Dreamers of the Day Read online

  Fed up, the parents would decide enough was enough. A father would appear at my classroom door. Hat in hand but defiant, he would declare, “My kid don’t wanna go to school no more.” Listening to those men, you’d have thought their sons and daughters wished for nothing more earnestly than to work for a pittance in a steel mill or a laundry.

  “And the children stood there, dying inside,” I told Herr Weilbacher. “I could see it! The boys would hang their heads. The girls would weep. I could do nothing, and it just broke my heart—because honestly? What the father meant was, I’m losing my power. I am diminished every day as this child grows more knowledgeable—”

  I realized suddenly that Herr Weilbacher, so charming and chatty before, had fallen utterly silent.

  You simply cannot see it when you bore others, Agnes, Mumma whispered. He doesn’t care that you were a schoolteacher. My land! He’s only being polite to sit with you at all, and here you are with your crossed eyes, braying about immigrant children. You’d drive gentle Jesus to drink, Agnes. Honestly, you would.

  I stared at my lap, hands clawed around my napkin. “I— My apologies, Herr Weilbacher,” I stammered, trying to drop my voice an octave and to soften its harsh midwestern timbre. “One does get carried away.”

  Still he said nothing. He is disgusted, I thought. Disgusted by me, by my opinions, and my loudness and my accent. He is struck speechless by disgust.

  He bent and lifted Rosie, one hand cupped under her muscular behind, the other supporting her chest. She could be wary with strangers, but there was something calm and assured about his hands. He shifted Rosie to the horizontal and stroked her back all the way to her feather-duster tail. His fingers stopped moving when he felt the misshapen bones.

  “She was born that way,” I said, ashamed of her and of myself. “Her tail is a defect. I know that.” I glanced up then and saw that his face had become … Well, I don’t know how to describe it except that he seemed impressed and entertained, at once.

  “You are compassionate,” he said softly, as though he knew that I had saved her life by taking her for my own on the day she was born. “I was not much of a student,” he confided then, “but perhaps I would have been if I’d had such a teacher as you, Miss Shanklin.” He set Rosie on the floor decisively. “I had an appointment this morning, but it was canceled. Cairenes are so unreliable. Everything with them is inshallah—”

  “If it be God’s will,” I said, remembering the word from Lillian’s stories.

  “Yes, but also ‘perhaps,’ or ‘someday.’ Or ‘not bloody likely,’ as the English say. Today, I think, this is good luck. It would be my pleasure to show you something of the city, if you and Rosie would do me the honor?”

  Agnes, no! Mumma cried. He’s a complete stranger, and a foreigner.

  Here in Cairo, Agnes is a foreigner, too, said Mildred. And that was true, of course.

  “What a lovely offer,” I said brightly. “Just let me get my hat.”

  We left the lobby with Rosie trotting ahead on her leash while Herr Weilbacher pointed out the sights. “Gardens like these are among the many European amenities in this neighborhood. This part of Cairo reminds me of Paris. Have you been to Paris? No? Ach! You must see Paris someday! Notre-Dame is on an island in the Seine just as Gazirah sits between two parts of the Nile. That is the Cairo Opera House, just there. It was built to celebrate the completion of the Suez Canal. Do you enjoy opera, Miss Shanklin?” When I allowed as how I’d never had the opportunity to hear one, he cried, “Then we must make an opportunity. I’ll try to get tickets for a performance. Perhaps Aïda! What could be better than Aïda in Cairo?”

  Halfway across the Gazirah Bridge, noise began to lap at us like waves against a shore. Arriving on the beledi side of the city, we were suddenly in the midst of it all: camels, carts, crowds, and an astonishing number of trucks and motorcars. Many were Fords, in considerably reduced condition. Stripped to their essentials, they made the kind of deafening racket that might have been produced by a thresher attempting to harvest a stone wall. Behind each ramshackle vehicle, a crowd of boys followed, “hoping for a breakdown or an entertaining collision,” as Herr Weilbacher put it. “Amazing how few parts a Ford needs,” he shouted when a particularly skeletal flatbed truck clattered past. “If something falls off, a Ford rolls right on—although it complains rather loudly.”

  “No wonder people here yell all the time,” I remarked at the top of my voice. “Everyone in Cairo must be hard of hearing!” And I was thrilled when Herr Weilbacher produced a booming laugh, amused at my remark.

  Engulfed by Cairo’s kaleidoscope of odors, Rosie dashed to the end of her leash in every direction, as eager to sample Cairo’s scents as I was to see its sights. Before long, however, her jaunty rolling trot slowed, and Herr Weilbacher scooped her up. “The world is very large for a sausage dog,” he observed. “It’s a short life but a hairy one, ja, Rosie?”

  With humor and insight, he began to interpret the street life for me, giving meaning to yesterday’s exotic chaos. The ladies’ long black garments, he explained, were allowed to trail in the dust purposely, to erase the tracks of their bare feet—in which an evil spirit might read hieroglyphs that could bring their families bad luck.

  “Look at that,” Herr Weilbacher murmured, speaking close to my ear. I followed his glance and was amazed by the sight of a woman balancing on her head a large chicken coop—complete with chickens! A man walked a step or two in front of her, carrying nothing more than a cigarette between his lips. “Probably her husband, or perhaps a brother,” Herr Weilbacher said. “Egypt is a man’s world. Women bear all the burdens of Cairene life. Clay jars, children, baskets of goods … You are lucky, Miss Shanklin, to be independent and free. What an extraordinary woman you are to come so far—all on your own!”

  We turned down a side street. For a short time, the noise around us diminished to the crunch of discarded pistachio shells beneath our feet and the ka-lop, ka-lop of delicate donkey hooves, followed by the rumble of wooden wheels on cobbles when a little cart passed by, laden with oranges. Soon, however, we entered an enclosed passageway where shouts and cries echoed against ancient stone walls.

  “I think we will not go farther inside. Just look from here,” Herr Weilbacher advised. “It is too dirty for your pretty shoes.” That was just the sort of thing Mumma might have warned against, but on Herr Weilbacher’s lips, the instruction seemed to convey concern for my welfare and carried no implication that my own judgment was inadequate to the situation.

  The covered bazaar was called a souk, he told me, and it teemed with jostling shoppers haggling over sacks of spices and beans, and piles of melons and cucumbers. Each item was the occasion for the sort of shouting matches I’d observed the day before, and when I inquired, Herr Weilbacher explained, “The negotiation is designed to make every transaction take as long as possible. It is a form of sport and justifies the time men spend on it. When they are tired from their bargaining, they must sit and smoke, or play dominoes for a while—to recover their strength, naturally.”

  Rosie wiggled in his arms, and he paused to set her on the pavement just as a gang of small boys gathered around us calling, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!” Herr Weilbacher shook his head and waved the children off, but one of them noticed Rosie, who was backing up, circling. When she curled like a comma to deposit her own malodorous contribution to the bazaar’s collection of garbage, donkey droppings, and camel urine, the little boy alerted his friends. In an instant, the whole group doubled up with glee. Herr Weilbacher tossed a coin into the souk. The boys ran off to retrieve it and were quickly lost amid the hawkers’ wares.

  “Baksheesh,” I said. I remembered the word from Lillie’s letters but couldn’t recall the meaning. “Is that a sort of fruit?”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking. Foreigners are the tree and all Egypt harvests us.” When I smiled uncertainly, he explained, “From the Persian bakhshidan, to give. It means a tip or a small gift.”

&nbs
p; “And how have you come to be in the Middle East, Herr Weilbacher?” I asked as we strolled onward.

  He stopped walking and waited with a hurt expression for me to look back. “Please, must I beg?” he asked, sounding comically aggrieved. “Call me Karl.”

  “Karl.” The word was soft in my mouth. “And you must call me Agnes, of course.”

  “That’s better.” He had a smile like sunrise. “Before the war, I supervised the construction of a railway my government built for the Turks.”

  “You are a civil engineer, then? My brother was an army engineer,” I said, delighted by the coincidence.

  “An engineer?” He laughed, but kindly. “I’m afraid I have no head for such things. No, Agnes, I was—let us say—an observer. I reported on progress to my superiors. There was a considerable investment of money. Many important people were interested in the project.”

  Toward noon we circled back toward an impressive square, which was, Karl told me, the very heart of Cairo. There, all the colors of humanity were in evidence. “Sudanese,” Karl whispered, indicating a family so dark as to be nearly purple. As we strolled, he nodded toward Greeks and Italians, Jews and Armenians, Syrians and Lebanese and Cypriots: all sallow and hirsute in varying degrees. “But look there!” Karl said quietly. A slim, square-shouldered youth passed by, slender brown limbs moving with fluid grace beneath his homespun cotton robe. “That is the true Egyptian, Agnes, just as he is depicted on the walls of ancient tombs.”

  Together we gazed at the young man’s beauty until Karl was distracted from it by a pair of white-skinned men. “Turko-Circassians,” Karl said. “They ruled Egypt until recently but were displaced by the French and then the British. Which reminds me! Was that not the famous Colonel Lawrence I saw with you yesterday? How do you know him, Agnes?”

  I spoke of my sister’s connection and then of Mr. Thomas’s presentation. Karl smiled knowingly. “The world’s most famous spy, our Lawrence—barring only Mata Hari, I should say. They both enjoyed dressing up as Orientals.”

  “I’m sorry, Herr—Karl. No, I don’t believe you have the right man. Colonel Lawrence is a British army officer.”

  “Among other things.” Karl smiled. “I have followed his career for many years, Agnes. We met near Baghdad before the war, when he was an ‘archaeologist’ at Carchemish.”

  “You say ‘archaeologist’ as though it were some sort of joke.”

  “Not a joke, but part of the truth, only. Lawrence was competent in his field and Carchemish was an important Hittite site, but there are many such sites. Why choose one and not another?” he asked playfully. “Because Carchemish was very near a bridge we were building for that new German railway, of course! Lawrence spent a good deal of time taking photographs and making notes that would be of use during the war we both knew was coming. I came to know him rather well …” Suddenly, a cloud seemed to pass over him. Karl shook his head sadly. “He was built like a young bull in those days—not tall, but great strength in the shoulders and chest.” The colonel had not struck me as robust, and I must have looked doubtful because Karl remarked, “It was a hard war for him, I fear.”

  He brightened up as we approached the famed Egyptian Museum, an immense building of peony-pink stone. “They held an international competition for its design. Worthy of the splendors it contains but, like Egyptian history, it contains too much. I will remain outside with Rosie while you spend just forty-five minutes in the museum— no more or you will be overwhelmed, dear teacher! You can come back again and again, and you will look at the same objects with different eyes. Learn inside, learn outside, then learn more on your return!”

  The museum was laid out clockwise, with the oldest objects to the left of the entrance. Circling, one encountered five thousand years of rulers: Pre-Dynastic, Old Kingdom, New Kingdom, Ptolemaic, Roman, Ottoman.

  Despite Karl’s wise advice, I tried to take it all in. The striding vitality of Ka-Aper, whose gleaming eyes seemed alert and lively; the seated Khufre, whose throne is enveloped by the protective wings of Horus; the lifelike statue of Princess Nofret, whose “real” hair can be seen poking out from beneath her royal wig. The sad, severe face of Ramses II, once mighty but now a beak-nosed, lipless mummy exposed to the vulgar curiosity of tourists.

  My eyes swept over death masks, coffins, armchairs. Statues of falcons preparing for flight and of crocodiles lying in wait. Alabaster perfume bottles that would not have looked out of place on a modern woman’s dresser. Gold jewelry that Tiffany’s might have sold that very day in New York City. I paid as much attention as I could to the exhibits so that I would have something interesting to tell Karl when I returned to him, but I will be honest with you: I was as giddy as a schoolgirl with a crush.

  Looking back now, it seems plain that I had passed into a sort of delayed adolescence on my first visit to Halle’s Department Store. After decades of defining myself by what I would not do, what I did not want, what I could not be … Well, my young friend Mildred had allowed me to see myself in an entirely new way—as a grown woman really, making my own choices, hearing myself think.

  And what I thought that first afternoon in the Egyptian Museum was, Forty minutes … thirty minutes … ten minutes, and then I will see him again.

  I made myself stay inside a while longer to keep my eagerness to rejoin him from being too obvious. When at last I allowed myself to go back outside, Karl was sitting on a stone bench in a cool green square a few steps from the entrance and waved to catch my attention.

  “An hour!” he called, releasing Rosie and grinning as she dashed toward me and danced at my feet, wagging herself almost in half. “I warned you, didn’t I? Quite overwhelming!”

  He had assembled a picnic for us: tomatoes, creamy goat cheese, disks of soft flat bread dotted with blackened, bubbled dough. “These tomatoes are delicious,” he told me when I joined him on the bench. “I am thinking of importing them to Europe. A man could make his fortune that way. And so, Agnes, what was the best thing you saw?”

  I chewed, and thought, and swallowed. “Akhenaten,” I said, and then described the winsome oddity of that strange pharaoh with his soft little potbelly and long lantern jaw. There he sat, basking in the sun with his beautiful wife, Nefertiti. I was especially intrigued by their peculiarly adult children, sitting on the royal laps or playing at their parents’ feet. The children looked like Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb.

  “A touching image,” Karl agreed. “And here we are, you and I, under the very same sun, with our little deformed daughter!” It took my breath away, that casual joke. “All those gods,” he went on, “each demanding attention! Amun, Osiris, Isis, Horus. Anubis, Ra. Maat, Geb, Bes! Monotheism must have been a welcome simplification,” he remarked, and I shocked myself by laughing at what I suspected was blasphemy. “Of course, polytheism has its advantages,” Karl pointed out. “If you fall suddenly in love with an unsuitable person, you may say, I am struck by Cupid’s arrow and helpless to resist! Or if something awful happens, you needn’t ask, What have I done to deserve this misfortune? Or, How could a just God permit such a thing? You merely say, Alas! Poor me! The gods are playing in the sky, and I have stumbled into their path.”

  With that, he licked the last of the tomato juice and cheese from his fingers and stood, telling me regretfully that he had an appointment that afternoon. “And you, I think, must now have a rest—siesta, the Spaniards call it. A nap in the heat of the afternoon. You must keep up your strength, Agnes, for more adventures later.”

  After the warmth and noise of beledi Cairo, my frangi hotel room was a cool and quiet oasis. I took off my street clothes, put on my robe, and lay back on the soft bed with Rosie at my side. Hands clasped behind my head, I watched the bed’s white cotton netting lift and sway in the slight breeze that drifted through the balcony doors. I felt enveloped, and … cared for.

  It occurred to me then that no one had ever really taken care of me. Papa was always working and, you’ll recall, Mumma was never a great one f
or fussing over children. I learned early not to need much. After Papa died, it fell to me to look after everyone else. So, you see, to have someone like Karl anticipate my need to learn, to eat, to rest, to enjoy—that was profoundly moving.

  Old as I was, I was innocent, but innocent as I was, I knew the difference, even then, between love and an infatuation. Infatuation is a mirror in which one gazes at one’s own longing for love and acceptance. Mirrors are fragile. Love endures.

  What I felt in those first hours with Karl was a sense of excitement at discovering a person who seemed to find me witty and perhaps even a little attractive. His joy in sharing his knowledge of the city made my own enthusiasms seem well proportioned and justified. He had a great deal to teach but did so without talking down to me. That meant a lot. Until I met Karl, I was a daughter before parents, or a student before teachers, or a teacher before students. Even with my brother and sister, my responsibilities took me somewhat out of their spheres. I would not have said so at the time, but I suppose I had been lonely all my life. Karl was a companion, you see. Someone who treated me as an equal, worthy of his thoughtfulness and care.

  He even mentioned Cupid, Mildred whispered.

  And, of course, when a couple walks side by side, they look out at the world together, not at each other. The voice becomes more important than the face, you see. The soul and the intellect can be more beautiful without the dross of physicality.