Egypt Rising Read online

  After several minutes, the police officer’s phone rang. He picked it up and then read our names to the man on the phone. He listened and nodded and then said something I couldn’t hear.

  “Your story checks out. You may go. I am writing your names down in my book. If you are brought in again, it will do you no good even if you know the President himself.”

  We staggered out of the building. We no longer wanted to shop, so we walked to a small coffee shop around the corner from the police station and collapsed in our chairs. We ordered Turkish coffee and sweets. After several minutes we both felt better although Aasuma still was shaking. I walked her to the subway station and then headed towards the cab line.

  When I returned home, Dad was still reading his book. I turned on the television and stared at the pictures of the demonstration.

  Please, God, I thought. Please don’t let Aasuma and me be on the news. I studied the video and breathed a sigh of relief. Neither of our parents would know how close we came to being detained.

  That evening Dad insisted I dress for dinner since we were going to meet Emily at the Hilton’s dressy restaurant, the one on the top floor. I dressed, but my mind was on what I’d seen at the Nile Hotel. I realized no one we knew ever went there because it was such a tourist trap. It was probably the perfect place for Emily to meet her lover boy without worrying about any Americans that were permanent Cairo residents spotting her there.

  Dad kept fidgeting in the cab. I’d never seen him so nervous. He cleared his throat several times like he was trying to say something but didn’t know how. I got that tingling feeling in my stomach once again. I was afraid he’d try to have the talk with me that I dreaded. He’d already tried to have The Talk with me, but stopped in mid-sentence before it got too embarrassing for both of us. The other talk I didn’t want to have with him was about how I needed a mother and he needed a wife. Hell, I was fifteen. What could she teach me now besides how to paint my face so I looked like a clown and how to cheat on someone you were supposed to love? I simmered inside.

  The waiter took our orders. Dad excused himself, and then it was just the two of us. She smiled one of those big toothy smiles that you know is phony. She also fidgeted. I noticed that she was running her fingers through her hair. I hadn’t seen her do that before. She picked up her wine glass and took a healthy swig before speaking. I knew this wasn’t going to be good.

  “Sweetheart, we really haven’t had much chance to talk, just the two of us,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s not okay. It’s pretty clear to me you’ve gotten away with murder with your father. Look at how you take care of yourself. You could be so much more attractive.”

  “I look fine the way I am,” I said, steeling myself for what I knew was coming.

  “The point is that I’m going to become much more a part of your life soon. Your father and I are planning a wedding this Fall. We wanted to give you plenty of time to get used to the idea. I know you don’t care for me, but that’s not going to change anything.”

  “You’re not going to marry my father,” I said.

  Emily looked at me, and I saw all the polite smiles were gone.

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Soon I’ll be the one who gives you an allowance, and believe me, I’m not going to be a pushover like Matt.”

  I realized it went far enough.

  “Did you enjoy your little love fest with your fat boyfriend this morning?” I asked.

  I saw her freeze. She narrowed her eyes, and I saw a vein pulsing on her neck.

  “What are you talking about? I am not going to sit here and listen to you lie about me. I’m sure your father won’t let you talk about me that way either.” She moved to stand up, but I put my hand out and caught her arm to stop her.

  “I saw you this morning at the Nile Hotel.”

  Emily stared at me. She pursed her lips together like she had just eaten something bad. Her eyes narrowed.

  “It’s your word against mine, sweetheart,” she said.

  “Me and my iPhone’s word,” I said, figuring that maybe I could bluff her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I have pictures. Maybe I should just forward them to Dad right now and let you explain why you and your friend were tongue wrestling.”

  “You’re joking.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe you should cancel your wedding plans. I don’t want to see my Dad hurt.”

  “You don’t understand. He was just a friend. Your father won’t understand that. It’s just a business relationship.”

  I saw Dad returning. He probably figured he’d given Emily plenty of time to smooth things over with me. Emily spotted him too. She put that phony toothy smile back on her face.

  “I hope I wasn’t away too long,” he said.

  Dad isn’t that well tuned-in to body language when it comes to people even though he can spot a tiny piece of a bone a mile away at one of his digs.

  “Perfect timing!” Emily said, smiling like she and I were just the best pals in the world.

  We were mostly quiet during the rest of the meal. Dad kept trying to make small talk, and I could see Emily was trying to figure out how to deal with me. I smiled back at her, and I saw her eyes weren’t smiling.

  Dad dropped me off first, and said he would drive Emily home. I wished I could be a fly in the car to hear that conversation. I hoped Emily let him down easy; maybe she would blame me, and she’d say that I needed more time. I did—like a hundred years. I hoped I wouldn’t have to have that talk with him because I knew I would break his heart.

  Chapter Two

  Dad was pretty quiet when I saw him the next morning. I decided to bring up Emily just to see what she told him.

  “Did Emily tell you about our talk?”

  Dad has an unsettling way of looking directly into my eyes in such a way that made it almost impossible for me to lie to him.

  “She did. I understand you need more time. I have to tell you I’m disappointed in you. She’s a terrific woman. I only wish you realized it. I’m willing to wait until Christmas, but that’s about it.”

  “Is she willing to wait until then?” I asked

  Dad nodded. I saw he wasn’t very happy with me. I figured a lot could happen between now and Christmas.

  On Monday, Mister El Haziz drove me to the school. Over the years I’d come to trust this close-lipped man. The University High School was right in the middle of the college’s campus. The Arabic language lab was already filled with students when I arrived. I heard a low murmur of conversation, but the room grew silent when stepped inside. I wished Aasuma were in the class so I would have at least one friend there. My smart friend had placed out of it and was taking an advanced Arabic literature class instead.

  I felt everyone’s eyes on me, but I ignored them. I’d grown used to hostile stares and rude comments and even practiced what I thought were clever responses. Unfortunately, I never can think of them at the right time. I slid into my seat, which is not easy for me because the desks were screwed into the floor. I happened to glance down at my seat and saw a folded piece of paper there with the single word ORCA on it. I opened the note, and my face turned bright red as I absorbed it. Someone had written:

  Too fat to bed

  Too ugly to wed

  Put a bag over your head and hold your breath

  We’ll all be happy to hear of your death

  I felt like throwing up. I wondered how many in the class knew what was written on the note. I heard Taylor’s friend Tiffany laugh; it sounded like something she would write. A few other people laughed now, and I recognized Taylor’s theatrically loud laugh. I then heard her say something in a far deeper voice that caused her friends to laugh even louder.

  Taylor was a skilled ventriloquist in addition to her other talents. She could even sound like an old Egyptian man when it suited her. I turned my attention back to the note. I crumpled it up and threw it at Tiffa
ny.

  “I think this is for you. Someone left it for me by mistake,” I said.

  I glanced over to my right and saw Paul looking at me. He wasn’t laughing like the other kids. I can’t tell you how often I thought of him, but of course he was way out of my league, more like on a different planet. He was Mister Student Body President and Mister Perfect. It should be against the law to be that smart and handsome. Of course his father was rich, too. He looked at me and must have seen something that roused his sympathy because he waved his hand in a gesture that I recognized as an invitation to sit down.

  I thanked Paul and took my seat. He nodded and smiled.

  “Don’t let any of them get to you,” he said.

  I decided that Paul might not be such a bad person even if he were best of friends with Taylor. He was often apologetic for her actions, as well as, the actions of her friends as if he were guilty too just because they were part of the same social set. I remembered the two always didn’t agree. When a wave of anti-Semitism struck the city, Taylor disliked the attacks, but she considered them unimportant since they didn’t affect her personally. Paul had taken my Dad’s position that the slurs were racist and needed to be stopped.

  On most issues though, Paul and Taylor and her group had similar views. I wasn’t surprised when I heard Paul’s father and Tom Thornton were friends. The class pretty much divided into students with lots of money and students on scholarship.

  As long as my father was on the college faculty and taught a class at the school, I didn’t have to pay tuition. Of course, the end was coming very fast. I wondered if Taylor knew since her father was head of the school’s board of directors. I knew she wouldn’t keep it a secret for very long.

  Dad was so quiet last week that I knew something bothered him. I made him his favorite dinner and served his favorite wine. After I saw he had mellowed out, I pressed him until he finally dropped his bombshell. His department Chairman told him there would be cutbacks, and since his research took a turn that the department viewed as non-scholarly, they would not renew his contract at the end of the school year.

  I knew why the department didn’t like Dad’s research. He turned from traditional Egyptian archeology to his obsession with The Emerald Tablets and Atlantis’ influence on early Egyptian civilization. Most of his colleagues thought he was crazy. I knew he was twice as smart as all of them. I had read his notes, and as far-fetched as they sounded, I hadn’t read anything to disprove his theory.

  My least favorite teacher took this opportunity to intrude on my thoughts. Mister Aziz sat on his desk at the front of the room and stared at me.

  “You will be quiet, Miss Hunter, or you will leave my class.” Taylor and Tiffany both laughed once again and this time Aziz looked at Taylor sharply before turning away. He would never criticize his benefactor’s daughter. He then began to hand back homework. He always returned the highest grades first.

  Taylor smiled as he handed her a perfect score. I admit that Taylor’s Arabic is far better than my own, but I still felt the teacher overdid it with his praise of her. Aziz had no advanced degrees, and he came from a poor family with no connections. He depended on Mister Thornton’s support. Aziz returned papers to several Egyptian students, taking a few moments to praise each one.

  The teacher spent several minutes talking with a small, dark boy. Neguib was the son of a diplomat from Yemen. I knew the teacher had a special fondness for him. Sometimes the two ate together in the lunchroom. Neguib often wore tee shirts with militant Islamic sayings. One of his favorites showed a large fist crushing a group of figures identified as Israelis, Americans, and British.

  The other Egyptian students were far lighter in color and were slow to accept the boy. Often I heard them refer to him as samara with obvious distaste. I knew it was the Arabic word for dark-skinned. Dad had drilled into me that Ancient Egyptians once used the word in a loving way and even used it to describe Queen Sheba. Now it was a term that most Egyptians used to describe someone who was clearly inferior. I felt sorry for Neguib. Once I sat down next to him in the lunchroom and tried to start a conversation. He just looked at me as if I were so inferior to him that I was beneath contempt.

  Only after Aziz returned papers to all the Arab students and praised them did he begin returning papers for the western students. I didn’t even glance at my grade as I folded the paper and stuck it in my desk. I knew he would never give me anything higher than or lower than a ‘C’. If he gave me below average grades, Dad would demand an explanation.

  All the non-Egyptian students, with the exception of Taylor, could never earn above average grades as far as Aziz was concerned. He never was satisfied with their accent or their pronunciation. In his mind, pure Egyptian Arabic required a native speaker with one very rare exception.

  I tuned out Professor Aziz. I knew he was unfair, but I also knew my Arabic was passable since I used it every day. Lots of things in life were unfair. Losing my mother when I was born was unfair, as was having a wonderful father who unfortunately never had recovered from the loss of his wife. Having a metabolism that caused me to gain weight no matter what I ate wasn’t fair either.

  When the bell rang, the students moved to Dad’s room. He still had the swagger and the lean but muscular frame of a man who was a living, breathing archeologist. Dad had used modern technology including ground-penetrating radar to find tombs near Cairo in areas that were picked over for decades.

  Many of the students found Professor Matt Hunter’s class in Egyptian history to be very difficult. It was hard to keep all the dynasties straight, let alone understand why they rose and fell. Dad wanted his students to explain historical and cultural trends, rather than memorize facts.

  I knew Dad would never call on me. He told me stories about Egyptian Pharaohs and their struggles as my bedtime stories. I learned to read hieroglyphics shortly after learning to read English. Dad drafted me as his assistant when I was ten. It isn’t an easy job since he is a tough boss who demands perfection.

  I heard Dad begin to talk about a familiar subject and groaned inside. It was almost a joke at the school that Dad was obsessed with the strangest Pharaoh of them all. Egyptian scribes described Akhenaten as having distinctly female features, yet this Pharaoh fathered six daughters.

  Akhenaten tried to destroy the priests and their worship of dozens of animal gods and replace them with a single God or Aten very much like the Jewish or Christian God. The Pharaoh called this God, Ra. I knew my father believed that Akhenaten found a library containing the wisdom of the ancients, the very ones who constructed the first pyramids. This library reportedly contained the original thirteen volumes of the Emerald Tablets. Aristotle mentioned these writings in a letter to Alexander the Great.

  According to some Greek scholars who wrote about Egypt, the Emerald Tablets contained wisdom and secrets going back to a time when the technologically advanced island kingdom of Atlantis ruled the world. After a terrible cataclysm sent the island to the bottom of the ocean, Dad believed that a few survivors made their way to Egypt.

  He believed that these very scientifically advanced survivors helped direct the construction of the first pyramids. He also pointed to pyramids in other parts of the world including Mexico and argued that they also were built based on knowledge from survivors of Atlantis.

  I knew this lecture by heart like a bedtime story. Dad pointed out the water erosion damage to the Sphinx and then told the class that the last time the Giza plateau had that level of water was 10,000 years ago. He pointed out that the pyramids and the Sphinx were aligned with stars which only lined up 10,000 years ago.

  As I told you, I was skeptical at first, but no matter how much I researched the topic, I couldn’t find any other theory that fit the facts so well. Now, I believed almost as strongly as Dad. Of course, the students—especially Taylor—were another story.

  I heard Taylor whispering and making fun of Dad’s obsession. She grew increasingly more disrespectful this term. In a theatrical w
hisper that Dad must have heard, she described the story as something only a drunk could believe.

  I felt as if Taylor had slapped me across my face. I looked over at Aasuma. She looked down at her notebook, clearly too embarrassed to look up. Dad’s face went red. That was not a good sign.

  “That’s quite enough, Miss Thornton. You are to go directly to the Principal’s office. I will join you when the class is over.”

  Taylor stood up and shrugged. Her gesture made it clear to everyone that she felt she was invulnerable. I’d often heard the girl tell her friends that the school needed her father’s money, as well as, his political connections. Likely, she would make sure her father heard how unfair Professor Hunter was.

  As Taylor rose, she stopped and in a stage whisper that the class could hear, told her friend Ashley that Professor Hunter must have heard about the note in Professor Aziz’s class. His dear little daughter must have told him and now he was taking revenge on her because she and Tiffany were friends. Well, he would pay for that. Maybe her father could have him removed. She couldn’t understand why her father always found something nice to say about me.

  I heard every word. I knew I could never win a beauty contest with Taylor. How could you compare someone who was short and fat with average looks to a statuesque blond who was far more developed than the other girls in the class? Taylor also made it known that there had to be something wrong with me since my best friend was an Egyptian.

  I loved Aasuma as much as I could possibly love a sister. It infuriated me to have Taylor act like the girl was inferior because she was Egyptian. Still, I had to admit that I really didn’t have any other friends in the class. Most were very class conscious. I didn’t have money, so I really didn’t count in their eyes. Paul was the only one who ever bothered to smile at me, and I figured he just wanted to make sure I voted for him when he ran for his next office.

  I had a break after Egyptian History. I waited as I watched the students file out because I wanted to say something to Dad before he went to the Principal’s office. Before I could open my mouth, though, I saw a small man wearing a white suit walk through the open door. His carefully brushed gray hair contrasted sharply with his dark black mustache.