A Boat With a View by Nell Freudenberger
In Egypt, our seven-year-old fell in love with a clock. It was sitting next to his bed on a Nile houseboat: a round, Forties-era analogue clock capped with a brass ring, which, for some reason, he named “Augley”. It must have looked old-fashioned to him, like something from a picture book. I could understand his fascination. One of the admittedly frivolous reasons I’d cajoled my family into a trip to Egypt was a picture I’d seen on the houseboat company’s website: a table covered with an embroidered cloth, supporting an oil lamp and a copy of the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire.
I discovered Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy as a teenager and devoured it; when I stepped into the dining room on our houseboat, a lowceilinged room below the main deck crammed with ornate wooden furniture, I thought I’d walked into Palace of Desire. The book opens as the family’s patriarch, al-Sayyid Ahmad, is being led by his best friend onto a pleasure boat, where he will fall completely and disastrously
for a sexy, young musician named Zanuba. My husband, whose suitcase had gone missing somewhere between New York and Cairo, was wearing the same clothes he’d travelled in overnight, and was having a less romantic experience. While I marvelled at the boat’s furnishings — high-gloss white louvered windows propped open with brass pins, and inlaid mahogany couches on which I could almost see Zanuba reclining with her lute, batting her kohllined lids — he made repeated calls over terrible reception to understaffed EgyptAir offices in Luxor and Aswan. We finally gave up and visited a hot and dusty covered market in Esna, where he drew the line at the traditional loose Egyptian garment called a jellabiya. I bargained instead for the souvenir T-shirt with the least garish hieroglyphics — “pure Egyptian cotton!”, no doubt manufactured in Guangzhou — which he gamely wore for the next week.
I’ve always had the uncomfortable feeling that I might one day turn into Eleanor Lavish; in place of poor Charlotte, I’d be tugging my longsuffering husband and children along behind
me, trilling, “A smell!… Every city has its own smell.” The kids were happy enough to visit the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where they saw the unwrapped and mummified body of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, complete with reddish hair and blackened teeth, and the golden face-mask of Tutankhamun — one of those iconic objects that actually manages to transcend all of its popular representations. Resistance came when we decided to walk from the museum to the Café Riche, a century-old Art Deco establishment with globular ceiling lamps, red tablecloths and a black-and-white photo of Mahfouz on the wall. While an enthusiastic waiter introduced me to his elderly Arabic-speaking colleague — who had actually served the great writer, but with whom I admittedly couldn’t communicate — my 11-year-old daughter whispered to her father, “Do you know that there’s a water park in the Bahamas called Atlantis that, like, everyone has been to except for me?”
My grandfather had a passion for foreign travel, and my grandmother had a degree in classics, and so my father was also dragged to Cairo aged 11, in 1956. He says that he remembers being terrified of the nighttime city he glimpsed out the window of the TWA shuttle bus. The purpose for his parents was to give their son a tour of the progress of “Western civilisation”: from Cairo, they went on to Athens, Rome and London. Our own 11-year-old had just finished a unit on Egyptian history and culture, in which she read that contemporary Egyptian boys and girls generally play sports separately, with girls more often exercising inside or in secluded areas. She was so appalled by this inequity that I decided not to share any of the alarming statistics about women in Egypt: that they are 65 per cent literate, that only 26 per cent work outside the home, that 92 per cent of married women have undergone female genital mutilation. My husband and I weren’t ignorant of these facts
when we took our children to Egypt, nor did we have any illusions about the progress of Western civilisation, which seemed to be careening faster than ever toward unmitigated disaster. What were we doing in Egypt, after all?
I knew that I didn’t want our children to come away with a binary conception of “developed” versus “developing” countries. As when we took them to India and Morocco, though, there was no escaping the fact that children their age and younger were selling snacks and souvenirs in the street. Amitav Ghosh discusses this “ladder of development” in his non-fiction account, In an Antique Land, about the time he spent in an Egyptian village in 1988, pursuing a doctorate in social anthropology. In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Ghosh finds himself in a room full of middle-aged wedding guests, villagers who start peppering him with questions about India, his native country; they are skeptical, and then flatly refuse to believe that some Indians lived poorer and less modern lives than their own. “I had an inkling then of the real and desperate seriousness of their engagement with modernism,” Ghosh writes, “because I realised that the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their lives in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time... It was thus that I had my first suspicion of what it might mean to belong to an ‘historical civilisation’, and it left me bewildered because, for my own part, it was precisely the absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epochs that I always had trouble in imagining.”
Ghosh’s imaginative trouble might be common to novelists, who are almost always less interested in historical categories than in the ways people depart from them. I thought that if Egypt was an “historical civilisation”, my family belonged to one that could be called “ahistoric” — a young country that has reeled dangerously between disinterest and wilful blindness toward its own past. In taking my American kids to Egypt, I wanted them to see the world like Ghosh did: not as a competition between more or less successful civilisations, but as a collection of individuals, each with a particular story.
One evening, our houseboat docked by a rocky seawall a few miles north of Aswan. We disembarked and followed our guide, walking underneath squat, thick-trunked palms, next to a field of tall, green barley. We stopped at a concrete canal, the bottom just covered in brackish water, and watched a man in a turban and jellabiya ride a donkey loaded down with freshly harvested sugar cane in the other direction. We hadn’t understood where our guide was taking us until we came to a village, where small children were playing under the mango trees. With the mysterious disregard for language barriers common to the very young, our seven-year-old joined them, speaking English to their Arabic and taking his turn as they chased one another around a whitewashed brick wall. When the Dutch couple from our houseboat started kicking a football with some older boys, our daughter at first hung back, but her interest was clear from the Barçelona shirt she was wearing. Two of the boys had on Liverpool red in honour of Mo Salah, and soon they were all passing to each other in a circle, whooping and showing off their footwork. While they played, I chatted with a young mother in a hijab whose hands were painted with henna, and who spoke excellent English. After we said goodbye, she came running after us with a gift, bracelets made of neon string that she braided onto each child’s wrist.
Later, our daughter confirmed that the visit to the village was her favourite part of the trip. When she remarked that there weren’t any girls her age in the game, I asked whether the boys seemed happy to play with her. “Yeah, they didn’t care,” she said. “It wasn’t like what I read in school.” Our son was disappointed that Augley couldn’t come home with us, but is still wearing the string bracelet three months later; it gets clean every night in the shower, and remains as uncannily bright as the day he got it.
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