Vital Signs (12 page)

“Stop it,” a voice says behind me, and it’s Charlotte
speaking to Sasha, who is laughing as they come into the room from their small excursion to a Queen Street café for the Blue Mountain coffee that Sasha says is the best in town. I click the clasps of the briefcase back in place and leave it propped up against the wall. I join them by the bed. Fred has returned to his hospital to check in on an elderly patient he was assigned yesterday, and somehow I’m relieved that all I have to deal with in this room are these three women.

“Shit!” Charlotte says as she takes in Anna’s bald head.

“You’re head’s a perfect shape, Mom,” says Sasha.

“Braised harps strung in trees—”

“Mom,” Sasha interrupts her mother gently, “I bought you some nail polish. Charlotte and I are going to do your nails. We have time. I really never have seen such a perfect shape. I wonder if mine would look like that if I shaved it.”

“Do you remember, Mom, we did this when I had my tonsils out,” Charlotte says, taking on her sister’s gentleness as she pulls out the polish and some cotton balls.

For six months after it ended, I ached for her—for her, and for the roaring sound that had rushed through me. But slowly I got the knack of this deadpan muttering
.

I wonder if Fred has really had to return to work or if he’s off fucking the woman he’s obviously been seeing. And what if I were to tell everything to Anna now, before she leaves this room for the surgery? Tell her how I never knew that defiance and betrayal would feel so fucking great?

I will the girls to leave. I pretend to be packing up myself by going to my briefcase and opening it.

“Charlotte has been flirting with the male nurse,” Sasha says to Anna in a playful voice.

“I have not!”

“You think because he does something un-macho that he’ll be great in bed—I know you.”

“Sash!”

“That’s what you thought about Robert.”

“Robert was good in bed!”

They laugh. I take paper out of the briefcase, then the drawing I did last night. I hesitate, then snap shut the briefcase with my free hand.

“In the desert there was one street light near our hut at the oasis. The Bedouin who danced with me had three wives.”

I turn and look up at Anna’s face, her head, round and then tapered towards her neck like a light bulb. I know that what she has just said is not confabulation. This really happened. I was there.

“She asked him if he minded night shifts,” Sasha says.

“That’s not flirting,” Charlotte defends.

“Ha!”

“His hips—they tossed themselves at me like a woman’s,” Anna says, and the girls don’t exactly ignore her but neither do they take what she’s saying seriously. Only I know that Anna is right. The man moved like a belly dancer.

Before everything changed.

Cairo had been a layover between the Upper Nile—Mustafa and the Valley of the Kings—and the next leg of our holiday in the desert. We were picked up at our hotel by a driver and another man I thought was to be our translator, but upon attempting to communicate with them it was clear that neither could speak English. The extra passenger, I realized, was the driver’s friend along for the ride. He took advantage of the minivan’s sound system to play tapes of Arabic music at high volume for the entire five-hour trip. As we drove past various formations of desert sand and rock, fantastical mushrooms, giant drums, and hundreds of dunes that resembled the backs of house-sized beetles skittering along the brown sand, I felt drugged, kidnapped, by the men and the chantlike singing blaring from the speakers.

We arrived in one of the towns of the Bahariya Oasis in the western desert of Egypt. I stumbled out of the van, fatigued and disoriented, and we were led to the home of a Bedouin family whose eldest son, Helal, was known, the
Cairo concierge had told us, for eventful tours into the White and Western Deserts, and whom we would meet at dinner that evening.

“This is wonderful,” Anna said. She pressed her body close to mine as we headed into the modest clay house. “This is what you wanted, and I’m glad you talked me into it.” There was only the slightest inflection to convey that she wanted my assurance. She was trying hard. I took a deep breath to help me handle the feel of her against my skin. I was unbearably hot, but it was not the heat of the desert; I was fiery with something under my breath, inside my lungs.

At the house, we met several Bedouin men, introduced to us by their roles: cook, camel tamer, builder, gardener. The last, Hamada—a short, boyish man with a serious face and small eyes—was to be our guide. We were invited to sit on the floor, where he served us a lunch of goat’s cheese, cucumber and tuna. Canned tuna in the desert? Though I didn’t say anything to Anna, the fact of this was dismaying to me beyond all reason. I watched Anna expertly wrap the flat wood-oven-baked bread around hunks of white cheese and fish, an expertise I was thinking must have been granted to Middle-Eastern people at birth. Hamada nodded at her, produced his first smile since our introduction, and I was irked. But when she faltered, dropped some of the cheese before it reached her mouth, reacting with an “oops” and a smile, I saw how I was wrong, how I’d spent years exoticizing her and how she was just like me. Still, the air in my lungs seared my insides.

After lunch, Hamada took us in a four-by-four on a tour of the oasis, the surrounding desert, and the sudden, astonishing gardens carved out of the land, where men irrigated crops with water flowing into gutters around vegetable patches and small orchards. At the base of a palm tree Hamada leapt up several times before he succeeded in grabbing hold of a low branch, which he shook with vigour until dark, oblong pods fell to his feet. He bent down and collected the pods in his tunic, then approached Anna, who took one from him. He moved towards me, but I put up my hand to refuse.

“Dates,” Anna said, as she sucked on one, her mouth puckered as though over a nipple. I hesitated, took one, and tasted its burly sweetness. As they walked ahead of me toward the Jeep I heard laughter from Anna, and was curious as to what the so far dispassionate Hamada might have said to provoke it. I noticed that Anna and Hamada were a similar height. Had Anna not been raised in Canada would she have been married off to a more suitable-sized, duskier-skinned man like Hamada? I drew a gasping breath, tossed the rest of the pulpy date on the ground and followed them. I was eager to get to the camp. There, I felt, I’d be able to breathe, to relax into the landscape and disappear into myself without any of the social niceties that this part of the tour required.

At the end of the day, after sitting us on a blanket at the edge of the oasis and feeding us corn that had been roasted over an open fire and a red tea made from sorel leaves, Hamada drove us toward the outer perimeter of the Black
Desert to our camp. We were greeted by the expedition’s leader, Helal, who had been born in the desert, was committed to its preservation, and was delighted to share its beauty with the right kind of people. I watched as Anna greeted him; how certain he seemed, merely by the look of her, that she was the right kind of people.

The camp was run entirely by men between, I guessed, twenty and thirty years of age; slim, statuesque men dressed in knee-length light-blue cotton shirts with matching trousers, barefoot or sandaled, with turbans on their heads; beautiful men who clapped to the music of horns and tarabuka drums even if it came from a tape in a car. I saw no women.

That night we ate an elaborate dinner with the men, seated on mats at a low table in a one-roomed, spacious sandstone building, where we were served bowls of tomato, eggplant, lentils, rice, and one of “meat,” as it was described to Anna when she asked. Two German couples were the only other tourists there and after dinner we all joined in a circle with Helal, Hamada and the others.

The cold desert night had descended and I desperately wanted to be under the camel blanket I noticed had been laid across the bed in our small hut in the dunes. I squirmed closer to the coal fire in the centre of the room and felt Anna follow me, snuggling close, as though attached by an invisible rope. To distract myself I tried to engage the Germans, but their poor facility with English and my non-existent German soon led to polite nodding and turning again to the music the men began to play.

Helal played a lute-like guitar, Hamada a tambourine-like drum. Helal sang a line, the other men answered in a Bedouin call and response that sounded personal and yet warlike. The music swirled around us as I leaned in closer and closer to the fire.

Suddenly, but without missing a beat, Hamada passed his drum to the tribesman on the right and stood, taking up a scarf from the sandy floor, which he tied around his hips.

And how he danced.

I call it dancing now, but when he began I thought it must be a mating ritual. His hips pulsed, slowly, erotically, from side to side, back and forth, and he held his arms up above his head and closed his eyes as though he were making love to a spirit that stood before him. And I was sure that ghost had Anna’s shape.

She sat straight, attentive, with a broad smile on her face that made her eyes sink deeper behind the folds of the Asian dusks and dawns that had created her. A young man stood up, this one much younger than Hamada, only a boy really, and he danced in front of Hamada with a similar rolling, lolling, hip-diving movement. The performance made me even more uncomfortable.

“They were so beautiful,” Anna said to me later, as I shivered in the flannel pyjamas I’d wisely brought for these desert nights. She wrapped her leg around me, trying to make both of us warm.

“Well, I guess so, but a little weird,” I said, rigid in my spot on the bed.

She looked up towards me: “Weird?”

“You didn’t think so?”

I sensed her frown. Her leg slid off mine. I’d disappointed her. She had been trying so hard. I knew that deep down she would rather have been home with our children, but here she was, trying, like a pet, to awaken my attention.

“Such confidence in the movement, so masculine,” she said.

I swallowed. A dark listlessness descended. I sank into a deep chamber of ennui. And felt it would be impossible to get out of it.

The next day, with Helal off on a separate tour with the Germans, Hamada drove us across the architectural dunes of the Black Desert, then farther along the edge of the Western Desert en route to the White Desert. The road was lined by desert sculpture—hardened sandy mounds sprinkled with black rock. The shapes were like darker cousins to the skittering beetle mounds we’d seen en route, but suddenly, everything was white. I can only liken our final destination to what the bottom of the sea would look like without the water or the life that thrives in it. The White Desert is nature’s sculpture garden, filled with crisp, bleached white sandstone figures that resembled a rabbit here, an eagle there, a mushroom over there. Odd sprouted mushrooms, with crowns formed from what looked like the finest marble, dotted the landscape.

We drove through the desertscape, stopping to marvel at spectacular formations, to pick up desert crystals and to walk on this alien terrain. A scorching, stalagmite planet.

“Look, look!” Anna said as we drove towards another pasture of rock.

“Ah,” Hamada said, smiling, pointing to where she was staring, both of them fixed on the same object. We pulled up beside an oblong sandstone figure that seemed to have been hollowed out. Hamada was delighted that Anna had spotted it without prompting. He got out of the Jeep first and walked toward the stone object with reverence. I got out next, happy to stretch my legs. Anna seemed to be stuck in her seat, transfixed. What we were all staring at looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

“A whale,” Anna said, as she opened the door and walked past me. I watched and then followed her, going right up to the carved out figure.

“They have measured it. Archaeologists. Equal to actual whale. Real ones,” Hamada said. I looked at him incredulously.

“Oh my goodness,” Anna intoned.

“Look here,” Hamada said as he took us inside the stone husk through its missing head. He rubbed the wall with his hands. I copied him automatically, feeling what he had intended me to feel: the ridges that were surely once the ribcage of the whale. I sat down. How was this possible here in the desert? Eventually, Anna and Hamada walked back to the Jeep, but I continued to sit in the belly of the whale, for some moments longer.

As we travelled into the desert, the afternoon sun rendered the white stone brittle-looking, as though it might
chip away with a gust of wind. We drove across dunes dotted with iron ore deposits that had formed into dark crystals, metal flowers popping up through the desert sand. The world was inside out and upside down.

I sat in the back seat of the Jeep; Anna sat in front, asking questions of Hamada as he drove, over the Arabic music that floated from the tape player. After some miles, the Jeep started to sputter and jerk. Hamada stepped hard on the gas, in an attempt to override the problem. Slowing and then hard again. And again, but the Jeep stuttered to a halt.