Sue Parker

 

Torso

 

We seem to be driving away from Cairo.

“Where are we going?” I ask a couple of times.

The driver replies in Arabic. I don’t understand. We travel past the tumble of brown low rises until even they thin out and the city disappears and we drive into the desert. Looking out of the back window of the car, I think I can see the pyramids to the south.

Outside it looks hot; inside the car, I wouldn’t know. The wind rolls the sand at the same speed as we are driving.

The driver plays one song over and over for more than an hour, a sad song that lasts the entire cassette; the woman’s voice disappears and reappears inside the music.

We pass two cemeteries, one on the right, the other on the left side of the road about a kilometre further down. The graves are built off the ground, two slabs like the ends of a bed, the taller end pointing towards Mecca. A woman dressed in black walks by the side of the road. She has bare feet, I notice, looking back at her. She carries nothing in her hands. The world is full of sad women, I think.

Further ahead the sand runs faster than the car, rolling over the flat road. When we return, it could be covered. I am lulled to sleep.

I awake as we drive past a terracotta pigeon house and, although I have seen photographs of them, I am not prepared for their scale. They are the size of houses. Nor am I prepared for their sculptural austerity, their perfect form. I think about wedding cakes. Even more beautiful are the broad strokes of black and white paint that decorate the pigeon house. I think of Brancusi and his bird. I aim my camera. We are moving too fast.

We drive along an avenue of date palms. The word ‘Fayoum’ is painted on a road sign in Arabic and English. The houses on the outskirts are far apart and blend in with the sand. Closer to the centre the dwellings are more substantial.

The driver parks the car in an open square by the side of a canal. He gets out and stretches his arms over his head. He leans his torso to one side then the other, twisting at his waist. I notice his tight abdominal muscles under his thin shirt. He holds his hands to his eyes as if he has an imaginary camera, his way of asking if I want to take a photograph.

I shake my head. We are next to a drink stall. I use my hands to ask him if he would like a Pepsi but he shakes his head. I buy us both a Pepsi; if he doesn’t want it now, he may later. Behind him is a restaurant built over the canal. Four men are eating at a table under an umbrella. There’s no water in the canal.

On the other side of the street is a large general store. I wander over the empty square to look at the mannequin in the window. The mannequin has no legs, just a male torso in a lemon cotton shirt perched atop a Russian twin-tub washing machine.  A shiny motor bike helmet faces the window, to the left, on the washer.

Inside the shop, an old man is asleep in a chair. A plump little girl is playing a game with her dolls under a serving table. Acres of fabrics are stuffed into racks that line the walls up to the roof. More rolls of fabric are piled high on tables that crowd the narrow aisles. I buy a heavy weave blue and white cotton tablecloth that catches my eye, even though I have no table. Actually, I have no house. I could give it to one of my friends.

Outside it is hot and the streets are empty. The driver leans against the car, under the shade of a tree, waiting. I sign to ask him if he wants to eat. He shakes his head.

Further along the canal, the mud brick houses look like a tourist village. The driver pulls up at a row of date trees beside a canal. He flicks his hand to send me out of the car. I look at the date trees, the bank of the canal, and finally notice a bullock whose rib cage jabs through its thin skin, whose matchstick legs are barely able to support its belly, bloated like road kill. The bullock trudges around in a circle, pulling a primitive looking wooden wheel whose cogs connect with another wheel and another fitted with pottery urns that ladle water from the canal into a clay urn. No one else is around. The driver uses his hands to ask me if I want to take a photograph. I find my camera. I have forgotten to bring any film. When I look up, I notice a cassia tree bursting with so many pink flowers that it’s like an explosion. I would have liked to photograph that.

 

We are returning, driving out past the grand houses, the sand coloured huts, on the same desert road. The car's engine clanks discordantly. The driver pulls up alongside a small hut under a pepper tree. There is a petrol bowser but it is old, probably dried up. He opens the bonnet of the car. Steam hisses and screams then bubbles out. Afterwards, the twang of metal contracting breaks the silence and accentuates the emptiness of so much sky, so much space. We wait beside the car. Crows caw above the pepper tree.

A young boy has materialised from the shadow of the hut. He must have been watching for a while. He looks about nine years of age, although he is probably older. He motions me to follow him. The car is not working. It looks like we will be here for a while.

I follow him over the crest of a small sand dune away from the hut. We are in the desert. Periodically, the boy turns around and waves at me to follow him, but, before I can catch up, he has pushed further ahead. We climb a second, larger sand dune walking into the sun. The sand is loose. Ahead, in a valley, are two long stone huts. The sun burns the crown of my head. The boy wears a loose scarf over his shoulders which he has pulled over his head. It is beige, like his gelabia, like the sand. If he were any further ahead of me he would disappear.

He moves up to one of the stone huts and holds the door open. At the entrance, a Pepsi dispensing machine is empty and, anyway, there is no electricity out here. This is the desert. It is cool and dark inside the hut. Light from a high window spills over large blocks of stone piled one on top of the other. On closer inspection, once my eyes adjust, I see they are sections of broken columns and stone urns and the shattered heads of ancient Romans as cold as death to touch.    

The boy coughs. He holds the door open. I follow. He leads me up another sand dune. He stands on the ridge, pointing forward and flicking his hands, as if to push me down into a garden, a labyrinth of sorts. There are many paths that converge at the centre, from which they split and divide, then come back together at the beginning.

Inside, the paths of the garden are trimmed with the fallen limbs of Roman statues. One corner is outlined by the bent knee joint of a running man, the outer surface smooth. Inside, where the calf muscle was, it is rough. The thigh is lost. Other turns are made from the crook of an elbow, a foot in sandals whose ankle creates the turn. The garden resembles an ancient battlefield, the dismembered and broken remains of its warriors bewitched to stone. I wonder who made the garden. Was it the boy, taking objects from the hut, moving them this way and that, placing them in a haphazard manner until one day the garden took this form? And the form only suggests other forms, other gardens, an infinite number of gardens.

I walk along one path and then another, the border trimmed with upright toes, imagining the delight the boy might have had on finding so many toes and planting them in the sand. I follow the toes to the centre of the garden where the torso of a Roman sculpture is planted in the sand. The torso is made of white marble stained blue. It is in the process of twisting, and my eye traces the line of invisible arms, the suggestion of the spear held but never thrown in his stone hand. There is no sense of his bravado, only the scrapheap of perfect form, its shy assertion of manhood.  It is heavy. The boy could never have moved it without assistance. Standing in the centre, looking over the garden, all paths lead to this absent moment of attack that is all roar and no bite, the mime of an action that happened so long ago, that came to nothing. The formality of the design suggests another hand who knows of other gardens in other times. I look for clues. I look, but it is the silence that registers.

I take a path that leads behind the torso to the far dune at whose base is a bed of stone ears, large ears descending to smaller and more delicate ears still, perhaps those of children, lying flat on the sand, row after row. Crumbling and incomplete ears are packed around the edge. The sharp contrast between the roughness of the broken ears and the smooth surface of the sculptured ears suggests that whoever made this garden was playing with that contrast. Nothing grows. I stand still and look around. The sun has shifted and is no longer overhead. How long have I been here? I take a different path that promises to return me to the beginning but it is not important; I am filling in time. You can’t get lost because it is easy to step over the legs and feet and walk around the perimeter.

There is an area bordered by broken pieces of stone and inside is a planting of noses, Roman noses, not so many. Their placement looks abstract. Looking down over them, at the shadow that is growing on their right side, a pattern emerges and I see that the gardener has planted each nose in such a specific way that as each shadow lengthens a pattern forms from their points of contact. I look again at the torso and see its crawl of shadow, at the shadows of the fallen legs which, at different times in the day, create different gardens, and I see that all the gardens relate to time. Is this what the boy wants me to see?

It is very hot and suddenly I am so thirsty I could die. I don’t know the way back. I look around to see if I can recognise where we came from. The wind has blown sand over my footprints. For a minute I panic. I call out to the boy. A crow answers. Ahead the desert stretches forever away, a labyrinth of an altogether different kind. I have no idea how long I have been left here, a few minutes, an hour, hours?

I panic and at the point when I am troubled by the thought that I may be left out here forever, the boy walks over the ridge of one of the sand dunes, smiling. I follow him, thinking about water and thirst and heat and how quickly you could burn up in the desert and die.

The driver is asleep under the pepper tree. I cough until he stirs. He kindly opens the spare Pepsi Cola that I originally bought him. There’s nothing else to drink. I give the boy some coins. He pockets them and disappears.

It is late in the afternoon now. We drive back into Cairo against the wind, against the blow of the sand, listening over and over to the sad song. In places the desert moves almost as quickly as the car.