation and posed their public challenges in Arabic, they spoke to me privately in excellent English. A bespectacled young woman in a hijab asked, “Are you a feminist?” and when I said I supported equal rights for women, she exclaimed, “So do I. Everything I do is for feminism.” To her, she said, the hijab was a symbol of female empowerment.
A pale man in a dark suit, starched white shirt and black tie patiently waited his turn and introduced himself as a professor of literature at a university in the Nile delta. He had read online that forty years ago I had lived in France on a Fulbright Fellowship. He was in contention for a teaching Fulbright to the United States, and it appeared that he would have his pick between a college in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one in Walla Walla, Washington. “Which city is most like Alexandria?” he asked.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing in America like Alexandria.”
“Okay, but which one is warmer? I’ve never seen snow.”
“They both have snowy winters.”
“Okay, but where won’t I need a car?”
“I think you’ll have to drive wherever you go.”
“Yes, America is so big,” he fretted. “My field is science fiction, but they want me to teach Arabic and comparative literature. What I would like to do is work on my own novel. Do you think I’ll be permitted to take a creative writing course?”
“I’m sure you can arrange that.”
“What I’d really like is to write for the movies,” he said.
“Sorry, that’s not my field.” Someone gripped my elbow and steered me toward the exit. I assumed it was Siberell rescuing me.
“But one of your books became a movie.”
“I wasn’t involved. Good luck to you.”
On the carpeted loggia that had served as a prayer rug, a caterer had set out sweets and soft drinks. I noticed then that it was a young man, not Siberell, who’d been clutching my arm.
“Unless you want to be stuck answering questions all night, I’d suggest getting out of here,” he said.
His name was Michael Nevadomski, and he was an undergraduate from Middlebury College in Vermont, spending a year in Alexandria to improve his Arabic. He was already quite fluent and had translated some of Durrell into Arabic. The son of a Polish-American father and a mother from the island of Guam, he had been raised in Florida and looked like a preppy New Englander in his tweed jacket. But he was completely at home in Egypt.
At Michael’s suggestion, we went to Pastroudis, another Art Deco relic from the Cosmopolitan Era. Although we had the paneled dining room to ourselves, waiters scurried around as if we had arrived with an entourage. Mineral water and a bottle of Obelisk wine promptly appeared on the table. A booklike menu came inscribed with a quote in English from Durrell about “Alexandria, the Capital of memory” and paragraphs of commentary about Cavafy and Mahfouz and King Farouk, Egypt’s deposed monarch, whose immense girth might have qualified him as a food critic. All the dishes had French names and were described at length in that language-which was strange since none of the waiters spoke a word of it. Michael ordered for us in Arabic.
In the adjacent bar, a radio played Lionel Richie. “He’s the most popular singer in the Arab world,” Michael said. “A lot of people don’t know any English except for his songs.”
From pop culture, he moved to local lore and arcana. Michael seemed to have read every book and to know every bit of minutiae about Alexandria, Egypt and Islam. He discussed sects and sub-sects. Not just Sunnis and Shiites, but Sufis and Salafi’ists.
When I mentioned that I was headed for Libya, he warned me that the border was littered with mines—some left over from World War II, others from more recent conflicts. He hadn’t crossed the frontier and didn’t know anybody who had tried to. But he had traveled by bus throughout the western desert and he urged me not to miss the oasis at Siwa, where Alexander the Great had consulted the oracle and discovered that he was divine.
While I wondered when my Libyan visa might come through, Michael went on to say that he’d take me to a mosque this Friday where worshippers chanted Dhihr—a repetition of the ninety-nine names of God, or the repetition of one of his names ninety-nine times. Then, on Sunday, since we were both Catholics,
