Dreamers of the Day Read online

  Shrouded women pressed themselves against alley walls as we passed. They balanced a variety of burdens on their heads, and most carried small children in their arms. These ladies nearly all wore veils or held over their noses a portion of the long black garments that trailed them through the trash-strewn byways. Lillie had written that such concealment was a sign of modesty, but now that I was in Cairo, I wondered if the practice had originated as a defense against the city’s odor, which was a perfectly nauseating blend of sewage and citrus, burning tobacco and roasting meat, unwashed bodies and jasmine.

  In contrast to the mute and shrouded hordes of Cairo’s women, the city’s men yelled constantly. Regardless of topic, every exchange seemed to be composed entirely of bitter recrimination. Men bargained loudly in tiny shops and stalls, where every item offered in trade provoked rancor, disgust, and a mutual loathing in buyer and seller. Others played games—checkers or chess or cards—at the outdoor tables of street cafés, and each was vocally convinced that his opponent was the worst kind of cheating lowlife. At one point, I braced myself to witness bloodshed as two chess players shrieked and gesticulated in the most menacing way. Then, to my astonishment, they stood up, mounted the same little donkey, and rode away together.

  Each time our cart rounded some corner, my presence drew rapt attention. Groups of arguing men paused and stared over the rims of tiny china cups, or sucked on long tubes attached to smoke-filled glass jars containing water that bubbled with each breath. I felt like a film star with my cloche hat and dark glasses, dressed perfectly for the late-afternoon warmth in a linen dress that stopped at my knees. I fancied that the Egyptian women envied me. Poor things, I thought, sweltering in their robes and veils!

  My dragoman pulled onto a lovely boulevard, and the noise receded as his donkey tugged us along its palm-fringed pavement. “The Nile, madams,” the dragoman called out, pointing with his whip. “The Semiramis,” he said a few minutes later.

  Sitting on the cart, I caught a glimpse of the hotel’s interior, which made a general impression of polished brass and marble across which teams of energetic bellmen carried hatboxes, toiletry cases, and wardrobe trunks. The Semiramis promised to be every bit as grand as I had anticipated, but the Nile itself? Well, I must admit that the Nile was a disappointment. Given my present situation, the irony is considerable, now that I think of it.

  I suppose I expected too much of a river that has been called “liquid history.” Mr. Joseph Conrad wrote that the Nile was an immense uncoiled snake with its head in the sea, its body at rest, curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost to sight. Mr. Conrad was, of course, a literary genius, whereas I was merely a schoolteacher. Imagine a hundred-foot rope, I would have told my students. Tie a knot in it ten feet from the end. That knot is Cairo. Now, to represent the Nile’s delta, separate the strands that make up the ten-foot end to form a triangle. The Nile’s length is marvelous, but when seen crossways from the boulevard, its width was unimpressive. And its depth? Well, in March, when I was there? Its depth was just plain silly.

  Why, the Cuyahoga River is more to look at! I was thinking when a fresh round of shouting broke out nearby.

  I have read that most travelers quickly come to feel a sort of detached immunity in truly foreign places, and I certainly experienced that myself. In the time it took to go from train station to hotel, I had come to the conclusion that Cairo’s unrelenting uproar was a phenomenon that could not possibly involve me. Then Rosie began to snarl, and I slowly realized our own arrival was the cause of the latest dispute. The combatants were a native doorman and my dragoman. Their field of battle was the stairway into the hotel. Fingers jabbed in my direction. Glares were aimed down substantial noses toward my luggage, my dog, and myself.

  “I have a reservation,” I said in the voice I used to bring classrooms of unruly immigrant children to order. “I made all the arrangements through Thomas Cook’s in Cleveland, Ohio.”

  Struck dumb, both men paused to stare at me.

  “That’s in America,” I explained in the sudden silence.

  For a moment they were joined in astonishment, as though they had just seen some revolting insect stand on two of its six legs and speak. An instant later, the dispute resumed; if anything, the attempt of a woman to take part in her own affairs provoked both men to further fury. The doorman, eyes and blood vessels bulging, blocked the dragoman’s effort to carry my bags into the hotel. The dragoman matched him in every particular, trying to gain entry by dint of volume and main force. Rosie’s high-pitched yapping adding to the bedlam.

  Even in Cairo, this was sufficient to draw attention. Thin brown children appeared as if from nowhere, their delight in the entertainment multiplied by the element of comedy contributed by a dachshund’s miniature ferocity. Several Egyptian policemen converged on the scene and joined in the shouting. Inside the hotel, a large group of European gentlemen halted halfway down a curving staircase that descended into the lobby. There were dozens of them, some in khaki uniforms, others in well-cut suits. All of them were looking at me. In their midst, like a queen surrounded by courtiers, stood a majestically tall woman in her fifties. More commanding than any of the soldiers around her, she took in the scene and frowned.

  At that point, I still believed that if I could just step inside and tell the desk clerk about my reservation, everything could be resolved in a civilized tone of voice. Explaining this to the accumulated variety of Egyptian gentlemen, I tried to move toward the lobby, but Rosie was engaged in a series of feints at the end of her leash. Though she had clearly identified the doorman as the source of our trouble, she took several distracted opportunities to snap at the excited children who danced away from her. I bent over to pick her up. Shrieks of childish laughter, and a shout of shared horror from the men informed me that the movement had exposed my legs upward of their midpoint. Mortified, I straightened, with Rosie squirming in my arms.

  The whole thing was starting to look like an audition for a comic vaudeville revue when the queenly woman broke away from the Europeans on the staircase and strode across the lobby toward me, with a very slight and very cool smile. She had a strong oval face surrounded by a mass of graying red hair folded into a pompadour beneath a densely flowered picture hat. Despite the weather and the decade, she was swathed in layers of Edwardian striped silk overlaid with lashings of Belgian lace. From the silver fox boa slung over her shoulder to the black high-topped shoes with their fine pearl buttons, the ensemble was tasteful and expensive.

  It was also, I knew from Mildred’s tutelage, hopelessly passé.

  I felt very chic in comparison and secretly superior, until she swept past me on her way toward the doorman. Direct, verdigris eyes met mine. I’ll deal with you later, young lady, she seemed to tell me with a glance. And though she said not a word, I felt like a third grader caught in the cloakroom showing her pantaloons to the boys.

  “Mrs. Cutler?” I heard someone call from within the hotel. “Lillie! Is that you?”

  A blond man, about thirty years old, wove through the main party of Europeans on the staircase and came toward me smiling broadly, blue eyes wide with astonishment. He was wearing a cheap brown suit, not flowing white robes, but I recognized him immediately from the many photographs in Mr. Lowell Thomas’s presentation. Colonel Lawrence in person was compact and more strongly built than I had imagined, and moved with the taut, athletic grace of a tightrope walker. As he approached, I was surprised to find that he barely exceeded my own quite modest height. Five foot four, perhaps? A bit more, if he would stand up straighter.

  His pace slowed and his smile faded when I took off my dark glasses and he realized he was mistaken about my identity. Yes, that flat-voweled Ohio accent is familiar, his embarrassed little laugh seemed to say, but you are definitely not the lovely Lillian Cutler.

  Hoping Rosie would mind her manners, I set her on the ground—bending carefully at the knees this time. “You must be Colonel Lawrence,” I said. “I’m Agnes Shanklin
, Lillian Cutler’s sister.”

  “How extraordinary,” he murmured after a brief handshake that seemed as reluctant as his words were warm. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Miss Shanklin. Lillie and Douglas told me so much about you.” And then, once more, he giggled.

  You doubt me, perhaps. No, Agnes. Lawrence was a scholar and a soldier. Surely such a man would not giggle like a girl! But that giggle turned out to be as much a part of him as his small stature and great strength of will. Often, it invited you to follow his quirky logic. Sometimes, it was a warning. More rarely, it was a spontaneous outburst of genuine amusement. On the occasion of our first meeting, it simply conveyed relief that he had not, after all, shouted across a busy hotel lobby at an utter stranger.

  He glanced beyond me toward the tall woman, who had by now dismissed the policemen and was taking the doorman and the dragoman aside. Perhaps because she herself spoke softly, their dispute became a conversation. Colonel Lawrence seemed to accept this lady’s intervention as a given. “If you wish to insult a Muslim, call him a dog,” he told me in a low, quick voice. “The gist of the doorman’s case is that your pet is unwelcome.”

  “But—No!” I cried. “The Cook’s agent in Cleveland said—”

  “Gerty will sort it out. How is Lillie? Is she here with you?” Colonel Lawrence asked eagerly. “No,” he said when he saw my look. “How?”

  “Influenza.”

  “My father as well,” he told me then, in the brief way we all had in those days. We’d acknowledge a private drop or two of grief in that ocean of general mourning and change the subject without providing the full roll of our dreadful losses.

  “So. What brings you to Cairo?” he asked, blue eyes narrowed, his glance sidelong. “Are you a missionary, as your sister was?”

  “Heavens, no!” I said with a bit more vehemence than I intended. “I’ve never been sufficiently confident in my faith to offer myself to others as exemplary.”

  “My mother has recently decided to bring Christianity to the Chinese,” Colonel Lawrence informed me, then dropped his voice to confide, “She could, I’m afraid, testify that being exemplary is not a requirement for missionary work.”

  My land! What a thing to say about his own mother, Mumma cried, and indeed, Colonel Lawrence snickered like a naughty boy aware of his transgression.

  Perhaps, I thought, I am not the only one whose mother whispers unwelcome commentary. To my own surprise, I said, “I take it you learned cynicism at home, Colonel Lawrence?”

  Another giggle, this one with a darker note that confirmed my guess. “Why Cairo then,” he asked, “if not to spread the faith?”

  Well, I could hardly say, Mark Twain advised me to travel. I searched, and found a different truth. “The war, you know. The influenza. I think—Well, one needs to make new memories, don’t you agree?”

  For a little time, he seemed quite far away. So many veterans had that look. “Yes,” he said finally, blinking himself back into the present. “Yes. Well put.”

  We fell into an instant friendship, our conversation built on the scaffolding of our shared regard for Lillie. “I shall never forget how welcoming and kind she was,” Lawrence told me. “I was a penniless undergraduate, but she treated me like a prince.”

  He was just suggesting that we meet for tea the next afternoon when the towering woman he called Gerty took her place at his side. Deliberately, I think, she put an arm over his shoulder, in a gesture that was both maternal and proprietary. In that pose, she asked, “And who have we here, dear boy?”

  Colonel Lawrence moved away from her touch, becoming formal and adult. “Miss Gertrude Bell, may I introduce Miss Agnes Shanklin? I knew her sister, Lillian, before the war. Miss Shanklin: Miss Bell, who knows everyone and everything Middle East. What have negotiations accomplished, Gert?”

  “Take her to the Continental,” Miss Bell told him. “They’ll never let her in here.”

  Her lips hardly moved when she spoke. I thought of Mumma taking down a hem, telling me to turn with her mouth full of pins. Unnerved, I lifted Rosie into my arms and stammered into her fur. “But—I made a reservation. I—I put down a deposit. The Cook’s agent in Cleveland said—”

  “Hold your head up,” Miss Bell commanded. “Look people straight in the eye and state your position without hesitation. It’s the only way to get anything done.”

  I felt both admonished and encouraged, like a failing student who’s been told how to earn a better mark on the next assignment. It took all my self-possession not to say, “Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.”

  She took a small, flat silver case from her handbag and extracted a cigarette with stained yellow fingers, tapping one end on sterling to settle its tobacco. “The dear boy and I stayed at the Continental before the war. We were colleagues at the Arab Bureau,” she said. “The rooms are quite adequate. I’ll ring ahead for you and make the arrangements.”

  “Will they allow Rosie in?” I asked.

  “If I tell them to.”

  She seemed barely to register my thanks as she placed her cigarette between lips permanently puckered by the habit and leaned expectantly toward Colonel Lawrence.

  He spread his empty hands and suggested, “Ask Winston.”

  She rolled her eyes toward heaven. “The dear boy has no vices, Miss Shanklin. Very tiresome for those of us who do.”

  “I have many vices,” Lawrence said. “It’s a vesta I lack.” A match, he meant. That’s what British people called matches back then.

  Miss Bell sighed, and turned, and raised her hand to catch the attention of a balding, thickish person who stood gesticulating with a cigar amid a knot of gentlemen in the lobby. “Winston Darling!” she called. “Light me, will you, please?”

  With that, she sailed off and docked at Mr. Darling’s side. He produced a lighter, and again she leaned forward—almost coquettishly steadying the flame with a hand upon his wrist. Pulling in the smoke with evident pleasure, she released a long plume into the air and took the round arm he offered. Mr. Darling was evidently undismayed to appear so short and soft in comparison to Miss Bell’s own commanding physique.

  “Don’t worry, dear boy,” Miss Bell called over her shoulder as she and Mr. Darling swanned away in a cloud of tobacco smoke. “We’ll save a seat at the table for you. Lawrence has been drafted to escort a lady in distress to the Continental,” she told the others in ringing public tones, and then laughed gaily before adding, “He’ll rejoin us shortly.”

  Colonel Lawrence’s face went very still. I winced. “Next,” I whispered with sympathetic annoyance, “she’ll say something to me about seeing straight.”

  Lawrence giggled, but rather grimly this time. “I don’t know why I let that kind of thing get up my nose, but—”

  “Maybe she’s self-conscious about being so tall,” I suggested.

  Lawrence gestured toward the door, where the dragoman still waited, and changed the subject. “Winston is His Majesty’s secretary of state for air and the colonies,” Lawrence began. “He was navy during the—”

  “Oh, and Miss Shanklin?” Halfway across the lobby, Miss Bell had turned around to address me once more in her loud, carrying voice. “Do find something more suitable to wear while you are in the Middle East,” she advised. “That clothing is far too revealing. The doorman took you for a whore.”

  After helping Rosie and me back up into the cart, Colonel Lawrence climbed aboard himself and gave the dragoman directions, using Arabic and gestures. “It’s not far,” he told me. “Ten minutes, across the river.” For the whole of that time, the colonel filled the silence with travelogue and chat. The boulevard we rode upon divided Cairo in two, he told me. The western half was frangi, or French—the word was used locally for anything foreign. The whole district used to be inundated yearly by the Nile’s flood, but after European engineers dammed the river, it was possible to build on the high ground. Foreigners were allowed to settle, and frangi Cairo came to look like a southern European city, fil
led with banks, hotels, consulates, and Art Nouveau residences. There was even a Sporting Club with a race course. To the east was beledi Cairo, the real city, in his opinion, where ordinary Egyptians lived and worked amid mosques, coffee shops, tiny stores, little factories, markets, and schools.

  The Continental Hotel was frangi, set in the Gazirah neighborhood, a quiet enclave popular with Europeans. “Gazirah means island,” the colonel said, as the dragoman turned off a broad boulevard onto a handsome bridge that crossed one of the Nile’s strands.

  The Europeans I’d seen at the Semiramis were a group of British officials. “Winston and his Forty Thieves,” Lawrence called the delegation. They had been assembled for a few days in Cairo to finish some business left undone at Versailles. Much of it had been decided years ago, in London and Paris, but details remained to be worked out.

  I nodded and murmured as he spoke, touched by his kind awareness of my speechless embarrassment. Only when we arrived at the Continental did I feel capable of asking the question that made my cheeks burn. “Colonel Lawrence, at the Semiramis…Was it my dog who was objectionable, or was it myself?”

  He sat still a moment, staring at his shoes, which were as scuffed as a schoolboy’s. “To a Muslim, all dogs are objectionable,” he informed me, “but those with short legs are especially to be despised.” He glanced at me to see if I was “buying it.” I must have looked skeptical, for he added, “I have no idea why, but that is the case.”

  “And Miss Bell’s suggestion that I—? That the doorman thought—?”

  “Oh, don’t mind Gert,” he advised with a patience that reminded me that he’d also found it necessary to overlook her tactlessness. “She really is quite extraordinary. There’s a saying here: If you think you understand Middle Eastern politics, they haven’t been explained to you properly. Gerty knows every nuance. No one in the West can match her. Still, she can be a bit—”