Copyright 2008, Glenda Burgess

Excerpt from Chapter 5: Ana Mish Khawaga

"Drifting away from the conversation at the table, I looked about the coffeehouse casually. Students and laborers of all descriptions crowded together at the tables, the thick smoke from Cleopatra cigarettes rising into the eaves.

A gecko skittered up the wall.

The cadence of jumbled languages was soothing somehow and I found myself thinking of my father in his military career. Had it been like this, on those assignments to Greenland and Iceland? To sit somewhere at a table you would never sit at again, feeling as though no one moment of time related to another, and it was all, always, too fleeting? Those days must have been like this suq, I thought, afloat in the strangeness of Cairo, listening to the flies bump against the wall, the geckos flick long tongues to snap them up. An unfamiliar world, strange and curious. And always, a sense of trespassing. The adventurer, the observer eyes wide open.

The shuttered windows and the heavy door of the café were thrown wide open to thee breeze and noise of the street. Night, cooler than the day, meant the city bustled and hummed long after nightfall. Traffic horns and the barking of dogs mixed with the energy of the cafés and street life. Looking across the table at Larry, I understood the allure of aloneness in his life suddenly; his desire to live deep in the exotic, keep fresh on his tongue the taste of the unfamiliar. I watched as he exchanged money for cigarettes from the boy running errands in the coffeehouse. This was very much a man’s world, and Larry liked the role of the expatriate reinventing himself moment to moment. He had even exchanged his ubiquitous Yale loafers tonight for street sandals. How odd his white feet looked against the dust.

As the hour grew late, a young woman, dark hair wrapped in a hegab tacked loosely across her cheeks, entered from the kitchen door and threaded her way to a tiny clearing at the back of the café where three fruit pallets had been rigged together as a stage. There was no microphone, no speaker system. Two middle-aged men waited there for her, one carrying a tin flute, and the other what looked to be a form of balalaika, a gourd-shaped string instrument.

The men nodded and smiled and flanked the young woman, tuning their instruments. Shyly the young woman removed her scarf and smiled toward the ground. At that moment I realized I was the only other woman in the coffeehouse, and slid down in my chair, feeling oddly obtrusive.

The chanteuse began to sing, and as she moved from one ballad to another—some sung in French, most in Arabic, and most love songs—the dark silences of the coffeehouse grew deeply reverent and moody. Several times a chair would scrape across the floor, and I would see a young man press forward, chin against the palm of his hand, cigarette glowing in the dark.

“La belle chanteuse... elle est magnifique,” I whispered to Larry.

He squeezed my hand, pleased.

Starry starry night, I thought, listening to the desert in the strange reedy melodies. How glad I was to be in Cairo.

Three seconds later the walls and the floor rocked with such force I thought there had been an earthquake. Cups flew to the wall, shattering, chairs toppling over in the dark as men rose from their seats and startled voices shouted out in confusion. Waves of booming sound, the echo of an explosion, vaulted off the walls and a hand pushed me hard, knocking my head under the table. I was crushed in a tangled throng of knees and elbows huddled against the floor. No one breathed.

The dust stilled and raw silence pressed against our ears, followed by the shrieking sound of sirens. No, not sirens, but the eerie frightened trill Arab women make with the tip of their tongues. Someone, far down the street, was shrilling into the night.

Larry shoved aside a broken table and scrambled to his feet. He pulled me up beside him.

“That was a bomb! Next door? Was it next door? Everyone all right and accounted for?” He looked swiftly about for Kamal, seeing then that his friend was already out the door with Tonio, running toward the billows of smoke and anguished trilling down the street. More shouting, and sporadic gunfire joined the melee and I strained to hear what Larry was shouting at me.

“Go home,” he yelled into my face, his eyes glittering. “Return to the hotel, Ellen. Correct that – go to the embassy! Make it the embassy! Wait for me there. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Larry sprinted out the door as the sound of rising sirens, this time real ones, wailed closer and closer through the night.

Cairo was under fire.

I stumbled through the smoky coffeehouse, climbing over the jumble of overturned chairs and tables that littered the floor. The electrical lights had been knocked out in the explosion, and the café door hung open to the black night. I picked out the shape of a kerosene lamp hanging on the wall, somehow unbroken in the blast, and fumbled for the matches in my jacket. Lighting the lantern, I held it aloft. The café was in ruins. And I was completely alone. Larry and the others had gone down the street to help. The Cairenes, the musicians - everyone else had fled.
Stepping out into the street, I stared up at the stars, disoriented by their changed position. In which direction would I find the embassy?

A dark youth slipped past me into the coffeehouse and bolted back out with the proprietor’s kanaker under his arm. Shock had given way to chaos in the streets. I needed to get myself out of the old city, and quickly."