The Scarab

 

In my curio cabinet, among much more conventionally precious things, there’s a scarab. A palm-sized black beetle, crudely carved in stone.  Made not by the ancients, but by some fellah with a chisel maybe a year before I got it. It’s special due to the circumstances in which I came by it.

In 1981 I traveled the length of Egypt with an English-teacher friend who lived there. We started from her apartment in the dusty, traffic-jammed city of Cairo and made our way by train down to Luxor, where the glorious ancient temples tower in Brobdingnagian splendor above the modern town. Nearby, over the Nile river, lie the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

Luxor has a thriving tourist economy. Exiting the three thousand year old phalanx of ram-headed sphinxes at the temple of Karnak, you come to dozens of tables of tourist bric a brac. Little plaster “faience” eyes of Horus, tiny iron statues of Bast the cat god, or Bes the god of motherhood, piles of copper plates decorated with pyramids and dozens, nay hundreds, of scarabs, the Egyptian beetle that symbolized the power of the cosmos that propels the sun across the sky.

I was just out of college and had no money for these things, most of which had been crudely made by amateurs unschooled in the techniques of the ancients. As I wondered if I should at least buy a lone ushabti – a little figure of a mummy, often placed in tombs to do the scut work in the afterlife the deceased himself would not wish to concern himself with – a large man came up to us. Dressed in a galebeya, the loose robe that Egyptian men wear over their clothes and a turban wrapped from a long woolen scarf, he greeted us with a bellow: “Hey, English ladies!”

My first thought was to run before whatever sting operation he was fronting could trap us. Mandy, with all her 300 words of Arabic, was more sociable.  “Sabakhayr,” she said, the word she thought meant hello.

We got to talking. He loved tourists. He loved the English. He wanted to be our friend. He was a big cheese here in Luxor, he said. “Look,” he said, “They listen to me.” He moved between the hucksters’ tables grabbing items. Ushabtis, scarabs, cats, eyes. He handed me half a dozen. He tried to fill Mandy’s purse with more.

She declined. “Thanks, but I can’t carry all that back to Cairo,” she said, laughing.

“You live in Cairo? Me too!” he boomed.  “I have to go, but come and see me when you get back home.” He wrote his Cairo address on a piece of paper, Western letters, the numbers in the Egyptian forms.

Mandy wanted to go. Naturally, I was against it. Mandy won. We went to his apartment the next week. He pulled out all the stops on hospitality. His family were there, selecting the music and trying out their English. He had food and – illegally – he had beer.

“You want to dance?” We shook our heads, laughing. “Come on, you want to learn to belly dance?” he said. We shook our heads again. “I will belly dance!” he said, stood up and began to sway to the music. He was not wearing the galebeya he had worn in Luxor, but trousers and a shirt. He was a stout man, shaped like an oak trunk, but he danced lightly, with feeling.  We clapped along with the music.

Someone passed him a beer bottle. He stopped dancing for a moment, drank a little beer, and then to our utter astonishment, unwrapped his turban, threw the scarf over a chair, balanced the bottle on his head and began to dance again to the cheers of his family and friends.

Whenever I take that scarab beetle out of the curio cabinet, I’m once again transported to that bare-bulb apartment and the Egyptian man who took off his turban and danced.