A
Tree on the
Rift
Stories by Bruce Colbert
“Bruce Colbert’s A Tree on the Rift, a collection of thirteen short stories, is like a series of snapshots of place and time. Each story has a different location, a different city, and different characters. Several times the protagonist is a Vietnam vet, usually, but not always living at a later time. The protagonists, although with an underlying resemblance, are not duplicative, each is his own character. Some of the stories take place in Vietnam. Cairo, Bangkok, Chicago, Sao Paolo, Budapest, Nairobi; the locations span the world. Colbert’s evocation of place is reminiscent of Lawrence Durrell. The collection’s beginning story, City of the Dead, which takes place in Cairo, stirs memories of The Alexandria Quartet. The story is romantic, suspenseful, and frightening. Romance is the most common theme among the stories. Usually it is the protagonist’s own affair that is at the focus of the story, but sometime that of one of his friends. The emotions range from the soaring hopefulness of an exploratory liaison to the sorrow and despair of a failed marriage, to the tension of an illicit assignation. All the emotions are genuine. One gets the feeling that the author has lived each of the scenarios, perhaps not exactly in the same way or in the same place as portrayed in the story, but with the same involvement of his heart. Indeed, many of the stories were evocative enough to stir my own memories as a reader.
Not only did the relationships portrayed in the stories ring true enough to prod the reader’s imagination, if not his recollections, but so did the locations. Cairo, Budapest, Chicago, Eugene; he writes with the assuredness of someone who has been there, both to the city and within the relationship. Each of the stories is captivating and, as a reader, each time I finished one story, I was eager to start the next. The stories are reminiscent of Durrell… and a touch of Hemingway. There is even a bullfight scene. A definitely masculine orientation lurks in the background. I have rarely been as captivated by a series of stories by the same author. There were several of the stories, Cairo and Budapest come to mind, which could easily have been expanded into novellas or fullfledged novels. I hope to see more of this author in the future, perhaps in a longer work. • Evokes the stories of Durrell and Hemingway. • Transports the reader from one corner of the world to another. • Absolutely captivating! • Every location and every relationship rings with the truth of experience.” —Casey Dorman, author of “I, Carlos,” and editor of Lost Coast Review
“Midlife crisis never travelled so far or got laid so much. Reading it, I felt naughty, like I was reading this guy’s personal travel diary. A man of certain age and experience, worldly, artistic, diffident and definitely bruised, drifting in the world, looking for a place or a person or menage a trois to reignite and heal himself. I felt like a voyeur in the bedroom of this guy’s midlife crisis. But I must confess, I couldn’t put it down. Fun summer read for people with travel lust or a lust for life.” —Elizabeth Wong, author of critically acclaimed plays China Doll and Letters to A Student Revolutionary
“In his new short fiction collection, Bruce Colbert’s aging and nameless bon vivant recollects through tales that resonate both in time and place of a military past and a former life filled with regrets. Each tale usually begins with a mysterious woman, followed by a meeting with a long lost friend in a city or country that illicts his somewhat jaundiced view of different cultures that often collide with his American male sensibility. This lonely traveler is seeking a life and love that in retrospect has eluded him. He seems to identify and emulate those doomed heroes one finds in reading of the lost generation, ex-pats and foreign intrigue. Ulitimately, this armchair world traveler is more akin to Walter Mitty than James Bond.” —Gregg Barrios, National Book Critics Circle and the author of the award-winning play Rancho Pancho
“Ambitious, worldly, and memorable.” —Tracy Crow, author of Eyes Right: Confessions from a Woman Marine
“Bruce Colbert’s voice for me is distinctly American—and heroic. I enjoyed these stories.” —Dan Fante, author of the novels 86’d, Chump Change, and Mooch, and the short story collection, Short Dog
“Bruce Colbert doesn’t do caricatures—every character he writes is real and believable. He’ll make you long for his women and fear his (antagonists/villains/etc.) through his honest and unfaltering narrative voice.” —Daniel Bazinga, editor of ARGOSY Magazine
“Well done, a highly readable writer…consistent voice throughout. I expect this will be a successful book.” —Bill Amatneek, author of Acoustic Stories
“…really impressed with the book—its control and character development, to say nothing of its wide ranging geography.” —Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy, Mary McCarthy Fiction Prize
A
Tree on the
Rift
Stories by Bruce Colbert
Š2014 Bruce Colbert All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of written reviews. ISBN 978-1-929878-56-7 First edition
PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733 www.lummoxpress.com /lc/
Printed in the United States of America
Parts of this book first appeared the following publications: Soft Ice Cream in Lost Coast Review; A Tree on the Rift in Bicycle Review; Star of the Sea in The Gambler; Angel of the Morning in Bangalore Review; Sullivano in Hamilton Stone Review; Dark as Dutch Chocolate under the title New York in the Irish literary magazine The Linnet’s Wings, and Sacre Coeur in Argosy.
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For Pidge, Mal and Whit
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iv
Table of Contents
Foreword …vi Author’s Note …viii
City of the Dead …1 Sacre Coeur …23 Soft Ice Cream …47 The McKenzie …57 Lost Colony …69 A Tree on the Rift …85 Star of the Sea …99 A Bullet from God …113 Dark as Dutch Chocolate …127 Josephine’s Bath …143 Sullivano …155 Frozen Borders …165 Angel of the Morning …185
Acknowledgments …197
v
Foreword
Since the beginning of time, man has forever been engaged in the primordial struggle between good and evil. Sometimes as mere mortals we’re victorious over these driving forces, and at other times we succumb. Regardless of the outcome, these passions rage in an inextricable struggle in all of us. Too often it’s impossible to quarantine, excise, dissect or suppress our basest desires from our lofty aspirations. There is no escape but there is survival. While writers can become blatant exhibitionists, the thirteen stories in this new collection allow us unashamedly to peer through our neighbors’ windows, forage through their secret desk drawer compartments, see what’s hidden behind the winter coats in the closet, and learn what really goes on in their lives. See the bittersweet, the painful. After all, don’t we really want to see what others do when no one is watching? A Tree on the Rift not only offers us a hint of hope and redemption, but also gives us knowledge of what it means to be truly human dealing with life’s violent and unforgiving nature. Lou Boxer, MD Wallingford, PA
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
vii
Author’s Note
Those highly charged years during and right after the Vietnam War changed a generation of American men, some where it wouldn’t show for years, or maybe at all. But it was clearly there if you bothered to scratch the surface. Usually you didn’t need to do much to find the aching discontent. The stories of these men, men like all of us, thread their way through black Africa, Egypt, Asia, and South America, the Caribbean, Paris, Budapest, Chicago, New York, the Pacific Northwest, and the California Coast. Those were some of the places they tried to lose themselves. Bruce Colbert New York City, 2014
viii
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Julius Caesar
~William Shakespeare
ix
City of the Dead
O
n the last afternoon of the month of Ramadan, I stood a little exhausted outside of my apartment in a decade old wrinkled tropical seersucker suit. I hailed a taxi for the Ritz Carlton hotel downtown. My shirt was already damp from the searing Cairo heat. I had fled a corrupt Washington and worse American politics recently enough for its sour taste to still linger in my mouth. Now I taught these same lofty political theories unconvincingly to a young Arab ruling class who had little use for them. The tables on the Ritz terrace were circular and inviting. Sitting at my table were three teenagers and their grandfather who told me over our initial conversation that he owned the three Sheraton Hotels in Egypt. There was also a petite blond woman in her early forties who sat on my immediate right, and said nothing. Two chairs were empty. They were waiting on the parents of the teens who I was told would be late as I sipped the cold mint tea put in front of us by the silent waiters which would remain untouched by my companions until the sun dipped below the horizon as was their custom. Putting the glass to my lips again, I noticed I had caught the attention of the blond woman. She looked directly at me and smiled wanly, but ventured no opinion of possible disapproval. The grandfather asked if I’d been to the Red Sea. I said I hadn’t, and he handed me his engraved business card, saying, “Please, be my guest there, it would be an honor,” calling me professor. I had told him minutes before that I taught at the American University. “Just ring up my secretary, she is very good and will arrange it. Sharm is our jewel.” 1
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A Tree on the Rift
And with that, he turned to his unruly grandchildren chiding them to keep their shrill voices down and then turned back to me. “Surely you know the Red Sea, no other sea is as warm and so full of life.” “I’m a sailor,” I said, “I love the water, boats, but I’ll have to watch that no one parts the sea on me.” I spoke without thinking. I was speaking to an Egyptian, for whom the drowning of the biblical Pharaoh’s army might not be so amusing. I looked away and hurriedly changed the conversation, this time to the language of jibs and spinnakers. The woman was bemused by what I’d said, glancing at us. His eyes never showed the thoughtless remark. He told me the late President Sadat had enjoyed sailing, and often invited his senior officers, him included, out on a boat that was kept for him, a small pleasure boat, really, by the Navy. “Sadat, what was he like?” I asked. “A prophet, truly.” He looked out at the sunset as he said it, and paused. “We would be nothing, tour guides, without him.” “Tour guides,” I repeated under my breath, smiling in disbelief. “You will like Sharm,” he promised me, graciously changing his pensive tone. He then matter-of-factly passed a plate overflowing with succulent dates across the table to his oldest grandson, a boy of perhaps sixteen who took it willingly slapping away the eager hands of his boisterous younger brothers. He laid it untouched in front of them. Sharm was a resort town where you saw Arab women in bikinis, mostly college-age girls. A few were students from the university; tolerated by a handful of sybaritic Arab fathers who probably had mistresses themselves the same age in Paris or maybe Rome. “This is the cradle of civilization,” he went on to say, “the world started here.” As for the more wealthy Saudis, “they’re fifty years out of the tent,” he muttered, cautiously peering over his shoulder as if to make certain no one overheard. He then dismissed them all, these depraved Sheiks, with a wave of his hand in the air. He leaned over to me, and said in a whisper, “Let me tell you something about the Saudis. You must understand that belly dancing here is an art, not prostitution.” “Men like myself and my son go to these clubs where one can see this folk dancing. And the custom is to place, fifty or one hundred pounds in
City of the Dead
the dancer’s belt, gently done, with respect, a tip,” he added. “The Saudis,” he spit out, “are loud, vulgar, they call these dancers whores, throw thousands of pounds on the floor in front of them, each of the sheiks throwing more money down than the other, and behave like swine, shouting for sexual favors. Beasts.” They have such enormous wealth, it allows them to behave as they please, unfortunately, I offered. “They have the oil, yes, and yet they belong with the goats, covered with their own…” and held up his hand stopping himself. “We must begin.” It started with five enormous and overflowing buffet tables stacked with gleaming silver chafing dishes urged out into the subdued orange light of the terrace evening. The meal was a carefully orchestrated cornucopia of thousands of dollars of domestic and imported delicacies with France well represented. I saw a dozen plates of pate and snails. Quietly this irreproachable grandfather rose and left the table to circulate amongst his close friends there, many already calling out to him. His grandchildren continued talking hurriedly with each other, the two younger boys loosening their neckties when he left. They ran from the table also seeking their friends who were streaming in from the hotel. The older brother followed obediently. I gazed over at the vast and desolate cemetery but could see no human in the stygian avenues of carved stone crypts. I thought of how the old Pharaoh himself must have looked down on the enslaved, or impoverished, in much the same way, and felt as disinterested as this chattering crowd of newly minted Egyptian masters around me. It had taken them less than two generations to accumulate these large fortunes in business, and the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James. Unceremoniously the woman next to me spoke, her words drawing me back into the clamor of Arabic voices surrounding us. There was now only the two of us at the table. The children had all left, their parents absent, doubtless caught in a traffic snarl, a commonplace nightmare in millennium Cairo, or perhaps simply faced with a last minute change of plans. “Haves, and the have-nots,” she said to no one in particular in perfectly accented American English, “and as old as the pyramids.” I agreed. She had piercing eyes, almost black, her lids painted with that deep purple hue Egyptian women favored. It made her look a little like what I had remembered Elizabeth Taylor did playing Cleopatra when I was a kid. I recalled the glamorous actress eating peeled grapes from the
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A Tree on the Rift
fawning hand of Richard Burton, her Marc Antony, on the big screen. The woman was fleshy. That’s the right term. A look many Arab men were fond of in their women; full-figured with large breasts and a round bottom. Not fat, no, but fleshy all the same. She wore bright red lipstick. Her clothes came from expensive stores in New York, or maybe Paris. She wore a large diamond, and a narrow wedding ring on her left hand. Next to it rested a gold bracelet with tiny rubies dangling from her thin wrist. “American, and teach something political, that’s what I thought you told Ahmed,” she said. “You know him?” “Of course, I know him,“ she said. “He’s an old friend of my family, same tribe. We marry each other, aunts, uncles, cousins, business partners. I went to boarding school with his daughter.” “Inbred,” and then she laughed, gently laying her head down on the white tablecloth. I looked at her blond hair fanned out before me on the clean table, waited, and tried vainly to move the conversation forward. I wasn’t quite sure if she were laughing or crying. Then she raised her blond mane and looked at me again straight in the eyes. Her half-closed eyes seem to be dry. She crossed her arms and leaned forward as if she wanted to whisper something. “How long have you been here?” “In Cairo?” I asked to be certain. “Yes, of course, Cairo.” I told her I’d been here less than a month, straight from Washington and had lived all over that city and in Georgetown for nearly fifteen years, working first in a series of Congressional staff jobs, then ten months in the White House in the second Clinton term, and finally as an itinerant political campaign strategist, a hired gun. In the last year, after a long and painful divorce, I had started spending more time back home in Chicago visiting an older sister I liked, and that helped somehow. My daughter Renee was in her last year of college in Charlottesville, far too busy with her own life to worry about me. It’s true the three of us, my ex-wife included, had been in therapy for several years to no avail; lots of shouting, unchanged behavior, and silent, unstated resentments. “I want to tell you a story,” she said, “ do you like stories?” “Sure, I’m a writer.” “About me, that kind of story.”
City of the Dead
“Oh.” “You may not like it.” “Tell me, but first, I want to know where you lived in the states?” I had her attention, and I was attracted to this woman. “Well?” “Two years in New York, a year at Barnard, the other working in fashion on Seventh Avenue, traveling for awhile with regional trunk shows mostly in southern California,” she said. “A lot of time in LA, a horrid, vacuous place.” I pressed her, “How did you get out of Egypt? you were unmarried then, right?” “Unmarried, yes. But it was easy,” she went on to say, “my father was a diplomat, he was based in New York at the Egyptian Consulate, and later very briefly at the UN, so he had no choice really in the matter.” “One of the privileged, I see,” I said. “He couldn’t very well leave me by myself in Cairo, or with his or my mother’s family, that would have reflected badly on him as a man of a certain class, impossible.” “Got it.” “What do you know about Arab men?” she inquired further. “The usual, from the faculty and just living here, that much.” “Then nothing,” she said moving nearer to me as she spoke, the fingers of her left hand touching my arm on the table as if she were tenderly plunking piano keys in a half circle. “Nothing,” I relented, looking at my half empty tea glass. She sighed, and said, “I’m talking to you because I want to, no other reason, you understand.” I acknowledged that I had, and glanced away from her summary inspection for a moment to see if anyone else was watching us, no one was. Laughing, she declared, “We should probably talk more over a scotch.” “Where? not here? maybe in the bar“ I suggested, knowing of course that the Ritz, or the Hilton, or most any of the international hotels were free to serve drinks. “No, that will be another time,” she went on as the darkness started to mask the crowded terrace and torches were lit around us and the other tables for illumination. She began to unfold her life for me, almost haltingly at first, but you could see how pleased she was with the telling. I was her audience. The glint from her black eyes seemed to dance, reflected by the firelight.
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A Tree on the Rift
“My husband is in London for a week, maybe two. It’s up to him how long he stays there. It’s not for me to question him at any rate. His father owns Osiris Construction. Together they build hotels all over the Middle East and in Athens, and also Beirut when bombs aren’t flying around. They did two of your friend Ahmed’s Sheratons, the newest one in Sharm, and the other on the corniche in Alexandria. The one in Alex was the only one ever done with any real taste. Maybe they had read Durrell’s Quartet, and were inspired. I somehow doubt it. They don’t read anything but bank statements and contracts.” I laughed at her honest description. “What do you think my husband is doing this very minute in London?” “I don’t know; sleeping, getting ready for a meeting tomorrow, I don’t know.” “I’ll tell you: he’s screwing his girlfriend, he likes that, and does it whenever he’s in Europe, and I imagine she’s good at it. It’s all part of their deal.” I didn’t know how to respond, and simply offered, ‘I’m sorry, that must hurt you.” “Did you notice that woman two tables away dressed in the pastel scarves, the Paris ensemble, over there?” she indicated moving her head in a slight dip in the direction. “There.” I rubbernecked and saw a man bending over talking to the woman, a sort of meditative encounter. “See her wedding ring, she’s married,” I almost rose from my seat to see but then sat down an instant later. “Yes, so what? I don’t see the connection.” “To Arab men of my class, that’s like flies to the honey.” “What do you mean?” “Most give no thought to a woman’s pleasure or emotions beyond the birth of their children, the heirs, and so they know all too well that these married women you see on this terrace at the Ritz are all fair game for them; they’re women desperate for love, for anything. Believe me. They know this so well because like my husband, God has ordained it in their rights as a man.” “But the religion…” I attempted. “The Prophet, if you take the time to read him, gives us half a soul. That’s all a woman’s worth, half a man.” I thought then, that as a man in the immediate path of all this rage, I might serve merely as a substitute for her absent husband, and possibly
City of the Dead
her father too. But I was wrong. “I’m attracted to you, and that’s enough,” she went on. “We don’t have to say anything more, not now.” “I see.” “I’m Fatima, a ridiculous ‘Aladdin’ kind of a name I know, but we have no control over those things, do we?” Unsure again of what exactly to say, I ventured. “What do you want me to do?” It was becoming dangerous. “I want us to have a love affair, they’ll be risks, but that will only sweeten it.” She had unmercifully challenged me. “Are you afraid?” I scanned the shadows on the terrace seeing if perhaps Ahmed or the grandchildren were coming back to the table, but they weren’t. I felt safer, and said, “No.” “Then I’ve chosen the right man.” I laughed uncomfortably, and said, “Maybe.” “What do you know about love?” She asked me, her voice softening and seeming to hold those words aloft in the warm night air. She ran her hand slowly through her hair, her fingers splayed. She started to twist some of the hair strands around one of her fingers. I could only laugh: “As much as the next man, maybe less,” came out of my mouth, remembering my own splenetic divorce. I had suffered a handful of disastrous couplings that had swiftly followed; all in a Washington blessed with more women then men. “I believe that love finds you,” she advised. “You can’t hide. You know the work of Paulo Coehlo?” “No.” “It’s of no importance.” “Go on, tell me.” “You see, you can be in love on a train with the person sitting next to you. Maybe it’s a man or woman that you’ll never speak to or ever know, someone in line in front of you at the Opera. A woman three tables away at a restaurant, any restaurant, anywhere. It’s as lasting and genuine as if it had been a lifetime. We’re not strangers, we’re lovers. You understand now?” “Yes.” She got up from the table, telling me she was so happy, and then motioned to her napkin. “After I leave, look under the napkin next to your hand. You’ll find a key to my apartment in Heliopolis, my card too. And I’ve written my cell number on it.” I looked at the napkin, rolled in a sort of ball.
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A Tree on the Rift
“Come next Wednesday after eight o’clock but call first. It’s Jack, right?” “Jack, yes.” I said, and told her I would come, rising from my chair as my Irish mother had taught me to do with ladies, uncertain of what I would do next. “You’re sure you want to do this?” I asked her again wanting to get all this straight in my own mind. “You’re not afraid, are you?” “Yeah, a little.” “Good. I’ve chosen well,” she said, throwing her head back with tangled hair flying, and heading toward the door. She stopped first and said hello to a table of garrulous friends, and then she disappeared. I slid the lipstick soiled cloth napkin over making sure no one saw me, and in a quick movement emptied the contents in my waiting lap. It was as she promised: there was a key and a calling card that read, “Fatima Bocktor,” along with her apartment and street and a scribbled telephone number. A smile crossed my face moist from the too warm night. As I sat in my closet of an office at the University thinking about seeing this woman again, Roger walked in, plopped down, folded his chunky arms on a growing belly, and put his feet on my desk. Roger had hired me when he heard from Washington friends that I was turning into a drunk, and handling more and political losers in campaigns each year. The last had been a fast-talking, shady former cable television evangelist. He had saved my hide, simply put. Outraged, he told me his story: It seemed the Shell boys he recruited had been stolen by another baseball team. One of the kids had been coached by major league All Star fast-baller Nolan Ryan who could throw a hundred-mile-an-hour pitch past your nose all day long. The kids had finesse, and now they were gone. It was piracy. He had been organizing a new baseball team, and was desperate for good pitchers. One kid threw a dynamite slider. Roger loved baseball, certainly more than the law or teaching political science, and even perhaps more than his two ex-wives Enid and Gwen, both rather righteous women. But I couldn’t help but think about Fatima while he was replaying the ins and outs of a deal gone south. When he finally finished the tirade, I asked him if he knew her. He said he knew her doctor brother much better and had been in their home several times, and they had talked on several occasions, once at dinner. She was very sophisticated. Her family was prominent. The maternal grandfather had been Sadat’s Minister of Agriculture, and they
City of the Dead
still controlled vast farming interests. But somehow her New York pedigree held more cache for him. “She’s a real New Yorker.” “New Yorker?” “Park Avenue. You know, as in Gucci loafers.” He explained: “There’s this sophistication she has, but the thing that strikes you most about her is that perfect face, a kind of flawless beauty that’s been unchanged here for over four thousand years.” He stopped speaking, and looked down at a food stain on his tie, absently rubbing it away with a dampened finger. “Look on the walls inside the pyramids, she’s up there, right on the frescos. I saw her in the Valley of the Kings, no kidding.” He snapped out of this uncharacteristic bout of sentimentality, glanced at his watch and five minutes late for a lecture, charged down the long hall, trailing obscenities. I called her in the middle of the afternoon and when she heard me she immediately said “darling,” and I could feel her liquid voice flow over the telephone. Blood rushed through my body. My hands tingled with sweat between my shaking fingers as we talked and agreed on the time for me to come to her apartment. I was anxious, near crazy with anticipation. I counted off the hours watching the clock in the hallway tick off the minutes. When I arrived I found a timeworn building facade with enormous colonial apartments. She told me to come to the top floor and knock twice on the larger door, the small one on the left a servant’s entrance. I’d been warned to stay away from intrigues with Arab women on the faculty, or anywhere else for that matter. Yet there were a great many beautiful women in Egypt. But I wasn’t a skirt chaser. I’m rather the opposite of the womanizer image that I’d created over too many all night drinking bouts, or too many outrageous Embassy parties where I had always been known to make some kind of clever, gratuitous toast to the ambassador’s wife or her ladies-in-waiting. One Canadian from Montreal on the faculty, to the obvious chagrin of his countryman, had gone native too. He had been seen mornings leaving the apartment of a woman who taught contemporary Arab literature, the novels of Mahfouz who likewise lived in Cairo and whom she knew well. Twice a year Mahfouz gave guest lectures, and usually a dinner followed at the university Chancellor’s home since he was now a Nobel lau-
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reate. Mahfouz was a humble, literate and an accessible man. I liked him as did many others who met him. In defense of the renaissance man from the frozen northland, the woman’s family did know about this affair and supposedly approved, it was said. He had met them all formally. Conceivably then, he would settle permanently in Egypt, convert to Islam from his present papist leanings, and do the right thing thereby forsaking hockey and Celine Dion forever. But, I didn’t recall hearing about any pending engagement, and you heard a lot of rumors around the faculty lunches. Mercifully the taxi I hired to Heliopolis was driven by a man with little English but he could understand the language well enough to find her building, some nine or ten stories. Her apartment was on the top floor. A doorman directed me to one of those ancient, gilded cage continental elevators. A young man in a blue blazer with gold buttons took me to the top floor. The elevator door opened, and I walked out and knocked on the large wooden door with fine brass filigree around its edge in some mythical Islamic motif. Fatima opened it motioning me in. She was dressed in what I imagine you’d call harem pants of a light almost palm leaf shade of green. Her feet were encased in gold sandals and her toenails painted to match the deep red of the long fingernails. With the door closed she kissed me ever so lightly on the mouth. She gave me a toothy smile and led me into an open solarium with the lights of the oncoming Cairo night starting to flicker through the open double French doors to my right. I trailed a step behind her in a scent of cinnamon and jasmine; it blended so exotically into my nostrils that it made me a little light-headed and queasy on my feet. She steered me to a divan covered in damask. In another instant, she walked over and opened a large dark cabinet of what I saw over my shoulder contained a well-stocked bar filled with at least a half-dozen bottles of Johnnie Walker, the same whiskey preferred by most Arab diplomats I knew in Washington who drank. “Make yourself comfortable,” she urged me, and then moved swiftly about the flat, and then through a swinging door leading somewhere. “I love this time of day, the light,” I said to her back. A bit edgy, I took my cellular phone from my sport jacket pocket, and looked at the same messages I had read ten minutes earlier. I reread her last three texts to me. “Yes, I do too,“ I heard her say loudly from behind the door after a
City of the Dead
pause. “It’s golden, dusk. The morning is too bright, too white.” “Yes, harsh.” I couldn’t sit still waiting, my stomach was acidy and the blood rushed through my veins with no real place to go. I felt so visibly exposed. I wasn’t practiced at this artifice. To get some fresh air, I walked out on the terrace that stretched before me like a road, and I found myself wondering where this affair would lead me. The terrace ran the entire length of the large living room and had a reddish tile floor. It faced a large park in the style of a formal English garden, complete with fine green trimmed lawns almost half a city block long, and was called Ard El Golf. It was unlike anything else I’d seen in parched Cairo. The park was protected by a heavy black wrought iron fence and a locked gate, with only villa residents possessing keys, I assumed. Inside were windy flagstone paths, huge date palm trees, a rectangular mirrorsurfaced goldfish pond, and a dozen raised stone flower beds where two indefatigable gardeners in dark blue burnooses still scurried about in the dim light, watering and pruning flowers. Was this a mirage? An oasis in the middle of this decaying, overcrowded city? It was real indeed. Built by a wealthy mid-nineteenth century Egyptian Caliph, educated at Cambridge, the garden was created following his memorable visit to Lord Randolph Churchill’s Blenheim Palace. He had succeeded, but of course on a less ambitious scale. A few couples, men in suits and women in long wool skirts and light sweaters for the chill of the coming Egyptian night, with small children trailing, strolled down the deserted paths. I could hear the faint echo of their musical voices. The children ran ahead of their parents, skipping amongst the flowers. I leaned on the terrace wall, and then noticed something else, moving. There were cats. The park was overrun with them. It struck me as mystifying at first, seeing all these collarless creatures roaming in the pruned flowerbeds. Cairo is a city blessed, or cursed, with a large population of domestic cats. No Egyptians I knew owned a cat. When I asked them about cats, they’d just shrug their shoulders. Cats. They were everywhere though. You would see them on rafters in the best restaurants when you were having lunch or dinner. You’d see them at the expat Bach concerts on Zamalek Island, and in a handful of belly dancing bistros in the most obscure neighborhoods. They slinked
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through the British Polo tack room following a match, and appeared at a black tie reception at the French Embassy in honor of former French President Mitterand. They were found in the humblest tobacco shop on a back street. Cats were everywhere. And they looked inexplicably sleek and well fed, a mystery to me. “Scotch over ice?” she called out, and I said “yes,” suddenly forgetting the cats. She disappeared in what I assumed was the kitchen, returning with a bucket filled with ice and then filled two glasses, mine and her own. I saw her turn from the bar and smile at me, holding the full glasses. She handed me a drink with some authority by its biting alcohol taste in an expensive looking crystal glass. Waterford probably. We sat down contentedly, Fatima next to me on the couch. “I don’t smoke, but feel free to,” she said. I told her I had quit many years ago when I had returned from two trying years in the Army at the end of the Vietnam War. I was never a heavy smoker anyway, so it was easy for me to kick the habit. In the jungle, cigarettes kept you awake and kept the insects off you too, so you always had a butt in your mouth. I carried a pack of Camels. “Unfortunate war, like Nasser’s,“ she said, dismissing the entire subject as she got up to look out upon the darkening night. She stood quietly, then swung around to me. “You know, I can’t have children. That’s why as a forty-year old woman, you hear no one playing here, in this apartment.” I cleared my throat, awkward with the turn of conversation. “Ovarian cancer came the year after we married, and it took the toys out of the playpen.” “I’m sorry.” “That may sound crass, but that’s what they did with that surgery. Arabs of my class don’t adopt, my husband never speaks of it, nor of what he really does, and he does that thing, with other women.” “Must’ve have been very painful for you.” “I presume he has a family somewhere. He’s a man of some wealth, maybe in Athens, or London or even Egypt. Does that trouble me? No.” “It’s OK.” “Yes, I imagine it is,” she said sadly, “so long ago.” She came over and held my face in her hands and kissed my mouth, this time harder than the first time.
City of the Dead
“Take that ridiculous tie off“ she insisted, “and come with me, bring what’s left of your drink.” Then she laughed the most bewitching laugh I’ve ever heard. That’s how it started with the two of us. I knew that this was going to be a perilous journey. And because my life had somehow seemed so monotonous, so barren in the past few years, I grabbed at this last straw to feel halfway alive again. I didn’t much care what happened. In time, I came to worship this woman. It hurt me to think about it, but we never talked much about a future, there wasn’t one. She was married. This was an Islamic country. I would text her at all hours of the day and night: “Please, tomorrow.” I was young again; randy, driving a muddy pick-up truck, country radio station blaring. She would text back: “Come to your harem, seven o’clock.” It was the language of unspoiled affection that blossomed between us, the shared acknowledgment of a growing intimacy. I felt whole and unapologetic about it. We saw each other most weeks with the complicit knowledge of doormen and elevator operators. Her husband was traveling constantly from the Middle East to Europe and then back again. She would give me the nights she was available, and then some clever phrase, a line from Rumi perhaps. We never saw one another in public places like restaurants or hotels. Our meetings suited her. Sometimes she would call me at my university office, and leave these coquettish voice messages. I’d play them over and over. It was almost an addiction. I must have heard each of them fifty times, for Christ sake, I’d play them in the midst of reading the thin Cairo English-language daily newspaper. We called it, Roger and me, “The Daily Nada,” much like we had the right-leaning Washington Times at the White House. I sifted through tons of meaningless university memos, all requiring neither action, or response, nothing. Then I’d glance at dreary student essays with pretentious titles like, “Jeffersonian Democracy, and Why It Can’t Work in the Arab World.” When it all got to be too much, I’d press play again and listen to her say, “When I go to sleep the last word I say is your name.” No American woman had ever talked to me that way. She inhabited my thoughts. Of course I never met her family. Her humanitarian doctor brother
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had been in Palestine and Lebanon off and on for almost a year working at refugee camps. Her celebrated father was dead, and her mother lived alone in a cavernous apartment with an army of servants overlooking the sea in Alexandria. The mother entertained regularly, and for the most part seemed satisfied. She called Fatima each week, and dutifully, once every two months Fatima would take the train to Alexandria for a short visit. Fatima became my life; teaching, Roger and his baseball exploits and what little other life I had in Cairo slowly disappeared from my consciousness. Some weeks I would visit her apartment almost every night. During one of those never-ending nights her husband arrived home unexpectedly, canceling a weeklong trip to London because the hotel chain’s British bankers had reneged on the financing at the eleventh hour. For three hours that afternoon, I sat through a tedious faculty meeting followed by an even more tiresome dinner whose avowed purpose was to discuss expanding courses in international relations and foreign policy. The university chancellor had this messianic vision to transform the school into an Arab World foreign policy think tank, mimicking Stanford’s Hoover Institute. It was his divination, and later proved to be his folly with a change of government. I was ready to catch a taxi from downtown to her apartment when a text appeared on my cell: “He’s here, don’t come.” I felt a sudden jolt go through me, almost like a high voltage electrical charge. This anonymous man had never interfered before that evening. He was some lunar force who put clothes in her bedroom closets, certainly, but never wore them. Some nights I would hold his handmade English shoes, brilliantly shined and think, “what sort of man is he?” That happened once, and then everything took on its familiar routine again, a marriage of convenience. She was big hearted, and so I was caught within this spider’s web. I sat contentedly on her silk divan for so many nights intoxicated in the reverie, drinking and rollicking. The endless exchanges spent lying next to her groggy with sleep on perfumed satins in a bed that once belonged to an Ottoman ruler. “In the desert, we know the secrets of the night,” she’d say. Then she would whirl around the room, kicking off her gold sandals, spinning until she was dazed, and then collapsing muddled on me, her eyes sparkling. She was a modern Scheherazade to me. She knew the ancient poets by heart, often reciting verses as she danced.
City of the Dead
Still at play one night, she settled her index finger on the tip of my nose. She had something more to say. “My mother leaves the weekend next. You can come to Alexandria, and stay with me. No one will know.” And so I did. That Friday afternoon I boarded the modern fast train, the Egyptian answer to rapid transit, almost European in first class comfort and service. It offered hot coffee and pastries, comfortable stuffed leather seats, businessmen in shirts and ties, jabbering co-eds, laptops, briefcases, sparkling windows, and a few families, all off to the weekend in Alexandria. The route took us alongside the Nile. It went through the green fertile swath of farmland stretching on either side of the sweeping river for six kilometers on each bank. We passed hundreds of villages, and a few tethered camels and goats staring blankly at the luminous rail cars. Her mother’s apartment was easy to find toward the end of the windy seascape. It overlooked the cobblestoned seawall nearer the town center in an old iron trellised building. That afternoon we marched up and down this splendid oceanfront boulevard, tiring ourselves, and coming to a standstill at a sidewalk café honored for its savory Turkish coffees. You could smell the rich blends on the street a block away. Sea breezes gently wafted over to us, and the sun dappled around the awning in a sort of Seurat melange. The day and temperature were heavenly. It felt like we had been together forever, we were so attuned to each other, basking there, continuously laughing, interrupting each other’s sentences. Our languishing glances followed the rhythm of boats taut on their anchor lines, drifting back and forth with the moving tide. “Fatima!” a well-dressed man cried out from the street, and eagerly rushed over to our table. “Ah, it’s been so long, I see your mother but never you.” “Kaspar, sit for a minute, please,” she implored him. “For only a minute, my dear. You’re so radiant.” He was a somewhat wiry but dignified man in his early seventies, with a clear unblurred smile and a casual, inviting demeanor. He sat down briefly and looked at me with straightforward friendliness, and said: “You know, her mother was a great beauty. The loveliest woman in all of Egypt. Still is, yes, still. She is so like her mother.” “Stop flattering me, you have no shame.” “I speak the truth.” She called me a trusted American colleague, now teaching in Cairo from her New York days. He kissed her flushed cheek, said a few more
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things in Arabic to her, and turned to me as he left: “A pleasure. You will enjoy Egypt,” and walked away smartly, waving once more from the seaside sidewalk. She raised her hand to her mouth, squeezing her full lips together tightly. “Perhaps he will say nothing, he’s discreet.” “I don’t know.” She became sullen, but then her spirit lightened again, and she said, “Walk with me some more, closer to the boats,” and then we were off again. “Let’s buy a boat here,” I pleaded, “just a small sailboat, we could come up weekends. This doesn’t feel like we’re in Egypt.” “Too many eyes.” “Where?” “Look what happened at the café.” “We could try.” I pressed her. “It’s like Europe, look around you, these people on the street.” Then I said no more, and we walked nearer to the water’s edge, and unobserved for an instant, I took her slight hand in mine. That night I had the most scandalous dinner I’d ever imagined. We dined on the balcony of her mother’s seaside villa, overlooking the same ocean that Alexander the Great first saw in his conquest of the discovered world. She had secretly planned it, first dismissing all the servants for the night, and they had left. “What I have wanted to do my whole life,” she sang out, “is to dine in the moonlight naked with the man I love, it’s what we must do tonight.” “Take my clothes off, having dinner?” “Yes.” “Some alfresco.” “It bothers you?” “No.” She was unpredictable. When she was sixteen she had planned to steal away to Paris to live and study painting at Academie Julian, Matisse’s school on the Left Bank. She had a plane ticket, and arranged for a garret room. But her father had thwarted her plans. “We cannot be seen, don’t worry,” she giggled and then began setting the table. I cooperated by decanting a chilled white wine to go with the fish and vegetable dishes the servants had prepared. I lit the two ivory colored candles on the table, and we were held in the radiant halo of soft candlelight in the black Mediterranean night.
City of the Dead
She crept to the lacquered dining room table in her flowered silk robe and dropped it to the floor in front of me, naked. I forced her toward me, but she pulled away quickly, wanting me to follow suit. “Do it, now.” “It feels strange.” I’m a self-effacing man, coming from a doctrinal and staid household where no one ever appeared nude in my recollection. Two cousins are protestant clergy. And my parents wore pajamas every night of their lives. I still feel vaguely embarrassed taking off my clothes, particularly in front of a woman watching me. Her eyes never left me as I removed my trousers, shirt and underwear and laid them folded neatly on the couch. I put my shoes together on the floor beside them. “Now the socks.” I looked down at my feet thinking how ridiculous I looked. Here I was stark naked with these black dress socks still on. I slipped them off, and rushed embarrassingly to the table where she was already seated. “Done.” I sat there rigid, sphinxlike. Fatima reached over and touched my face, “relax.” Then she asked me to pour her a glass of wine and said something I thought profound in an Arabic that I didn’t understand. I started to slowly unwind. How baffling to watch the heaving movement of a woman’s breasts as she cuts her food, reaches for flat bread, and adds chutney to her flounder. After dinner we made maddening love, and refreshed, decided to walk alongside the sea once again. We finished with a late night last espresso at a nearby Italian café. And then, sitting in the clear moonlight with the café lights ablaze behind us, watched horse drawn carriages filled with chattering tourists clop to the snap of the whip. “Should I divorce him?” she asked me, but somehow I didn’t believe she meant it in the way she said it, so unemotionally, almost callous. She seemed so blasé. “Nothing would make me happier.” “Then it will happen,” was the last thing she said, as she waved for our waiter to come with the check. “The West Coast is great place to live, “ I told her, leaning closer, “We’ll go there. I’ve got tons of friends in San Francisco, you’ll love it there, so cosmopolitan.”
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My first assignment as an investigative reporter had been at Hearst’s Examiner, and those were exhilarating days in a free-for-all two newspaper city. I could still swing a few deals there. “My cousin teaches in Seattle, he’s an architect, he’s been there for twenty years, or more, won’t ever return, I’m sure,” she said. “His wife is American. Cairo is over for Ali, finished. Is Seattle nice?” “Yes.” “Tell me about it.” “It has snow covered mountains, Mount Rainer, right there, you can sit at a café and look up and see it, and the ocean too. It rains though, five months straight.” “Rain, I know nothing of rain,” she said, picking up my fingers and putting them up to her waiting crimson lips. The week before Christmas it actually did rain. For two or three days a year thunderstorms descend on Egypt. It poured for almost four solid hours one night when I jumped into her elevator soaked to the skin, my shoes creaking with water. For some reason the rains amused me. If we moved to San Francisco she’d enjoy a whole month of rain, sometimes two every year. But it would be perpetual fall weather. As I got off on her floor, I noticed she had left the front door ajar for me. Shaking off the damp, I stepped into the apartment. I called out to her, reckoning that she heard me and had gone into the kitchen for fresh ice for our cocktails. As I started toward the kitchen a man stepped in front of me. As soon as I saw him I knew who it was with his jet black hair and dark suit. It was him, her husband. I started to speak. But before I could, he reached across and slapped my face hard with his right hand. Then two men grabbed me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides. He walked over and slapped me again, this time cutting my lips. I could taste the salty fresh blood in my mouth. I called out: “Fatima! Fatima? What the hell is going on?” but there was no answer. The husband said something to the men in Arabic, and they started to drag me toward the French doors on the terrace. They smelled of old sweat and rotten food. I flung one of them off me for an instant, but he was back again forcing my arm behind me till I cried out from the pain. I kicked at him and knocked over a table and lamp. No one paid attention to the broken lamp on the floor, as they dragged me fighting them to the terrace.
City of the Dead
The rain had stopped, but there was a laden mist in the air. A grey fog was rising from the hot streets. Forced against the hard concrete wall, they tried to turn me around facing the city. Desperate to live, I saw Cairo moving fast beneath me, the buses and cars, and people scurrying along the wet crowded sidewalks. I wrenched an arm free and managed to punch one of them behind me, bloodying his nose and stunning him. He grabbed his face for an instant, but then a split second later was crawling over me with the other Bedouin, smashing me hard in the kidneys. The pain shot through me, and I thought I would lose consciousness. They were going to kill me. Her husband walked near me, perhaps no more than a foot away, and looked at me with pinched, accusing eyes. “They will throw you off this terrace, and you will die, nine floors down to the street. I’ve already paid them to do it, and you will certainly go to your death.” He went deliberately back over to the incandescent bar, and poured himself a drink, then stood watching me for another moment, thinking aloud: “It will be called a suicide, if the police bother at all,” the drink in his hand, smiling. “Fatima was a fool.” I tried to shout at him, but nothing came out of my mouth, my body and mind seemed paralyzed, locked up and useless. I struggled with every ounce left in me, and managed to only slow their progress in forcing me to the terrace wall, cutting into my back. I was feverish and panting. He told them something, and they grunted some half answer in reply. They pushed me on to the top of the sharp, narrow stone wall. It cut through my shirt into my skin. I saw the street below me. I would die now. And as I screamed, he said something to them again, this time louder and more forcefully. They stopped immediately and put me down as I slid off the wall to my knees, moving two steps away. The Arab with a bloody face stared at me with empty eyes. “This is a lesson to you. I’m not a murderer like these Bedouins,” he said without emotion, “I’m a civilized man, but if you want to live, you will leave Egypt, and you will never speak to my wife again.” The husband was immaculate, probably dressed in the best British suit you could buy, starched white shirt and blue paisley silk tie, his nails manicured, hair and small mustache perfectly trimmed. “Did you think that you could do this in front of me?” he asked, not
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waiting for any answer. I stared at him, my breath coming back to me in a forced cadence. “Even her mother’s senile old lawyer Kaspar felt I must know, know what?” He went back to the bar and found a silver case of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it. “It just happened, she’s not to blame.” “Don’t be ridiculous! Not even some filthy goatherd squatting in a wadi would stand for this behavior,” he trumpeted, but then calmed himself, running his hand through his shiny dark hair. “You know nothing of Arabs. At first I thought I might kill you with my own hands, cut your throat like a sheep. They would love that,” he said, motioning to the waiting Bedouins. “But it would be senseless, too barbaric.” I started to speak but held my tongue, wondering if he would become violent again, or decide to turn his paid assassins on me after all. We stood for long seconds staring at each other. “You may go. Leave now, go,” he ordered. I hesitated for a few seconds, trying to collect myself, wanting finally to say something more. I slowly walked toward him but stopped as he held his hand up, shaking his head, no. “I understand, it was wrong.” “There is nothing more to say,” he said pointing a finger at me. “She has shamed me, with the likes of you. Some broken down school teacher, you!” And then he started to laugh. “Then let her go,” I yelled back at him, the words escaping my mouth. “Let her go?” he answered with a sneer, “we are tied together for a lifetime.” “That’s not true,” I gasped, finally finding my voice. “She is a woman of this world, this is what she knows and wants, not some boring suburb you think you can put her in.” He then shook his head, with this telling the tribesmen who had started to move, to stay put. “You know nothing, let me explain, as I would to a schoolboy. Sit down.” “No, I’ll stay where I am.” “Suit yourself,” he said. “The Quran gives us two wives, well, should you want two,” he added with mirth as if telling me some clever story. “I know all about that.” “I happen to have two, one I’m married to, and the other is the moth-
City of the Dead
er of my son who lives in London; in St. John’s Wood, to be exact. Not English, from Beirut, more French than Levantine. You know what the Levant is?” “I’m not an idiot.” “I know who you are. I’ve had the police track you, friends in Washington too, where people say you now play the fool. A drunkard, too bad. Must have been your divorce.” “Say what you want.” “You’re under surveillance by our government as a suspected trafficker in narcotics, a serious charge. Could bring you a life sentence in an Egyptian prison, teaching’s merely a cover.” “Hah, that’s some lie,” I spit out. “Is it, really?” he said. “Yeah.” “Interpol has provided your FBI with reports from witnesses of these transactions, with arrangements for drops in Rotterdam, on ships bound for Boston and Norfolk. Nasty business, drugs.” “No one will believe that.” “On the contrary. Do you know how primitive prisons are here?” he said, slowly and deliberately sipping his scotch. “They’ll sodomize you the first day, and then the creatures inside will kill you within a month. No one will notice, or care.” “She wants to be free of you.” “Don’t be a bigger fool than you already are,” he warned, “Now go. She used you to get at me.” I moved closer to where I could lay my hands on him if I wanted to. “They’re armed and will kill you,” he repeated, with no real malice in his voice, pointing to the open door of his apartment. With that, he had completely dismissed me as if I weren’t in the room at all; nothing that I had to say held any further interest for him, either about Fatima, or anything else in the world. He nonchalantly walked back over to the wooden bar, where he grabbed a fresh bottle of scotch from the top cut glass shelf, broke the seal and opened it, refreshing his drink, adding a few more ice cubes, and then swirling it around noisily in his hand. “Fatima saw too much of the world, it made her bitter,” he added, “she wanted to shame me, that was her intention. No one does that, no man, ever, or a woman. You think she loved you? Then you are a fool. I could kill her, and no man here would lift a hand to stop me. That’s what these beasts next to you would do. They would cut off both her ears, or
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her nose for this sin, they’ll still do it, a word from me.” I was beginning to understand him, his twisted motivations. “And they would slice off your manhood as you screamed,” he said catching the Beduoins’ attention, and grabbing a handful of his own genitals. They chuckled. “Did you ever love her?” “Didn’t I?” he threw back at me. “Was it her not having children,” I reminded him. You could hear the slight tinkling of the ice against his glass which followed the exhaling of cigarette smoke. He remained silent as car horns blared in the night. He looked at his drink, and then back at me. He laughed and stopped leaning on the brightly lit bar: “I should offer you a drink. How ungenerous of me.” I shook my head, no. “She has humiliated me in the eyes of God,” and then he walked around the room and standing in the terrace doorway looking out at the dark night, “but she knows I will let this pass, be merciful as Allah would wish. We will continue as before except…” “Except what?” “There will be no you.” He motioned to the open doorway. There was nothing left for us to say, so I turned from him and started across the room. I walked out the door and into the hallway with its two English hunt country landscapes, and rang for the elevator, glancing once more over my shoulder into the room where he stood. The two Bedouins had started to argue, and he quickly shouted something at them. Then they were silent. The taller of them, the bloodied one, had pulled out a knife from under his dark burnoose, looked at the sharp blade, and touched it with his dirty fingers, smiling. He looked out at me, a momentary glance. The elevator came, its doors opened and I saw the look of fear on the operator’s face as I stepped inside. Then we started to descend.
A
“Take that ridiculous tie off,” she insisted, “and come with me; bring what’s left of your drink.” Then she laughed the most bewitching laugh I’ve ever heard. That’s how it started with the two of us. I knew that this was going to be a perilous journey. And because my life had somehow seemed so monotonous, so barren in the past few years, I grabbed at this last straw to feel halfway alive again. I didn’t much care what happened. In time, I came to worship this woman. It hurt me to think about it, but we never talked much about a future, there wasn’t one. She was married. This was an Islamic country.
Tree on the
Rift
—Excerpt from “City of the Dead” I have rarely been as captivated by a series of stories by the same author. Several of the stories…could easily have been expanded into novellas or full-fledged novels. I hope to see more of Colbert in the future, perhaps in a longer work.
• Evokes the stories of Durrell and Hemingway. • Transports the reader from one corner of the world to another. —Casey Dorman, author of “I, Carlos,” and editor of Lost Coast Review
This is a sample. To order the complete 220-page book, visit LUMMOX Press at www.lummoxpress.com/lc/