Shooting the Sphinx (13 page)

Ari raised his camera and snapped a picture. Farah looked at him with a complicated expression of skeptical pleasure.

“This is Ari, everyone. He's come to get an education.”

Everyone in the room laughed as she started to erase the blackboard.

 

Chapter 26

A thousand students hung out on the quad, milling about in clusters, some listening to people making speeches or arguing with each other. Ari and Farah lay on the grass relaxing. Ari raised his camera.

“Smile, Professor Farah. Can you say, ‘U.S. Imperialism?'” Ari snapped a picture of her.

“Let me see that thing.” She reached for it and he handed it over. “Eh, not my best angle. You can do better. Can you say ‘Hollywood movie?'”

She took a picture of him, then both of them looked at it.

“You have a crazy smile.” She scrolled back a shot. “You know what it says to the world?”

“Be happy?” he guessed.

“Yes, because I'm smiling you should be smiling, too. Forget everything else. Let's go have fun.”

“And what's wrong with that?”

“Someday, maybe, it would be great,” she said wistfully. “Where's my brother?”

“At the Ministry of Defense.”

“Amazing that he would even set foot inside of that place.”

“Why not?”

“You don't know?” Her face darkened.

“Know what?”

“When I was a little girl, he used to have a big smile.”

“Samir the Hammer?” Ari couldn't believe it.

“Not hypnotic like yours to cast a spell over people, but a very happy one, yes.”

“I don't believe you. He seems like he's angry all the time. Why is he so mad at you?”

“I shouldn't say this, but … it's no secret. Everyone knows. Now, he won't touch anything political.”

“He doesn't like … all of this?” Ari pointed at the students making speeches.

“Well, he fell in with the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man and got religious.”

“Were your parents?”

“Not at all. No one was. See all the girls wearing the head scarf?” Farah pointed at the crowd and about 90 percent wore the hijab. “When I started school here, no one wore it. Maybe five percent.”

“What happened?”

“You invaded Iraq, then everyone started.”

“What's that got to do with—?”

She cut him off. “Everything's political. The scarf on my head is political. The beard on my brother's face—”

“You have no scarf. He has no beard.”

“The spot on his forehead … was political. On my first day of school here, he dropped me off at that gate over there, and he told me he was coming to pick me up after a meeting at the mosque. ‘No, no, I'm an adult now,' I said. ‘I don't need you to take me home anymore.' He was the one who disappeared.”

“That day?”

“For over a year we didn't know where he was.”

“Why?” asked Ari.

Farah sighed heavily. “Eh, I'd better let him tell you.”

She scrolled through the pictures on the camera and found the one of her lecturing in the seminar room.

“How do I delete?” she asked him.

“Wait!” He reached for the camera. “That's my only shot of a classroom with students in it.”

“They are not students, Ari. They are the brains of the revolution.”

She hit
DELETE
.

 

Chapter 27

Ari sat in the café at the Necropolis drinking a mango juice. It was dusk, closing time. All across the vast expanse of pyramids and tombs a line of tourist police was shooing the daily exodus of tourists toward the road. Ari was in a misanthropic mood. He looked at the truck with the blue box on the back, with the kids inside. He had never felt so ineffectual.

A cheerful middle-aged Egyptian in an open blue shirt came up to him.

“Mr. Ari?”

“Yes, that's me.”

“Welcome to Egypt.”

“Thank you.”

“You are Ari. I am Ali. I have something very special for you, something special that you will remember for the rest of your life. Come.”

“What do you have for me?”

“My family run the light show, take the ticket for forty years.”

Ari looked at the man skeptically. Of course, he wants money, thought Ari. Yet the man's effusiveness picked up Ari's spirits a bit.

“Oh, no thank you.” Ari shook his head. “I have to meet someone.”

“I invite you for a private visit with the Sphinx after closing.”

“Alone?”

“By yourself.”

“Wow.”

Curious, Ari stood and threw some coins on the table. He walked with Ali in the direction of the Sphinx against the flow of departing tourists. Ari pointed out the police truck in the street.

“Tell me, Ali. What do they do with the kids inside that big box?”

“Not to worry, Mr. Ari. They beat them a little on the leg, drive them out of Giza, let them go. Some come back. Many do not.”

“Every day?”

“Every night.”

“I have a friend who was in that box.”

“Do not worry. He will be free.”

Ari spotted Samir gesticulating by the Sphinx gate. Samir was hot in argument with a tourist policeman trying to close the area. Ari knew then that his having met Ali was no accident. Samir must have sent him.

They reached the old wrought iron gate. Ali shooed the policeman away by producing a large old bronze key and unlocking the gate.

“You may want to give Ali a tip,” suggested Samir.

“How much?” asked Ari.

“Twenty dollars would make him very happy.”

Ari searched his pockets. “Uhm … I only have hundreds … could I borrow…?”

Samir slipped Ali a bill.

“Shukran,
” Ari thanked him.

“Fee Kedmehk.”
At your service, said Ali in Arabic as he closed the gate with a clank and left, locking Ari and Samir inside. The two drifted down into the dig that had been excavated around the Sphinx.

“In Egypt miracles happen for twenty dollars,” said Ari.

“Sometimes less, sometimes more.”

“Sometimes a lot more.”

“In America, you have money enough for everyone?”

Ari didn't feel like explaining. “It's just different.”

They walked in between the two gigantic front paws of the Sphinx and stared up. If it were alive, the creature could have crushed them. They weren't even as tall as its paws, but it looked straight ahead, over them, unconcerned with their fate.

Ari began to speak, slowly, deliberately. “Samir, did you know that the Israeli defense minister has a conference call with the Egyptian defense minister every week?”

A grim look came across Samir's face. “Tantawi.”

“Yes, Field Marshal Tantawi. Out of respect, I'm asking you for your permission for the defense minister of Israel to speak with Field Marshal Tantawi about our film—.”

“No,” insisted Samir.

Ari tried to stay calm, to keep emotion out of the moment. He'd already had Samir quit on him once. “Why not?”

“It is not necessary.”

“Is it because he's Israeli? Is that why you don't want to do it?”

Samir looked up at the face of the Sphinx. “At the airport, when you were alone with the head of customs, what happened?”

“He asked me if I liked George Bush.”

“A tricky question.”

“I didn't what know what to say,” admitted Ari. “What was the right answer? But I didn't want to make a mistake and say the wrong thing. I thought, does he want me to say ‘I hate George Bush.' Or, ‘He's a war criminal.' That kind of thing? Was that what he wanted?”

“No, that would not be an Egyptian answer.”

“I thought so, but why?”

“It would be giving away too much, and he would have thought you were a coward, just saying something to please him that you might not believe. What did you say to answer him?”

“I said, ‘I think George Bush made a mistake, a big mistake going into Iraq.'”

“And he said?”

“‘You are good man. I give you your camera. Saddam is great man!'”

“Really? He said Saddam?” Samir chuckled softly.

“Yes, Samir.” Ari turned to face him. “I'm so afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I think this whole…” Ari's voice choked up for a second as he reflected, wondering why he felt such strong emotion. “That … everything here is a test.” He patted the immense dry dusty paw with his hand. Heat still radiated out of the limestone. “I'm on some path through the desert and if I take one step in the wrong direction, I'm lost.”

“Now, you are starting to think like an Egyptian.” Samir reached into his pocket and pulled out a letter.

“Read it,” said Samir.

Ari took the letter and squinted at it in the blue twilight. “I can't. It's in Arabic.”

“Would you like me to translate?”

“Please.”

“‘Your request to fly a helicopter around the Sphinx has been approved.'”

Elation flowed into Ari's breath, into his chest. Lustful for this turn of fortune, Ari grabbed Samir by the arms and shook him. “Oh you, you crazy son of a…! You've been holding out on me!” Samir must have had that letter for at least an hour. “That's great! Great news! If I didn't get that shot then … then … I don't know what.” Ari leaned back against the massive lion's paw. His tremendous relief was delicious. What could Beth say now? “How much did this cost?” he asked Samir.

“Ask the Sphinx.” Samir pointed up at the broken stone face, scarred by the sands of time. “Only he knows.”

 

PART FOUR

What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?

—Sophocles,
Oedipus Rex,
The Riddle of the Sphinx

 

Chapter 28

Tomorrow was the big day. Ari couldn't sleep. He'd had several beers in the hotel bar with Don and Charley to talk about the flight, but the alcohol had just energized, not calmed him. He flopped around in the huge bed. He craved Beth, but he didn't want to call her. Samir still owed her a budget for the overage and he didn't want to hear her gripe about it.

He remembered Farah sitting on the grass on the quad at Cairo U. He wondered, if he set his intention to it, could he get her to fall in love with him? The dangerous thought shuddered his body as if he had lain on a bed of ice. Why did he crave people to love him so much? What an insane mess that would make. Did he need some sort of self-sabotage to complicate things, to give him an ever-increasing problem to solve? What would Samir do if he even thought Ari was attracted to her? Not that she could ever see him in a serious light. She was a true believer, a real revolutionary.

She made Ari remember his own radical college days back in the States. Sitting on the grass with a cute redhead from his Macro Econ class on the quad in the midst of a peaceful yet rowdy mob. Some students had chained the front doors of the administration building closed, demanding that the university sell all its investments in South Africa.

“What do we want?” went the chant.

“Divestment!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

Then there was a lull. The microphone was open.

“Why don't you speak?” the redhead from Econ class challenged him.

“Yeah, why don't I?” Ari had jumped up, stepped over everybody sitting on the lawn, walked up the steps of the building, and grabbed the mic. He didn't know what he was going to say, but he stared out at the cute redhead and six or seven hundred other students looking up at him and thought, what does she want me to say? What do they want? The question kept repeating over and over in his head. I've got to give them what they came here for. I've got to, if I can only figure out what that is.

“You know you're going to win, don't you?” he asked the crowd while he looked straight at her. “In a matter of days, this university is going to announce that it's selling all its stocks in South Africa. How do I know this?”

Everyone sat up. They didn't know how he knew. Even he didn't know how he knew. He just knew it. “If the University of California is going to dump three billion in investments, so will we. If Harvard is talking about it publicly, you can bet that our administration is talking about it privately right now.” Everyone nodded vigorously. The redhead was beaming. Ari looked at the student organizers. They were all spellbound, nodding, smiling. She—no—they all love me, he thought. I can feel it washing over me brighter than sunshine and it feels so good, better than sex.

“But why stop at South Africa? Why stop with one thing? We know we can do this now. We can vote with our money. Why don't we organize a list of all the biggest corporations in the world and pass this list to every college everywhere? Why don't we figure out who is the best and who is the worst on human rights, labor, the environment, and lobbying the government? We find out who is the best, or really, who is the least worst, and spend our money with that corporation, and ask every college to do the same.

“A corporation has no morality. Its only morality is profit. People have morality, and people buying things make those things profitable. If we have the power to end apartheid in South Africa, we have the same power to tell Exxon and General Motors and McDonald's and AT&T what to do and what not to do. We are just getting started!”

Ari went on and on about building a new society based on voting with your dollars and trying to make every decision a moral one. He spoke far longer than anyone else. After he finished, everyone cheered, mostly from the break in the monotony of days of divestment talk.

He went back to his redhead, who squeezed him in a big hug. He felt her breasts press against him. With adoration in her eyes, she told him that his was the best speech, and he felt as if a messianic vista has opened before him. They left, went back to his room, and made love. Ah college!