Death in the Desert: A Story that Demanded Telling

Today the sharp-toothed smile rarely leaves his face. A 38-year-old ball of energy, he begins the day as the sun rises over his self-built desert abode, tending his garden, his camels, and his goats.

“I love every grain of sand” he says as he lets a hand-full flow through his fingers. “Egypt is my country and Sinai is my heart, how could I ever leave it? You know sometimes I’m afraid to sleep because I think I will miss something!”

He stands about 5’8”, muscular and tan. His speckled gray stubble and a few laughing wrinkles betray his otherwise youthful physic. Today he looks more like Gandhi than Ahmed; a delicate thin skirt of Bedouin patterns and colors reaches his ankles topped by a long sleeved white cotton tunic and his trademark bare feet. “I would fall over in shoes!” he once told me. He is the image of a free spirit. Only upon digging just below the surface did I learn the trials of his past. 

I imagine him much the same twenty years ago, though I know the head that he keeps bald now was rampant with a reckless black mien, but those laughing lines surely must have come with him out of the womb. He was a guide then too, a safari diver with a speed boat parked on the Island of Tiran just between Egypt and Saudi. Tiran was a staple then, the Mecca of the diving world and there he worked, plunging into the crystal waters eight months out of the year. As the God’s of ancient Egypt held the key to eternal life dangling for the pharos passing into the next realm, he held the key to the water, to the bright corals beneath the surface of the red sea. Each morning he would drive his boat without caution or pace right up on to the shores of Sinai to pick up his incoming tourists.

 “I loved the speed, I would drive onto the sand, nobody was watching, the coast was mine in those days.”

It was in this way that he met Yana.

“Her skin was so pale and beautiful it blended right into the sand. Even her voice as she screamed at me, “You idiot you almost killed me!” was beautiful,” he says laughing. “I loved her instantly.

Two weeks later they were married.

They were eighteen-years-old, she a young Russian beauty on vacation and he a Muslim Egyptian addicted to his earth.

“My friends looked at me every day and they would say, “Ahmed, today you look even happier than yesterday, but tomorrow we know for sure you will somehow look happier than today. It is Yana, we know.””

They lived together on that small island between Egypt and Saudi for two years. In the cradle of the Red Sea, they grew together entwined and safe in the world they had created for one another. Away from the politics and rivalries of Cairo, they ignored the world that would have torn them apart because of their differences.

“One day out of nowhere, I started getting calls on my mobile,” he says. “Ten, twenty, thirty calls at once. It was Yana’s mother. She worked for the Russian government in the province of Karelia, something like what you call…The Central Intelligence. She wanted Yana home. She screamed, “Ahmed, you’ve done something to her, you’ve kidnapped her, she was supposed to come home after two weeks. What have you done to her?””

“I didn’t understand” he tells me, “I told her, what are you talking about, we are married, we live together, we’re in love, I turned to Yana, “Yana what have you told your family about me?””

“Only normal things darling,” Yana says. “Please believe me. But my mother, she is crazy with missing me. She makes things up in her head to explain my being here so long. She hates you because I have stayed with you. I have tried to reason with her for two years. I tell her to come here and see our life together and meet you, my husband! But she won’t see it no matter what I say.”

Soon after, Yana’s mother arrived on the Sinai Peninsula with every conceivable government documentation she could get hold of.

“I didn’t understand the documents,” Ahmed tells me, “but in the end they didn’t matter because Yana was in Egypt and legally married. No Russian document could change that and her mother knew it.”

In the end she pleaded with the couple, offering them their own palatial house in Russia with servants and endless amounts of money.

“She says to me, Ahmed, you won’t need anything, you want water, you push a button and servants will bring it to you, you two will have every luxury, just come to Russia.”

“But that’s not me” Ahmed cried. “My work is my happiness; my heart is this country, the sand and the sea. Take me away from Egypt and I am a fish out of water, this land is my air, I will die without it.”

And so Yana’s mother left, defeated and another year passed before they received another phone call. It was a Wednesday morning and the still happily married pair were sound asleep.

Yana’s mother was extremly ill, the doctors gave her one month and Yana had to go say goodbye. “Come with me darling,” she pleaded, “I need you there.”

“Of course, I just have to finish certifying this last group of divers and I will be there, you know this.”

So she went.

Two weeks passed with no word from Yana. Terrified, Ahmed flew to Russia, leaving everything to find his wife. He was arrested and detained in the Karelia airport, and by a mysterious governmental decree he was deported.

“I called and called, every number I could think of, Yana’s phone was disconnected and I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of Russian boarders without being arrested.”

The distraught young Egyptian received another phone call three weeks later. On the opposite end was a soft-spoken Russian woman…her English came in short bursts as she spoke quickly in a nearly inaudible whisper. 

It was Yana’s childhood nanny.

“I knew it had to be the nanny” Ahmed says, “Yana talked about her more than she talked about her mother, it was she who raised her, she was more like a mother to Yana than anyone else.”

“Yana is here,” the nanny said. “Her mother has her locked up in a room, with no communication.”

“Her mother is alive?” he asked.

“She was never ill Ahmed.”

And all at once, a door opened, and Ahmed could hear angry voices on the other end, the phone clicked off leaving him with nothing but a dial tone.

The desert stars grow brighter as the fire ambers begin to burn out. We are on a cliff in park Nabq, the moon has not yet risen so each constellation is clearly visible interrupted only by the occasional dying ball of flame silently streaking across the black night. Lights are visible in the distance that I hadn’t noticed when Ahmed began his tale. He points to the distant glow that has caught my gaze.

“That is Tiran Island, and just beyond it the west bank of Saudi Arabia. That’s where I met my Yana.”

Beyond his finger the silhouette of a camel meanders its way though the nearby dunes, and all is silent save for its laborious footsteps through the sand.

“I was broken…completely helpless” Ahmed continued. “I couldn’t get into Russia, I couldn’t call her, I didn’t have any high ranking government friends that could help me. I had nothing. Another two months passed before the nanny called me again. Her voice was muffled as if she was speaking from a closet.”

“Yana has stopped speaking and she refuses food. They’ve moved her to the hospital…to inject the nutrients,” said the nanny.

“I pleaded with her to find a way to let me talk to Yana; if she could just hear my voice…I thought I could fix it. I was able to talk to her just three times through the secret phone calls from the nanny. I pleaded with her to eat, I told her I’d find a way for us to be together. But she was broken, just like me, and she knew these were only words. Her mother was blind, and refused to see what she was doing to her daughter.”

He fell silent.

“My Yana layed in the hospital like that for two years, broken, refusing words and food…and then, she died.”

Ahmed pokes at the charred wood as his eyes glaze over. Like a faithful Muslim; he looks out toward the pitch black sea and says, “It was God’s will I suppose.”