A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore Read online

  With fear in her eyes, the woman said, “Truly?”

  “I swear it in the name of the Messiah.”

  The foreigner hesitated for a moment, then slid her hand into an opening in her robe and drew out a cord attached to a key so large it was hard to imagine it suspended from anyone’s neck. She turned it in the lock and the mother pushed on the gate to help her swing it open, then sprang through the gap without waiting for an invitation. With the foreigner in the lead, the mother pulled Aisha along beside her as they approached the immense building, its tower rising above it. They passed through the door into a damp and dimly lit antechamber. Aisha shivered. The foreigner pointed to a wooden bench and said, “Wait here.”

  Aisha leaned against the back of the bench. The walls were high, with only one window, which was close to the ceiling and had stained-glass panes. This was the only source of light. There were strange images depicted on the walls, people and places and vast ships, all watching over them, impassive and silent. Aisha’s mother gripped her shoulders to stop her from shaking.

  “Get ahold of yourself, girl,” she scolded. “We’ve reached the end of our journey—don’t ruin everything now.”

  On the point of tears, Aisha said, “I don’t know what you’re planning to do with me.”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s all over.”

  On hearing the approach of footsteps, she fell silent. The foreigner appeared and beckoned to them. Following her, they crossed a wooden floor, clean and polished to a mirror shine. The walls were faced with gleaming wood as well, and Aisha could see her image reflected back as she passed. The foreigner paused before another closed door and knocked politely. Then she entered, and they followed her. Here, too, there was just one window, an enormous crucifix on the wall, a picture of a woman holding an infant, and an immense desk in the middle of the room, behind which sat an old woman also wearing a nun’s habit.

  Aisha’s mother startled her by letting go of her hand and falling to the floor in a full prostration. Her mother’s body, she thought, had betrayed her at last, her self-possession temporary, and now at an end. But then her mother spread her arms, brought her legs together, and lowered her face to the floor, forming the shape of a cross.

  Alarmed, the nun behind the desk got to her feet. Standing up, she seemed more imposing. In Arabic distorted by a strange accent she said, “This will not do. Raise your head, stand up.”

  Without lifting her face from the floor, the mother said, “I cannot, Mistress, not until you grant my request and save my daughter.”

  “We don’t do such things here unless there’s a massacre. And no one should prostrate himself before a human being—get up and tell me what it is you want.”

  The mother raised herself, but remained crouched on the floor with tears pouring down her face. Aisha didn’t know where she found them. Pointing at Aisha, her mother said, “I want you to save my daughter’s life. Death stalks her.”

  The woman looked at Aisha, her face like those drawn on mausoleum walls. “Death—how?” she said.

  “We are from an old Muslim family, but we converted. We chose the way of Christ.”

  The nuns, the elder and the younger, gasped, and so didn’t hear Aisha’s own sharp intake of breath. The mother alone maintained her composure, as she continued her story. “It was a moment of illumination, Mistress,” she said. “The Virgin came to me in that state between waking and dreaming, and revealed herself to me. I had no choice but to follow her path.”

  The old nun looked uneasy. It was a tale too shopworn to be easily believed. The mother knew it, and turned to Aisha. “Show them your arm,” she said brusquely.

  Her voice had regained something of its commanding tone. Aisha pulled her robe aside, revealing her swollen arm and the points of the cross implanted in her skin. It was ugly and painful-looking, especially on so small an arm.

  For the first time, the young nun intervened. She came close to inspect Aisha’s inflamed arm and cried, “What is all this swelling and bruising?”

  “Our family tried to remove the cross from her skin,” said the mother. “If we hadn’t run away they would have cut off her arm entirely.”

  The young nun stepped back in horror and crossed herself. She pressed her hand to her chest and began praying silently, her wide eyes shining with fervor.

  Examining the tattoo, the abbess said, “It must have been done by some primitive method, God help us.”

  The sight of the tattoo made an impression on the nuns that lingered even after Aisha covered her arm once again. Her mother lightly touched the elder nun’s knee and said softly, “Save her, Mistress. Accept her into your school. Give her the chance to be educated, and save her life at the same time.”

  “That is not what we do,” said the abbess in some agitation. “We are simply an American school on foreign soil, and we mustn’t implicate ourselves in local troubles. We have only girls from Coptic families here—there’s no room for fugitives.”

  The young nun was looking at Aisha, who stood abject and broken before them. She couldn’t know that hunger and the cruel journey to which Aisha’s mother had subjected her had reduced her to this state. The nun approached the abbess and spoke to her in an unfamiliar language. Aisha’s mother looked on in meek submission. The young nun bowed her head humbly and retreated once more to a corner, but the mother sensed that something had changed.

  The abbess sighed. Gesturing toward Aisha she said, “What is her name?”

  “Call her whatever you please,” said the mother quickly. “Her given name won’t suit her anymore.”

  “Don’t you have any papers?”

  “In our remote village there are no papers. We live and die and no one knows we ever existed.”

  The abbess cast her eyes about uncertainly. “And have you no luggage or clothing with you?”

  “We were running away, Mistress. We would have attracted too much attention had we brought anything with us.”

  The abbess was silent then, studying the young nun’s face, the crucifix on the wall, and the icon of the Virgin. Then she said, “I don’t know what to do.” She pointed at the young nun, who stood modestly to one side, biting her lower lip. “Sister Margaret says we must offer succor to lost souls, but we came here to help the Christians, and we do not wish to take sides in any unrest or conflict. We have no business with converts or fugitives. We don’t want to set the Muslims against us. In our midst this poor child would be a bomb that could demolish our mission here.”

  “I came in order to save my daughter,” said the mother, “not to sow discord. Her presence here is a secret that will go with me to the grave.”

  “This story you’ve told me—how many people know about it?”

  “Only she and I.”

  The abbess turned to the younger nun, whom they now knew as Sister Margaret, and spoke to her. Aisha’s mother could see that the conversation went on too long for there to be any possibility of retreat or refusal. The abbess sighed. She stood stiffly before the icon, as if waiting for some word or sign. Then she turned to the mother, as though trying to rationalize what she was doing. She said, “Do you swear to keep the secret?”

  Aisha’s mother replied quickly, “I swear on the Qur—” She stopped and corrected herself. “On the Gospel.”

  Had the abbess caught her slip of the tongue, or had she already made up her mind? Gazing at the girl’s face the abbess said, “In truth she is a sad little flower. She’ll take the name of our Lady Mary. May it be a blessing to her.”

  Now Aisha was genuinely alarmed—at being stripped of her name, in part, but most of all because she was going to stay here in this place, losing her mother and everything that connected her to her old life.

  The abbess spoke again. “You may go with Sister Margaret and she’ll find you a place in the private residential quarters.”

  Aisha tried not to breakdown, but could not keep a tremor from her voice. “I want to talk to my mother first.”

  Her
mother spoke quickly to keep her from saying anything more. “We need to say good-bye. God alone knows when it may be possible for me to see her again.”

  The abbess nodded to Sister Margaret, who led them from the room. They passed once more through the dim and silent antechamber, then into a side passage, which brought them into a small chapel, chilly like the other rooms and so dim that they could scarcely discern the images hung upon the walls. Sister Margaret ushered them to one of the wooden pews, where they sat down side-by-side. The nun then withdrew, leaving them alone.

  Aisha held her tongue until the sound of footsteps faded away, then turned to her mother, fighting back tears. Her mother’s face was utterly impassive.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” said Aisha. “Why would you want to leave me in this place?”

  Her mother’s reply was resolute and betrayed no sign of weakness or indecision. “What would you have had me do? Was I to abandon you to disgrace and death?”

  “I really am disgraced now, with all these lies you’ve been repeating about me!”

  “On the contrary. I saved your life. I removed you from the clutches of that man who was lurking by your bed every night.”

  “My uncle. He took the place of my father.”

  “That is not how it was. You were still little when your father died. And then everyone—my relatives, the whole village—pressured me to marry his brother. That’s the tradition. But from the first moment my body was resistant to him. I couldn’t conceive with him, so you remained my only child. I could have reconciled myself to life with him if it hadn’t been for the way he looked at you, the way he tried to touch you. You were too young to understand what he was doing, but it terrified me.”

  Just then the tolling of the bell could be heard, albeit faintly. Was it just the wind that caused this, or was it time for prayers? Avoiding her mother’s eye, Aisha gazed at her surroundings. Now she could make out the walls and the pictures mounted on them: elderly men with long beards and flowing robes, staring straight at her as if they disapproved of her presence here.

  She looked back at her mother’s face, whose features had softened. It was as if she were somewhere else, absorbed in the memory of a different time and place. All her past sorrows had been stirred to life: when Aisha’s father, mysteriously slain, was brought home on the back of a donkey gray as the dust, the village was mute, the mountain colluding in its silence. Her first thought had been to take Aisha and flee with her to Asyout, where she had come from—a decision she delayed for thirteen whole years, unable to summon the courage to leave her house and land. No one knew who had killed Aisha’s father—or if they knew they didn’t dare say. The elders of the family met and decided that the younger brother should take the place of the slain husband: a decree that struck her like a thunderbolt.

  Omran himself was a reprobate: “a raging bull,” as his dead brother had called him. There wasn’t a woman in the village he hadn’t run after, nor a husband who hadn’t come to grief with him. His insatiable lust was the subject of the village women’s secret gossip, but she hated him, especially after the scandal with the Gypsy girl, whose people had accused him of rape. His family tried to settle the dispute by giving a large sum of money to those drifters; the Gypsies themselves cared little for honor, but the family was angry and the village was disgusted with Omran’s behavior. Days later, cast up at the edge of a drainage ditch that traced the borders of the village, they found the girl dead, her body bloated, her mouth crusted with salt and stuffed with waterweeds. No one knew what had happened to her, whether she had slipped and fallen on her own or whether her family had grabbed the money and then killed her and taken themselves off, leaving her to be buried in a potter’s field. Be that as it might, Omran, with all that attached to him, would have been the widow’s last choice.

  Aisha’s mother swallowed hard and went on in an undertone, “From the time you were five years old I felt what a menace he was to you. You may even have been younger than that the day I left you sleeping and went out early to the village market. I reckoned I’d be home before you even knew I’d gone out, but when I got back I found you awake, your little body completely naked, like a dove chick newly hatched. Omran was standing there in front of you, pouring water all over your shivering little body—he’d put you into a tin tub and was pretending to give you a bath, but really it was nothing more than an excuse to have the body of a growing girl exposed in front of him. He was laughing with the delight of his power over you, your innocent nakedness, making a sound like some stud bull when it’s aroused, pouring the water with his hands, rubbing his hands in your hair, and you sitting there in front of him, cringing in fear. I snatched you up away from him and swaddled you in all the wrappings I could find—you were still so little and slight, so vulnerable to a predator like him. I remembered all the frightening stories that had been repeated about his stalking young girls, and about the Gypsy girl who was found raped and killed in a ditch. He laughed at my terror and said, “How are you going to hide her from me?”

  “From that day on, when you slept beside me in my room, I felt for you a dozen times a night to make sure you were still there next to me. I found no pleasure even in food, especially when I noticed your body maturing, your hair growing, your face filling out, and your breasts beginning to swell. I was so overcome by fear I could no longer sleep. Meanwhile, he circled us unceasingly, like a voracious hawk. He paid no attention to me or my threats, he was indifferent to my fear and alarm. He knew I was too weak to stand up to him. In the end the only solution was to run away with you to this place, and to make up this outlandish tale.”

  Aisha kept silent while her mother, breathing hard, poured out her story. She knew what her mother was talking about. She remembered things her uncle had done, things her mother didn’t know about, hadn’t seen, his rough touch when he would press up against her body in the enclosure that housed the livestock, when his fingers groped her small chest. There was not much she could do about it—she had tried simply to shrink away from him, to escape with as little damage as possible. She knew her mother was right, but in her helplessness she said, “Must I really renounce my religion, change my name?”

  “You’re still the same person, by your own name or any other. As for your faith, it’s in your heart, my child. No matter where you are you’ll go on worshiping the same God.”

  “What will you tell them back home?”

  “Some fib. They won’t want to believe it at first, but if I stick to it they’ll have to.”

  “How will I see you?”

  “You’re part of my heart, Aisha. I’ll see you even if you can’t see me. The important thing is for you to seize this opportunity and live your life as you deserve to, without shame or dishonor.”

  Aisha began to cry, feeling how young she was, how lost and hungry. But her mother embraced her, saying, “Don’t cry. Smile for my sake. I want to remember you smiling for me, not angry with me or bitter toward me.”

  Aisha dried her tears and tried to smile. She was overcome with despair, a lump forming in her throat. Her mother stood up and said, “You’re safe now.”

  She kissed Aisha on both cheeks and on her forehead, and Aisha kissed her hands. They heard the sound of the door opening, and Sister Margaret entered. She didn’t come toward them but, lightly as a butterfly released from the net, proceeded to the statue of the Virgin and child, and stood before it, her head bowed. Then she went to a small table and lit the two candles that were set upon it. As light filled the room, Aisha and her mother realized that dusk had fallen over them without their having been aware of it. Then the nun got down on her knees and began to pray. Aisha’s mother stood up. She didn’t look back—she couldn’t bear to see Aisha, the forced smile fallen from her lips. She let the door of the small chapel close resoundingly, as if in confirmation of her departure. And it was all over. Aisha felt intensely alone, felt the need of someone, anyone, beside her—even a wolf. She gazed at Sister Margaret’s back as the n
un continued her silent prayers.

  “Aoufallah . . . yaa Aoufallah!”

  There was a skinny-legged old man dashing up and down the riverbank, shouting these words. Aisha was watching him from the window as she looked out at the river. She couldn’t tell whether he was shouting from joy or from fear, but the river was raging, its brassy surface crosshatched with waves, its waters rising to the point of overflowing the banks that contained it. The man would stop every so often, scoop up a handful of the red-tinted water and fling it into the air, then again take up his running and shouting, “Yaa Aoufallah!”

  The wind was blowing hot from the western side of the river, out of the foothills of the mountain. Aisha, as was her habit, had woken before all the other girls. She saw the river rising and reddening as daylight came on. The fishing boats were not out, for the fishermen knew that the river in its turbulence would sweep before it red silt, tilapia, and fishing boats alike. The man disappeared in the direction of the city, still shouting. Aisha watched the river birds wheeling in alarm. This was their regular morning itinerary, but at the moment their flight was agitated—something had upset them and was preventing them from flying in their usual arrowhead formation.

  The Nile was among the most extraordinary rivers in the world. In the summer, when rivers run dry, the Nile would defy the laws of nature and flood its banks. Beset by winds blowing from north to south, its current runs contrary, flowing north, descending from the highlands of distant Africa, bellowing like a king. Heedless of the dense forests, the vast and scorching desert, it traverses immense boulders, massive and solid, and confronts the resistance of six cataracts. It fills the still forests with its clamorous roar, bubbles with foam, and sends out its spray to create rainbows that never dissolve. It passes among acacia, ebony, willow, and sycamore. It wanders like a sad poet amid the wastes of the desert, undeterred by hills or sand dunes or mountains of granite. It tumbles violently over Camel’s Neck Cataract, its waters bubble and froth at Marjan Cataract, and then it slows down to catch its breath before plunging into the cataracts of Beit al-Abd, al-Ma‘four, and Harek. Along its arid track it encounters but little of the dark waters of Atbara River. The sky does not lavish it with rain, nor do the snows melt to refresh it. It is surrounded only by great masses of black stone, which share with it the secrets of eternity; and the river, in turn, takes care not to erase the relics they bear: the inscriptions, the scarab images, the cartouches.