Gospel (104 page)

Lucy beheld the continent less fondly the next morning when she and Dr. O'Hanrahan discovered there would be no train to Khartoum before Saturday night, virtually a two-day wait.

“Where … is … the train?” enunciated O'Hanrahan carefully, his handkerchief out to wipe sweat from his brow on this dry 110-degree day.

“Eet is not to come.” The man at the station, patient and smiling in a perspiration-stained
galabiyya,
had introduced himself as Mohammed. As Lucy and O'Hanrahan were the sole crazy Western
'kchawagahs
here this time of year, Mohammed had taken a piteous interest in them.

“Can you find out when the train will come?”

Mohammed smiled inappropriately. “The phone ees not to work,” he said in explanation.

“So you don't really know anything?”

“Saturday night, good sir, there will be a train. When there ees no train on the Friday morning there is always a train on the Saturday night. Oonless it is to come on the Sunday.”

O'Hanrahan thanked the man and led Lucy away to the dusty main street, such as it was. Wadi Halfa could have been a Mexican Wild West town with shacks and adobe-style huts, abandoned buildings with broken windows, and white dust hanging everywhere above the road. The gas station was the locus, apparently, of all activity.

“We'll go by road,” suggested O'Hanrahan, starting to haul his suitcase over to the gas station. “The train takes forever anyway.” Sand dunes block the track. Things break down. The train stops five times a day for prayertime. “Let's hitch a ride.”

They met a truck driver named Mohammed. He had a Bedford truck for rough terrain with a canvas-covered bed full of ammunition, chickens, goat hooves, plastic beach balls, and animal feed. There was room for two passengers in his wide front seat, and if his guests found that uncomfortable, they could stretch out with the chickens in the back. The price was easily negotiated by O'Hanrahan, who had prefaced the deal with many elaborate Arab blessings and, as he told Lucy later, a semipromise to vouch for Mohammed's green card should he come to the States.

“In Europe and the second world they hate Americans,” O'Hanrahan explained in the small grocery store as they loaded up on fresh bottles of water and prepackaged snacks. O'Hanrahan held one water bottle to the light and grimaced at the things floating in it. He examined the bottle top and figured well water or lake water had been put within and a new metal cap hammered on the bottle. “But in the third world, ironically, we get treated nice because they want to come to America. It's a cheap way to win friends but I'll promise anything to get out of this town.”

Lucy raised a bottle to the light. “This looks clean…”

And so they were off, down the well-worn tracks alongside the narrowing Lake Nasser. The road soon degenerated and the pace slowed to 30 m.p.h. as Mohammed and his truck wavered and rolled precariously going down and up gullies. They had an air-conditioning of sorts; the truck had a fan that blasted hottish air upon them, in addition to the occasional breeze stirred by open windows.

Lucy looked at Mohammed, who kept sneaking looks at her. Lucy was dressed conservatively, long pants, long sleeves, but her neck and hair were exposed and that seemed to be of peculiar interest to Mohammed. Lucy was hot and weary enough to contemplate O'Hanrahan's dying of a heat stroke and then having to be Mohammed's sex slave all the way to Khartoum. Could be worse. He was about 35 or so, a smiling brown face, having gone a few days without shaving, had most of his teeth, big, moist, brown eyes, and that receding manner of many Arab men, a shyness borne of humility before Allah. Each truck voyage for Mohammed was a sign of God's grace. The next moment she grabbed the doorhandle to steady herself as Mohammed nearly tipped the truck over in a dry gully. Maybe, she thought, Allah
is
a major part of the completed journey.

(We help where We can.)

“I called Rabbi Hersch back in Aswan,” she confessed.

Maybe it was too hot for O'Hanrahan to get particularly worked up.

Lucy wondered, “You're not upset?”

“No. Saved me from having to do it. You told him we had the scroll, didn't you?” O'Hanrahan explained he intended to call the rabbi in Cairo, then in Khartoum, but he had put it off so long he sort of dreaded the blast of accusations.

Hours were extinguished in the heat.

The road was so bad in one place that Mohammed took a detour down to the river bank, only to whir and slide about in the mud. Mohammed laughed as if this were high amusement.

Another hour passed and the lake had narrowed back to Nile-width and the desert on either side flattened out and was searing and endless. An hour might offer as entertainment nothing more than a two- or three-camel caravan, slowly moving along the riverbank, or a passing truck in the other direction, which was met with honks and shouted blessings, and once, when the Nile peeked through, a felucca idling against the current.

Lucy had memorized the truck cabin, which was affectionately cluttered with blinking Christmas lights, faded streamers, Arabic decals of holy phrases, a yellowed photo of Mekkah cut from a magazine and taped to the dashboard, photos of the driver's son, in ceremonial circumcision-wear, taped to the back of the visor. O'Hanrahan, noticing her interest in the photo, began a lecture on circumcision, that for boys it was often done at village fairs. Mohammed's boy was darling, thirteen, his eyes betraying terror of the public humiliation to come.

“And most natives,” whispered O'Hanrahan, “circumcise the women around nine or ten. If not at birth.”

Lucy worked on that a minute. Circumcise the women? “Wait, you don't mean…”

“That's exactly what I mean, removal of that organ of pleasure.” O'Hanrahan enjoyed Lucy's fulminations and outrage, reviving them both as she railed against this butchery.

“The U.N. ought to stop it,” she stammered.

“Heh-heh-heh, a woman who can't be ruled by sexual desire is a woman who can be trusted not to cheat on her husband with a better lover. I wonder how effective it is. You would think other body parts would step in as erogenous zones. Come to think of it, there are the Rasheda peoples in Sudan. Women's chins are their prize possessions, and are always kept hidden. You may see some in the
souk
of Khartoum. Anyway, women perform the operation, and there's no stopping the custom. A mother is heartbroken if her daughter doesn't have it.”

That topic killed a good twenty minutes.

Lucy also contemplated the rough road and how, only a few hours into the big ride, she felt her bowels stir uncomfortably and her behind was sore. Maybe, she thought darkly, she would miscarry.

(Dark thought, indeed.)

Hey, it's my pregnancy. I can think darkly if I want to.

(A miscarriage would relieve you of a choice, you believe.)

It would make it easier.

(You want to risk hemorrhaging in the Sahara?)

No, I suppose not. Hey, I'm probably not even pregnant anyway.

(And if you are?)

This topic again? Well, she sighed, it has only been forty minutes since I last thought about it, so why not?

I confront the idea of raising a child by myself and what that would do to my life and I see a void, a cartoon scenario that has no reality, no shape, me miscast in a bad TV movie. Abortion's probably out. Yeah, if this were Judy I'd advise
her
to have one, but this is me and people can say I'm screwed up by Catholicism and guilt-ridden and all that stuff, but I know I could live with nine months of pregnancy more easily than with my having had an abortion. Besides. The pregnancy has the proper elements of punishment, of
ordeal
for my sin. That'll teach me, she set her mind to it coldly. I will undergo the tribulation as part of the penance for my sin of stupidity—

“Lake Nasser,” said O'Hanrahan, mopping his sandy, sweaty brow, determined to resuscitate conversation, “has buried some one hundred monuments of historical interest. Nubia, Cush, the northern reaches of Meroe, a thousand clues under the water for good…”

My mom, thought Lucy. There's a happy thought. She felt her stomach tighten as she always did when thinking of her family. Her family, which was about to have a new member.

Actually, Lucy's mother would be the better parent about the news.

Of course, there would be grieving and recriminations, but after a complete submission was made, her mother would then wear her daughter's unwed pregnancy proudly in her martyr's crown, another gift of suffering sent her way. Dad would see it for what it was, Lucy's stupidity and indifference to his good name. Her sister Cecilia would be woeful and superior, though faintly consoling. Her brother Nicholas would take the news the best—making a joke, relieved now to shift the black-sheep-of-the-family mantle off his shoulders. Her brother Kevin, younger and never particularly close, would bestow upon her “Smooth goin', Luce,” and other slogans by which she would know she'd failed yet another test on his eternal adolescent coolness-scale. Her sister Mary would roll her eyes and whisper, “Why didn't you have an abortion?” because Mary probably had gone that route a time or two. And the reactions of the maiden aunt brigade, the prayer circle of St. Bridget's, her namesake Aunt Lucy—none bore contemplation.

Lucy let a small laugh escape. Actually, it was almost appealing: the idea of torturing the old harpies with her sin.
Here,
I should say, rub your superior ancient faces in it! Feel a disgrace and shame I myself couldn't possibly imagine!

“Zauba'ah,”
said Mohammed blandly.

O'Hanrahan chattering away: “… one thinks of the lost cities, yes, maybe even entire cultures themselves buried under this lake. It's changed the entire water table of the Sahara.”

“I read somewhere it was unsafe, the Aswan Dam.”

“Well, the Soviets helped build it, so what do you think? Khadaffi keeps threatening to blow it up, every so often. You realize if it broke, the whole of Egypt would be washed away into the Mediterranean. Aswan, the Valley of the Kings, the pyramids perhaps, Cairo and its 15 million … an awesome thought. And yet without the flood control, a modern Egypt isn't possible—”

“Zauba'ah,”
said Mohammed, shaking his head dourly.

“What's he saying?” asked Lucy.

“I have no idea,” said the professor. “Not that the third world does very well with progress—the rain forests, the unlimited pollution, the rape of their environments. Like that smokestack plume ahead.”

“Disgusting, isn't it?” said Lucy.

They stared at the plume of yellow and brown filth rising in a mushroom cloud above the distant desert.

“Did you see, when our train was leaving Cairo, the appalling pollution of some of those factories?” asked Lucy, stirring in the seat. “Some of the nearby houses were coated in that yellow chemical filth, and the river. They just dumped all that bilge into the Nile. Something wrong, sir?”

O'Hanrahan was grave. “Could swear that cloud came from the direction of the desert.” O'Hanrahan's eyes widened. “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“It's a duststorm.”

“Zauba'ah,”
said Mohammed, pointing to the storm.
“Aywah, hennak … al-haboob.”

The notorious
haboob
of the Sudanese Desert. It took up about a quarter of the sky, rising like a funnel cloud from a single point, then branching out in clouds of bilious yellow and brown and black, depending on what was being sucked up and how the sun hit it. Beautiful in its way, falling, rising, reconstituting its shape as if it were alive, Lucy thought, panicked by the sure doom of facing some part of it.

Mohammed slapped his steering wheel, disappointed but not particularly energized, muttering a prayer to Allah. He began to turn the truck around.

“What's he doing?” Lucy asked.

O'Hanrahan learned in Arabic. “There's a road a few miles back that leads to the Nile, a mile or two over. We're going to put the truck by the river and sit it out.”

“Why?”

“Because,” O'Hanrahan said, having reasoned it out himself, “if ten inches of dust are dumped on us, we want some bearings when it's all over.”

As they drove north back to the turnoff, Lucy looked ahead at the clear blue sky in the direction they came from. But then eerily all the desert around them turned dim as the cloud passed before the sun, and the loose sand of the nearby dunes began to dance, agitated by the increasing wind. The wind began to whistle around the truck, rattling the canvas shell. Mohammed found the turnoff to the Nile and Lucy anxiously glanced to their right: no sky, no light, just an approaching curtain of churning sand, tossing itself and roiling like clouds of smoke.

“It was a perfectly calm day,” said Lucy. “How…”

“Nothing needs a reason that happens out here,” said O'Hanrahan, wrapping his handkerchief around his mouth.

Mohammed spoke, now more concerned.

“Mohammed thinks we'd do better in the back of the truck,” said O'Hanrahan. Mohammed opened his door and the wind doubled its howl; he had parked the truck to protect the radiator grille so the back would bear the brunt of the storm. Lucy slid across the seat and hopped to the ground. A nettlesome blast of small sand particles stung at her, lashed her … she squeezed her eyes shut as Mohammed took her arm and helped her along. Upon rounding the back of the truck, she met the wind full force and she felt dust fly up her nose and, shocked, she breathed through her mouth, only to get a lungful of dust too. She tried to spit it out but Mohammed was pushing her up and over onto the floor of the covered truckbed. O'Hanrahan rolled in over the raised tailgate and then Mohammed himself climbed in and began to lash the canvas, sewing them up inside.

Lucy used her sleeve to wipe her eyes. Under her eyes, in her ears, up her nostrils, down her blouse, through the clothes, through her skin, the driving dust had penetrated everywhere. As soon as her eyes were accustomed to the dark she picked out a relatively clean place and huddled down behind the packages; with some amusement she saw O'Hanrahan settle himself beside the chickens in the coops. Mohammed continued muttering his prayers and rubbing his screwdriver, holding it up, kissing it …