The Cairo House
Love, loyalty and exile on the banks of the Nile
Samia Serageldin

For Kareem and Ramy

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

PART I PHOTOGRAPHS

1 The Feast of the Sacrifice

2 Sequestration

3 Past As Prologue

4 The Proposal

5 The Wedding

6 London

7 Cairo

8 Jedda

9 Papa

10 Madame Hélène

11 The Day of Remembrance

PART II EXILE

12 Paris

13 New Hampshire

PART III THE RETURN

14 Cairo Revisited

15 The Dervish

16 The Pasha

17 Tamer

18 Tarek

19 The Restaurant

20 Luxor

21 The Visit of Condolences

22 Insomnia

23 The House

24 The Accident

Glossary

P.S.

About the author

Seeing with Bifocal Vision

LIFE AT A GLANCE

A FEW FAVOURITE READS

A WRITING LIFE

About the book

The Alternative Universe of the Imagination

Read on

If You Loved This, You Might Like…

Find Out More

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART I PHOTOGRAPHS

1 The Feast of the Sacrifice

For those who have more than one skin, there are places where the secret act of metamorphosis takes place, an imperceptible shading into a hint of a different gait, a softening or a crispening of an accent. For those whose past and present belong to different worlds, there are places and times that mark their passage from one to the other, a transitional limbo: like airports and airplanes.

Watch the travelers going through the arrival gates, being greeted by family and friends, or by strangers holding up a sign with their company name. Watch the subtle shift to accommodate a change in status or expectations, as we play our many roles in life: boss and child, parent and lover, hometown hot-shot and small fish in a big city pond. We emerge from the tunnel ramp and swing through the gates, a chrysalis bursting free of its cocoon, Superman erupting from the telephone booth; or we shuffle off to the luggage carousel, waiting to pick up the familiar battered luggage with which we left.

But the true chameleons are the ones who straddle two worlds, segueing smoothly from one to the other, adjusting language and body language, calibrating the range of emotions displayed, treading the tightrope of mannerisms and mores. If it is done well, it can look deceptively effortless, but it is never without cost. There is no hypocrisy involved, only the universal imperative underlying good manners: to do the appropriate thing, to make those around you comfortable. For the chameleon, it is a matter of survival.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing at Cairo Airport in twenty minutes. Local time is 4 p.m., and the ground temperature is 22 degrees Celsius. Please fasten your seat belts and return seats and trays to their full upright position. We remind you to have your passports ready and your landing cards and customs declarations filled out.’

I stare at the landing card in front of me. ‘Purpose of visit: Business or pleasure?’ Simplistic questions in a complicated world. What is the purpose of my visit? How do you answer, I have come back to claim what’s mine? To find out if it is still mine. To find two children I left behind when I ran away a decade ago: one child is my son and the other the girl I once was. The future and the past. Between them they hold the key to the question I have come to try to resolve: where do I belong? Where is this chameleon’s natural habitat?

I fasten my seat belt and smile at the white-haired Minnesotan couple next to me as they grasp each other’s knuckled hands. We have made small talk about cross-country skiing and hockey. At some point they asked me where I was from, and I answered, truthfully, that I live in New Hampshire. It is not evasiveness, nor even the instinct to resist being pigeon-holed. It is only that any answer I give will be just as incomplete and misleading, so this is as good – or bad – as any other.

The wheels skim the ground and the engines are thrust into reverse with a violent roar as the plane hurtles down the runway, then skids to a stop. There is a round of clapping from the Egyptian passengers; it never fails, no matter how bumpy or smooth the landing. As much as a courtesy to the pilot, the applause is the self-congratulation of a fatalistic people on arriving safely. Hamdillah ‘alsalama. Home safely.

Cairo Airport, finally. I sling my shoulder bag and coat over my arm and head for the passport check booths. The Minnesotan couple follow me in line. I hand my blue American passport to the man at the first booth.

‘Do you have a visa?’ he asks in English.

‘No, but I’m Egyptian-born.’

He looks mildly surprised; perhaps I do not look typically Egyptian. He flips through my passport.

‘Seif-el-Islam?’ He raises his eyebrows at my maiden name and asks in Arabic, ‘Any relation to the Pasha?’

‘I’m his niece.’

The man enters the data from my passport on a computer screen, then hands the document back to me with a smile. ‘Hamdillah ‘alsalama. Welcome home.’

As I pass through the gate I nod to the couple from Minneapolis, a little awkwardly, because I can see in their eyes that I no longer belong to their world. At customs I push my cart right through the Nothing To Declare aisle. I scan the mass of dark, eager faces beyond the barrier at the exit. One does not distinguish black or white, only infinite gradations of gray in this most ethnically-mixed and color-blind of peoples. Within a few hours I will no longer notice such things, just as I will no longer see the inevitable film of desert dust in the stark sunshine, like a layer of ash over the gray buildings and the sooty cars, the leaves of the trees and the dark winter clothing of the people.

The muezzin’s call from the minaret wakes me at dawn my first morning in Cairo. I listen to the drawn-out echoes rising and falling in the stillness. I try to go back to sleep but the layers of noise start to build up outside the wooden shutters: first the birds twittering, then dogs barking, voices raised in greeting; finally the first car will set off the incessant honking that punctuates every minute of the day on the streets of Cairo.

I can hear Ibrahim the doorkeeper carrying out his morning ablutions at the tap in the courtyard under my window. His wooden clogs clap on the cobblestones, then the creaky faucet is turned off. I can imagine him winding his turban around his shriveled old head. Someone passing by in the street calls out a greeting: ‘Morning of jasmines!’ Ibrahim responds: ‘Morning of cream to you!’ The flowery greetings make me smile. Such small automatic courtesies are some of the few luxuries which even the poorest of the poor can afford.

As a child I used to sleep right through all this. I even used to sleep through the Bayram Feast sacrifice. Except for that one year, that year that was to be the last of the ‘good old days’.

There is a photo of me and my parents taken in the salon of the villa just before the Feast of the Sacrifice that year, 1961. Papa is holding a cigarette in one hand, his other hand on my shoulder. He chain-smoked Craven A’s; I remember the red and white box with the black cat. In the photo he has the broad-shouldered, dark looks of the Latin film stars of the fifties. His moustache is very neat, and his hair is slicked back. That style of suit, double-breasted, with boxy shoulders, was in style then, but I remember him wearing it a decade later and still looking impeccably tailored in it. He was that rare sort of man who carries himself well, without a hint of vanity.

Papa and I are standing behind Mama’s Aubusson bergère. Papa never changed that much – because he died young, I suppose – but Mama is almost unrecognizable in the photo. Her black hair is short, she has the thick straight brows, the red lipstick and string of pearls that were the ‘look’ of the period. Her features are too irregular to be photogenic, but her smile is confident. She is wearing a salmon, lace-encrusted tulle dress she kept for years after she stopped wearing it. She is at her slimmest in that photo, and although her shoulders and arms look creamy and plump, the boned bustier of that dress is tiny. I know because I tried it on when I was eighteen. I could only hook up the waist if I sucked in my breath, while the fabric of the hips and the bust hung loose on me.

In the photo I am standing with an arm around the back of Mama’s chair, head tilted to one side, one foot rubbing against the patent leather heel of the other foot. My shoulder-length hair is brushed back in a velvet Alice band. It was chestnut brown in those days and Mama rinsed it with camomile tea to bring out the highlights. I am wearing a sweater set over a short pleated skirt, and my legs are coltish and long. I am nine, on the verge of l’âge ingrat, as my governess called it, the awkward age.

Just before the photograph was taken, Mama had hurriedly tried to smooth my eyebrows.

‘Stand still, Gigi!’

She had wet the tip of her finger with her tongue and run her finger over my brows. I remember making a face. It’s the same face my son makes today when I take a sip from his drink, or in some other way betray the fact that I still don’t see him as his own person, physically separate from me.

Old photographs are like a deck of worn cards; you can try to read them like a fortune-teller at a fair, except in reverse: to read the past, rather than the future. With hindsight you recognize the people in them for what they were: the king, the joker, the knave, the hangman. The Pasha, of course, would be the King, the Sha’ib or Graybeard, as he is called in Arabic; Fangali the jester; Om Khalil’s black figure the hangman, turning up like an ill omen at unexpected junctures. But only with hindsight. While the cards are face down, you cannot tell what hand you’ve been dealt.

That photo of me with my parents was taken just before the Feast of the Sacrifice the year I turned nine. It was the last time we ever posed together for a family portrait.

The Feast of the Sacrifice must have been in winter that year. The sheep had arrived two days before amid much commotion, an incongruous sight in a residential neighborhood in Cairo. Sheep or cattle were sacrificed on the family estate, but it was also customary to carry out the ritual in Cairo. This imperative was never questioned: it was one of the many instances in our hybrid culture when Western norms were unhesitatingly sacrificed on the altar of tradition.

The Bayram Feast was meant to ransom one’s blessings, as Abraham did by his sacrifice. Health, wealth, and the greatest of blessings, children, could be withdrawn on a whim of the Giver. The Revolution of 1952 was nearly a decade old, and the Land Reform Act had stripped the bulk of our landholdings, but the worst was still around the corner for families like ours, and as yet unimaginable.

The distribution of the meat from the sacrificial beast was a symbolically intimate form of charity, sharing with dependents and mendicants the meat from one’s own table. For the sacrifice to be accepted, every detail of the ritual had to be carefully observed, such as the exact window of time during which it should be performed. That year that was to be the last of the good days, there was a hitch, the lapse of a fatal few minutes. In retrospect, it was an ill omen, and I was the one responsible for it.

I remember watching from the balcony when the van arrived with the two sheep in the back. The cook, his helper, the chauffeur and Ibrahim the Nubian doorkeeper then proceeded to drag the bleating, resisting beasts to the dog run where they would be penned until the morning of the feast.

There was a sudden commotion and panic; someone had forgotten to chain up the dog, who had come flying at the throat of the ram. The howling German shepherd was dragged away. Finally the sheep were safely enclosed. Two days later, before dawn on the day of the Feast, they would be taken to a shed in the backyard that was ordinarily used once a week by two washer-women who came to do the laundry, then on the following day by a man who came to do the ironing. The dog was also bathed there. But on that one day of the year, between dawn and daybreak, as tradition required for the sacrifice to be valid, the sheep would be slaughtered and skinned in that room, and the stench of blood would replace the scent of soap and starch. Then the walls and floor were hosed down and everything returned to normal for another year.

On the morning of the day before the Feast the bustle around the house had reached a pitch of controlled frenzy. In the salon, the Sudanese head-suffragi stood on top of a tall ladder, painstakingly unhooking the crystal drops from the chandelier, one by one, to be wiped with vinegar and water. Mama supervised, hair in curlers under a chiffon cap, wearing one of her favorite déshabillés: a faded, blue satin, shawl-collared affair with a sweeping skirt. Mama only dressed to go out, and then she spent at least an hour in front of her tulle-skirted vanity and her modern built-in closets.

The under-suffragi was pushing a heavy contraption across the parquet floor to polish it; twice a year the hardwood floors were hand-stripped with steel wool, cleaned, waxed, then polished with a chamois cloth weighed down by a massive brick of lead at the end of a stick. He pushed the unwieldy contraption forward and dragged it back with a clicking, sucking sound. One of the maids was using a bamboo duster to beat the back of a rug slung over the railing of the balcony.

I stood on the balcony at a safe distance from the dust raised by the maid, watching the arrival of the sheep. I remember the scent of jasmine from the bushes under the balcony – jasmine and dust. The cook came up to the balcony with some carrots to coax me to feed the lamb. A large, garrulous man with terrible burn scars on his chest, he was sweating from his recent efforts and the general excitement. All the household help seemed to go around with unusually dilated pupils in the days leading up to the Feast. ‘Blood lust’, my mother called it. The cook proudly pointed out the two animals to me, a ram and a lamb.

‘See the pretty little one, I chose him just for you.’

He went on to make a remark about the ram’s horns and his virility. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the remark qualified as one of the ‘indelicate expressions’ to which the cook was unfortunately prone, and on account of which I was discouraged from engaging in conversation with him. The poor man was aware of this failing of his, without quite being able to determine how he offended. The comical result was that he prefaced his remarks with a precautionary ‘excuse the expression,’ as when he referred to a breast of chicken or a leg of lamb.

I went back inside, up to my room, and whiled away the afternoon styling my long-suffering governess’ hair. Madame Hélène was over sixty, but she still had long, lush hair which she wore in a dowdy forties bun. I loved to pin her silvery hair up in complicated twists and braids. She always undid my fantastic creations before venturing out.

A persistent bleating from the backyard was followed by the dog barking. ‘Oh, listen to that bleating,’ Madame Hélène grumbled. ‘At least tomorrow it will all be over and we’ll have some peace and quiet.’

I took the bobby pins out of my mouth and slowly secured a twisted braid in place. ‘I wonder what happens, when they sacrifice the sheep, I mean. It would be interesting to watch, just one time, what do you think?’

‘Quelle horreur,’ Madame Hélène shuddered. ‘Don’t even think about it. Your mother would never allow it.’

‘Oh, it was just a thought.’ I slipped one last pin in her hair. ‘There, your chignon is done, you look like the Belle Hélène of the Greeks.’

That was not strictly true. Madame Hélène had big, bulging blue eyes, rather like boiled eggs, which I attributed to much weeping. She had told me all about her sad life. A Frenchwoman married to an expatriate Italian count with considerable property in Egypt, they had been dispossessed by the British during the Second World War. Her husband’s death had left her penniless and childless. She had been reduced to working as a governess for a living, although among her coterie of expatriate widows she only admitted to giving private lessons. She kept a small apartment in downtown Cairo, where she spent her days off. She had no close relatives left in Europe, but was very attached to a godson who lived near Lyons. She often talked about ‘le petit Luc,’, and wrote him letters. She kept a photo of him on the table next to her armchair in my bedroom: a photo of a boy with a thick thatch of blonde-streaked hair over a square, smiling face.

‘That photo is at least ten years old,’ Madame Hélène would sigh as she looked at the photograph every day. ‘He must be eight or nine years older than you, ma petite, I can’t remember exactly.’

I sat down and flipped through a book, but I could not keep my mind on the pages. I had never been particularly curious about the ritual of the sacrifice. By the time I woke up on Feast Day mornings, it was all over. It was over by the time my father was roused, at about six o’clock, to attend the early prayers. Even Muslims who rarely set foot in a mosque during the year attend the feast prayers, and, on these occasions, the carpeting is extended out into the courtyard of the mosque in anticipation of the overflow. Papa tended to be late, so he usually ended up in the courtyard, along with the cook and his helpers, who would also arrive late and exhausted, having just finished with the butchering.

Mama, who normally rose at about ten o’clock, would have been up at dawn, supervising the distribution of meat to the old retainers and the poor who regularly came to the house. A small crowd would have gathered by daybreak. The wetnurses were given the lion’s share, followed by the household help. The sheepskins invariably fell to the lot of the Nubian doorkeeper, who took them back with him to his village in the Nubia on his biannual visits home.

I would stay up in my room until it was time for me to dress and go with Papa on another round of visits. By the time I came home, calm would have been restored, and the people who had come for charity would have dispersed. Dinner would be served, with several dishes of lamb as required by tradition. I never touched it; the odor of freshly-butchered meat still lingered about the kitchen, wafting into the dining-room every time the door to the butler’s pantry swung open. The household staff would be in a hurry to clear the table and be gone for the holidays, except for the governess, who did not celebrate Muslim feasts, and for the doorkeeper, who had no family in Cairo.

It had never before occurred to me to be curious about what went on in that shed, between dawn and daybreak. But now I could not get the idea out of my head, not even when Papa took me with him on the first round of visits to relatives. The routine never varied; the aunts and uncles were visited in order of their seniority. Since Papa was the youngest of his eight brothers and sisters, his turn to receive visitors came on the last of the three days of the Feast. On the Eve of the Feast he took me to visit the Pasha, Papa’s oldest brother and the head of the clan. He lived in the family home in Garden City, which everyone called the Cairo House.

On the way we passed a truck full of smiling, excited people from the country. They were standing up in the back of the truck, swaying with its movement, singing and clapping. The girls wore neon pink, nylon gauze dresses, the boys new striped pajamas. We also passed pick-up trucks carrying bleating sheep marked for slaughter with a rose-red stain on their fat tails. By dawn the next day they would all be butchered. I stared at them with equal fascination and revulsion, trying to imagine the actual proceedings.

We drove down the Nile Corniche past the grand hotels and the long white wall of the British Embassy, then turned off into the narrow, villa-lined streets of Garden City. When we reached the family house Papa stopped the car and honked for the gatekeeper to open the gate. He parked in the back of the villa, alongside several other cars.

I followed him round to the front, past the fountain with its statue of a reclining Poseidon. One of the two heavy double doors was open; normally the front doors were only used on feast days, and at weddings and funerals. Inside the long hall the marble floor radiated cold. I looked up through the atrium at the blazing crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling of the second floor, fifty feet above my head.

‘Let’s go upstairs to see your grandmother first.’ Papa headed for the wide marble staircase with the two curved balustrades. I followed him up, then along the gallery.

At the top of the stairs we were met by Fangali, the majordomo of the house. He adjusted the out-moded fez he wore on his head and tugged at his caftan as he came forward to greet us. There was something about him that eluded my understanding. The high-pitched voice, the ingratiating manner, contrasted with the thin moustache, the bold eyes. I wondered why he, of all the menservants, was the only one allowed to come and go freely upstairs, in the family quarters. I had vaguely overheard that, as a result of an accident at birth, he was not quite a man. I wondered if he was an agha. I had heard of the eunuches of my grandmother’s day, without understanding what the word signified. I didn’t dare ask. Years later I thought I understood, but later still, Fangali would spring a surprise on us all.

Fangali knocked perfunctorily on the door to Grandmother’s room and opened it, announcing in his peculiar whine: ‘Look who’s here, Hanem. Shamel Bey and Sitt Gigi.’

Grandmother was sitting on a chaise longue, her legs covered with a knit shawl. Fangali tucked the shawl around the child-like feet in satin mules, and left the room. It never failed to amaze me that this tiny woman could have born my tall, strapping father and his eight brothers and sisters. But it seemed as though the effort had drained Grandmother completely; as far back as I could remember, she had always had that vague air of detachment about her.

Papa kissed his mother’s hand and pulled up a chair beside her and I followed suit. She was saying to Papa, with an approving nod in my direction, ‘That little one can name her own mahr.’ I understood vaguely what the word meant: the dowry the bridegroom brings to the bride.

Papa laughed and rumpled my hair. ‘I’m going down to see your uncle in his study, Gigi. I’ll send for you when I’m ready to go, and you can come to wish him a happy Feast before we leave.’

I nodded and sat down beside Grandmother. Fangali brought us glasses of qammar-eddin, apricot nectar, and a tray with sweets. I nibbled absently on a glacé chestnut, my mind on the act of the Sacrifice. Mama would never allow it if I asked to observe it, but she had never expressly forbade it, so technically I would not be disobeying. I knew Mama’s rules well enough though: whatever was not explicitly allowed was forbidden. As for Madame Hélène, she slept in the room adjoining mine, with the door ajar, but she slept heavily, with a smoker’s nasal snore. I made up my mind: I would do it.

At that moment Fangali ushered in a shriveled old woman wrapped in black from head to toe. The sooty black eyes, ringed with kohl, darted sharply around the room. No one seemed to know how old Om Khalil really was, but it was rumored that the secret of her spryness was drinking nothing but vinegar and water for one day a week. She went from house to house, making jam, pickles, rosewater, kohl from pounded roast almonds, or special concoctions for recovering new mothers. The servants in each household treated her with the awe commensurate with her reputation for an undeflectable evil eye.

I tried to resist an involuntary frisson when I set eyes on the black-shrouded figure. I knew this reaction to an old family retainer was highly reprehensible, but children, like animals, have not yet learned to override their instincts. Seeing Om Khalil at the moment I had made my decision was a bad omen, and I hesitated again.

‘How are you, Om Khalil?’ Grandmother reached for some money from a tasseled purse she kept beside her for the steady stream of family domestics who came to visit on feast days. She had phobias about certain things; for instance, she insisted on having the maid wash any money that she handled, whether it was coins or bills. ‘It’s because she had such a bad experience during the cholera epidemic,’ Mama had explained. ‘She lost two children to cholera, they were just babies.’

Fangali came to fetch me. I kissed Grandmother and hurried downstairs. The door to my uncle’s study was open, and there were a dozen men sitting around the room. My eldest uncle sat behind his desk at the far end. He seemed even larger than the last time I had seen him, on the Lesser Feast a few months before. A big man, his bulk suggested power rather than obesity. His gray double-breasted suit fitted him perfectly, and the silk square in the breast pocket matched his tie. I went up to kiss him; he smelled of Cuban cigars and Old Spice, just like I remembered.

‘Happy Feast, little one, what a big girl you’ve become.’ He patted my cheek and reached into his pocket for a handful of shiny coins. It was the custom to give children shiny new coins for luck on feast days, and my uncle always prepared great quantities of them for all the children of the clan, and the children of friends and retainers, who came to visit.

I had heard that in the old days, before the revolution, before I was born, when my uncle had been prime minister, he had once paid the Feast Day bonuses to some of the Cairo police force, out of his own pocket – out of the family’s pocket, really, since it was all one and the same. During the revolutionary tribunals of 1952, this had been brought up as proof of undue influence. The Pasha had countered that, there being a temporary shortfall in the budget, he had only advanced the money out of his own pocket, in order to make sure that the poor policemen and their families would have the wherewithal to celebrate the Feast. I did not understand what all the fuss had been about; I thought it was about the new coins that children were given.

That night it took me a long time to fall asleep. I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not to risk trying to watch the sacrifice. Finally I dozed off. The call to dawn prayers from the minaret of the mosque nearby woke me. Every morning I slept right through the call to prayers, but that day it had woken me. It seemed like an omen. I sat up in bed in the dark, blinking at the dial of the alarm clock. Had the cook and his helpers started yet? The ram would be first. The larger, more dangerous animal is always killed first, before it has time to panic and resist. I strained my ears but I could hear nothing but Madame Hélène’s regular snoring through the door to the adjoining room.

I slumped back against my pillow. I tried to go back to sleep, but my whole body was tense, straining for the slightest sound. I thought I heard a faint bleating, but I couldn’t be sure. I sat up again, my heart pounding. It was now or never. I would just go down to the back garden, but I wouldn’t actually look into the shed. I jumped out of bed, and pulled on my yellow wool dressing gown. I slipped on my ballet slippers and tiptoed out.

Within minutes I had slipped out of the kitchen door and headed for the lighted shed at the bottom of the garden. I could hear a sort of scuffling, then staccato bleating and the low, urgent voices of the men inside. I recognized the voice of the cook, suddenly raised in warning:

‘Watch out!’

Then the encouraging mutters of the doorkeeper and the other men.

‘In the name of Allah!’

‘Easy now!’

‘I’ve got him.’

‘Allah Akbar.’

I tiptoed to the door of the shed, my heartbeat throbbing so loudly in my ears I could hear nothing else. I clamped my hand over my nose and mouth against rising nausea, and peered in. To this day, I am unable to tell for sure what I actually saw from what my overheated imagination filled in: the harsh light of a naked light bulb on the straining backs of the men bent over in a circle; blood spattering the walls; bound hooves flailing. I screamed and turned to run, slipped in the pool of blood seeping under the door, and fell unconscious.

As Madame Hélène was to tell me later, she was roused from her sleep by the shouting of the cook under her window. She looked out and saw me, lifeless and blood-spattered in the arms of the bloody cook, and started screaming. The cook was apparently shouting for her to come down so he could unload me onto her and get back to his work, but she understood little Arabic at the best of times and at that moment was completely hysterical.

The combined screaming and shouting roused the household and the cook was able to leave me in Mama’s care and get back to slaughtering his sheep. But by then the first light had broken, and the men shook their heads. It was a bad omen.

When I woke up, I found myself in my own clean bed, in a fresh nightgown. Madame Hélène was embroidering in her armchair, looking as if she had been severely reprimanded by Mama, which boded ill for me. I buried my head in the pillow, ashamed and miserable, knowing I had taken the risk of breaking an absolute taboo, and yet was none the wiser for it.

Later that year, when the blow fell, when the stormclouds broke, I could not help believing, in the unreasoning, solipsistic way of guilty children, that there had been a connection. That some sacred rituals – even good magic – should not be exposed to the eyes of the uninitiated, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the gods. Looking back, I realize that this experience left a deeper mark on me than anyone could have foreseen at the time: a fear of curiosity, a squeamishness, an avoidance of the messy, unsettling underside of life which left me singularly unprepared to deal with it as an adult.

2 Sequestration

Later that year, when the blow fell, when the stormclouds broke, it started with a speech broadcast over the radio. That was the first time I became aware that my life was susceptible to being caught in the slipstream of history, that a speech broadcast over the radio could change my life forever. The year I first became aware of the burden of belonging: to a name, a past.

One day that summer I came home to find my parents sitting in front of the television set in the living room. President Nasser’s oversized features dominated the screen, the intense eyes smoky under the thick eyebrows. I remembered that it was Revolution Day, July 23, 1961. Nasser was giving a speech, one of his three-hour harangues that were regularly broadcast on radio and television. The familiar hypnotic voice rose and fell, echoed through the open windows by the radios blaring from the street. Everyone seemed to have the radio on: the man in the cigarette and candy kiosk on the corner, the doorkeepers, the motorists in their cars.

I started to say something and Mama put her finger to her lips. It was then that I became aware of the tension in the air. I turned to the television set. I couldn’t understand every word that was being said, but the virulence in the tone was unmistakable. There were repeated references to ‘the enemies of the people.’

Over the next few days many inexplicable things happened. When I asked questions I was told not to worry and sent to Madame Hélène. I overheard snatches of anguished conversations, whispered phone calls. I gathered enough to understand that, the day after the speech, at dawn, all my uncles, including the Pasha, had been taken away to an internment camp. That night Papa brought out a little overnight case. He packed some underwear, toiletries and medicine, and put the case under the mahogany sleigh bed in his bedroom.

One morning all the servants were gone, except for the cook and Ibrahim the doorkeeper. I found Mama sitting on a stool in the butler’s pantry, talking to the cook.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she was saying, ‘but you know we can’t afford you any longer. You won’t have any trouble finding a job as a chef with one of the hotels. You’re a first class cook and you’ll have the best references.’

The cook stood in the doorway to the kitchen, dramatically baring his scarred chest and declaiming that he had been with my parents since they first set up house and that he owed them the flesh on his shoulders. I assumed he was referring to the terrible accident in which he had incurred the burn scars on his chest. He had been trying to light the gas stove before the Feast the year before when the stove caught fire and he was wrapped in flames. Papa had ventured into the blaze to turn off the gas, taking the risk that the entire cylinder would blow up in his face. The cook was rushed to the hospital, where, despite the severity of his condition, his eventual recovery was assured. Mama had been very sorry for him at the time and only much later made the remark that the fire probably started because the cook was so lazy about keeping the stove clean from grease.

‘What I need for you to do,’ Mama was saying that morning as she sat on a stool in the pantry, ‘is to find a suffragi-cook for me, someone who doesn’t need a kitchen boy, a marmiton, to help him. Of course I don’t expect him to cook very well. It doesn’t matter as long as he will settle for the salary I mentioned and won’t mind doing some housework on the side. Help with the heavy cleaning, that sort of thing.’

The next morning, when the cook arrived, Mama went into the kitchen.

‘Did you find someone?’ she asked.

‘I found you a cook who will be happy with the salary, doesn’t need a marmiton, will peel the vegetables himself and will even mop the kitchen floor!’ the cook concluded triumphantly.

‘Well, where is he?’

‘You’re looking at him!’ The cook beamed, slapping his chest.

But Mama was just as stubborn as the cook, and adamantly refused the sacrifice. Eventually a ‘passe-partout’ was found. Dinners were no longer served the usual way, with the head-suffragi bringing around each dish in turn to your left and serving you himself. Meals were served ‘family style’ instead: the dishes were all placed on the table at once, and we passed them around and helped ourselves. I, for one, was pleased: it always looked so much cosier in American movies and on television when I watched families sit down to dinner.

Madame Hélène stayed. She would not consider looking for another position, at her age.

Later that week four men in dark suits came to the house, clutching pens and clipboards. They were solemn and almost apologetic as they dispersed through every room of the house, making careful notes on every piece of furniture, every object, every bibelot. They even went into my room and counted my dolls. At the end of their tour they handed Mama a copy of the inventory they had made. When they left, one of them drove off with one of the two family cars. They also took the revolver that Papa kept to take on his trips to the estate, in case of highwaymen on the road.

Mama looked at the list and then at Papa. She started to laugh. ‘Just look what they’ve written down. They have no idea what anything is, or what value to put on anything. We could sell any of the carpets or any of the vases, and replace them with fakes, and they’d never know the difference.’ Then she looked at me and changed the subject.

At the end of the month, when the servants had to be paid, Mama’s younger brother Hani came to pick her up. She wore sunglasses and she was biting her lip as she slipped a bank passbook into her handbag.

‘I wish you didn’t have to go through this.’ Papa put his hand on her shoulder as he saw them off at the door.

‘It’s all right, really. There’s just a chance – it’s such a small account, they might have overlooked it.’

I went up to my bedroom and cornered Madame Hélène, who was writing a letter to ‘le petit Luc.’

‘Why is Uncle Hani taking Mama to the bank? Why not Papa?’

‘Because he would be recognized. All the family’s bank accounts are frozen, and your mother’s as well, because she’s married to your Papa. All the family keep their accounts at the Banque du Caire. But Maman has one small savings account that she’s had since she was a minor, in a little bank, I don’t know its name. And of course the account’s in her maiden name. So perhaps the sequestration authorities don’t know about it. Madame is going with your uncle to try to cash it. Let’s hope the bank would not have instructions to freeze the account, and that they would not realize who she was married to.’ Madame Hélène shook her head and sighed. ‘Who would have believed all this? It’s like what happened to us during the war, my husband and I. I never thought I would hear that word “sequestration” again.’ She sighed. ‘Now please don’t tell Madame I told you all this, she said you were not to be allowed to worry about these things.’

Mama and her brother came back an hour later. She looked at Papa and shook her head. Before Uncle Hani left, Mama handed him a small, velvet jewelry box.

‘It’s platinum and pearl, I don’t know what it’s worth, but see what you can do. All my valuable things were in the bank vault. I had taken out all my best pieces for the Bindari’s wedding last month, if only I hadn’t been in such a hurry to put them back in the vault…’

‘What’s that you’re giving Uncle Hani?’ I asked.

‘One of my bracelets, the clasp is broken, it needs to be taken to the jeweler’s to be fixed. Kiss your uncle and run upstairs now, darling, I think Madame Hélène is calling you.’

Later that night I looked for my parents to kiss them goodnight. Mama’s bedroom was dark but the French doors were open and I heard their voices coming from the verandah. Before I reached them the word ‘divorce’ made me stop in my tracks and hold my breath.

‘I mean it,’ my father was saying. ‘You heard Nasser’s speech. If I were to divorce you right away you could keep your property. But if you stay married to me, you lose everything. It’s not fair to you. Most of my brothers are married to their cousins, their wives would be subject to the sequestration decrees anyway in their own right. But you wouldn’t be. Nabil and Zakariah’s wives wouldn’t either, but they have no money of their own. But you do. No one would blame you if you asked for a divorce, it would be understood that you were doing it for the child’s sake. I would be the first to defend you if anyone said a word against you.’

‘Don’t let’s discuss this. There’s no point.’

‘I want you to think seriously about this before it’s too late. You didn’t marry me for love. You married me because I was one of the most eligible bachelors in Egypt. Things have changed.’

‘You know my answer, once and for all. Promise me you won’t bring this up again?’

I crept back to my room.

When school started in the fall, there was a lot of whispering among the other girls, cut short when I approached. The nuns patted me on the head for no special reason and murmured ‘la pauvre petite.’

My birthday fell on a weekend early in December, and nothing seemed different about the preparations that year. It was only as an adult that I realized what a sacrifice this appearance of normality must have represented. As usual I handed out an invitation to every one of the twenty-two girls in my class, no R.S.V.P. requested. Every girl in class had always come to my birthday teas. Mama and Madame Hélène put together twenty-two bags of party favors. After lunch I wasn’t allowed into the dining-room while they festooned it with balloons and streamers and set the table with an organdy tablecloth. At three the deliveries arrived: Mama had ordered the decorated birthday cake, the gâteaux and the petits fours from Simmond’s in Zamalek. At three-thirty I put on a velvet dress with a lace collar hand-made by Madame Hélène, and a little gold locket that was Mama’s present. It was one of hers that I’d always liked.

At four o’clock I waited for the doorbell to start ringing. By four-thirty only one girl had arrived, Aleya Bindari, who was a distant cousin. At five o’clock, looking stricken, Mama suggested we go ahead with the birthday party. She said she had heard that there was a case of measles going around the school and the other girls must either have come down with it or have stayed away for fear of getting exposed to it. I pretended to believe her, then and forever.

At school the following week only one of my classmates apologized. ‘I wanted to come, but my parents said I couldn’t, because it wasn’t safe to associate – you know, because of the sequestration.’ I nodded, although I didn’t really know what sequestration meant, nor, I suspected, did she.

One day the Arabic teacher, the only male instructor, came into class and announced that a new subject had been added to the curriculum by the Ministry of Education. It was called Arab Socialism and was mandatory. It would be one of only three subjects taught in Arabic, the other two being the language itself and Religion for the Muslim pupils.

The Arabic teacher taught all three. During the break between Arabic class and Religion class, while the half dozen Coptic girls filed out for Bible study with one of the nuns, he could be heard noisily performing his prayer ablutions in the washroom next door to my classroom. He gargled and spat, and cleared his nose and throat copiously. When he walked back into class, the girls would giggle and make faces.

The new course, Arab Socialism, seemed to focus on identifying ‘the enemies of the people’, and the Arabic teacher took evident satisfaction in teaching it. He drilled us in the triumvirate of evil: ‘Imperialism, Feudalism and Capitalism.’ Whenever he reiterated the words: ‘landowners,’ or ‘capitalists’, he looked at me and at Aleya Bindari, who sat one row behind me.

I showed the textbook to my parents, with its illustrations of peasants being whipped by cruel landowners. ‘Now they’re poisoning the minds of children!’ Papa erupted.

Mama quickly put a warning hand on his arm.

‘You’ll only confuse Gigi that way. And if she starts to repeat things at school…She’s too young to carry that kind of burden.’ She put an arm around me. ‘One day you’ll understand all this. Things aren’t going to stay like this forever. You’ll see. Just don’t worry about it now.’

One morning in November when I woke up, I looked at the alarm clock and realized that I had been allowed to oversleep, I was late for school. Madame Hélène was sighing in her armchair, her boiled-egg eyes reddened. I ran to find my mother. Mama was on the phone in her bedroom, whispering urgently, a hand over her eyes. I opened the door that led, through my mother’s boudoir, into Papa’s bedroom. It was empty and the suitcase under the bed was gone.

In an otherwise forgettable essay on glamor, I read the phrase ‘our parents are our earliest celebrities’, and I suppose that’s true. In my own case, the recollection of my early years is colored by more than the rose-tinted glasses of childhood. I realize now that it is the easy life, the freedom from petty problems and concerns, that imparts the glamor of optimism and generosity.

I think what I regret most from ‘the good old days’ is the loss of lifestyle of the open house, of the easy welcome to guests at any time of day, on any day of the week. Merely to ask a drop-in guest if he would be staying for dinner rather than to assume, indeed to importune, him to do so, would have been considered irredeemably tactless. The cuisine and the etiquette may have been more or less cosmopolitan, but the spirit of hospitality was as uncompromisingly Egyptian as that of the country people with whom we shared our roots.

It’s true that the easy welcome of the open house was made casual and effortless by the swarm of domestics hovering in the background. But it’s just as true that the back door was always as wide open as the front. No beggar off the streets was turned away without a meal or a handout. Anyone with the most tenuous claim, whether of kinship or former service, could be sure of a regular stipend or a place to spend the night.

The nether regions of the house: the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the kitchen balcony, the maid’s room and the all-purpose ‘holding-room’, were a domain into which I trespassed cautiously. At any time of day, but especially at mealtimes, I never knew whom I might stumble upon: the doorkeeper’s third cousin come up from the country, my aunt’s wet nurse, the seamstress who did alterations and ran up the servants’ clothes, the laundryman who did the ironing, the shoeshine man.

It’s also true that, long after the front door was closed, the back door stayed open. And that the last luxuries we clung to were pride, and the good name of the family.

3 Past As Prologue

The good name of the family. Growing up, I was constantly aware of bearing the burden of belonging. You couldn’t help it, when the mention of your last name invariably provoked a reaction not always easy for a child to read: dread or pity, envy or commiseration. You grow up unable to reconcile family loyalty with the virulent rhetoric from public podiums. You grow up with the myth of the ‘good old days’, before the revolution, antebellum, before you were born. All you have are photographs, but they cannot tell the whole story, because even the most candid snapshot always presupposes angles and editing.

You can pick one faded black and white photograph after another, and look at the people in it, so young, so carefree, and wonder how they never saw the storm clouds gathering. There is one particular snapshot I find in a worn leather album of my parents’ wedding pictures, an incongruous photo tucked in the flap. This photograph, in black and white, was taken a couple of years before the Revolution, around 1950. A woman sits between two men at a table in a restaurant, the men in light summer sharkskin suits, holding cigarettes, the woman in a scoop-necked cocktail gown. All three are smiling at the camera.

The broad-shouldered young man with the neat black moustache is my father, Shamel. The slender girl with the dark hair in a French twist is his niece. Her name was Gihan but he always called her Gina. The only time I ever heard him call her by her real name, she ran out of the room and he never saw her again. But this photo was taken before I was born, before my father was married.

The other man in the photo is shorter than my father, wiry, radiating energy. His lanky black hair falls over his forehead and his teeth flash in a smile that etches deep creases in his face. His name was Ali, and he was my father’s best friend, but they had been estranged for years before his death.

Shamel splashed some water over his face and neck and came out of the bathroom. The room was quiet except for the sound of the fan, whirring clockwise in one direction, then counterclockwise back again. Ali Tobia was sprawled in an armchair, propping an open book on his bare, smooth chest. Maurice Baruch was slumped in front of the chess board, his head down on his arm, apparently snoozing. Shamel sat back down opposite him and moved a rook to the right. ‘Your move,’ he touched Maurice’s arm. The other ignored him. He turned to Ali.

‘Want to take over from Maurice? He seems to have fallen asleep.’

‘Leave me alone, will you, I have to study. Some of us need to earn a living, you know.’ Ali was an intern at the Kasr-El-Eini Hospital, not far from Garden City.

Shamel lit another cigarette. May was hotter than usual in Cairo that year. The three young men in the room had taken their shirts off. In the salamlek or ‘bachelors annex’ of the Cairo House, Shamel was free to entertain his friends as he pleased. The older, married brothers of the Seif-el-Islam family lived in the main house, while the unmarried, younger brothers slept in the salamlek, a separate small building a few feet away on the grounds.

Shamel poked Maurice again. ‘Are you going to finish this game or not?’

There was no response. Shamel reached over and shook his friend’s shoulder. Maurice rolled over onto the floor, the chair crashing down with him. Shamel dropped to his knees beside him and Ali leaped out of his armchair.

A few minutes later, Ali sat back on his heels and shook his head. The two men were pouring sweat from their efforts to resuscitate their friend. ‘It’s no use. We’ve tried everything. He must have been already dead when he fell.’

It was about a month later that Shamel stood, hesitating, one foot on the bottom step of the wide, curving marble staircase flanked by a pair of stone griffons. His grandfather had brought the griffons back from Italy, along with the Italian architect he commissioned to build the house. Seif-el-Islam Pasha’s portrait hung in the hall, with his formidable handlebar moustaches, his tarbouche, and the sash and sword of a pasha of the Ottoman Empire.

The grandfather had been the one to make the momentous decision to uproot the clan from their family home on the cotton estates in the Delta and establish them in Cairo. The Egyptian Cotton Exchange in Alexandria was booming. Seif-el-Islam Pasha and his brother-in-law left for Europe with a suitcase full of Egyptian pounds, to which they each had a key; they helped themselves at will as they toured the continent. It was in Italy that the Pasha finally saw the palazzo he would set his heart on. Within three years the family moved into the brand-new mansion in Garden City that came to be known as the Cairo House.

Twenty years later, he sent for his Jesuit-educated son from Paris, married him to an heiress and found him a seat in Parliament. It was time for men like him to lead the nationalist movement against the British and against the Albanian dynasty that ruled Egypt. His son died at fifty, but the old Pasha had the satisfaction of seeing his grandson chairman of the most powerful party in the country.

The wealthy heiress that Seif-el-Islam Pasha had chosen for his son’s bride was an only child; this unusual circumstance was a result of her mother’s gullibility. Her mother had been a beautiful redhead Circassian from one of the Muslim regions of the Russian steppes. The women in her Egyptian husband’s household could barely contain their spite against this lovely and somewhat dim-witted foreigner. When her first child, a girl, was born, they convinced her that, according to local superstition, her daughter would die if the mother subsequently had a male child. The poor woman believed them, and resorted to midwives’ tricks to prevent another pregnancy. Her husband, however, did not immediately take another wife, as the spiteful women had hoped. When he died unexpectedly, his daughter was the only heir to his considerable fortune.

At fifteen she was married off to Seif-el-Islam Pasha’s handsome son, and bore him thirteen children, of whom nine survived. Two babies had died in succession before the youngest, Shamel, was born. She insisted on having him sleep in a small bed in her boudoir until he was eight. That was the year his father died of a heart attack, and his older brothers decided that it was time for him to move into the bachelors annex with them.

Shamel strode up the stairs and stopped briefly in his mother’s bedroom to kiss her hand, as he did every morning. Then he crossed the gallery to his oldest brother’s suite. He knocked, just in case his sister-in-law was still in bed, and went in. There was no one in the bedroom. His sister-in-law must be up already, seeing to the needs of the household, and he could hear the Pasha washing in the bathroom. Shamel referred to his oldest brother, who was eighteen years his senior, by his title, as did most of the family.

The Pasha came out of the bathroom in his satin dressing gown. ‘Good morning,’ he smiled. ‘Well, well, it’s been a while since you joined us for breakfast. Shall I ring for some more tea?’

Shamel glanced at the breakfast tray with the flat, buttery pastry, the white slab of thick clotted cream and the clover-scented honey. It was his favorite breakfast, but he could not muster an appetite. He had lost considerable weight lately. He shook his head.

The Pasha reached for the first cigar of the day and sank into a comfortable club chair. ‘Your sister Zohra was complaining just last night that you haven’t been to visit her in a fortnight. What have you been doing with yourself?’

Shamel suspected that his brother already had a fairly good idea of the answer to that question. Not that the Pasha was in the habit of keeping tabs on his family. But the chief of the Cairo police reported directly to him; as a courtesy he routinely included briefings on the movements of any and all of the cars belonging to the Pasha’s address. Their special single-digit Garden City license plates identified them immediately to the police all over Cairo. Shamel had found this to be a mixed blessing. If he was in a hurry he could park his car almost anywhere without getting a ticket. On the other hand, the police report was not for the Pasha’s eyes only; it was turned over to the ‘Abeddin Palace.

Shamel supposed that the Pasha was aware that, of late, his youngest brother had neglected his familiar haunts and regular nightclub companions; had taken solitary trips to the country; and had spent several hours with an illustrious doctor of theology at the Azhar University.

‘There’s something on your mind.’ The Pasha puffed on his cigar. ‘I’m listening. You’ve not been yourself lately. I know it must have been a shock for you, your friend Maurice dropping dead like that. And so young too, in his twenties.’

‘That’s just it. You never think it could happen to someone your own age. I mean, you live your life, you sow your wild oats, you think you have all the time in the world, to settle down later, to make everything right with Allah and your fellow-man. And then, just like that…You realize that you can run out of time at any moment.’ He shook his head. He was quiet for a minute, then he turned to face his brother. ‘I’ve come to ask for your permission. To get married.’

The Pasha listened, nodding from time to time. If he had an inkling of the nature of Shamel’s revelation, he did not show it. Shamel had learned very early on that his oldest brother could listen to the same piece of information five times from five different people and leave each one of his interlocutors with the impression that he was imparting news.

‘Well, well, so you’ve decided it’s time to settle down. Of course, what a shock, that poor Baruch boy – You know, someone else would have dealt with that very differently. But you were always mature for your age. I think you’re making the right decision. Congratulations.’ The Pasha puffed on his cigar, deep in thought. ‘When I get back from the ministry this evening we must get together with all your brothers and decide about dividing up the inheritance. We always said we’d do it when you came of age. We should have done it five years ago, but there never seemed to be a good time. Now that you’re thinking of getting married, it’s high time.’

The Pasha got up and started to put on the suit that was set out for him on the clotheshorse. He picked out a bow tie and matching silk pocket square. ‘What do you think of the land around the Kafr-el-Kom villages? It’s good cotton land, and there are mango orchards. It’s right next to the land your brother Zakariah has his eye on; the two of you can take turns running both estates.’

He picked up two soft, silver-backed brushes, one in each hand, and brushed his thinning dark hair with both brushes at once. ‘Do you have a particular bride in mind? No? Then I assume you’re leaving that to the women?’

‘As soon as I had settled it with you, I was going to speak to Zohra – and to Dorria too, of course,’ Shamel added, remembering his sister-in-law.

‘Good, good. You couldn’t make them happier if you offered them Solomon’s treasures. It will keep them occupied for months.’ The Pasha clearly relished the thought. ‘I swear there is nothing women enjoy as much as matchmaking.’ He buttoned up his waistcoat and pressed his tarbouche down on his head. ‘There, I’m ready. Let’s go.’

As the Pasha and Shamel opened the door, Om Khalil straightened up from her position at the keyhole. The Cairo House teemed with intrigues, what with its three sets of married brothers, the bachelor brothers, distant relatives and assorted hangers-on. The Pasha sometimes found it more of a challenge to manage the politics of his household than those of his cabinet. The thirty-odd domestics played an indispensable role in the scheme as spies and couriers. So Om Khalil did not bother to disguise or excuse her eavesdropping behind the door. She threw her head back, put her hand to her mouth and released the blood-curdling whoop of rejoicing called a zaghruta. The men groaned. They knew that in a few hours every household of their acquaintance would have been informed that the youngest of the Seif-el-Islam brothers had thrown his hat in the ring.

Shamel drove across the Kasr-el-Aini Bridge, flanked by its British stone lions, and down the Nile Corniche to his older sister Zohra’s villa on the island of Zamalek in the middle of the river at its widest point in Cairo.

‘Is Zohra Hanem home?’ Shamel asked the maid who opened the door. ‘Good, I’ll go up then. And go tell Sitt Gina that if she’s ready in twenty minutes I’ll take her out to dinner.’

There were twenty years between Shamel and his oldest sister Zohra, so that his nieces were only a few years younger than he was. Zohra had four daughters, and each of her three youngest brothers had a favorite niece whom he chaperoned and squired around to restaurants and shows. Shamel’s favorite was the oldest, Gina, not because she was the prettiest – the youngest was considered the beauty – but because she was the most intelligent and spirited.

Shamel found his sister sitting in front of her secretary desk, tallying up the household accounts. When Shamel told her the news she jumped up and hugged him. ‘Have you told anyone yet but the Pasha? Do you have anyone in mind? No? Will you leave it to me and Dorria then, to find you a bride?’

‘All right. But no cousins. There’s too much intermarriage in our family already. You know how I feel about that.’ Zohra herself was married to a cousin on her mother’s side; it had been a difficult marriage. ‘And none of these “modern” girls,’ he added. ‘I’ve known too many of them.’

‘Of course, of course. Leave it to me. These things take time, they have to be handled very delicately.’ Zohra’s eyes gleamed at the prospect. She was already weighing and dismissing various possibilities. ‘Why don’t you go see the girls? You’ve been such a stranger lately, they’ve missed their favorite uncle.’ It was obvious that Zohra could barely contain her impatience to get on the phone.

Shamel headed down the corridor towards his nieces’ rooms. It occurred to him as he caught whiffs of lemon juice and talcum powder, nail polish and hot curling irons, that four daughters in the house was something like a cottage industry. His arrival was greeted with squeals of alarm, cries of welcome and doors being pulled hastily shut. His youngest niece, Mimi, skipped down the corridor towards him. She tossed her chestnut brown plait over her shoulder and offered a plump cheek for a kiss.

‘The bath woman is here today,’ she confided. ‘They’re all getting their legs waxed with sugar wax, then smoothed with pumice stone. I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet. It hurts! Come in here.’ She pulled him by the hand into a small sitting room where a dressmaker was running up a nightgown. ‘Gina’s almost ready.’ She sat him down and perched on the arm of the chair. ‘Why is it always Gina? When are you going to take me out?’ She pouted.

‘When you’re older. And when you stop eating so much Turkish Delight. You’re turning into a piece of Turkish Delight yourself.’ He pinched her chubby pale arm.

‘Gina’s taking so long because her hair takes forever to hold a set,’ Mimi announced spitefully. ‘It’s so floppy she has to set it with beer. But Nazli’s hair is so coarse and curly, she has to straighten it with the curling tongs. She even waxes her forearms. Why –’

‘Mimi! Wait till Mama hears how you’ve been talking!’ Gina came in, smoothing the puffed skirt of her flowered-print silk dress. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Uncle Shamel,’ she gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘Where are we going?’

‘The Romance. I haven’t taken you there yet. They have a new band, all the latest sambas and rhumbas. And Samya Gammal is the featured belly dancer for tonight. She’s back from Europe, she just finished filming a movie with Fernandel.’

Gina looked around the dance floor. The band was playing an animated ‘Mambo Americano, Hey Mambo’. She sighed. One thing her favorite uncle could not do was dance, and of course it was out of the question for her to dance with anyone else. She put down her fork. Her portion of the Chateaubriand steak for two they had ordered was daunting. She put her hand on Shamel’s arm and motioned with her head. ‘That man that just came in – I think he’s trying to catch your eye.’

Shamel looked over across the dance floor.

‘Oh, that’s Ali Tobia. He’s a good friend of mine.’ He waved to Ali, who crossed over to their table. Shamel offered him a seat and introduced him to Gina. They shook hands. It seemed to Shamel that it took Ali a heartbeat too long to muster his easy smile and that Gina turned her attention back to the dance floor a little too self-consciously. It was hard to read young girls, Shamel thought, but his friend was a different story; he knew Ali well enough to sense his momentary loss of composure. At the first opportunity he would mention that Gina was spoken for. It would avoid complications, and in any case it was true enough.

A sudden scurrying and whispering on the part of the staff was followed by an expectant hush. All eyes turned to the door as King Faruk and his retinue made their way to a table by the dance floor. The diners at the other tables stood up and applauded. The three at Shamel’s table clapped perfunctorily. The king lowered his great bulk into his chair, people took their seats and the band resumed playing. Faruk’s head turned slowly toward Shamel’s table; he stared in their direction for a moment, then turned away. Pouli, his Italian valet, whispered something to the maître d’hotel. Faruk would be informed in a minute who was responsible for this public display of disrespect.

‘I think we might as well go somewhere else,’ Shamel suggested, motioning to the waiter for the bill. He handed Ali his car keys. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take Gina to the car? I’ll follow as soon as I’ve settled the bill.’

Several other tables with young women in their party were following suit. The king had a reputation for forcing unwelcome attentions on any woman who happened to catch his eye. As a preliminary, he would send a bottle of champagne, with his compliments, to the woman’s table. If his overtures were repulsed, disagreeable incidents ensued. Faruk could be dangerous; it was widely believed that he had arranged for the ‘accidental’ death of a young officer, the fiancé of a woman Faruk was currently besotted with.

By the time Shamel joined Gina and Ali in the car, the incident with the king had had the effect of completely dismissing from his mind his earlier misgivings about having introduced them.

That summer, as every summer, there was a mass migration of households to escape the heat of Cairo during the mosquito-infested months of the Nile flood. Those families that were not vacationing in Europe sent the staff ahead to air and clean their summer homes in Alexandria. A few days later the entire household would follow. Shamel shuttled between the seaside and his new duties on the estate in the Delta. Ali Tobia came up from Cairo every weekend that he could get away from hospital assignments.

The days were spent at cabanas on the private beaches. At around ten in the morning the beach boys unlocked the cabanas and set up the parasols and chairs on the sand. By noon the beach would be busy.

‘Fresca! Ritza! Granita! “Life”!’

All day long the vendors walked up and down, hawking tiny honey and nut pastries, raw sea urchins, water ices and magazines in four languages. The waiters from the cafeteria on the pier hurried back and forth in their embroidered caftans, carrying pitchers of frothy yellow-green lemonade the color of the foamy waves that lapped at their feet.

At two o’clock in the afternoon the Corniche was clogged with chauffeur-driven cars bearing full-course hot lunches which would be served on folding tables in the cabanas. Reluctant, brown children were called out of the water by nurses with large towels at the ready. In swimsuits and burnouses, families sat down to lemon sole and sweet sticky mangoes. Lunch invitations were passed along from cabana to cabana.

By sundown the beach boys folded the parasols and pulled the light wooden paddle boards up the sand and stacked them. The beaches were deserted for the night spots.

All through that long, lazy summer the photographers trudged up and down the shore with their pant legs rolled up, their equipment slung over their shoulders, looking for likely prospects. They snapped the photos and came back with a print the next day. Shamel had a photograph with Gina and Ali sitting on either side of him, at a table in the garden of the Beau Rivage hotel at night; wrapped around Gina’s wrist was a string of jasmine blossoms that Ali had bought from a street vendor. Looking at the photograph, later, Shamel wondered how he could have been so blind.

It was late August when the three of them were having dinner on the terrace of the Beau Rivage. There was an end-of-summer air about the folded parasols and the black flags fluttering on the beaches. The strings of lights suspended from the trees swayed in the breeze and Gina drew her wrap around her bare shoulders. Shamel got up to use the washroom.

When he came back to the nearly deserted restaurant, Gina and Ali had their heads together, whispering urgently. She shook her head and turned away. He reached for her hand. She laid her forearm flat on the table between them and turned her palm up. He covered her hand with his and pressed her fingers apart. She closed her eyes.

When they heard Shamel coming they jumped apart. He sat down between them.

‘How long has this been going on?’ He put up a hand. ‘Never mind. I tell you one thing. It stops right here, or else you speak to Gina’s father tonight.’

‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ Ali burst out. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to ask for her hand from her father, for weeks now. But Gina won’t let me. We were arguing about that again just now.’

‘He doesn’t know Papa,’ she pleaded. ‘You know what he’s like, Uncle Shamel. We don’t stand a chance. Give us some time. Maybe if I can talk Mama around to our side first –’

‘No.’ Shamel had seen enough. He was not going to be responsible for what might happen between them. ‘You talk to your father tonight, Gina. I’ll come with you, I’ll do my best to convince him. But if the answer is no, then that’s that. Ali?’

‘Of course,’ Ali nodded miserably. ‘You have my word. You should know me better than to ask.’

Gina’s father, Makhlouf Pasha, never felt as out of place as he did in his wife Zohra’s boudoir. He was not sure what grated most on his sensibilities: the uncomfortable preciousness of her Louis XVI-style bergères or the feminine froufrou of the chiffon skirt of her dressing table. It reminded him that he lived in a household of women.

A few minutes in his wife’s boudoir were enough to make Makhlouf Pasha long to be on horseback in the country, touring some corner of his land. In the freshness of the dawn he would ride out to the white pigeon towers of the Bani Khidr village, wheel his mare around and whip her into a flat gallop all the way home. They said of Makhlouf Pasha that he rode his peasants as hard as he rode his horses, but he only really felt at home among them. He was proud of not being an absentee landlord, like most of his wife’s citified, Europeanized brothers.

His cousin Zohra had been barely sixteen when he married her, but even then Makhlouf realized that he could never completely cow her. Had she born him a son, she would have been intolerable. But every time she had been pregnant with a boy, she had miscarried in her last term. Allah knew Makhlouf had indulged her every whim during her pregnancies. She could not suffer his presence in the first months: she claimed the sight of his thick, red lips made her ill, it reminded her of raw meat. Baffled and humiliated, he would take off for the country and return after the months of morning sickness were over. But his sons had been still-born. Only the four girls survived.

Allah had not seen fit to give Makhlouf the sons who should bear his name and inherit his land. But his brothers had sons, many of them, and his daughters would marry their cousins. His grandchildren would bear his name, and the land of their great-grandfathers would not be parceled out to the sons of strangers.

Makhlouf Pasha had always made clear his expectations in that respect. So he was astonished and annoyed as he sat in his wife’s boudoir and listened to his young kinsman and brother-in-law, Shamel, intercede on behalf of some fortune-hunting suitor for Gihan.

‘Ali is no fortune-hunter,’ Shamel objected, ‘and you know as well as I do that the Tobia family goes back a long way.’

‘Much good that does them!’ Makhlouf was stung by the hint at his own parvenu status. ‘All I know is that they’ve run through their fortune. Oh, they live well, vacations in Europe every summer and all that. But there won’t be one fedan left for that boy to inherit by the time his father is done selling off their property. And even if he owned half the Sharkia province, I wouldn’t marry a daughter of mine into a family with such “modern” notions. It’s a scandal how his sisters drive their own cars and smoke in public. I ask you!’ He threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘No, Gihan will marry one of her cousins, that was decided a long time ago. Now I’m not an unreasonable man. I’m not imposing my choice on her. My brother Hussein has three boys and Zulfikar has four. She can pick and choose.’

Makhlouf Pasha leaned back and closed his eyes. He stopped listening to Shamel’s arguments and Gihan’s pleading, he ignored Zohra’s interjections. He took a deep breath and tried to control his rising temper. His blood pressure was dangerously high, the doctor had warned him repeatedly not to get worked up. He opened his eyes.

‘Listen. I’ve been very patient, but enough is enough.’ For once even Zohra was silenced. She knew him well enough to know when he could not be budged.

‘Gihan will get engaged to one of her cousins within the month. I don’t want to hear any more about Ali Tobia. If you ever see him again, Gihan, I will disown you.’

A week later Gina was engaged to her uncle Zulfikar’s second eldest son. She did not see Ali Tobia again till Shamel’s wedding.

By the end of summer Shamel had settled on his choice for a bride. The fact that the new fiancee was no kin helped to minimize the inevitable slight to the matchmakers whose candidates were passed over. It was grudgingly admitted that Shamel’s choice was perfectly appropriate in every way, and that she had the best kind of reputation, in other words, none. After lengthy, delicate negotiations and a short engagement period, the wedding was set for an evening in late October.

The double front doors of the Cairo house were flung open, as they had been so many times before, for weddings and funerals. The chandeliers in the hall blazed down on the scores of huge, free-standing flower arrangements sent from all over Cairo and the provinces. At the far corner of the salon, a kosha had been set up, a bower of white flowers where the bride and groom would be enthroned in state for the first part of the evening. The bride had arrived an hour earlier in a limousine followed by a procession of cars, and had emerged, in a pale pink chiffon gown, on her uncle’s arm, to a volley of zaghrutas and clapping. She had been hurried up the stairs to change into her Paris wedding gown with the help of hairdressers and maids of honor. Armand, Cairo’s premier photographer, followed in due course with his assistants, and the bride was photographed standing alone against a sweeping drapery of red satin and ten-foot-tall, bird-of-paradise arrangements in baskets.

Meanwhile downstairs, suffragis in brilliant caftans circulated with trays of jewel-toned nectars and mounds of almond dragées. The guests who had been milling around the two salons now crowded the bottom of the staircase in the hall; the rumor had spread that the bride and groom were about to make an appearance. Everyone prepared for the zaffa, the slow procession down the staircase that was the highlight of an Egyptian wedding. The belly dancers adjusted their sequined sashes, the torchbearers lit their torches, the flower girls picked up their baskets. Under Zohra’s direction, the unmarried girls and boys of the clan lined the steps of the staircase on both sides, holding tall, flickering tapers. Gina took her place with her sisters and cousins at the top of the stairs, one hand shielding the flame of her candle from a sudden breeze.

There was a burst of ear-splitting zaghrutas from the maids at the back of the second floor gallery, drawing everyone’s attention to the top of the stairs. Belly dancers clicking castanets and musicians clashing cymbals and banging drums wound their way slowly down the steps. Then came the flower girls, tossing wafer-thin, gilded coins. The bride and groom finally made their appearance at the top of the landing, the bride in a bare-shouldered gown of creamy satin entirely embroidered with tiny seed pearls, long satin gloves and a diamond pendant at her throat; the tall, beaming groom in a black frock coat. They stood there for a few moments while the guests broke out in applause and the photographers popped their flashbulbs. Then the groom gave the bride his arm and they started slowly down the stairs, one step at a time, stopping every so often to let the maids of honor adjust the long, heavy satin train and the frothy tulle of the veil sweeping behind them. As Gina followed the procession around the curve of the landing, she saw Ali Tobia at the far end of the hall, in a group of young men. She looked away almost as soon as their eyes met.

The zaffa procession made its leisurely way down the stairs and through the hall to the kosha set up at the far corner of the inner salon, and there was a pause while the bridesmaids negotiated the task of drawing the train out of the bride’s way and arranging it in a pool of shimmering satin at her feet. The bridesmaids took turns sitting on little stools at the feet of the bride and groom. Gina discreetly slipped away when it was Ali’s turn to approach the kosha dais and greet the wedding couple. The photographers snapped endless photos and the belly dancers entertained the crowd, as the Pasha beamed and greeted, and Zohra supervised and ordered the wait staff and the photographers about.

Eventually the bride and groom got up from their gilded chairs in the bower of flowers to go upstairs and change for the second part of the evening. Gina followed the bride to one of the suites while the groom’s attendants followed him to another. Half an hour later, the bride made her reappearance in a pale lemon, sleeveless satin gown trimmed with wide black bands of pearl and jet embroidery; she wore long black satin gloves to match and her diamond pendant mounted on a black velvet ribbon around her neck. The groom had changed into a white smoking jacket and black tie. They made their way down the stairs again and headed to the dining room where they cut a ceremonial ribbon to open the grand buffet, and the guests took their places at the tables set out around the dining room and the hall.

The long evening stretched into the early hours of the morning, and the bride and groom got up again to cut the wedding cake. Finally the center of the hall was cleared and a full orchestra of traditional musicians set up their chairs and stands as the guests gathered around. The legendary singer Om Kalthoum, clutching her trademark chiffon handkerchief, belted out song after song in her deep, powerful voice, urged on by cries of ‘Allah’ and ‘Encore.’

When the first light of day broke, the bride and groom went upstairs for the last time, to one last tribute of zaghrutas and applause. The first guest got up to leave, picking up the wedding favor at his place at table, a silver ashtray embossed with the couple’s intertwined initials and filled with pink and white dragées. As the long hours of the wedding wore to a close, as the drawn-out litany of leave-taking took place, the ‘mabruk’ and ‘may your turn be next’ echoing over and over, Gina and Ali breathed a sigh of relief; throughout it all, they had somehow avoided coming face to face.

Two months later Makhlouf Pasha sank into an armchair in his salon, his thick fingers splayed on his beefy thighs, his muddy shoes planted squarely on the rose border of the Aubusson carpet. He had just arrived in Cairo an hour ago, and the servants had scurried because they had not expected the Pasha to be back from the country till evening. Zohra Hanem was out shopping with the three youngest ladies, and Sitt Gihan had gone out on her own a while ago.

The doorbell rang and he heard the voice of his oldest daughter as she greeted the maid. Then she walked through the French doors of the salon, dropping her handbag on the console on the way.

‘Hello, Papa.’

‘Where were you?’ he barked.

She stopped in the middle of the salon. One look at her face brought the blood rushing to Makhlouf’s head. Gihan could never hide anything.

‘Answer me. Where were you? Did you see that Ali Tobia?’

She stood there, not saying a word, head up, eyes down, twisting her gloves. Even as a child, Makhlouf thought, she did not lie or whine when she was accused; she should have been a boy. He felt the blood surge behind his eyes so he could hardly see. How dare she stand there, facing him down! He grasped the arms of his chair and tried to heave his bulk out of it.

‘Papa, be careful!’ Gina instinctively took a step forward, to help him up.

He swung his arm back and lunged at her, swiping blindly at her face as he lost his balance. She screamed and turned, running for the door.

‘Get out!’ He was frothing at the mouth. ‘Don’t ever come back! You’re no longer my daughter!’

She ran out, not stopping to pick up her handbag.

A few hours later, Zohra let Shamel into her husband’s bedroom. ‘No one has been able to go near him,’ she whispered, her eyes red. Shamel patted her hand and closed the door behind him. In the semi-darkness of the room he made out the figure of his brother-in-law lying on the bed, still wearing his muddy shoes.

‘Who is it?’ Makhlouf Pasha growled, lifting the ice pack off his forehead. ‘Oh, it’s you! I should throw you out of my house! It’s all your fault. I trust you with my daughter and you play the Pander between her and that—’

‘I wanted to tell you that Gina –’

‘Don’t ever pronounce that name in my house! I have no daughter by that name.’

‘She only disobeyed you that one time, I swear. And nothing happened. Even after you threw her out and she ran to Ali, he brought her straight to me, he didn’t even let her through his door. The last thing he wants to do is compromise her. Don’t you see that you’re wrong about him? He would marry her this minute, in the dress she’s wearing, but he must have your blessing. He won’t make her choose between him and her family. And he has too much pride to marry her without her father’s permission. The Tobias have their pride too.’

‘By Allah she’ll have nothing from me! Not one feddan after I die and not one piastre while I’m living. She’ll be sorry. No wedding trousseau, no shopping trip to Europe, no furniture, no decorator, no antiques, nothing. Let’s see how long this true love will last.’

‘It won’t make a difference to Gina. If it were any of her sisters, I’d agree with you. But she’s different, things like that don’t matter to her. And I can speak for Ali. All he wants is Gina – but not without your blessing.’

‘Then let him have her! In nothing but the dress she is wearing!’

‘And your blessing –’

‘My blessing, my curses! Now get out before you kill me!’

It was a happy ending, for a while. Gina and Ali set up house in an apartment with simple modern furniture. My parents were newlyweds themselves, and the two couples were inseparable. When I was born, my father named me Gihan.

That year the coup d’état of 1952 changed everything, although no one at the time realized the magnitude of what was happening.

The day came when the bulk of the large estates was confiscated from the landowning families. Mostly the fellahin accepted this momentous change with their usual mixture of resignation and indifference, but there were isolated incidents of violence. When the rumor spread that government agents were on the way to confiscate Makhlouf Pasha’s country house, a mob of peasants besieged the place. Their intention seemed to have been to loot the house before the agents arrived. Makhlouf came out on the terrace and roared at them, and they took a few steps back. But he was suddenly struck by a massive stroke and collapsed, speechless. The fellahin surged forward; some of them were carrying torches and they set fire to the house. Makhlouf and his family were smuggled out in a car, the two youngest girls lying on the floor. Makhlouf never recovered from the effects of the stroke; he remained a paralyzed husk of a man.

Ten years later the selective sequestration decrees targeted certain families, notably the Seif-el-Islams and the Makhloufs. Gina’s sisters, married to their cousins, sold off their jewelry and their furniture, piece by piece, to live from day to day.

Meanwhile Ali’s reputation as a brilliant cardiologist had risen steadily. The waiting rooms at his clinic overflowed and he was increasingly called in for consultations by the most prominent members of the new regime. His success cost him long hours away from home, but he encouraged Gina to go out without him. She was often seen at parties and restaurants, always with a group of close friends from the new elite of doctors and their wives.

One day the rumors started about Gina and the scion of a Lebanese banking family. She did not lie to Ali.

‘You’re my only friend,’ she pleaded, ‘help me.’

He acted like a perfect gentleman: he divorced her on the spot, pronouncing the ritual words ‘I release you,’ three times in quick succession. He told her she could take anything she wanted, as long as she left quickly. She took nothing but photographs of the two children she was leaving behind, Leila and Tamer. There was no question of taking the children with her; they were both of an age when custody would have gone automatically to the father, even if the mother were not the one to ask for divorce, even if she were not leaving the country, even if she were not remarrying.

I remember the day Gina left for Lebanon; she came to our house to say goodbye. I was fourteen at the time. I watched from the balcony as she arrived in the Lebanese playboy’s sports car. He stayed in the car, but I got a glimpse of dark sunglasses and a gold bracelet on his wrist glinting as he tapped his fingers on the side-view mirror.

Gina ran up the stairs and into the living-room where my father was waiting. She came towards him, arms outstretched. ‘You’re the one person I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye!’

‘Goodbye, Gihan,’ he said very quietly.

She stopped dead in her tracks. Then she turned on her heel and ran out of the room and down to her lover waiting in the car.

At the time I misjudged my father’s harshness. I even attributed it to the fact that the man was a Maronite, and that Gina would marry out of her religion. But I realize now that it had nothing to do with it. My father was a romantic. He had believed in their love, his Gina and his best friend. He could not forgive her for disillusioning him.

Many years later, Tante Zohra was to tell me that for Gina it always had to be the grand passion. She was one of those women who need to feel in love, the way an addict craves an elusive state of euphoria. She could not bear to see her romance with Ali succumb to routine and neglect; she could not bear to be taken for granted. She looked for the immediacy, the missing thrill, the passion, in the eyes and the arms of another.

Today I can try to understand the fugue for which Gina was condemned without appeal by everyone she knew. But what I remember thinking at the time was that I could never bear to disillusion my father that way. Did Gina give a thought that day to the adolescent girl watching from the corner? Do we ever realize, when we take a plunge, that the ripples we create can spread as far as the distant shore? But there was no way anyone could have imagined then that Gina’s story would lie like a palimpsest under mine, long after it had faded from memory.

As for Gina, Papa never saw her again. A few years later the civil war broke out in Lebanon; it must have been particularly hard for her, a Muslim married to a Maronite.

But he did see Ali again. A year after Gina left him Ali remarried, a younger woman with ties to the new regime. He became President Nasser’s personal physician. So it was hard to believe when Dr Ali Tobia came to visit my father one night. It had been years, even before his divorce from Gina, that he had not come to our house. Few people who had anything to lose risked association with the families that Nasser had designated as ‘enemies of the people’. It was no secret that the intelligence agent at the door took note of every visitor, that the telephone was tapped and the servants were spies. Even in the privacy of our own bedrooms, between parent and child, we still whispered. That Nasser’s personal physician would risk calling on my father was unthinkable.

Yet one summer night, there was Ali Tobia. He looked tired, the creases in the craggy face were deeper, but his smile was unchanged. He chucked me under the chin as if I were still seven rather than seventeen. Then he and my father went out to the verandah to talk in private. I remember seeing the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark for over an hour.

Only after Ali’s death did I learn from my father why he had come that night. He needed to confide in someone he could trust. He was convinced that Nasser was paranoid, clinically paranoid, and increasingly irrational and dangerous. A few months later Ali Tobia died overnight of an unexplained illness. It was generally believed that Nasser had his physician poisoned for spreading rumors about him.

4 The Proposal

The girl watching from the corner, the girl I once was. Where do I start looking for her? In retrospect, she seems to have drifted along like a leaf borne downstream. When could she have changed course?

I flip through an album of my own wedding pictures. These photographs are in color, and that difference in itself seems to mark a distinct shift in time and mood, the inherent glamor and nostalgia of the black and white images replaced by the stark, bright immediacy of the color prints. I am looking at a photo of a young bride with a round, sweet face and long, dark brown hair. She is looking straight at the camera, unsmiling, and the only expression behind the blankness of her wide eyes is a flicker of apprehension. But I am only guessing. I can close my eyes and get under the skin of the child of nine, but when I look at the photo of the bride of nineteen it is like looking at a stranger. Somewhere in the intervening years I have lost the key to her thoughts and emotions.

Perhaps it is the evolution girls go through in the process of molding themselves in the image of a feminine ‘other’. The wild, willful ‘I’ is mercilessly renounced like the outgrown, embarrassing, favorite things of childhood. They become strangers to themselves. Years later, a change in their lives can trigger a return full circle, and they rediscover their lost voice.

The Gigi I remember at eighteen was a little set apart by her circumstances and consequently unusually sheltered and naive. She lived largely in her books and her imagination; the outside world filtered through as feebly as light through the thick wooden shutters of Mediterranean windows.

In the way that the particular, rather than the general, colors our fundamental experience of growing up, hers was a cherished, normal girlhood. All children have nightmares about a bogeyman. For Gigi the bogeyman was real, he had a name and a face. The black-browed face was inescapable on a million posters throughout the country: the intense, sooty eyes, the prominent nose, the moustache, the lantern jaw. The name was whispered: Nasser, El-Raiis; his thousand eyes and ears lurked behind every corner. She did not have nightmares, only she was a very light sleeper, and she always woke at dawn, straining her ears; when they came for her father, it was at dawn.

She never heard her father talk about his experiences in the internment camps. At home he spent hours smoking in an armchair, lost in his thoughts. He had no land or business left to run. According to the sequestration decrees that applied to most of the men in the families affected, he was barred from practicing law or belonging to a professional syndicate or even a social club. Like a prisoner on parole, he could not leave the city without clearance from the authorities, nor leave the country under any circumstances. His revolver and passport were confiscated. Nasser’s sequestration decree went far beyond the confiscation of wealth or the stripping of civil liberties. It was the sharply-honed instrument of his malice: it emasculated, it isolated, it muzzled, it humiliated, it stigmatized; it forced retirement on men in their prime; it immured them in their own homes.

If the diffuse gloom that hung in the air at home had an effect on Gigi, it was to teach her a sort of precocious tact. She learned to be unquestioning and accepting, in order to spare the adults who imagined they were shielding her. She cultivated a bubbly surface. Mama in particular regarded any sign of moodiness as alarming.

She waited patiently for life to begin, without giving a single conscious thought to what she was supposed to be waiting for, until her aunt Zohra’s visit set the wheels of this unspoken destiny in motion.

‘Gigi! There you are.’ Madame Hélène stood at the door, a little out of breath. ‘Reading again? You’ll ruin your eyes, ma petite! Monsieur is looking for you. He’s in the study.’

Gigi put down Le Rouge et le Noir with a sigh. She went downstairs to the study. Papa was sitting at his desk. The window behind him let in the afternoon sunshine and a whiff of jasmine from the bushes outside. Gigi perched on the arm of his chair, watching him fill his pipe, his movements careful and precise, the back of his hands shadowed with dark hair. He had given up cigarettes years ago, since his first heart attack. Gigi loved the smell of the aromatic pipe tobacco.

‘Well, Gigi, your Arabic tutor tells me you need to do some reading if you’re going to pass your Arabic exam for the baccalaureate this year.’

Gigi made a face.

Her father laughed. ‘Considering that Madame Hélène was just complaining you stayed up all night reading a novel by Zola—’

‘Not Zola. Stendhal.’

‘Stendhal, then. Surely you can make yourself read a dozen pages a day of Naguib Mahfouz.’

‘His books are so – depressing.’ She flipped through a book titled Midaq Alley.

On her way elsewhere Gigi had been driven through some of these back alleys, her nose firmly buried in a French novel, avoiding the sight of the beggars; of the carcasses of meat hanging on hooks in front of the butcher shops; of the flies on children’s faces; of the peasant woman sitting cross-legged on the railroad station platform, suckling a baby on one swollen, bare breast. The woman had been totally unselfconscious, and no one had stared at her. Whether it was motherhood or misery that removed the provocation from her nudity, Gigi had not been able to tell.

Papa took the book from her and put it back on the shelf. ‘One day you’ll appreciate Mahfouz’s writing. But never mind for now.’ He pointed to the bookcase behind him. ‘Pick a book by Yussef El-Siba’yi. They’re harmless romantic novels about cavalry officers and pretty young girls.’

‘They sound like books by Delly. I don’t like the roman à l’eau de rose type either! But all right, if you insist.’

Gigi leaned against his shoulder.

‘Papa, were you ever sorry that I wasn’t a boy?’

‘Every day.’

‘Please be serious!’

‘Then why do you ask?’

‘It’s that I just found out that the sacrifice of the Feast is to ransom the male members in a family. Only the sons.’

‘Strictly speaking, that’s correct.’

‘But we always sacrificed a sheep and a lamb, and you always said the lamb was for me.’

‘As far as I’m concerned we ransom our blessings. And you were a blessing – most of the time!’

Domino suddenly started barking and the doorbell rang. In a minute the maid announced that Tante Zohra was at the door. Gigi ran upstairs to tidy up.

She looked out of her bedroom window. Tante Zohra’s ancient black Mercedes was parked in front of the house, and the driver was helping her out. Her tall, lean figure unfolded slowly out of the car. Gigi recognized the driver, Omar, although he was not her aunt’s regular chauffeur. He was an agent of the government intelligence service, the dread Mukhabarat, who had been assigned to follow Tante Zohra around several years ago. Like the rest of the family, she was the object of constant surveillance since the sequestration decrees.

Gigi had heard the curious story of how it came about that the government informant ended up driving her aunt around. One evening during the month of Ramadan Tante Zohra had been looking out of the window and had seen the man standing alone in the deserted street. It was sunset, and the calls from the minarets echoed all over the still city. The birds were twittering in the Indian jasmine trees and an eerie moratorium had fallen over the normally bustling traffic. Everyone was indoors waiting for the cannon to go off, announcing the breaking of the fast. Apparently no one had thought to relieve the poor Mukhabarat agent. Zohra felt sorry for him and sent someone to call him around to the back door for the Ramadan meal.

From that day on, the man bowed politely whenever he saw her waiting outside the door to her villa, while the doorkeeper tried to hail a taxi. Her husband, Makhlouf Pasha, was wheelchair-bound since his massive stroke. She herself had never learned to drive and now could no longer afford a chauffeur.

One day when she was late and having trouble stopping a taxi, she had a brainstorm. She beckoned the man over and suggested that he could drive her where she was going in her own car, which was sitting idle in the garage; that way he would know her exact whereabouts at all times without having to chase after her. The man fell in with her plan immediately and that was the beginning of a long, mutually profitable association. It was one more instance in which the Kafkaesque shadow of the police state was undermined by the irrepressible common sense of the people.

Gigi dragged her hairbrush through her hair hard enough to make Madame Hélène wince, then slipped on a headband. She washed her face but decided against changing out of the dreary uniform of the Sacré Coeur school.

She skipped down the stairs and stopped short just behind the Aubusson screen that separated the two salons. She had remembered to unroll the waistband of her skirt, which she had rolled over twice while dressing in the morning in an attempt to shorten it. Papa was very old-fashioned about things like that and called any hemline above the knee a ‘miniskirt’.

‘Gigi’s too young,’ she heard her father say.

‘She’s eighteen.’ Her aunt’s voice. ‘Her cousins were engaged or spoken for at her age.’

‘Fine. I have only one daughter. I’m in no hurry.’

‘That’s evident. Look, I’m not talking about marriage yet. I’m just asking you to consider an engagement. At least you would have some peace of mind – you know what I mean.’

‘I’m not worried about anything like that with Gigi.’

‘I know she’s very sheltered, but if you think just because of that –’

‘Not at all. Girls who get into that kind of trouble lack attention and affection at home, they look for them in the arms of the first boy who turns their head. I know Gigi; underneath her bubbly ways she’s a cool, self-sufficient girl.’ Gigi could hear Papa puffing on his pipe, the way he did when he was thinking. ‘Besides, she really is too young. She should wait until she finishes college. She’s a bright girl and should do very well in her studies.’

‘All the more reason why she won’t have any trouble studying for her college degree while married. The boy is suitable from every point of view, and these days, what with the situation in the country what it is –’ She sighed. ‘You should be glad to see her get away, to have her study in Europe. You should think of her future, of her own good. Things are going from bad to worse over here. If things were different, if we weren’t under sequestration, a girl like Gigi would have her choice of suitors, but these days…’ She sighed. ‘Really, Shamel, we’re only talking about an engagement. But it’s not as if we could take our time about this. Yussef is only here for a couple of weeks, then he’ll be going back to England. His father is putting a lot of pressure on us to arrange a meeting right away.’

Yussef? Gigi tried to guess whom they were discussing.

‘His father is a hard man,’ Papa was saying. ‘A hard man in business, a hard man with women. Twice divorced, and his wives complained bitterly during their marriages. No, Kamal Zeitouni is a hard man. I don’t know if I want to hand over my only child to a son of his.’

Yussef Zeitouni. Gigi remembered being introduced to him at a wedding, and running into him again on feast days at her aunt’s. His mother Zeina, Kamal Zeitouni’s first wife, was a friend of Tante Zohra’s.

‘It’s not always like father, like son,’ Tante Zohra was remonstrating. ‘Besides, do you want her to marry one of those pious young men who’ve never been with a woman before?’

‘And have him experiment on my daughter? Allah forbid!’

‘At least let me arrange a meeting between Gigi and Yussef –’

Gigi had been standing awkwardly behind the screen, too embarrassed to interrupt once she realized she was the subject of the discussion. But now she heard her mother coming down the stairs and decided it was time she made an appearance in the salon.

Yussef, Kamal Zeitouni’s son by his first marriage, was now in his late twenties and lived in London, where he was studying for a doctoral degree. Since Tante Zohra’s visit, Gigi had met him again several times at formal teas and dinners that common acquaintances had arranged. She found him as she remembered: good-looking, tall, with his mother’s sweep of raven hair. He had come to the house for lunch, twice. After lunch they had made strained conversation in the salon while Madame Hélène sat discreetly in a corner, ostensibly engrossed in her embroidery.

Normally the next step would have been a formal engagement, followed by a few months of courtship during which the engaged couple, still more or less chaperoned, came to know each other better. Either one could break it off at some point before the wedding, and some of Gigi’s friends were already on their second engagement. But the circumstances were different in this case. Gigi knew that she had run out of time to make up her mind: she needed to give an answer before Yussef left for England. If it was favorable, he would be back in a few months for the wedding, after which they would leave immediately for Europe.

Papa assured her repeatedly that the decision was entirely hers; it was his prerogative to veto any of her suitors, but he would never influence her in anyone’s favor. Mama seemed to be favorable. Gigi’s girlfriends thought Yussef was handsome and that she was lucky to be going abroad not just for a honeymoon, but to live and study.

Gigi kept stalling; she felt she didn’t know Yussef at all, a reasoning which made Mama impatient. What she could not tell her mother was that she had only the vaguest notion of what marriage was about and did not feel ready for it, regardless of the suitor. Indeed the idea that her parents actually expected her to marry so soon came as a surprise, tinged with a slight sense of betrayal.

Tante Zohra took the matter in hand with her usual decisiveness. ‘Gigi dear, I have an idea. I know it’s hard for you to exchange more than a few words with Yussef with people around all the time. Why don’t you go spend a couple of days at my beach house in Agami? Yussef could come to visit, without all the pressure, in peace and quiet. With your governess, of course, to chaperone; and take Tamer along too, so it won’t seem too obvious. Leila has to study for an exam, but Tamer can go, he never studies anyway.’

Ever since their father’s sudden death nearly a year ago, Tante Zohra had raised Gina’s children, Leila and Tamer. Gigi got along very well with Leila, a level-headed girl only a year younger. Tamer, on the other hand, alternated between uncommunicative sulks and obnoxious high spirits. Gigi was a little disappointed that it was Tamer and not Leila who would go along on this trip.

‘See Alexandria and die,’ the ancient Greeks used to say. Gigi tried to remember the book in which she had read that. She loved Alexandria in the off-season, before the summer crowds arrived. She sat in the back of the car between Madame Hélène and her fifteen-year-old cousin Tamer as they drove up the desert road from Cairo. Omar, Tante Zohra’s occasional driver, was at the wheel, with Om Khalil, all in black, in the passenger seat next to him. Tamer gripped the dog between his knees, his long, lanky legs bent nearly in half.

Tante Zohra’s chalet, as small beach houses were called, was in Agami, on the far side of Alexandria, but they detoured through the city. Once past the salt marshes and long before they could see the Mediterranean, they caught whiffs of the sea breeze. Then they were driving along the Corniche, relatively quiet because it was only April. They stopped at Glimonopoli to buy granita: lemon and mango ices.

They parked on the Corniche. Gigi and Tamer leaned against the railing at the top of the sea wall and let the breeze blow in their faces as they licked their ices. The sun glinted on the crests of the steel blue waves that broke briskly against the sea wall. Gigi closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, her senses overwhelmed by the light and the warmth, the smell of salt and seaweed, the tang of lemon on her tongue.

At the chalet they were greeted by the familiar musty smell, soon dissipated when the creaky wooden shutters were flung open. Gigi found a battered straw hat in the hallway closet overflowing with sand-encrusted sandals, fins, goggles and inflatable rafts. She rolled up her pant legs and ran down the beach across the fine, sifting white powder. At the water’s edge she dug her toes into the cool, wet sand and the gritty, crushed cockleshells. She ran in and out of the surf, keeping a lookout for the loathsome jellyfish washed up by the tide.

‘Gigi! Will you come back in now? It’s getting dark.’ Madame Hélène’s plaintive voice called from the top of the path down to the beach. ‘Gigi! Come in now, you’ll be bitten by crabs.’

After dinner Tamer found the dog-eared deck of cards and the Scrabble game with the three missing letters; they played for hours in the dim light. The electrical voltage in Alexandria was 110 rather than the 220 prevalent in the rest of Egypt and the light always seemed weak there.

Gigi tried on the new dress she was planning to wear when Yussef came tomorrow. Mama’s ‘little dressmaker’ had just finished running it up for her. It was an apricot sundress with crisscrossing shoulder straps and a short, swinging skirt. Gigi twirled round and round in front of the mirror, making the dress flare up and out, and her long hair fly about her face. A Beatles record played on the small portable record-player. Tamer sipped a coke through a straw; it was flat and syrupy, the only kind available in Egypt for years now. When Gigi stopped twirling, she saw him gazing at her, and she pinched his cheek.

That night she dreamed that Yussef was coming down the beach towards her, but all she could see of him were his bare feet. He had black hairs on the toes. She turned and started running away. But suddenly something surfaced in front of her, terrifying eyes in pools of black ink.

Gigi fought off the clutches of the nightmare to find herself staring into the fierce, kohl-ringed eyes of Om Khalil. Om Khalil applied a lot of kohl before going to bed and washed it off in the morning. This morning she had apparently not yet done so, and the kohl was smeared all around her eyes.

‘Sitt Gigi, are you going to sleep all day? What time do you want lunch? What time is your company coming?’

Gigi looked at her watch on the bedside table. ‘Nine o’clock! I’d better hurry. Yussef said he’d come early. We’ll have lunch at two, Om Khalil, does that give you enough time? Just a simple lunch. I’ll come down and see about the menu. Where’s Tamer?’

‘Sleeping on the slope of the roof; if he slips down and breaks his neck it’ll teach him a lesson.’

Gigi yanked on her dressing gown and went out on the roof terrace. Her cousin was still half-asleep in the morning sun, his curly dark hair rumpled, a blanket over his shoulders. He didn’t turn in her direction. Gigi leaned against the sun-warmed wall. She wanted to ask him if he missed his father, if he wished his mother would come back from Lebanon. But the eyebrows drawn down like shades over the eyes warned her off. She touched his shoulder.

‘Come on, Tamer, we’d better get dressed. Yussef will be here any minute. Will you find Domino and chain him up?’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Yussef doesn’t like dogs.’ She sighed.

Tamer looked at her as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind. He went off to find the dog.

Gigi went downstairs to check on the preparations for lunch. She stopped short in her tracks when she saw Yussef standing in the middle of the foyer. ‘Oh! When did you get here?’

He smiled. ‘Just now. Your governess went to look for you.’

Involuntarily, Gigi’s eyes dropped to his feet. He was wearing canvas espadrilles. She couldn’t tell if his feet looked anything like those in her dream.

‘Excuse me a minute, I just have to dress.’

She ran back upstairs. Before the mirror she surveyed her messy hair and childish dressing gown in despair. This day was not getting off to a good start.

A few minutes later she came down, wearing the new apricot dress. They went for a walk on the beach. She carried her thin-strapped sandals and waded ankle deep in the water. He kept his espadrilles on and walked on the sand, a foot or two up from the water’s edge.

‘Father says I’d better be flying back to London as soon as I get back to Cairo.’

‘Oh, so soon?’

‘My thesis supervisor threw out all the data I’d collected over the past two months, he insists that I redo the experiments. Just because I took a shortcut! He just likes to give me a hard time, the old stick-in-the-mud.’

They walked along, Gigi swinging her sandals by the straps. She tried to imagine what life would be like for her in London. ‘Do you have to study all the time?’

‘Oh, no, London’s lots of fun! Parties, discos on the King’s Road.’

‘You have a lot of friends?’

‘Quite a few. Many of them are foreign graduate students like me. The one thing we all miss is home cooking. My mother is having a dozen stuffed pigeons, a leg of lamb and I don’t know what else prepared for me to take back to London. Then as soon as I get there I’ll call everybody to come over and we’ll have a big dinner.’

He sounded eager to go back, Gigi thought. She couldn’t see herself in the picture he was painting. Maybe she could put off making the decision till later, maybe they would have another chance to get to know each other better. ‘When do you think you might be coming back to Egypt?’

‘I don’t know, it depends on what my father decides. I doubt I can come back before summer next year. But I think he said a day or two before the wedding would be plenty of time. That is, of course, assuming…’ He trailed off a little awkwardly. Gigi too was embarrassed. It seemed bizarre to be discussing wedding plans with a man with whom she had not exchanged an intimate word. It occurred to her that he had not asked her a single personal question, about her likes or dislikes, her hopes or her dreams. Disappointment formed a lump in her chest. She knew she was hopelessly romantic, waiting for some intrepid explorer to discover her like some uncharted island; like the woman languishing dreamily on a deserted tropical isle in the advertisement for Fidgi perfume: ‘Toute femme est une île’ – every woman is an island.

Just then Domino appeared at the top of the dune, barking frantically as he ran towards them. Yussef stiffened and Gigi rushed to head off the dog.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t imagine how he got loose.’ It could only be Tamer, she thought grimly, as she caught Domino’s collar and dragged him back towards the chalet.

Om Khalil cleared the lunch table and set down a tray of baklava and a basket of the earliest mangoes of the summer: green, comma-shaped Hindi; sweet, round, orange Alphonse; huge ‘calf’s egg’. Gigi regretfully decided to skip the mangoes – no matter how careful she was, there was no way to eat a whole mango without risking a stain on her new dress or at least getting her fingers all sticky. At home Mama would have made sure the mango was served peeled and diced in a bowl. Gigi started to serve the baklava to Yussef and Madame Hélène.

Tamer chose a round, fleshy Alphonse. He held it upright in his fist, stuck a knife into the middle and cut about an inch deep all the way round. ‘Aren’t you going to have a mango, Gigi? You like them so.’ He twisted the top half off, ending up with one half like a cup and the other with the large pit still attached, protruding. The sticky, indelible, bright-orange juice ran down his hands. Gigi watched with horror out of the corner of her eye while trying to make conversation with Yussef.

‘So what was the weather like in London when you left?’

‘Wet and cold, as usual. But you get used to it. There aren’t many days in the year you’d get a chance to wear a dress like the one you have on.’ He glanced at her bare shoulders, lightly tinged with pink from the sun.

Gigi blushed, she wasn’t sure why. She tried to think of something to say but every topic seemed fraught with implications of one sort or another. She was a little resentful that Yussef seemed to be making no effort, while she felt it was incumbent upon her, as hostess, to keep up the conversation. For his part, he seemed perfectly at ease answering questions but devoid of curiosity himself. She wondered if it simply meant that he had already made up his mind. But based on what? Her looks and her pedigree? She was disappointed rather than flattered. But she tried to put herself in his shoes: it must be awkward to be the suitor, waiting to be accepted or rejected; perhaps that explained why he didn’t want to appear to be trying too hard.

‘Did you find it hard to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road in England?’ she hazarded.

‘A little at first. Not that I drive much there, I don’t have a car. But one time, I borrowed a friend’s car and found myself going the wrong way down a one-way street.’

Gigi’s attention was distracted. Tamer had acquitted himself of the first half of the mango easily enough, scooping out the flesh with his spoon, but when he came to the half with the pit he abandoned all decorum and simply sucked on the pit like a dog worrying a bone, juice coating the incipient down on his upper lip and dribbling down his chin. He picked at a mango fibre stuck between his teeth.

When they left the dining room Gigi pointed Yussef to the washroom and, as soon as his back was turned, lobbed a small, hard mango at Tamer’s ribs. He gave an exaggerated yelp.

‘Now, now, children,’ Madame Hélène remonstrated automatically, ‘jeux de mains, jeux de vilains.’

Gigi flushed, mortified. But Yussef only looked amused. At least that was one point in his favor, she thought; Tamer’s antics didn’t seem to disconcert him.

‘Well?’ Mama asked impatiently on the phone late that afternoon, after Yussef had left. ‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh, nothing special. We went for a walk on the beach. You know, he was wearing espadrilles all the time.’

‘Espadrilles?’ Mama sounded puzzled. ‘Darling, have you made up your mind yet?’

‘Not yet, Mama. But I will by the time I come home tomorrow, I promise.’

Gigi decided to take Domino for a walk on the beach; he had been cooped up a good part of the day to keep him out of Yussef’s way. She changed out of her dress and put on a pair of comfortable Bermudas.

The sun was setting and the beach was deserted. In the distance she saw a windsurfer skimming the water, headed for shore. A lonely swimmer bobbed in the foreground.

Gigi turned and headed away from the chalets, splashing calf-deep in the surf, looking away from the blood-orange horizon periodically to check the sand under her feet for the dread jellyfish. She knew she had been gone long enough for Madame Hélène to fret, but she was reluctant to head back.

Mama would expect an answer about the marriage proposal when she arrived in Cairo. Gigi tried to concentrate. She realized it was the first time she had had to make a real decision in her life, and it would be the most important decision she would ever make. It frightened her to feel as detached from the outcome as if it concerned someone else.

The idea of marriage seemed unreal, somehow. Whether she said yes or no, Yussef would go back to England and life would go on as usual for her. Even if she said yes, she would have a year to change her mind.

Years later, many years later, Tamer was to ask her: ‘Why did you marry Yussef? I always wondered about that.’ It would be years later, on a balcony overlooking the Nile, overlooking a by-pass bridge like a gigantic Ferris wheel spanning the city; a bridge that would not be built for another decade, and would be named after a war that was yet to take place: the Sixth of October Bridge. Years later Tamer would ask her that question, long after they had both crossed over to adulthood; when they had changed as unrecognizably as the transformed vista over the familiar old river; when they were trying to reach across the distance the years had stretched between them. He would ask her that question then, and for the first time, even to herself, she would have an answer.

But the girl walking her dog on the beach that day had no answer. Except perhaps that she was tired of waiting for life to begin.

5 The Wedding

The month before the wedding went by in a whirl. Gigi tried to concentrate on her final exams, but she was distracted by the sessions at the dressmaker’s and other preparations. She left the details to Mama, even the styles and colors of the embroidered satin negligées for her trousseau. But the choice of a stone for the solitaire engagement ring was to be entrusted to the Pasha, by family tradition. He was considered as much a connoisseur of jewelry as he was of period furniture.

Rather than pick a ring, Yussef’s parents had presented Gigi with an equivalent sum of money, discreetly concealed in a navy Sèvres bonbonnière. She called her uncle.

‘Of course, dear, I’ll call my jeweler right away. Do you have any preference as to cut? No? All right then, I’ll tell him what your budget is and he’ll pick a few stones for us to choose from. You can pick them up from the shop in town tomorrow morning and bring them right over. It’s the Sirgani jeweler downtown, but make sure you ask to speak to Sirgani Senior himself. Just tell him you’re my niece, he’ll be waiting for you.’

Gigi had driven downtown to the busy square and circled a couple of times, not looking so much for a parking space, which was near impossible at this time of day, but for a minadi, one of the self-appointed parking attendants who offered to watch your car when you triple-parked. In exchange for a small tip, they staved off the roving policemen so you did not get a ticket or your car towed. She finally caught the eye of a minadi and parked. She hopped out, telling him she would be in the jewelry shop and he was to fetch her if one of the cars she was blocking needed to pull out or if the tow truck showed up.

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