Adé: A Love Story (3 page)

In Cairo, men had gestured angrily until we fled the tearooms, hands covering our heads, shuffling through cross-legged patrons, painfully aware of our womanhood. But Mouna’s was filled with men drinking tea, smoking hookahs, playing backgammon, and singing verses along with the ecstatic incantations of Oum Kalthoum (
“The Voice of Egypt! The Fourth Pyramid!”
) that streamed from tinny speakers powered by a long line of extension cords. Mouna appeared from behind a curtain leading to the backroom a few moments after we entered. She clapped and sang loudly along with Kalthoum, her arms reaching up, up, up, lifting the energy of her patrons. She was not covered. She was the first woman I had seen in public who was not wearing any part of the hijab. Her face was bright and her body full, with hips that swayed to the music. This woman was not afraid. She was
not a stereotype. It occurred to me that this place, Egypt, and perhaps the rest of the Islamic world, was unpredictable.

Mouna headed straight to me, her arms outstretched.
“Habibi!”
she exclaimed. Darling! “Where have you been all of this time?” And then my face was buried in her bosom, and even though I was confused and overwhelmed by the instant familiarity, I wanted to stay there, enjoying her ripe smell and ample warmth. Her solidity.

“I have been away,” I said, finally disentangling myself, not comprehending my own response. I looked at Miriam quickly, as if to say,
We’re good on this, right?
She beamed, approving, loving the idea of being inside, across the line, even vicariously. “I have been in
Amrika,
” I went on. “But I am home now.”

We stayed with Mouna for a month, listening to her story, washing tea glasses and serving customers, learning the names of her Bedouin regulars and listening to their lives. Mouna’s family disowned her when she announced she would not be wearing the hijab, nor marrying the man they had chosen. She roamed the streets of Alexandria alone, the city where she was born, continually subjected to taunts, until one day she slipped unseen onto a train, and then a bus, and arrived at Sharm determined to live her own life. Hassan, a tall, silent Bedouin we met a few days after our arrival, took her in, and eventually gave her the money to open the tea shop.

“And today we are known all the way to Alex!” Mouna said, beaming. “My family cannot bother me anymore. I make my own money. I run my own business. That is it, isn’t it? This is what we are supposed to do, is it not true?”

I wanted to record Mouna’s story as proof of something. The tenacity of the human spirit, or a woman’s escape, or maybe I just wanted to take part of her with me. I couldn’t imagine leaving her there in the middle of that desolate expanse, surrounded, yes, by men who loved her, but fundamentally alone—with no other women around to mirror her courage, her breathtaking will to thrive. Miriam didn’t feel the same longing, and by then had made her own friends, men who liked to watch her dance and who shouted uproariously each time she beat them in backgammon. In the afternoon, she often visited a few of their wives; they braided her hair, and she taught them to write their names in English.

The night before we left, Hassan and Mouna arranged a farewell feast in the desert. Miriam and I were forbidden to take part in the preparations. Mouna said we were to be treated like royalty. For what reason, we could hardly say. For arriving at the teashop? Recognizing Mouna? Validating her life choice? For whatever reason, Mouna made sure every detail was polished to perfection, and told us we would not have to lift even one piece of bread except to eat it.

“It is a party for you, my sisters,” she said, “something we will remember until we are finished with this life.”

One Mercedes was filled with a goat, red wine, and plates of tomato, cucumber, hummus, and lemons. Another was filled with barefoot children who ran to us at the last minute, arms loaded with firewood, laughing with excitement in their embroidered
galabiyas.
The first Mercedes, which would lead the others, was for the four of us. Miriam sat in front with Hassan, and Mouna
sat in the back with me, holding my hand. It was the beginning of our goodbyes. She was orchestrating a farewell with no tears, no bitter herbs—only sweetness.

Hassan started the car, and we headed toward the setting sun. I had become accustomed to driving in the desert. That is to say, when Hassan led the three-car caravan, I didn’t look for a road because I knew none existed. I had learned that the Bedouins knew this triangle of land like they knew their own names. I didn’t understand it—how they could drive for hours, day or night, and arrive at their destination without a road compass or landmark of any kind—but I discovered that my lack of understanding was irrelevant. They could and they did, as if the whole of the place, the entire land mass, was a huge, three-dimensional grid inside their heads, a map imprinted at birth.

A few hours after sunset, Hassan abruptly stopped the car. Again, I saw only miles of nothing, but carpets were unrolled and a fire was made. Miraculously, a goat was cooked and people began to play music on small instruments pulled from their pockets. A small boy took my hand and led me to the reason we had stopped at this place—a wadi, a large pool of water, a mirage that wasn’t a mirage—and he motioned for me to sit down. I saw the crescent moon reflected in the water, and gasped. He laughed. “
Amar,
” he said, pointing to the moon. “
Nejma,
” he said, pointing to the stars, of which there were millions, lighting up the sky like the tiny phosphorescence that danced around me when I swam in the sea months later with Adé, laughing at the magic of the tiny bits of aquatic fire. I nodded and repeated the words back to him:
amar, nejma.

I tried to read his body, from his soft brown eyes and faded
galabiya
to his long, tapered fingers and the way he sat on his
knees, palms turned up on his thighs. My patient instructor would be a man someday, but tonight he was a boy translating the universe, giving me his world with his words.

On our way back to Cairo, Miriam and I stopped for a few days in Dahab, the place of gold, before the flight to Nairobi, and rented a square cement room with two mats on the floor for fifty cents a night. When the sun rose and the morning was still cool, we rode camels and gazed across the water at Saudi Arabia. I spent the sweltering afternoons in the shade, talking to old men under baobab trees who called me
mok kabir,
big mind, as I cajoled them into teaching me more words. Sun. Water. Rain.
Shams. Ma. Mathar.
One man asked why I wanted to know so many words. He was tall and dark, a luminous black figure with long arms and legs, sitting erect on a sun-bleached white stone bench.

“So I can talk to you, and you can tell me things,” I said.

So I can truly be here,
I thought. So I can become of this place, and not the other.

After Dahab, we flew to the relatively crowded streets of Nairobi and went into a kind of shock. We were in a real city again; the tall office buildings and sidewalks full of expats and Kenyan businessmen in boxy suits threw us. We scrambled to the other side of town and secured a cheap hotel where, in an altered state and apropos of nothing but an inner call to metamorphosis, I started hacking at the long, thick ropes of my hair with a pair of rusty scissors I found on the sink.

It was hot and swarms of mosquitoes made their way through the screens on the windows. I was changing. I was becoming someone else; I was emptying myself of identity. I wanted to give
all of it away, everything I had, and everyone I was. Miriam hovered as I snipped, making sure I only thinned the great mass I had grown for a decade, rather than shearing it off completely. She kept telling me not to move too quickly, as if she sensed I could shock myself out of self-recognition. That I could get lost and not find my way back.

We quickly had enough of the metropolis, the young hustlers and prostitutes, the piles of garbage, the incessant sounds of the
matatus
—privately owned minibuses—rounding up their passengers. Foreboding posters of President Moi, Kenya’s brutal dictator well into his second decade of power, were plastered everywhere: the exterior walls of every business, the front door of every home, the base of every monument at the center of every roundabout. A traveler at the airport with a backpack three times the size of ours had mentioned the islands off the coast of East Africa ringed by white sand, and we decided to go, to get back to where we could breathe.

We came to the decision lightly, like all the others. There were signs, but it was also intuitive, something bigger, this way we followed another calling. In the morning we boarded an ancient bus headed to the coastal town of Malindi. From there we would take the ferry to Adé’s island of sand and stone—his speck in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Lamu.

WE STEPPED OFF
the bus with our backs kinked and mouths dry. The twists and turns of the road from the city to the coast, the loud yelling of the bus driver and his obvious addiction to an herb pulled obsessively from a wrapper of old newspaper had left us skittish and raw. The other passengers did not seem to notice the careening into darkness, the hypnotic beat of imported hip-hop pumping through the threadbare seats, the angry outbursts of passing motorists.

Miriam and I tried to let our bodies sway with each lean and brake, tried not to conjure images of mangled bodies and buses overturned by the side of the road, but found we could not help ourselves. We sat the whole sixteen hours clutching metal bars crudely nailed into the sides of our seats, rivers of sweat streaming from our armpits. We glanced meekly from time to time at our fellow passengers, men and women who awoke from naps refreshed and took pity on us, offering cigarettes and bottles of hot cola as we quaked.

To finally climb aboard the ferry that took us away from the mainland of Kenya was to step into a dream. We were never so glad to leave tar and cement, metal and glass, profane music and
men who did not take precautions. The boat was not big, but it was old and looked to us seaworthy, though of course there would have been nothing to do had it been otherwise. It was painted white and a calming pale green, and once it began to move, groaning loudly as the waters churned beneath us, it did not take long for the coastline to disappear, and for the fumes and chaos of the dock to fade from view.

I was worn out, but had never seen a swamp before, and certainly not the vivid mossy green of mangrove forests, the bent reddish-brown trunks rising up out of the muck, miraculous as lotus blossoms. Again, I felt a sense of belonging—the slow, irrational dissolution of the self I had known, and another, core truth of being emerging in concert with the landscape. I wanted to know about the small islands we were passing. Were they inhabited, did food grow there? But I knew better than to talk to the women cloaked in black and laughing insouciantly at their own jokes, wrapping and rewrapping their coverings while staring nakedly at me as if I were no more than a life-size cutout of a woman, and not the real thing. I sensed there was a code to this place, and that I knew it. I did not believe in the notion of a return to the homeland—such an Africa was gone, I knew that, and yet, there was something akin to a homecoming. As in Tahrir Square and Maadi and Gizeh and Sharm el-Sheikh, I felt familiarity in my marrow.

Those moments of being watched on the boat were another kind of initiation—the women cut me into pieces and then put me back together again. I felt the burn of their stares acutely. But there was nothing to be done, no one else to be. My role was to be quiet, to make myself as still as possible while continuing to hold my body in a way that seemed normal. I was being apprehended
and to speak would have been to thwart the process, to deny these women the chance to run me through their filters, to digest me and, therefore, let me inside and I knew that inside was where I wanted to be; that I would be accepted in the eye at the center of the storm, and so I calmed myself and let myself be pulled across the divide.

Soon the landmass appeared on the horizon, and then all at once we were upon the tiny village, a string of flat, tin-roofed buildings, and the boat was roped to the hooks on the cement pier by a barefoot man old enough to be my grandfather. I noticed the Portuguese influence, the squat columned structures reminiscent of the slave trade, but it was not my first thought, nor did it take hold for long. I was already caught up in what was going on around me.

It was mango season, and mangoes were everywhere: loose and spoiling on the ground at my feet, carried in bulging sacks on the backs of men, bright orange and dripping in the hands of children along the sea front. Women were covered from head to toe in black, strolling unhurriedly in groups of four and five. Young, shirtless men with dreadlocks and surfboards were scanning the ferry passengers for rich white tourists. Older men in neat white shirts and embroidered skullcaps were walking briskly to and from mosques that dotted the small town.

I don’t remember how we got from the pier to the guesthouse, but our bags were tossed onto the concrete, and we were escorted from the mouth of the boat onto the firm ground of the pier. Miriam and I stood there for a few moments amidst the orderly confusion, too tired to check the guidebook buried in our baggage and too happy standing still to rush to movement. Then a young, brown-skinned man with thick-rimmed black glasses approached
us with a mixture of boredom and pity, picked up our bags without a word, and led us through the narrow, winding streets to our new home, a few tiny rooms off a rooftop courtyard, completely hidden from the street but for a narrow stone staircase winding up from the curb.

Adé did not appear until many hours later, after the sun had melted into the sea and the sticky heat of the day had settled into a breezy cool. I had unpacked the contents of my bag into an old wooden chest that stood beside the thin mattress on the floor, and hung my brightly colored scarves on hooks pounded into the cracked, dry walls. The sheet on my bed was faded and flowery, and I stretched out on top of it in the dimly lit room, hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer and thumbing through a book of poems,
The Captain’s Verses,
by Pablo Neruda. The tightness in my neck and in the small of my back relaxed, and my mind began slowing to the pace of the island, downshifting from the screeching city chaos to the gentle lapping of the sea that beat like a pulse through the tiny town.