“Egypt?”
Muhammad’s head nodded up and down over the grill. “Yes, the beginning of the universe.” He surveyed the lamb, the onions and the bread.
David recalled his one sojourn in Egypt, with his wife Kitty some years before. Sitting in a wooden deckchair on a boat down the Nile, feeling like Somerset Maugham coming upon an unusual colonial intrigue, he had luxuriated in one of the most spectacular scenic splendors he had ever seen. A thin sliver of green bordered each bank of the river, sometimes extending fifty yards from the bank, sometimes as much as a quarter mile. Beyond the green, desert of every shade of yellow and brown gave way to vast mountains similarly colored in the far distance. An ancient emptiness, it seemed, although David knew this could not be so. He imagined goatherds and camel drivers, caravans and dry, parchment-protecting caves, the wrecked evidence of centuries-old Napoleonic passings, shepherds, occasions of Pharoanic glory and Muslim punishment, romance, Flaubert, T.E. Lawrence, Napoleon himself, Cleopatra, Marc Antony….
Every now and then, the boat would stop, and David and Kitty would go with a group of passengers to Karnak, The Valley of The Kings, or some other site, to view the antiquities. Here he felt indeed Napoleonically small. These great structures must have made the French Revolution appear to the grand emperor as an arriviste trinket. Were David to channel the pharaoh Hatshepsut and ask her what she thought of the effects of Paris 1789 on New York 2011, she would probably say that it was way too early to tell.
For David, the overall effect of the ruins of Karnak was one of drifting through a gargantuan dream delight that put aside for the moment anything of lesser importance, like the boat waiting back at the pier or his gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. He showed prints there by people like Kara Walker and Cy Twombly, and worried that those things were just moments of momentary personal idiosyncrasy and slowly disintegrating paper, along with all the flatbed presses, silkscreens, lithograph stones, solvents, inks, and odd artist behaviors that, with time, would glimmer away to nothing. Ozymandias had been right, David decided, as he craned his neck to look up at the pillars of Karnak. ”Look on my works, ye mighty—”
“I’ve been to your country,” David said.
The large dollop of yogurt that Muhammad had just applied to the mixture of vegetables dripped through them like spiced, creamy snow. The pita bread in his right hand caught any that made it all the way through to the bottom. “Where did you stay?”
“Cairo.”
“Hmph.” Muhammad shook his head, waving the plastic container that contained the yogurt in the air. “My nephew lives there.”
“He enjoys it?”
“He’s a student.”
“What do you think of the place?”
“Eh! In Cairo, they are all bums!”
“Where are you from?”
Muhammad ladled a pile of lamb onto the pita. “Alexandria, my friend.” He rolled the sandwich and wrapped it in tin foil. “I was trained for many years as a chef there.” He took David’s money. “My nephew’s parents, my brother and his wife, they wish he would come back to Alexandria. They think he’s in danger in Cairo.”
“From what, the politics?” At the moment, a crowd of a hundred thousand people occupied Tahrir Square, despite the remonstrations of President Mubarak.
“No. The university girls.” Muhammad tapped the griddle with his ladle. “They are pretty. He is handsome.”
Mike’s Lamb and Burgers stand was about seven feet long, four feet wide, made of metal, and seven feet high, plus an umbrella. It had a griddle for lamb and a grill for burgers and hot dogs. A small closed cabinet at one end of the stand contained soft drinks and water.
“Don’t worry about the line,” Kitty had told him. “It’s always this way.” Mostly blue-collar people and office workers, they comprised the most patient long queue David had ever seen in Manhattan. Smiling, he suggested to Kitty that this sanguine comportment was out of respect for Egypt and its antiquities. “No, It’s out of longing for the sandwiches.” She had further told him that any New Yorker who did not come to this stand for a sandwich at least once in his life was condemning himself to the dismayed emptiness of a barren, joyless existence on a treeless plain.
Kitty carried herself with an air of elegant fashion, gleaned from her years working as an editor at W. Her clothing appeared, always, to have been taken from the pages of that journal, except that she was such an exceptional shopper that she usually ended up paying one third of what she would pay were she to go to the stores recommended by the magazine. She also wrote best-selling love novels for women, and had explained to David that you had to supply such apocalyptic lines as that of the treeless plain at the end of each chapter, to keep the reader going. She was famous among her fans for that talent, and prided herself on it.
The sandwich stand and Muhammad had been here for years. He was a man of heavy proportions and casual dress, wearing a navy pea coat and a watch cap on this clear January day. His greying hair flew from beneath the cap in uneven curls, and his hands, whose thicknesses belied the speed with which they moved across the grill, appeared much larger than the rest of him would suggest. Indeed he operated the grill in the way that the organist at, say, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral would essay the keyboards. The skin on his face appeared grainy, the result of so many years being surrounded by heat and smoke. He had a full set of teeth, although one of them, a lower one, was framed in gold. It flashed whenever he smiled.
Kitty told David that she had bought her first food from Muhammad at least ten years ago. He was a maestro of the hot lamb sandwiches, franks, burgers and all the accompanying accouterments to be found here: sliced onions, mulched tomatoes, shredded lettuce and, in the case of the delight that David was about to consume, fresh pita bread and a yogurt sauce made with olive oil and various Middle Eastern spices. Although he had walked past the stand many, many times, this was David’s first time ordering anything there and, with regard to what was coming, he was a naif.
Kitty had ordered a lamb sandwich and, while Muhammad had cooked, David had watched. He saw right away that the lamb had been cut up into small pieces…a great pile of it on the grill, savory with spices that were, Muhammad assured David, a secret. David’s attempt to eyeball the lamb more closely was foiled by the various depths of shadow cast by the exhaust flue just above. The tomatoes, lettuce, and yogurt were in plastic containers inside the counter. The pita bread was wrapped in plastic that was easy of access, so that Muhammad could grab one right away.
He was an authoritative man. When they had first arrived, David had read the menu on the side of the stand and determined that he wanted one of these lamb sandwiches. Muhammad’s first question was, did he want it on pita or on a roll? David had asked for it on a roll, and requested mustard and catsup.
Muhammad had glanced at him with only slightly muzzled disdain. He had then turned to Kitty. “The lady is always first, my friend.” More knowledgeable than David, she had ordered the lamb sandwich just as a lamb sandwich. She knew what she was getting and so made no special requests for things like catsup. Muhammad placed a pita bread on the grill, waited a few moments for it to warm, then began putting the sandwich together, a mixture of the lamb and all the other things, enormous amounts of each. He rolled the pita around the concoction and wrapped it in tin foil. This all happened very quickly, and he passed it hurriedly into Kitty’s hands
He pointed at David with an index finger. “And you want what?”
Normally David carried himself with handsome, slightly aging aplomb. He enjoyed being noted for his looks and his conservative stylishness. Just now, though, he realized that his request for catsup and mustard had marked him as a hick. “The same as she got.”
Smiling, Muhammad gave David the thumbs up, and turned to his task.
A moment later, David and Kitty walked to Central Park where, seated on a bench in the dazzled cold, they devoured the sandwiches. David decided with the first bite that his sandwich had been prepared in the Garden of Eden, which was, he knew, also in the Middle East, probably not far from Alexandria.
He returned to Mike’s three more times in the following week, always ordering a lamb sandwich. The first time, he got there early, hoping to avoid the line. But apparently there was always a line. When he arrived, Muhammad, grinning with falsely condemnatory glee, asked him if he wanted catsup. David responded, commandingly, that he did not. The next time, two days later, Muhammad offered his right hand in friendship, which David took. Of special meaning to David was Muhammad’s touching his own hand to the front of his jacket—to his heart—after the handshake.
They talked as Muhammad prepared the sandwich.
“Have you heard from your nephew?” David asked.
“No.”
“Are you still worried?”
“Yes.”
“About the girls.”
“Yes. Even though he’s no fool, my nephew.” Muhammad moved the lamb around the grill with a metal spatula. The odor of it rose to David’s nose like a suggestion of sensuous whispering. “No politics or anything. Jail is not for him.” He jostled the onions. “Politics are dangerous in Egypt. We all know that.” Muhammad pursed his lips. “Look at Anwar Sadat!” He scraped the open grill with the edge of his ladle. “They killed him dead, didn’t they? No, my nephew, he’s a good boy. A good cook, too.” A cloud of steam rose from the onions. “You watch. He’s coming to New York this summer. He’ll be cooking here, and it will be my great pleasure…” Muhammad slid the spatula beneath the lamb and hurried it onto its less-cooked side. “To introduce him to my new friend David.”
“I’ve been watching television, though.” David waited as Muhammad wrapped the sandwich. “The demonstrations.”
Muhammad handed over the sandwich with one hand while he raised the other in a gesture of disdain. “Bums, that’s what they are.”
“Who?”
“Mubarak!” He glanced up at David, his eyes centered, unmoving. “All of them. The politicians. The Brotherhood. The army.” He shook his head. “No, you come to Alexandria, David. You’ll enjoy it.”
While David was shaving the next morning, Kitty called him back into the bedroom. She stood before the television, and turned toward David, a look of startled disbelief on her face.
“Look at this.”
David held the ends of the long white towel, which he had wrapped around his neck, close to his foam-speckled cheeks. About fifty horses in some kind of charge hurtled through a large crowd in Tahrir Square. Armed with clubs and sticks, the riders attacked people in the square, and were in turn attacked themselves. Then camels arrived, at first appearing to be in a race, strange creatures so oddly shaped yet so graceful as they ran through the crowd. Their saddles and blankets were the same as those that David had seen in the books he had read, about Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and Lawrence of Arabia. Some of the men wore traditional Egyptian clothing, galibayas and turbans. Others, the younger ones, dressed in old Levis and ragged shirts. They too pummeled people in the crowd, which scattered before the charge of each enormous animal. The attack from a camel—a much higher vantage point on a much larger animal—appeared safer for the riders than that of the horsemen. The camels turned through the crowd, separated from each other, their riders flailing at people with long sticks. Within just a few moments, the square had fallen into chaos.
A long shot from the roof of a building showed the panic that had gripped the thousands gathered in the square. But it also revealed little pockets of return brutality. People pulled some of the men from their horses and beat them. Crowds surrounded them and clubbed them with merciless anger. The surviving horsemen turned to retreat, still pursued from behind by men hurling stones. The camels too ran for escape.
Kitty’s eyes lowered with worry. “You’d better go see him.”
David got dressed, put on an overcoat, grabbed an umbrella and hurried out of the apartment building. He hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the corner of 66th and Madison Avenue, where, he knew, Muhammad would just be setting up for the day.
A freezing rain swept Madison Avenue, but the line nonetheless contained a half dozen people. The umbrella shielded the stand from the rain. Right away, David saw that Muhammad was not manning the grill. The new fellow was tall, having to bend beneath the exhaust flue over the grill. Another man was with him, both dressed against the cold and rain, speaking very loudly in a language David could not comprehend.
When he got to the head of the line, the tall man asked him what he wanted.
“Lamb sandwich.”
“Pita or a roll?”
“Pita.”
“Everything?”
“Yeah. But where’s Muhammad?”
The man did not answer. David looked toward the companion, who turned away, not willing to speak.
“Will he be here later?”
Still, no answer came from either man.
“What’s your name?” David asked.
“Mike.”
“Alexandria?”
“No, I’m Greek. I own the stand.”
“Is Muhammad OK?”
Mike stood up straight. Rain fell across his face as steam rose from the ladle in his hand. “Sir, he’s—”
“Is he sick?”
“No, he… His nephew—”
“What about him?”
The two men exchanged glances. Mike spoke a moment with the other man, in their own language. He appeared confused about what to say to David.
“Come on, what’s wrong?”
“The nephew, he’s dead.” Mike wrapped up the sandwich and passed it to David. “Muhammad was here earlier. He phoned me this morning, said he couldn’t work. But he helped us anyway, to set up the stand.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
Mike pointed down 66th. “He headed for the park. But you know…” He put a hand to the back of his neck and shook his head. “He didn’t seem to know where he was. He just took the sandwich I made…. I don’t know if he had had anything to eat. So he took the sandwich and headed over there. I don’t know where he is.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A half hour.”
“OK, I’ll go look for him.” David pulled some money from his pocket
Mike grinned, although chagrined himself. “Thanks, friend.” He opened a side drawer and brought out a can of root beer. “For you, it’s free.”
David shoved the can into one overcoat pocket, the sandwich into the other.
“He’s a good man, Muhammad,” Mike said. “A valuable employee.”
“Thanks.” David turned away.
“If you find him, let me know how he’s doin’. Please.”
“OK.”
Very few people walked on The Mall, and only one person, at the farthest end, sat on a bench, slumped to the side as though asleep. David could barely see, the rain thick with cold and patches of condensed fog. Muhammad was nowhere in sight. The park remained gray, dark mists obscuring the leafless trees into the distance. The sandwich that Mike had made remained in David’s left hand, in the pocket, its warmth passing quietly through his fingers. He stood below the Shakespeare statue, bowed before the cold rain and holding the umbrella tight in his right hand. Everywhere the park appeared beaten down, its green turned to gray and black, its growth snuffed out.
Will Shakespeare stood casually behind David, who looked around at him. The poet had paused on the marble pedestal in Elizabethan attire: short ballooning pantaloons, long stockings, a pair of leather shoes with buckles, a shirt with floppy sleeves that was open at the throat, and a vest, perhaps of leather. Also, a cape hung down his back from his shoulders. Will held a book in his right hand, clutched to his chest. He looked down at an angle, in a moment’s thought, maybe a little despondently.
David had always felt that this was a major sculpture suffering a minor distraction. Will was looking for the homely moment in which to find his metaphor. He was seeking the proper collaboration of words. He was quizzical and self-involved, caught for the moment in private.
David could tell he was an actor because a lower portion of the cape was draped over his right arm, the arm holding the book. It was a jaunty thing he was doing there, a gesture to showmanship. But this man was also a working writer. He had little interest in having some flash of inspiration flood his eyes. Rather he wished to find the right few words for his valiant, black military hero’s increasing worry that this world is not a safe place for those who would protect good people. Simple as that. Will had a problem—how to get Othello from here to there, how to change his actor’s mood—and he was trying to figure it out. Great international struggles had brought his hero to this moment, alone with Desdemona in her boudoir. Othello struggled with his private suspicions. Armies clashed far away. Children died. Whole cultures had been destroyed, while this single man, home from the wars, worried that he was losing his mind, his will, and his love.
The world had come apart so far away, and here it was coming apart in Othello’s heart.
The person seated at the far end of The Mall stood up. He walked a few steps from the bench, looked up into the sky and, shaking his head as he fell forward to lean on the bench’s back, sat down once again. It was Muhammad.
David hurried up the walk and sat down next to him. Muhammad’s sandwich had grown cold, soaked with rainwater where it lay barely eaten on a piece of newspaper on the bench.
“Muhammad. Mike told me. Your nephew….”
Muhammad could not speak. He took up the sandwich, but it remained between the fingers of both hands like a sagging, filthy towel.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s a terrible day. For you. For your people.”
“What people?” Muhammad whispered.
“The Muslims.”
“Muslims! What have I got to do with Muslims?”
“Well, your name, no?”
A flash of anger showed momentarily through Muhammad’s mourning. “I’m a Coptic, David.”
“Christian.”
“Yes.”
“But your name—”
“So what?” Muhammad slumped forward. “My father named me that. He wished that The Prophet had been a Coptic prophet, instead of…well, you know. But, who cares? What’s in a name?” Muhammad frowned. Suddenly distracted, he turned away from David and looked down The Mall toward the Shakespeare statue. “It’s like wanting it on pita or a roll.” He lay his sandwich aside on the newspaper, leaned forward and folded his hands together, placing his elbows on his knees. He studied his shoes. Sadness rolled through him so regretfully that David regretted immediately what he had said.
“My nephew’s name…now, my nephew…his name….” Muhammad looked across the pathway at the empty benches. David waited. “His name was Mark. After the apostle.” Muhammad’s hands intertwined each other in nervous indecision.
David could feel the certitude of disaster that flowed from Muhammad’s very inactivity. He was imagining the worst. Mark trampled by raging animals in the square. Crying out, his skull crushed by an iron-shod hoof. A face smashed into unrecognizable, flesh-flecked blood by the great stick of a Bedouin attacker. Worse.
David put his hand in a pocket. “Muhammad.” As a few days before, with Kitty here in the park, the sandwich’s warmth seemed more like proffered kindness than just a lot of yogurt, pita and lamb. But this heat now felt so insubstantial to David, so irrelevant to Muhammad’s concern, that it seemed to dribble away, falling from his very fingers through the cloth of his coat. Both men waited in silence.
“Muhammad!” A high voice, that of an excited woman, came up The Mall. “Ay, Muhammad!” The woman, dressed in a thick black wool skirt and black stockings, wearing a puffy cold-weather parka, her black hair covered by a wool watch cap, hurried along the walkway. Her exposed brown face was exceptionally round, a pocket of fat below her chin. She wore rimless eyeglasses and a pair of old running shoes. She carried a large plastic bag from which the green heads of carrots and the end of a large bunch of celery appeared rattling back and forth as she ran.
Muhammad stood. His face, fallen now into unguarded fear, appeared many years older than it had even moments ago. He held his hand out to the woman, who approached him shrieking, her free hand waving in the air. During a long exchange of Arabic—David hoping for a translation of some kind—Muhammad asked numerous questions, his voice breaking with anger and distress. The woman hurried answers at him, shook her head “No!” a number times, “Yes!” even more often, more words hurrying from the couple like garbled water.
Muhammad grabbed the sides of his head with the palms of his hands, and then held his hands together close to his chest, beating against it. He sat down and laid his forehead into his palms, unable to gather himself as the woman continued shouting at him, the name “Muhammad,” as though the woman were seeking to regain his attention and to calm him.
“Please,” David muttered, placing a hand on the other man’s knee. “Can you tell me? What…what—”
“He’s alive!”
The woman held her hands before her face, for the first time seeking David’s attention. “Yes!” she said in English. “He is…he is…eh?” She searched the English word, her heavy accent revealing that she spoke very little of it. “Alive!”
“My brother…” Muhammad clasped his hands together. “He didn’t realize. It was a neighbor boy, another Alexandria boy, a university friend of Mark’s…killed. Horrible.” He looked away. “They were attacked by the horses. But it was not Mark.” He clenched his fists in a gesture of victory. “No, he lives.”
He turned to the woman and asked a few questions in Arabic, then spoke again to David. “Wounded, yes. A broken leg. Blood. But…” He made the sign of The Cross, muttering its language. “He lives.” Lowering his head once again, he fell into anguish. “I know that other boy, though. I…I know his father.”
After a moment, Muhammad started, suddenly remembering something. He gestured toward the woman. “My wife, David. Miriam.” Miriam’s hands remained in the pockets of her parka as she gazed at her husband. Her eyes, the skin around them thick with worry and the effects of tears, clearly conveyed how deeply she loved him.
The couple spoke with each other a moment more, until Miriam reached into the pocket of her parka and handed Muhammad a cellphone. He asked a question, and Miriam started feeding him numbers, in English. He punched them into the phone, many numbers, and then, after a moment’s waiting, he spoke.
“Abdel.” Muhammad talked with the other person for more than ten minutes. The mood of the conversation went from a number of seemingly fiery, desperate questions to deep quiet and commiseration. Simply from the slope of Muhammad’s shoulders and the way his free hand went from rapid, imploring gestures to tapping on his right knee to hanging almost motionlessly from the knee, David could feel the conversation’s downward spiral to ultimate silence. Muhammad slumped, and still with the phone at his ear, his voice ruptured and broke up. “Abdel…Abdel….” Miriam sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulders, taking him close.
Muhammad placed the phone in a pocket of his jacket and embraced Miriam, hiding his face in the water-soaked roundnesses of her parka. He wept and wept and wept.
David put a hand on Muhammad’s shoulder, waiting.
Muhhamad shuddered. “God be praised, that was the other boy’s father.”
The following morning, David and Kitty arrived at the stand. As the line progressed, they saw how Muhammad’s work was being hampered by the calls he was getting on his cell phone. His Arabic flew as, shifting the phone and the ladle from one hand to the next, laying the phone down momentarily so that he could wrap whatever he had prepared in tin foil, he yet kept up these multiple conversations.
“My father,” Muhammad explained when Kitty and David arrived at the head of the line. “In Alexandria. My cousin Beshoy in San Francisco.” He shrugged. “Who would live in a dump like San Francisco when you got New York, eh?” He turned the lamb about slowly and tended to a large hamburger on the grill. “Beshoy’s mom in Cairo. My other brother, in Amsterdam. Everybody…”
Finally, he put the now silent phone into his jacket pocket. “Poor Egypt.” Slowly, a sorrow-laden smile appeared on his lips. His face came to sad life. He turned to Kitty. “And you, pretty lady. Please. Pita? Or a roll?”
Copyright ©2017 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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