“I know what. Let’s take Asher to see the belly-dancers,” Aurora said.

12

We left the restaurant and took a taxi downtown. It was cold. Aurora bundled into her fur coat. I was assured that going after a nice dinner to see the belly-dancers would be fun. They were very special belly-dancers. The real thing. I could not remember Eighth Avenue being quite this dark. Winter always made the city seem darker. The cab driver knew where the Alexandrian Gardens was. It turned out to be a dilapidated three-story building.

I paid the cab and tipped the driver. A neon sign flashed in the darkness. We went up a flight of stairs. The walls were painted a diseased green. The stairs were uncarpeted.

It was early and the first show of the evening would not start for twenty minutes. We checked our coats. The proprietor, in a dark suit, with a white carnation in his lapel, short, stocky, with a gleam of oil to him, led us to a small table. We were close to the musicians’ stand. The place was not big. A bar was in the rear. I looked at the murals painted on the wall. I looked at the palm trees. The palm trees were papier-maché. The tablecloths were less than a spotless white. Lamps, of the sort found on old horse carriages, hung among the palm fronds.

Allah Akbar, I thought. In the tents of my fathers there are many tourists.

I leaned forward to Michael.

“Would you call those murals the real thing?” I said.

He was sitting, slumped down again, his legs crossed, his feet extending onto the dance floor.

“Why?”

The murals showed a painted Sahara. A peeling oasis. A camel that would never make it across a vacant lot. I looked from the murals to the sad palms. Then at the boy.

“But it’s all fake.”

“Of course.”

Aurora (the tempura could not yet have been digested) had ordered goat’s cheese and olives. The brandy came in minute jiggers.

They smiled at me (she, nibbling the olives, breaking the small coarse loaf of bread) as though I had hardly said anything they did not expect me to say. It was a tourist trap; it was a clip joint. It did not seem to bother Michael or the girl. Rather, they seemed quite contented, waiting for the dancers, as though all of it somehow (my mild irony about the palms or the decor notwithstanding) was about as it should be. The Alexandrian Gardens was gradually filling now, the small identical tables were being occupied. The four-piece orchestra came in and took its place on the wooden platform. Three girls came in, dressed, and sat down in three chairs in front of the orchestra. One had a drum. The music began. Michael listened with a distinct pleasure to the music. I thought about it. When was the last time I had visited an authentic sheikh in his authentic tent out there among the whispering authentic palms of a real oasis? The boy had a point. He had only smiled, and looked at me (goddam it: I was being superior) but I could see he had a point. It was a fake. Okay. A tourist trap. Fine. The jiggers of brandy were minute. Check. I thought about it. Did they (she and Michael) put all this together and get something I did not get? And what did one call it when one got it? The reality of the fake? An inauthentic authenticity? Since only a fool could have expected genuine sand, then painted sand (and the more badly painted, the more obviously painted, the better) was the only thing to be hoped for. A stringed lamentation filled the air. The drum throbbed.