Sean Horan (no relation) from Belfast told me in the faculty cafeteria that he is not negotiating with the Libyan military to buy weapons for the IRA and that Dr. Ghanim had a telegram for me. Horan said he had just met Ghanim, our department head, in the parking lot. I was surprised. Not by my namesake being here on IRA business. He worked that into every conversation. And not by the telegram. In 1979 that was the only practical way for the outside world to reach someone in Libya. There were no e-mails, of course. Nor were there fax machines or even phones at the University of al-Fateh, named after the revolution that put Colonel Muammar Qadhafi in power. And the postal system was a black hole that sucked mail into an alternative universe.
But I counted the deplorable communications system a blessing. Patrick had not taken the divorce well, and before I left New York he had done a good job of convincing me that he would kill me if I did not take him back. The relief was temporary -- I would go home again eventually. But I was glad for the respite from the daily threats and hoped that my prolonged absence would dampen the fires of Patrick’s obsession.
What surprised me was Horan’s campus encounter with Dr. Ghanim. No one had seen Ghanim on campus since the beginning of the semester when he assigned courses without saying where or when the classes met. I wandered the dark corridors of the university for weeks looking for mine before giving up and settling into an uneasy torpor.
I had two off-campus Ghanim encounters since then -- once, I saw him duck into an alley leading to the Tripoli Medina, the old town. I shouted his name and ran after him, but he had too big a lead and got away. As I bent over to catch my breath, a group of teenaged boys surrounded me. They laughed and chanted something that I did not understand. One of them grabbed my ass, and I ran from the alley in tears. For days I was certain that my ex had arranged the ambush. Slowly, however, I felt a hardness coating the emptiness in my chest.
The second time I bagged Ghanim at a spice stall in the souq, a warren of shops and open air markets. He said we would talk on campus the next day and that he was on his way to a meeting, but I stood my ground. When he tried to slip around me, I grabbed his wrist and said that I could not find my classes. He tried to shake me off, but mine was the grip of a desperate woman, and he could not pry my hand loose.
“How do I find my classes?” I said.
“You don’t,” he said. “And now I must leave for the very big important meeting.”
“Then how am I supposed to teach?”
“Classes are optional here. Especially English classes. You must not be so inflexible about our ways. Now let me go.” He turned his body into a bag of jello and sagged away from me like a two year old having a tantrum, but I held onto his wrist.
“Are you saying that I should meet with my students individually?”
“A woman cannot meet with male students alone. Are you that stupid? And why
do you dress like a whore?”
The whore comment disoriented me -- I was wearing flats, a formless black calf-length dress and a black sun hat at the time -- and in that instant he escaped.
* * *
So when I heard Horan had seen Ghanim on campus, I set out to track my boss down and retrieve my telegram. I knew he would not be in his office, but I had heard a rumor that he had a room in a vacant student dorm. He sounded shocked when I found him there. He would not let me in, so we spoke through the door.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I understand you have a telegram for me.”
“Go away. I am in the middle of an important meeting and cannot talk right now.”
“Sure. Where is my telegram?”
“You should talk to the school mail room, not me,” he said. He was scurrying around inside the room, his voice rising and falling as he moved.
* * *
I fell for the mail room dodge once before when I tried to find a box of books that I had mailed to myself, as Ghanim had suggested, before I left New York. The closest I got to my books was a grizzled haji, an honorific given to those who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca as all Muslims must do at least once if they are healthy and wealthy enough. I found him drinking a glass of mint tea in a campus room that had rows of mail slots and piles of mail stacked against the walls of the room. But the haji said that the mail room that he was sitting in was mahfeesh, meaning it is no more, does not exist, is gone, goodbye. The best place to look for my package would be the post office in Tripoli, the haji said, but he warned me about going there by myself.
“You foreign women have no sense of decency,” he said with the smug certainty that comes from saying such things without being slapped.
And when I let slip that the package contained books, he said I had better forget about them. Books were trouble in Libya, especially English books. My books were mahfeesh, the haji said. I thought I saw my carton in a pile of boxes in the back, but the haji would not allow me back there, and he refused to look himself. When I lost my temper, he seemed pleased.
* * *
“Look,” I tried to reason with Ghanim. “Just tell me where the telegram is and I’ll leave you alone.”
“I don’t know. Try the British embassy. Go away now. I am preparing for my meeting.”
“Why would I go there? I’m not British.”
“Someone may have sent it there by mistake. Now I must ask you to leave.”
“I am not leaving until I find out where my telegram is.”
“I sent it to the British embassy, I am telling you that. If you want the telegram, you should go to there now before they destroy it.”
“Why did you send it there? You know I’m American.”
“I must have had you confused with the other Horan. Now go away.”
“Did you read it? I don’t care if you did. I just want to know what it said.”
“I don’t recall,” he said, “but you have my condolences.” My heart shriveled, and I leaned my head against the door. My sister had made a full recovery from breast cancer the year before, or so we thought -- I was certain now that she had relapsed. I heard a window opening in the room and remembered that we were on the first floor. Ghanim was mahfeesh when I got outside, but he left the window unlocked. I climbed inside and found a stack of magazines featuring bloodcurdlingly violent pornography in the closet. There was a cigarette lighter on a desk, and I used it set fire to the stack of horror without the voice inside that usually quashed such impulses saying a word.
I made it to the British embassy, a white building rising out of gated olive groves. by noon. An Arab man in the traditional Libyan galabiyya, white linen pants and matching long sleeved shirt that ended at the knees, crouched against the black wrought iron gate outside the grounds and greeted me with a mumbled salam ‘alekum, peace be upon you. I salam ‘alekumed right back at him. In my early thirties at the time, I had not turned heads in New York, even before adding thirty pounds of divorce fat, but in Tripoli I was a femme fatale. I had become accustomed to dealing with men on the streets who behaved as though they were alone with a life-sized centerfold photo in Penthouse. So the crouching man’s casual greeting was refreshing.
“It’s not open today,” he said in English. “Perhaps I can give you a lift back to your flat.”
“No, thank you.” There was not a chance in hell I was getting into a car with a strange man. I noticed a sign above his head with the embassy hours on it.
“The sign says the embassy is open now,” I told him. “What makes you think it’s closed?”
“Oh, you did not understand me. I said that this entrance is closed today,” he said. “But you can get in the back door. I will take you there, professor.”
“How do you know I’m a teacher?”
“It’s the way you dress that gives it away.” He tossed his cigarette butt into the street and turned his head to stare at me. “What is the word – provocative, I think you say.”
I was wearing a sexy ankle-length skirt and a loose long-sleeved black sweater with a crew neckline. I tried the gate but it was locked.
“You don’t trust me, professor. I am hurt.”
There was an intercom on a stone pillar beside the gate. A walkway meandered through a grove of olive trees from the gate to the embassy door about twenty yards away. I could not see a guard or any one else inside the gate. If I went in with the crouching man at my heels, I might not make it to the front door. But I tried the intercom anyway. A live human being answered and buzzed the gate door. The crouching man got up to follow, but I slammed the gate in his face.
“Would you open the door please,” he said. It was not a question, and I saw he had something in his hand that could have been a folding knife. I sprinted for the embassy door.
Inside, a thick-necked, blonde soldier pointed me down a corridor and then sat down at his desk with the air of a man who has done his duty for the day. At the end of the corridor, an Arab man sat behind the counter dressed in a tattered blue and white seersucker suit and read the Toronto Star. A man crouched in front of the counter read the International Herald Tribune. Both men had cigarettes in their mouths as did a half dozen other men who walked around the room with their hands behind their backs. The absence of women no longer surprised me.
I told the clerk that I had come to pick up my telegram. He mumbled something in Arabic without looking up from his paper. I did not understand what he had said and asked if he spoke English. The crouching man said “he asks if you are a British citizen.”
“No, I am American. But he has an urgent telegram for me. I have come to collect it.”
“He cannot help you because you are not British,” the translator said.
“But this has nothing to do with my nationality. I just want my telegram.”
“He says he understands,” the translator said before the clerk responded. “He also wonders whether your husband knows you are out alone and whether he saw you leave the house dressed like that.”
I counted to ten before replying. “Look, could he do me the great favor of looking for my telegram?”
“He appreciates your position,” the translator said, “but it is hard for him to make an exception, for reasons that he is sure you understand.” The clerk added something in Arabic. “He also wonders,” the translator said, “if you are a whore because he may know someone who is in need of your services if you are.”
I looked around and saw that the crowd was enjoying the let’s screw with the American woman’s head game.
“I am not a whore, although I look forward to reporting to this man’s supervisor that he has called me one,” I told the translator. “You wouldn’t know anything about a telegram addressed to Catherine Horan would you?”
“You are Professor Horan,” the clerk said, “the English teacher from the university? Did you know that a telegram for you was sent here?”
“Where is my telegram?” I shouted, and all movement in the room stopped for a long moment as though time itself had frozen in shock at the behavior of this foreign woman.
When time resumed, the crouching translator shrugged as though he had lost interest in the conversation. The clerk slipped out a door behind him and returned a few seconds later with a pink skinned Brit dressed in a blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt and a club tie who introduced himself as Mark Blair.
“Can I help you?” Blair said. “I understand you’re looking for a telegram.”
“Yes, that’s right. My name is Catherine Horan. I understand you have a telegram for me.”
“Horan? Are you with that IRA bastard from Northern Ireland?” Blair drew back as though I had just sprouted bubonic plague blisters.
“No. We share the same last name, but we are not related. Does your clerk call all western woman whores?” I said.
“Oh, I am sorry if you were insulted. But you have to understand the Arab culture if you want to live here,” he said. “An unescorted western woman is fair game, I am afraid.”
“Have you always been this stupid or were you dropped on your head recently? You’re saying I’m ‘fair game’ if I venture outside by myself? Is that the position of the British ambassador as well?
“No need to be rude,” Blair said. “And I don’t have your bloody telegram. I sent it to the American embassy after a Dr. Ghanim at the university sent it here for some reason. Good day.” He walked back to the counter where he had a good laugh with the clerk.
I walked away in silence composing the letter I would send to the ambassador.
“It is a very sad thing,” the crouching translator said.
“What is?”
“You have my condolences.”
“I take it you read my telegram. Can you tell me what it said?”
“No. I cannot say,” he said. “Anyway, I speak English but I can’t read a word of it,” he said as he turned a page of the International Herald Tribune.
When I got back to the main entrance, I asked the guard if there were another way out, but then I stopped. I was through running away. I went out the way I entered. The same man was crouching there, but he did not look up when I passed.
The American embassy had the telegram. It was from my loving ex, Patrick. He quoted a New York Post article about a Brooklyn woman murdered by her former husband and added that he would be waiting for me whenever I returned. Patrick’s creepy telegram did not frighten me. If anything, I felt relieved that my sister had not had a relapse. I was glad I had the telegram to bolster the records I had kept of Patrick’s prior threats. It was time to go home, to go to the police, to fight back. He had driven me into exile in a strange land, and I knew now that no matter where I went or how much time passed, he would be waiting for me when I returned. My brother had given me a pistol for my protection that I had locked away in a storage facility on the West Side. That would be my first stop when I returned.
On the way back to campus, the soft evening sun bathed the stone walls of the city in a creamy light. Scents of cumin, orange blossoms and sea salt flavored the air. The recorded chant of a mu'adh-dhin, calling the people to the mid-afternoon prayer wafted over the streets from the minaret of a nearby mosque. As the call wound down, I turned a corner and came upon a group of teenaged boys kicking a ball around a vacant lot strewn with rocks and garbage. When I crossed the street to avoid them, a small rock hit me in the back and others bounced all around me. The boys were stoning me without much enthusiasm. I picked up a rock, hurled it back and hit one of them in the neck. A lucky shot but that did not stop a thrill of triumph passing down my spine. We glared at each other while the boy – who seemed to grow larger and older as I stared at him -- rubbed his neck. An Arab woman and an older man walked up from behind me and broke the spell. The woman was dressed in the traditional head scarf, veil and loose dark robes. She shouted something at the boys who dispersed.
“Shukran,” I said to her. Shukran gazeelan.” Thank you, thank you very much. I felt a warm sense of solidarity with this woman who had crossed over cultural lines to protect me.
“Well, really,” the older man said in Oxford English. “What do you expect to happen when you walk around without an escort dressed like a whore? You should cover your face if you want to be treated like a woman.”
“I would prefer to be treated like a man,” I said. “And where I come from, this is what happens when you call a woman a whore.” I slapped him in the face with a satisfying crack. The woman giggled, and the man went goggle-eyed while I watched the imprint of my hand redden on his cheek. He reared back as though to punch me, but the woman grabbed his arms. “Shukran,” she said to me. “Shukran gazeelan.” I stood my ground while she pulled the sputtering man down the sidewalk.
The next morning I bulled past the haji in the campus mail room and grabbed my box of books with one arm while fending him off with the other. A small crowd gathered outside the mailroom attracted by the haji’s shouting, and when they saw me escape with the box, they stormed the mailroom. I watched for a few minutes, enjoying the enraged haji’s futile attempts to beat them back; then I headed out to the airport for the next flight back to New York.
