by Dawn-Michelle Baude
\n
<\/br>
\nAre you ready?<\/p>\n
Put on the long, baggy skirt\u2014black, of course\u2014down to the ankles. \u00a0Loose white shirt. \u00a0Black-and-white striped socks and black boots. \u00a0(Closed-in shoes are required.) \u00a0Sun block? \u00a0Check. \u00a0Hat? \u00a0Check. \u00a0Black backpack? \u00a0Check. \u00a0Take the trash\u2014wait! \u00a0This is tricky.<\/p>\n
Things you don’t mind your neighbors pawing through go in one bag. \u00a0Foodstuffs you won’t eat but some starving person will, another bag. \u00a0Finally, the beer bottles. \u00a0This is the trickiest part of all. \u00a0The clinking part. \u00a0The best bet is to double-bag-tie and put them in the backpack for disposal a good distance from home.<\/p>\n
Now yank open the door (it sticks). \u00a0Sparrows? \u00a0Pigeons? \u00a0Doves? \u00a0Third floor, second floor, first, past the broken window and vacant apartments\u2014don’t touch the banister! \u00a0Deadly bird-flu virus may lurk in the droppings. \u00a0Ground floor: out into the beautiful Alexandrian day. \u00a0Around the front porch, delicate jasmine and honeysuckle grow, while aloe plants, with strong tentacles, wave from stone planters. \u00a0Down the porch stairs to the bawwab’s shack and the first trash bin where the innocuous stuff goes\u2014try to sneak out the gate so as to escape conversation with the bawwab. \u00a0He’ll ask, as usual, where you’re going.<\/p>\n
Look both ways before you step off the curb\u2014although it’s a one-way street, cars surge forth in both directions. \u00a0Since the sidewalks are parked-up, it’s better to walk rapidly down the middle of the street so as to minimize conversation with the numerous soldiers guarding the backside of the British Consul’s property. \u00a0The soldiers want to hear you speak poor Arabic while they pose questions in poor English. \u00a0Some days you are in the mood for halting conversation; some days not, even though it is your job to build bridges between peoples, cultures, nations.<\/p>\n
Watch out for the needles and syringes at the corner\u2014it\u2019s disagreeable to step on them. \u00a0Turn right, and start down the hill, past the front of the consul’s house. \u00a0The poor, poor consul. \u00a0He has one of the best examples of 70’s architecture you can lay eyes on\u2014a two-story ranch-style, brick with white-wood trim, banks of glass. You can almost imagine the stretch pants and bridge parties inside. \u00a0But all the shutters are closed tight. \u00a0There’s no way to look from the house onto the enormous garden brimming with roses and laden with fruit trees. \u00a0The fence is wired, soldiers and cameras posted every few feet. \u00a0You’ve never seen the consul, never seen anyone in the garden except the gardeners, never seen any shutter or door or frosted window open even a crack. \u00a0But it is all perfect from the outside. \u00a0Just perfect.<\/p>\n
The trash in the street begins to thicken as you descend the hill to the main road. \u00a0You’ll pass two gorgeous art-deco villas, both with long balconies and stained glass, and three or four Italianate villas with extravagant turrets. \u00a0But it’s hard to admire the houses through the crowd of cheap, concrete buildings hemming them in on all sides\u2014unpainted concrete, crumbling, sprouting rebar and complicated hosing. \u00a0Drip. \u00a0On the ground floor of one of them is a clothing store, and further along there’s a wooden bench in the shade of the sycamore tree where a bawwab in turban and gown often sits. \u00a0You’ve seen him hundreds of times. \u00a0You’ve never spoken. \u00a0He knows that a respectable woman avoids speaking to strangers.<\/p>\n
Keep your eyes open for the trash-pickers as you go. \u00a0They will be happy with your leavings. \u00a0They usually have a welcoming smile\u2014they’re not wary of you, trying to get your money, or predisposed to thinking that you’re politically, socially, sexually or religiously disreputable. \u00a0They simply seize upon the moment to exchange a few, pleasant sentences the way they might seize upon an unfinished falafel.<\/p>\n
Remember the handsome boy with excellent English? \u00a0The one who was licking a piece of technology before you talked together of the sandstorms? \u00a0It looked like a circuit board\u2014maybe it was covered with honey. \u00a0Or the lovely young girl with slightly Asian, almond-shaped eyes, bone-structure to die for, and rich, caramel skin? \u00a0The one who could grace the cover of Vogue? \u00a0You had asked her name. \u00a0“Trash,” she said. \u00a0And you, embarrassed, had said, no, no\u2014that’s not your name, that’s what you do, that’s your job. \u00a0“Job?” she echoed. \u00a0“Job? \u00a0Sexy. \u00a0Hot. \u00a0Wet.” \u00a0You had neither the English nor the Arabic to sort it out. \u00a0“I have go,” she said. \u00a0“I am working.” \u00a0She shut the lid. \u00a0“Enjoy Egypt!” \u00a0And she left you there, standing by the bin.<\/p>\n
As you are standing by the bin now. \u00a0No one close by on the street, cars in the distance, but someone may be watching you from behind the curtains. \u00a0Someone is always watching you. \u00a0This is not idle fancy. \u00a0The handful of other foreigners in Alexandria will all tell you the same thing. \u00a0You are always being watched because most people who catch sight of you are intrigued, fascinated, repelled, perhaps dumbfounded, by your blond foreignness. \u00a0When you lived in the tenements of Moustafa Kamel, you could not open the window and gaze outside because of the faces of the people in the other towers, the ones you could see. \u00a0On the hill of Kafr Abdu where you live now it’s not so bad, but elsewhere in the city\u2014depending, perhaps, on chance alignments of the stars\u2014you can halt conversation in a store or a cafe with your presence. \u00a0You cause people to open their mouths so that you can see the spittle gather between the tongue and lower teeth. \u00a0Some children who look upon you run to their mothers, hiding in their skirts, just as they do in the movies. \u00a0This is not an exaggeration. \u00a0You are being watched.<\/p>\n
Constant, irrational scrutiny makes disposing of the beer bottles all the more challenging. \u00a0You stand there, posed at the intersection of clich\u00e9. \u00a0Drunken Westerners, sexually depraved Westerners, morally corrupt Westerners, spiritually bankrupt Westerners all converge in your person. \u00a0You want to explain that it’s just one bottle of beer, if that, a night. \u00a0But they wouldn’t understand. \u00a0And besides, only you are listening. \u00a0You take a step back, on the sidewalk, squeeze in between the parked car and wall while you unzip the backpack and remove the bottles. \u00a0Quick! \u00a0Slip them into the bin along with the rest, and hurry on your way.<\/p>\n
The residential feel of the neighborhood now starts to change. \u00a0The exclusivity that somehow still clings to the streets fades after you pass Nour’s villa. \u00a0Ah, sweet Nour\u2014she is from Libya, Palestinian in origin, you suspect. \u00a0In fact, her eldest son, the one doing his graduate degree in math at Cambridge, had almost mentioned it. \u00a0Perhaps he did mention it. \u00a0Like many of the Palestinians you know, the ones whose families could get out, Nour is discreet. \u00a0She is small, perfectly proportioned, and beautiful, one of those buoyant women who are always genuinely cheerful in spite of themselves. \u00a0She has decorated her home with objects from estate sales from all over Egypt\u2014Ottoman rugs, Nouvel Empire sideboards, Japanese silk. \u00a0You have to restrain yourself from oo-ing and ah-ing even when you stand in the vestibule, waiting to collect your son.<\/p>\n
Recently, you had lunch in her kitchen, and you relaxed, and you thought, this is so good, so right, to have lunch with a friend. \u00a0You could have been in Geneva, Chicago, New York, Rome, Paris, San Francisco. \u00a0You drank in the modern cleanliness of the room, the glistening porcelain tea cups on the table, and smiling Nour herself in a lacy d\u00e9collet\u00e9 (you’ve forgotten that women wear d\u00e9collet\u00e9). \u00a0Her phone kept ringing\u2014she chatted in three or four languages while making fresh orange juice for the boys. \u00a0Yes, you drank in the home\u2014a home you might dream of. \u00a0If you were going to live forever in Alexandria, Nour would become a dear friend\u2014you laugh easily together, your observations interest her and your children are already close. \u00a0But the die has been cast. \u00a0You are not going to live in Alexandria much longer. \u00a0You will say good-bye to the man who has touched your heart. \u00a0You will never be able to deepen the love that you’ve found. \u00a0Some questions will remain unanswered. \u00a0Others you’ve learned to stop asking.<\/p>\n
The door to Nour’s villa is tightly shut when you pass. \u00a0Like other private homes on the hill where you live, it has a high, opaque wall around it with broken glass and barbed wire at the top\u2014too high even for the sick and desperate cats to scale. \u00a0There darts one now, under a car. \u00a0You try not to look at the cats under the cars because sometimes they are sleeping and sometimes they are dead. \u00a0The trash men dispose of their bodies, you suppose. \u00a0The trash men! \u00a0With their toothy brooms. \u00a0The work of Sisyphus.<\/p>\n
Now you have to really watch where and how you walk. \u00a0The street narrows so that you can’t simply lean against a parked car to avoid the one speeding up the hill\u2014you have to take to the sidewalk when they roar past. \u00a0Sidewalks always pose a challenge. \u00a0You tell yourself that sidewalks are a Zen exercise in awareness, balance, coordination. \u00a0Deep holes appear from nowhere, strange rusty rods protrude from the broken concrete, and live electrical wires dangle from above (just the other day, a driver from Alex’s school was hospitalized from electrocution). \u00a0If there is hosing protruding from an adjacent building, you may be doused with a disagreeable liquid, as you already have been, twice. \u00a0If there’s construction, tools or materials may fall. \u00a0You have seen death, in the form of aluminum siding, land just in front of you. \u00a0An odd cable may catch at your ankles. \u00a0The fact that the obstacles are intermittent makes navigation all the more challenging. \u00a0It keeps you alert. \u00a0A sprig of bougainvillea, a blue-glass vase, a brass bell\u2014some small trinket may catch your eye when you should be avoiding the box of rusty metal in your path. \u00a0The big cartons sometimes serve as beds. \u00a0Once you thought you were looking at a carton full of trash and it moved.<\/p>\n
Now you are almost at the main street. \u00a0You will stop and buy a paper, as you always do, from the newsman at the corner who repairs his portion of the sidewalk, sweeps the concrete clean. \u00a0He is old enough to have lived through Nasser, Sadat and thirty years of Mubarak. \u00a0He remembers when Egypt was a cosmopolitan center, when foreigners bought out his international press, when women showed their faces, legs, arms, and the city streets were tidy and clean, the buildings kept up, the roads and sidewalks freshly paved. \u00a0You represent, in your own humble way, hope\u2014you can see it in the pleasure he takes in handing you a perfectly folded paper. \u00a0For him, the odd foreigner is a sign that perhaps Egypt can emerge from decades of oppression, that perhaps the extremists will be mollified, that the rot could be incised from the infrastructure and wounds heal. \u00a0You feel sorry for the newsman because week after week the same costly National Geographic<\/em> is stubbornly on display. \u00a0Occasionally he has a Newsweek<\/em> or a Decouvert<\/em>, and occasionally you buy it, although it costs fifteen dollars. \u00a0Most of the time you give him one Egyptian pound for the Egyptian Gazette<\/em>, thank him kindly, and continue on your way.<\/p>\n As you do today. \u00a0You are always, it seems, continuing on your way. \u00a0No matter what happens, you keep moving. \u00a0It\u2019s something that\u2019s hard to understand about yourself. \u00a0You look at yourself and wonder. \u00a0Sometimes it\u2019s even hard to think of yourself in the first person, the one who has experience instead of the one watching.<\/p>\n As you are now. by Dawn-Michelle Baude Are you ready? Put on the long, baggy skirt\u2014black, of course\u2014down to the ankles. \u00a0Loose white shirt. \u00a0Black-and-white striped socks and black boots. \u00a0(Closed-in shoes are required.) \u00a0Sun block? \u00a0Check. \u00a0Hat? \u00a0Check. \u00a0Black backpack? \u00a0Check. \u00a0Take the … Continue reading
\n
<\/br>
\n
<\/br>
\nDAWN-MICHELLE BAUDE<\/strong> is the author of several poetry volumes, including Finally: A Calendar<\/em> (MindMade 2009) and The Flying House<\/em> (Parlor Press 2008), among others. Her prose has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Newsweek International and Vogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"