It began, if it ever had something like a beginning, with a call in September or October 2004. The country code in the telephone display meant nothing to me. A deep female voice whispered: “We want to send you a fax.” At first I thought it was a call from Kiev, the accent was a match for that of a Russian or Ukrainian, because in early March I was supposed to tour Ukraine for a week. When I saw the page that came out of the fax machine, I had to laugh, and I mean a real guffaw. It annoys me now that I laughed, but at the time I found it completely absurd for someone to send me a fax in Arabic. What was I supposed to make of that calligraphy? At the bottom, however, I discovered an address written in tiny roman type.
I showed Sheila the fax, Sheila can manage a little Arabic, and with the help of a dictionary she finally figured it out.
“The purpose of this correspondence,” she said, “is to extend to you a very honorable invitation to an international writers’ conference.” Those were in fact her pathos-laden words. I was being invited to Cairo to deliver an address on “Literature and History,” flight and accommodations paid for by the organizers.
It was clear to me that I ought not accept any more invitations. For a year and a half I had been living off an advance and debts. I needed finally to finish the new book, and there was that trip to Ukraine besides.
My guess was that Gamal al-Ghitani and Edwar al-Charrat were behind the invitation. I didn’t want to disappoint them. But most of all I did it for Sheila. Sheila said it had always been a dream of hers to see Egypt.
Sheila’s father is Algerian, her mother comes from Kamenz near Dresden, the same town where Lessing was born. Sheila’s parents had both studied at the Technical University in Dresden. Sheila knows her father only from photographs. Sheila and I had met toward the end of 2003 at a reading in Koblenz. She had joined us afterward for dinner and, along with the bookstore owner, had accompanied me back to my hotel. Might she see my room and its view of the Rhine? she asked, as I was about to say good night. I had in fact enthusiastically recommended the view earlier.
I could get involved with Sheila with a clear conscience. But that was also the only advantage of having to live separated from the woman I loved, and my own daughter.
Sheila usually stands out because of her incredible hair and her vivacity, with its tinge of overexcitement. After flunking out of law school she worked in a notary’s office. A couple of weeks after my reading in Koblenz she had moved in with a girlfriend in Berlin and, against the odds, immediately found a job here. From then on we saw each other almost every day, and soon we were being invited everywhere as a couple. I did not, however, introduce Sheila to Anne, my daughter by Tanya.
Sheila was now reading nothing but Egyptian writers, and learning Arabic vocabulary every morning. I patched together a lecture from various texts, found the hook to hang it on in the relationship of the words “history/story” and Geschichte/Geschichten, and finished with the conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which implies that whoever has power also decides what words mean, which is why we storytellers, or so I planned to conclude, are so important. Because we …
I could see myself in a huge auditorium, with a horde of photographers thronging the space between the stage and the first row, heard myself say shokran—the word for “thank you” being the only word of Arabic I know — and felt myself being literally overwhelmed by the applause. I put my hand to my heart several times and bowed. Some people responded so enthusiastically they couldn’t stay in their seats.
With the help of Elisabeth, the librarian for the Goethe-Institut, who had smoothed the way for an Arabic translation of my Simple Stories, I arranged for readings at the university, the German high school, and the Goethe-Institut in both Cairo and Alexandria.
In early February — I hadn’t learned until the end of January that the conference would be held the last week of February — it dawned on me that there wouldn’t be much point in giving my speech in German. John Woods, who was sitting atop his packed possessions in San Diego, on the verge of a move to Berlin, translated the text in two days and wrote me a few encouraging words. Finally I spent an afternoon with Eleonore — nicknamed “Nörchen,” a friend of my mother’s who had grown up in South Africa — memorizing the correct pronunciation of the English words and a corresponding cadence for the sentences. The day before we were to depart I bought half a dozen German and Berlin calendars that I found on sale, as well as three smallish boxes of Mozart balls — prettily packaged chocolates are always well received. At KaDeWe I found three chunks of the Wall (the colorful ones) encased in Plexiglas for 6.90 euros apiece. People can laugh, or take this as a bit of self-irony on my part, but everyone who travels for business or an official tour knows how helpful such items are at that first encounter with one’s hosts. Nor do I wish to hide the fact that I have the occasional weak moment when I consider myself a good representative of my country — yes, why not, of Europe and the West.
On February 22 we flew Air France via Paris to Cairo. The music played in the plane before takeoff in both Berlin and Paris was, remarkably enough, an instrumental piece by Michaela Melian, the title track from a CD that I had given Sheila for Christmas. Sheila likewise thought that was a good omen. This was our first trip abroad together. Closing our eyes, we held hands on takeoff.
In Cairo, before we even reached passport control, we were greeted by two young men. Thanks to their presence as ambassadors of the conference, they claimed with some self-assurance, we would be able to have our passports checked right away, no visa necessary — which turned out not to be true. We had to go back and purchase a thirty-five-dollar visa that looked like a postage stamp — the pragmatism of a country with lots of tourists, said Elisabeth, who was waiting for us on the other side of passport control.
The warmth, of course, was a gift from heaven. After our edgy drowsiness on the plane, the few yards from the arrival hall to the parking lot sufficed to instill euphoria. The driver of a shiny silver VW bus, an older gentleman in a suit, opened the car doors for us, stowed our luggage, and then we glided out into the early evening traffic. Soldiers in dark blue uniforms and armed with shields and billy clubs stood in cordons along both curbs — awaiting President Mubarak. But we were soon driving along elevated roads, gazing down at Cairo, and getting used to the ubiquitous honking of car horns.
As darkness fell we arrived at our hotel. Sheila called our room a “suite,” since we had at our command both a living room and a bedroom, as well as a large bath. The view was blocked by the smoothly stuccoed wall of another high-rise, but far below we could see roofs with antennas. We left our bags unpacked and started off at once, made it hand in hand across a multilane road from which the hotel driveway diverged, and a minute later we were beside the Nile. We should walk along the Corniche, Elisabeth had suggested, to the Fish Market, a boat restaurant.
Not that I was unfamiliar with the term “corniche,” but all the same to my ears it sounded as remote and exotic as the words “Tuscany” or “Broadway” once had. And now I was leaning beside an energized Sheila on the railing of Cairo’s Corniche and watching the current as attentively as if a basket were floating there in the water. Neither the myriad boats draped with garlands of light, nor the hotel palaces on the far shore, and certainly not the streetlamps on the bridges and along the river-banks were able to illuminate the Nile. It flowed along wide and heavy under a gentle cover of darkness. We walked upstream, past a disco and restaurants with just a few customers. The young people strolling side by side — there was a good distance between streetlamps — never touched one another. When they spoke it looked as if they were explaining very serious matters, at least it didn’t look like chitchat. At one point Sheila stopped, hugged and kissed me, and said, “Thank you so much!”