Picture in the sand, p.31
Picture in the Sand,
p.31
For a time, she even considered exchanging her own faith for mine. She learned verses from the Holy Koran so we could communicate in code, began to dress like a proper Muslim wife in burka and hijabs; and then, after her father passed, she changed her name from Mona to Amina. But in the end, she retained the faith she was born into and attended weekly Coptic services until the day she died.
Perhaps it was true, what she had said when we were both younger: she had always been in search of a purpose that she could open her heart to. She had chosen me, and this was a miracle even greater than the parting of the Red Sea.
She was your grandmother, and I loved her very much.
On that day, she put her arm around me and helped me limp from the taxi into the building where she’d found an apartment for us. It made no sense, except as an act of faith. I was a half-blind former movie critic and chauffeur with a prison record and no immediate job prospects. Yet she acted like I was as wealthy as the Aga Khan. Maybe it was because she knew I needed her so badly that she agreed to join her destiny to mine. The stairway smelled of urine and fruit-flavored tobacco as we ascended to the third floor. She left me to rest against a banister and get my bearings as she opened the apartment door.
There was no furniture inside, just a prayer rug and a golf bag she’d rescued from my father’s home, four candles, a Koran, and an old mattress on the floor. I didn’t even have a copy of the silly little student film I’d made in eight millimeter. But now a slant of sunlight angled through an open window, and as I heard the chanting of the muezzin from a nearby minaret, dust specks revolved within the shaft in a way that reminded me of the beam from the projectionist’s booth on those Metro matinees. And quite unexpectedly, an old, half-forgotten melody stirred in the back of my mind. See the pyramids along the Nile.…
“God has smiled upon me,” I said.
“God is always smiling. Even when we go astray.”
“But today, he is smiling a lot.”
So this was my Hollywood ending. In a dirty little unfurnished apartment that cost fifty dollars a month, with squeaky plumbing in the bathroom and neighbors arguing loudly upstairs.
We would be married for twenty-seven years. We would live in Cairo for another six months and then move to France, where she still had citizenship because of her mother. Then God would soften the hearts of the immigration officials and make it possible for us finally to come to the United States, where she had a cousin in New Jersey. Then he granted an even greater miracle and allowed her to become pregnant when she was forty-one years old. She gave birth to your father at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and lived to see her first grandchild be born as a full-fledged American. I know you were too young to remember her, but she was the finest of women and the shining star of my life.
She waited up for me every night with a cup of tea when I came home late from driving the taxicab with a special license the New York Department of Motor Vehicles granted me for my one eye and the medallion I bought with three other Egyptians a year after I came to America. Then she worked out our finances so we could buy my partners out in 1985 and then sell that medallion for $100,000, which we then used as a down payment for a broken-down Esso gas station on Bay Ridge Parkway. Then she worked beside me at the register seven nights a week, behind a bulletproof glass partition, selling gasoline and lottery cards in her hijab, until we turned the corner, paid off the mortgage on the property, and then earned enough to buy our family our first real home on Colonial Road, made of solid red brick, where it was my joy and blessing to see you come home and grow. So after all those years, we made it over the rainbow and made a small American success of ourselves.
And every Easter, we would watch The Ten Commandments together when it was shown on TV. We’d laugh about Yul Brynner and his cigarettes, and Chuck with his beard, and we’d marvel at the beauty of Miss Yvonne De Carlo and Miss Anne Baxter and the parting of the Red Sea. These days, I imagine young people might find the special effects dated and some of the dialogue painful. But it was part of our lives. Every year, we would pretend that we could spot ourselves finding each other among the cast of thousands, which was as close as we’d ever come to having our stars embedded in the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.
God took her from me in 1998. Many things happened after that. Some were almost as wondrous as the life I’d had with her. Some, like the day the Towers fell, were as heavy as bricks on the other side of the scale. But I’ve tried to live as if my heart were as light as a feather. Not every prayer was answered. And I still miss that woman every hour of every day. But I do not regret anything—not losing an eye, not failing to escape during the fires, not even the seventeen years of my life spent in prison, when I consider that beam coming through that sooty window and the path it illuminated through the long corridor of decades.
“Do you want to pray and give thanks?” Your grandmother pointed to the rug she’d spread before the window.
“No.” I shook my head and pointed to the mattress. “I would like to lie with you. I have waited a very long time for this.”
EPILOGUE
September 8, 2015
To: GrandpaAli71@aol.com
cc: Bayridgemama475@gmail.com
From: Alexisfire475@gmail.com
Grandpa,
I don’t know if you’ll be able to receive this message directly, so I’ve sent a copy to Mom so that she can read it out loud to you.
I’m on my way home, writing on the laptop of Ms. Schulman, with the FBI agents looking over my shoulder. A lot more has happened since I last wrote. I’m not the same as I was when I left. But I’m not the same as I was when I was over there either.
If anyone would get it, you might. I had to agree to confess everything I’ve been involved with to my handlers over here in Turkey, as part of the deal to get me home. I’m telling them about some of the things my unit wanted to do to people and places in the United States. I’m trying not to feel too bad, because now I know you and my grandmother did some of the same things and had to make statements of your own. Which made it a little easier for me to make a U-turn.
I know it’s not going to be easy to convince everyone that I’m on the right side of the road now. I will definitely have some explaining to do, especially to Tyler’s parents—even though I tried to help their son.
The agents seem pretty skeptical, so Ms. Schulman says I’m probably looking at a sentence of at least eight or nine years in a federal facility. Which means I won’t get out until I’m close to thirty, but then again it’s only about half as much time as you did.
In exchange for signing the cooperation agreement, and because you’re housebound, Mr. Foxworth, the special agent in charge, says that he’ll write a letter requesting that I get one supervised home visit every two weeks until I start my bid.
So please hang on a little longer for me. I know it’s taken me a while to come around, but I’m getting there.
Thanks,
Alex
September 9, 2015
To: Alexisfire475@gmail.com
From: Bayridgemama475@gmail.com
Alex,
Your grandfather says he’ll have the kushari ready and warm seats waiting for you and your handlers on the couch. He hopes that you all like mixed spices and movies long enough to have intermissions.
Love,
Mom
HISTORICAL NOTE
Picture in the Sand is a work of fiction, and most of its main characters are figments of the author’s imagination. As always, the mistakes and distortions, intentional and otherwise, are my exclusive property as well.
The background borrows heavily from historical accounts.
In the fall of 1954, Cecil B. DeMille brought the production of The Ten Commandments to Egypt to shoot several key sequences in the desert fifteen miles outside Cairo. There had been preliminary discussions with King Farouk about making accommodations to film in Egypt. But by the time a script was ready and the production was travel worthy, the situation had changed drastically in the Middle East.
Six years earlier, Egypt had been at war with the newly declared state of Israel. Its ill-equipped army was soundly defeated, and much of the blame was directed at King Farouk. In 1952, frustrations about the king and the British occupation of Egypt came to a head. A group known as the Free Officers from the Egyptian army, with support from members of the Muslim Brotherhood, staged a coup and forced Farouk to abdicate. General Mohammed Naguib became Egypt’s new leader, even though Gamal Abdel Nasser, a young lieutenant colonel, had been the true driving force.
DeMille then struck a deal with Naguib that allowed him to film outside Cairo, using two hundred cavalry officers and their horses to play the pharaoh’s army, and borrowing twelve decommissioned air force planes to use as wind machines. In exchange, DeMille agreed to produce a short documentary film about contemporary Egypt and its revolutionary achievements, for the new government to use as it saw fit.
However, things had changed yet again by the time DeMille’s ship reached the Port of Alexandria. Naguib and Nasser had become enmeshed in a power struggle, with Nasser emerging as the eventual victor. He met with DeMille and Henry Wilcoxon and agreed to honor the agreements the filmmakers had made with his predecessor.
At the same time, Nasser was dealing with serious issues. Tensions were still high with Israel. Right before DeMille came, thirteen young Egyptian Jews were arrested in the Lavon Affair, which involved spying and acts of sabotage in Cairo and Alexandria. Simultaneously, the Muslim Brothers, who had been more closely aligned with Naguib, were becoming increasingly disillusioned with Nasser’s failure to make shariah, law based on Islam, Egypt’s governing principle. The Brothers’ “secret apparatus” hatched a conspiracy to bring down Nasser. The plans included the bombing of roads and bridges and an assassination attempt made against Nasser during a speech in Alexandria. As depicted in the novel, that attempt failed, and newspaper stories the next day mused that the effort had looked so staged that “some people wonder if Cecil B. DeMille came to Egypt to direct the eight bullets, not the Ten Commandments.” A major crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood resulted, with hundreds of members imprisoned, tortured, and in several cases put to death. Many historians say the rise of radical Islam, al-Qaeda, and ISIS began in this period.
As in the novel, members of the Jewish spy ring were imprisoned at the same time and in the same facility as the Muslim Brothers. But, according to some accounts, these two groups reached a truce after a Jewish inmate refused guards’ orders to discipline a Muslim Brother by beating him and was, in turn, beaten himself.
The character of Dr. Sabri is also based on historical record. After World War II, a number of Nazi doctors and officials were able to immigrate to Egypt. One of the most prominent was Aribert Heim, also known as “Dr. Death,” a member of the Waffen-SS, who killed hundreds at the Mauthausen concentration camp before going to Cairo and living under a false Egyptian identity until his death in 1992.
The Brotherhood’s plot against The Ten Commandments is a fictional invention, as far as the author knows. It is true, however, that DeMille suffered a major heart attack while directing the Exodus sequence in the Egyptian desert. He managed to climb down 110 feet from the gates of Per-Rameses, and after a period of convalescence was able to return to Hollywood and complete filming on the studio lot, including aspects of the famous parting of the Red Sea sequence that were combined with footage shot in Egypt.
The Ten Commandments was a major worldwide success and won an Oscar in 1956 for Best Special Effects. But it did not win an award for Best Director. It has become a holiday tradition to broadcast it on national television every year around Easter and Passover.
Cecil B. DeMille died on January 21, 1959. The Ten Commandments was his final film.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank:
Lawrence Wright, Raymond Stock, Samir W. Rafaat, Mona Serageldin, Mahmoud Sabet, Jeff Osborne, Belal Fadl, Khaled Gabry, Amr Gabry, Ahmed Gabry, Ahmed Seddik, James D’Arc, Tawfik Sola, Pierre Cachia, Mahmoud Tawfik, Mona Tawfik, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Nina Foch, Haroon Moghul, Tarek Lofty, Gamal Al-Bana, Frank G. Wisner, Arthur Levitt, Peter Bloom, Harold (Smoky) Simon, Elizabeth Keyishian, Kevin Brownlow, Patrick Stansbury, Helen Cohen, Ashraf M. Mobariz, Lawrence Schoenbach, Andrew Patel, Dan Morrison, Naguib Mahfouz, Dr. Nabil Farouk, Maurice Yenni, Katherine Orrison, Mickey Moore, Jim Voorhees, Jeanine Basinger, Francis Ricciardone, Jeffrey Wells, Helen Lovejoy, Stuart Friedland, Barbara Friedland, Alan Weisman, Gabriel Cohen, Fraser Heston, Marisa Silver, George Hagen, Ali Salem, Peg Tyre, Loren Janes, Barbara Hall, Albert Maysles, D. A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Robert Drew, Jack Garfein, Lofti Sherief, Julie Martin, George C. Stoney, Ellen Lippman, Philippa Gordon, Kendall Rose Storey, Eric Pooley, Laura Sanchez, Peter Herbst, Madeline Houpt, Tom Straw, and Angela Cheng Caplan.
I would like to give special thanks to Joanne Gruber for her editorial help in combatting ungrammatical insurgencies. John Ragheb went above and beyond in sharing his insights and showing me around Cairo, especially during the Arab Spring. John was also kind enough to read the manuscript to try to correct my many errors of fact and interpretation.
Finally, I want to thank Cecilia Presley and Joe Harper, Cecil B. DeMille’s grandchildren, for their patience, their insights, and their willingness to share memories of their time in Egypt during the filming of The Ten Commandments. This book would not exist without their participation.
ALSO BY PETER BLAUNER
Sunrise Highway
Proving Ground
Slipping Into Darkness
The Last Good Day
Man of the Hour
The Intruder
Casino Moon
Slow Motion Riot
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER BLAUNER is an Edgar Award−winning, New York Times bestselling author of eight other novels, including Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder. His books have been translated into twenty languages. Picture in the Sand is the culmination of two decades of writing and research that took him from Brooklyn to Hollywood to Cairo a half dozen times. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Historical Note
Acknowledgments
Also by Peter Blauner
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
PICTURE IN THE SAND. Copyright © 2023 by Peter Blauner. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover art: man looking across desert © Mohamad Itani / Trevillion; woman © AleksZ Photo / Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Blauner, Peter, author.
Title: Picture in the sand / Peter Blauner.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Minotaur Books, 2023. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022042896 | ISBN 9781250851017 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250851024 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3552.L3936 P53 2023 | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20220909
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042896
eISBN 9781250851024
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First Edition: 2023
Peter Blauner, Picture in the Sand
