Out of Egypt I Called My Father—40 Years After He Left On His Own

My father crawled as best he could, holding out a flashlight that blinded me when I turned to look at him. We moved together and with no one else inside the entry vein of the Red Pyramid of Dahshur, Egypt. As the guards assured us, about a third of the way inside, cheap strip lights appeared every four or five ramp footings, but my nervous father refused to put the flashlight away.

On our way inside, I thought about how my father lied to those two smoking guards in galabayas. We met them hundreds of feet up at the pyramid’s entrance, after they watched us hold each other’s shaky hands to find balance on a thousand ancient, uneven, bannister-less steps. My father handed them our tickets, mine large, color-printed, and priced for a foreigner and his, a narrow slip of paper deeply discounted for locals.

“Where are you from?” they asked him.

“I’m your brother,” he answered them in casual Arabic.

“But you don’t look like you live here, brother,” they said.

They were right. They saw his Costco cargo shorts held up under his belly by a matching belt. His flashy Swiss watch. They saw my father’s gray hair revived by trendy tortoise shell sunglasses, which made the full cool nerd transition into clear lenses under the canopy’s shade and their scrutiny.

“I live here. I live here,” he said in this getup. “I live here and this is my American daughter. She’s visiting me, here, in our country.” He looked down the limestone stairs with great worry that he’d have to turn around and go back down them alone. “I’m only going inside because she wants to go,” he plead his case.

That was enough to earn their pity. They gave us their flashlight and pointers and took a healthy tip.

Even as he scraped his arthritic knees 200 feet down a narrowing tunnel at my demand, I thought about how I wished his lie were true. I wished we lived a world apart and had a relationship of sporadic, pleasant visits. If I lived in New York and he still lived in Egypt, I probably would have been excited about doing guidebook things like this together. I probably would have been excited to see him and spend this time together.

Up until this trip, he was distant when not absent. And whenever he was around, he told me, “No,” because of an explicit philosophy against raising me to hear only, “Yes.” Now, more than thirty years later, he invited himself on what I planned as a solo Egyptian adventure. My mother pushed him and exhausted me into accepting that there was no reason a young woman should go all over Egypt alone while her retired, Arabic-speaking father sat at home doing nothing. I had never spent more than two hours alone with my father. He promised to help me get around on this trip. He promised to say only, “Yes,” for two weeks.

By the dusty halfway mark, I felt guilty for testing his promise as soon as we arrived by asking him to climb in and out of the fourth largest pyramid in Egypt well into his sixties and even better on his way to a double knee replacement. I stopped and considered turning around, but that was a physical impossibility in the tunnel, so we were both committed perhaps against our considered judgment and went on.

My father was still casting unhelpful shadows in front of me with his borrowed flashlight when we tumbled into the pyramid’s main chamber. He put it down when we sat and looked straight up at the vaulted ceiling in a silence that can only be heard under a crushing weight. We stretched our legs and walked together to the second chamber.

My father watched as I climbed the shaky staircase up to the third chamber.

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

“This is far enough for me,” he said. “You go and tell me what you see.”

I left him as he sweat a pungent mix of pride, jealousy, and fear.

I came back down the ping-pong staircase explaining that the third room was the same, though a bit smaller and exploring was limited because the floor was original or destroyed.

“These stairs aren’t as bad as they look, if you go slow. I’ll go back up with you, if you want,” I said.

“Monica, I never, never thought I would step one foot inside this pyramid or any pyramid in my life,” my father said with an accent that made Americans think he wasn’t their brother either. “If you saw everything you want to see, that’s more than enough for me.”

I stopped myself from gloating about making it a level higher. Instead, we sat another minute under the weighted silence. My father and I took our first selfie together after we unwound ourselves at the base of the Red Pyramid, after laughing out our exhaustion and awe and landing heavy high fives in the sun.

Next, he said “yes” to visiting another burial chamber that he hadn’t expected to see in his lifetime—his father’s.

At my request, we toured his childhood house first. A cousin inherited all four stories and renovated bits, leaving the steps my father walked down for the last time when he left his dusty village in tact. I followed him as he walked back up them.

My father spontaneously led the tour, and even its current residents gathered close to hear him and see a new light shining deep into the corners they saw every day. He pointed out where and how he’d sneak in late at night, where he grew a lush rooftop garden, where he first kissed my mother. He paused in front of a kitchen cabinet that, in his day, was the center of the family’s living room.

He remembered out loud that, one summer while he was in college, he went to work in Denmark for four or five months. It was the longest he’d been away from home, so he missed everyone. He came back with a brand new red television set for his parents and 7 siblings.

At that time, many families in Fayoum didn’t have a television at all. There was a town television, in the square down by the waterwheels, where those less fortunate gathered to watch an Oum Kalthoum’s concert on the first Thursday of every month. Although my father’s family was wealthy enough to have a small often-functional black and white set, he was proud to gift them an audacious replacement.

“I put it right here for them,” he said, tapping on the now kitchen counter. “But my father, he didn’t like it. He didn’t even say thank you. He was so, so mad. When he finally spoke to me again, he said, ‘Your mother barely speaks Arabic, and you go and buy her a television that speaks a different language. What is she supposed to do with that?’”

My father shook his head at the memory of being a college kid who knew more about how the world worked than his locally successful father.

Later that afternoon, also at my request, we visited the mausoleum where his parents and aunts and uncles breathed life into a pile of neatly laid bricks. Although he’d never visited before, I suspect my father paid for these crypts, at least in part, out of guilt for staying in America with his work when each of these elders entered.

I stayed back and took pictures of him standing in Costco jeans between his oldest sister and his youngest brother, both of whom had spent their lives in Egypt. He stepped up about 2 inches or so onto the entrance’s platform and got on the tips of his toes to get a deeper view inside the wrought iron doors sealed shut with a padlock wrapped in three or four plastic bags to keep away rust. My father clutched the railing with both hands.

With that tiny step, those 2 inches, my father outdid all the steps I have ever taken and will ever take. When he left for America, still a college kid, he told his mother he’d be home in two or three months. It took him 11 years to return. He left, he took off above his parents’ heads as they sweat that pungent mix of pride, jealousy, and fear. But his father didn’t try to hold a shaky flashlight to help light any part of his way, not one step.

The risks he took, the sacrifices he made, and the promise of my realized privileges brought him to the doorstep of this crypt on my timing. After he built me the foundation of a life that easily took me up to the Red Pyramid’s third chamber, with all the resources and confidence I had to know I could reach it alone, he stood as close as he could to his parents who were now long gone.

Maybe my father got what I thought I wanted. He lived his life in New York, while his father lived in Egypt. But they did not enjoy a relationship of exciting, movie-script vacation reunions. They didn’t do cute touristy activities together. My father craned this tiny bit to see whatever was left for him.

True to his word, my father said “Yes” to a Nile River Cruise, midnight hotel room champagne toasts, floating leisurely in the Red Sea, shopping for Egyptian cotton goods in well-lit tourist-targeting stores with 100 and 500 pound bills that were heavy with the plaque of filthy money. In Sts. Sergius and Bacchus Church in Cairo’s Old Coptic Quarters, we walked single file past the cave ledge where Mary laid Jesus to sleep.

I took my father back to Egypt and all around it, and then we came home.