We got the last available window table in the Fish Market. Silly of course, but it filled me with a certain pride to know that the river we were watching flow by beneath us was the Nile. And at the same time it seemed a kind of sacrilege, as if this were somehow presumptuous of us. Sheila pulled out her cell phone. “Mama,” she exclaimed. “Guess where I am?”
The buffet was an elongated mountain of ice cubes, in which lay the rarest and finest fish. You saw only the mouths of most of them, and the waiter in charge of the buffet had to dig deep and extract them for presentation to his guests. Sometimes he displayed the fish like a precious necklace draped between his hands, sometimes he held one in each hand like a balance scale. Once we had made our decision, the buffet waiter passed the “Egyptian fish” on to a chef and turned to his next guests. Sheila returned to the table. I waited a while but finally followed her — and was certain I had done something wrong. No one had given us a number or a chit. But no sooner had I taken my seat than our chosen fish were presented again for approval, our order was then repeated—“Yes, grilled, sir”—and served to us shortly thereafter, although we weren’t even close to having sampled all the appetizers.
On the way back to the hotel we bought mineral water in a little shop. A young man sitting on the steps smiled and pretended to tug at his hair, pointed then to my long hair, and called out, “Very nice, very nice!” I felt not just flattered but right at home.
The next morning began with a misunderstanding. We arrived at the foot of the hotel stairway at the agreed hour and kept an eye out for our silver VW bus. I waved off the offers of a steady stream of snail-paced taxis, and Sheila had to repeatedly assure the bellhops that we didn’t need one. When at twenty after ten still no VW bus had appeared, I called the Goethe-Institut. The driver, I learned, had also just phoned to ask where we were. Suddenly I heard my name being shouted from a battered old car, a Lada. We climbed in. The driver laid into us. He claimed he had been driving in circles for half an hour, that he wasn’t allowed to stop here — a no-parking zone. Sheila said he was lying, that we had been standing there for a good twenty minutes.
Our outraged glances met in the rearview mirror. I was offended by their having sent us a gypsy cab instead of the nice gentleman in the silver VW bus.
Sheila and I now slid deeper into our seats, because in an attempt to make up for lost time, the driver pursued a slalom path through the lanes of the road, with every stoplight a kind of course marker. At major intersections, with traffic spinning in a vortex, he kept so far to the right that he was always in the first or at least second starting lane.
When we stopped at the courtyard in front of the Goethe-Institut our eyes met again in the rearview mirror. I had no choice but to thank him for the ride. He gave a gloomy nod, got out, and vanished into the building.
It’s a great temptation to write about my readings at length. Given all the young women on the university campus, Sheila did not stand out. In the dean’s office I was presented the university’s shiny gold medal in a red-lined box. I returned the friendly gesture with Mozart balls and a colorful piece of the Wall in Plexiglas. The entire office was furnished like that of the director of a printing outfit in Leningrad in the eighties: bulky desks and cupboards, lacquered very dark and with numerous scrapes and scratches. A portrait of the president adorned one wall. The lecture hall was overflowing with women students, Sheila was seated somewhere in the middle, a few male students stood along the walls. All I could see of some women students was their glasses, the rest was swathed in black. Most of them, however, wore jeans and T-shirts or a long tunic and headscarf. I wasn’t sure if they had even understood what I read. They were in their third and fourth years of German. Breathless silence, but otherwise no reaction, brief applause at the end. To my left and right sat the college staff, professors, who were to moderate the discussion.
The questions, asked in German, were much like those at home. Why do you write? How autobiographical are your books? Are the East Germans being oppressed by the West Germans? Why are your characters unhappy? That I made a living writing my books required some explanation. I intentionally said my books, to avoid having to say two books. The question about Israel, about which I had been forewarned, was not posed either here or later. When the moderators overlooked a raised arm and I pointed this out to them, a professor asked me, “Which of them would you like to have?” He later assured me that it was just a joke, he had merely been teasing.
We had to wait for Sheila, who had by now been subjected to more than a dozen of my readings, because she was still chatting with some students and a translator — to be on the safe side, my speech for the conference was to be made available in Arabic as well. Once in the VW bus, Sheila announced how happy she was to experience the university from the inside and not have to walk through the city as just a tourist.
It all looked as if this would indeed be a successful trip.
But then came lunch, and we met Samir over lunch. Elisabeth had hired Samir as our city guide. He was tall and trim, with a profile like an ancient Egyptian bas-relief. He wore a long white robe and handsome leather sandals. In addition to Arabic Samir was a master of English, French, and Spanish. His German and Russian weren’t so good, he said — though his spoken German was close to fluent. He had beautiful hands with well-manicured nails, and wore a wide gold band with a black stone on his left hand. He walked with an easy grace. His voice on the other hand sounded high pitched to me. He seemed truly excited to meet a writer.
He had, Samir said, read two of my books, both of which were in the Goethe-Institut library and both of which — yes indeed, both of them — had been “a top-notch pleasure” to read. He planned to write novels someday, too, but the time for that had not yet come. (Samir looked to be in his mid-to late twenties.) He wished and hoped, however, that his book would then please me as much as mine had him. We toasted. When Sheila raised her glass — without the least hesitation Samir had ordered white wine — he looked at her for the first time.
Toward the end of the meal Elisabeth reminded me that we hadn’t much time for a translation of my text, she needed it as soon as possible.
I’ve often thought: If she had said that earlier, if I had not foolishly left my shoulder bag in her office, if I had not had to walk back across to the institute with Elisabeth — and so on and so forth. I am well aware of how pointless such thinking is.
When I returned to Sheila and Samir twenty minutes later, the die had been cast. Both had propped their elbows on the table, Sheila’s right barely a handbreadth from his left. Smiling dreamily to themselves, they both sat up startled as I approached the table.
Sheila began at once to tell me about Samir’s passion for the Pyramids. He had had to promise his father never to leave the Pyramids for any length of time. Samir knew everything a person could know about the Pyramids. He demurred, and I said that it would be nice to take a stroll through the city.