In Their Father's Country

by Drosso, Anne-Marie;

  In a postscript, she had scribbled:

  How I wish for some external factor to force a decision upon me, one way or the other!

  A week after sending that letter, she received a telegram from Alexandre stating ‘very ill uncle requests your presence.’

  The telegram was followed by letters delivered by a friend of Claire’s, who had just arrived in Beirut. In his letters – he had sent three – Alexandre was expressing the sentiment that, whatever his own personal feelings about the man, he thought she owed it to her uncle to be by his side at the end of his life. For her part, Gabrielle had written:

  Uncle Yussef is not well. If you want to see him, you probably ought to come back sooner rather than later, but he might surprise us.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Claire had telegraphed back. Suspecting Alexandre of using her uncle to precipitate her return, she avoided taking any step until a letter from Iris arrived:

  You, of all people, know my ambivalent feelings towards my father. I’m sure you remember how, when I was little, I would tell anybody and everybody who cared to listen, ‘I don’t love Papa.’I was not trying to be singular! That was how I felt. Very early on in life, I sensed that I hardly existed for him. He had three children but only two really mattered to him. That’s the truth. He chose to ignore me in almost all regards. My school successes counted for nothing. Never a ‘well done;’ never a ‘bravo.’ Not a single word of encouragement from him, not even when at the age of fifteen I entered an adult poetry competition. Nor one congratulatory word when I won it and my poem was published. No kudos either for doing six years of Latin in two years. All I would hear from him was criticism for being who I was coupled with implicit reproaches for being sick, as if I could have helped that! Need I go over that history again, his sending me, for my asthma, to a home that was actually an institution for people with mental problems?I was twenty-two at the time ... Why am I telling you all this, when you know it all?

  Over the last couple of years, my feelings for him have changed somewhat. His reaction to the events in Egypt touched me. He has shown much less bitterness than I had anticipated. I was prepared to see him become even more egotistical, for which I would have excused him. After all, he has witnessed the death of the one real love of his life – the world of business. I sometimes think that the stroke he suffered a year ago was caused by those events. That he should have come out of his stroke relatively unimpaired is quite something for a man nearing eighty-five. That he should have come out of it a touch philosophical is the real miracle. He is infinitely more likeable now than when he had the world at his feet, don’t you think? And yet, I cannot forget all the years during which he ignored me. Your presence, Claire, would be of immense help to me. There is something about you that pacifies me and brings out my better self (the little bit there is to bring out ...). And he loves you very much. For those reasons, I need you in Cairo. It’s very selfish of me to ask you to leave Beirut at this juncture. I know the predicament you’re in. I know the anguish you’re going through. I am sorry to be complicating your life. Forgive me.

  My sweet Claire, come to Cairo so that we can be together in these difficult times. They’re difficult both on a personal level and on a bigger scale. Cairo and Egypt are changing so fast that they will soon become unrecognizable to us. Will we ever get to the stage where they will be the mere shadow of a memory?

  Your Iris

  While waiting at the Egypt Air office in downtown Beirut for her ticket to be issued, two days after receiving Iris’s letter, Claire would jot down on the margin of a newspaper, ‘This every day we deemed to be so negligible and which we used to take for granted, how much we would like to revive it.’

  The departure lounge began to fill. Standing in one corner, Claire had visions of jumping in a cab, returning to her pension and showing up for work the next morning.

  Her thoughts then veered towards her daughters. She wondered whether her relative laissez-faire in raising her children had in fact harmed them more than helped them. She had let herself be guided by the principle that it was best not to force her children to do what they did not seem keen on doing. She had urged them to capitalize on their apparent strengths, encouraging the bookish one to read more books, the theatrical one to get on the stage and the beautiful one to tend to her good looks. This had backfired, certainly in the case of the older two who often accused her of having slotted them too readily into categories they were finding it hard to break out of. They felt she had given them a constraining view of themselves and their potential. In hindsight, she might have done it differently yet was not certain that the results would have been significantly different. In reality, Claire did not much believe in the virtues of education, if that meant the molding of characters. Teaching a child how to use cutlery properly, she was all for. But teaching a child what to think, how to think, what living life is about, she was less sure of. The only moral message she had ever tried to impart to her children was to avoid, to the extent possible, hurting people’s feelings. One regret she definitely had. She blamed herself for allowing – even encouraging – Simone to leave Egypt and try her luck in Europe when she was not even twenty. Had she left to go to university, it would have been one thing, but it was work she was seeking as Claire did not have the means to support her in Europe. Having a vastly idealized concept of life in Europe, of the freedom this life would entail and the opportunities it would afford, she had not appreciated the difficulties Simone would face, the loneliness, the sense of isolation. ‘She’ll make it, if she wants to,’ she had assumed, certain that where there is a will, there is bound to be some way. It had been, on her part, in part projection, in part identification with Simone’s naïve enthusiasm and determination to go.

  ‘I’ll wait for another ten minutes after which if there’s no sign the plane is departing, I’ll head back to Beirut,’ Claire suddenly decided while looking at her watch. When she looked up, she saw the Egypt Air employee waving in her direction. ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ she muttered under her breath and went to the counter to be told that the plane would be departing with a two-hour delay – ‘only two hours,’ the employee stated with jubilation as though it was news that should elate Claire. Then, pointing to a seat in the hall, the employee added, ‘Here’s an empty seat. You should grab it. You don’t want to be standing for two hours.’

  Claire was a fifty-two-year-old woman whom men, some even younger than her, still wooed. Her gray hair – more white in fact than salt and pepper – did not seem to have much dampened men’s interest in her. As ever, they felt good in her company – both at ease and understood. Her features were still delicate, their purity still striking, her jaw line firm and face unlined. She had grown neither heavy nor thin; if her body was not quite youthful, her style of dress hid this well.

  A man in her Beirut circle had fallen in love with her. However, Beirut – not he – was on her mind as she took the empty seat spotted by the Egypt Air employee. Over the course of her six months in that city, she had come to enjoy its changeable weather, including the rain, wind and thunder – all so rare in Cairo – and even to take pleasure in climbing up and down its narrow, interlacing streets, hood on her head, clogs on her feet, wrapped up in a raincoat. At the beginning of her stay, the grocery stores and pastry shops used to overwhelm her. There was so much to buy. The displays were so inviting. In present-day Cairo, she had become accustomed to the rationing of meat, sugar, oil and the disappearance, from the grocery shelves, of most cheeses and cold cuts, of nuts and imported sweets, of any item that smacked of luxury. Beirut had struck her initially as a Cairo of the thirties and forties, though on a small scale and with a modern touch. She gradually revised her opinion. Beirut’s café life in which men and women partook in equal measure gave it a languid, intimate atmosphere she had never experienced in Cairo, nor even in Alexandria. Together with the still very palpable French feel of the city, that atmosphere delighted her. Never having set foot there, Beirut’s less Europe
anized quarters – the poor Beirut – remained terra incognita for her. She imagined Beirut to be a city of sharp cleavages and divided worlds, although, based on her vague impressions, less so than Cairo. While there was a lot she did not know about Beirut, the little she knew, she liked a great deal. Could it be that Beirut’s main attraction for her was providing her with a sense of liberation?

  Checking her watch for the umpteenth time, Claire thought of her Uncle Yussef – whether his death would leave her sad, relieved or largely indifferent.

  She was his favorite niece. Some said that she was the daughter he would have liked to have had. For several years – even after his falling out with Alexandre – he would call every morning around seven o’clock to tell her there was some important matter about which he needed her opinion, would she mind riding with him to the office, the driver would take her back home after dropping him off. During those years, which ended only once he started suffering from poor health and took to staying at home, it became part of her daily routine to accompany him to his office – a trip that lasted between five to eight minutes, depending on the traffic lights. He would rarely solicit her opinion. He never much solicited anyone’s opinion. He simply wanted her company and the opportunity to give vent to whatever happened to be bothering him that day as plenty used to bother him; agitation seemed to be his second nature.

  Had there been more to his affection than the attachment of an uncle to a preferred niece? Every so often that possibility would cross Claire’s mind without arousing anger since there had never been any transgression on his part.

  A month after her father’s funeral, they had had their first confrontation. He was hoping to dissuade her from sitting for the bac, saying it was more trouble than it was worth, and the nuns at her school had better things to do than to cater to her whims. She would not yield. Nonplussed by the firmness of her resolve and her composure, he had let her be that time – not that there was much he could have done to stand in her way since she had already won over the nuns.

  Barely a couple of years after that little skirmish, their big war would erupt. On hearing her announce to him that she was smitten by Alexandre, a good friend of his, and that they were considering getting engaged, he had yelled, the veins of his throat swelling so much that she had grown alarmed, ‘You’re thinking of getting engaged to him? An impractical squanderer twice your age? You’re barely seventeen! Over my dead body, you hear! Over my dead body.’ But she would not capitulate and, with remarkable sang-froid, had proceeded to enumerate Alexandre’s virtues, many more than she had been aware of before her uncle’s outburst. They had fought for almost two years – Yussef alternating threats with pleas. When she married Alexandre, he crossed her off his life. Even Gabrielle was forbidden to make mention of her sister in his presence. Then, some ten years later, he had bumped into her at a party and all was forgiven. Not only had he welcomed her back into his life but he had welcomed Alexandre too, insisting they work together. By way of a reconciliation and belated wedding present, he had given them an apartment to be furnished to their taste, at his expense.

  Shortly after her thirtieth birthday, they were again at loggerheads. This time it was over her wanting to leave Alexandre for Guy. The intensity of his reaction at the prospect that she might be leaving the country with a man she had fallen in love with had been so excessive, his hostility towards Guy, whom he had never met, so visceral, that she did wonder about the nature of his feelings for her. He had reacted as if he and not Alexandre was the one about to be jilted, arguing Alexandre’s case as though arguing his own.

  Out of her adolescent confrontations with her uncle, Claire had emerged victorious. Out of that episode, he had, since she would give up Guy. At the time, Claire had resented her uncle enormously for the pressure he had brought to bear upon her, including issuing an order to his daughters Bella and Iris to cut off all contact with her – an order both girls ignored, calling her right away to express their solidarity. ‘To hell with him. We’re with you all the way,’ Bella had said.

  Brooding over these episodes in her life, Claire found herself now begrudging her uncle more his stand when she was a sixteen-year-old girl in love with Alexandre than his subsequent opposition to her wanting to end her marriage. In retrospect, it seemed to her that it was her uncle’s heavy-handedness that had precipitated her marriage, that his disapproval – he who stood for much of what she then derided, namely, unabashed materialism – had solidified her resolve. Had he been less vituperative, her infatuation might have run its course, and Alexandre might not have felt as honor-bound to stick to his probably impulsive proposal that they get engaged. Her uncle might have been able to talk her out of getting married by offering to send her to France to do a degree in philosophy. But there had been no such offer – not even a hint of it. As she now saw it, besides being instrumental in her decision to stay with Alexandre – an arrangement that would suit him, making her more available to him than had she remade a life with another man – he was to some extent responsible for her marrying as young as she had, as foolishly as she had.

  It was too late for her to tell him any of this. As it was too late for her to ask him why her father, a successful lawyer, died leaving so few assets. Had her uncle really been their savior, moving the family into an apartment he owned to save them additional expenses in view of their reduced circumstances? Or had he appropriated her father’s assets, her mother being in no position to defend herself?

  There are moments in one’s life when one sees oneself in a new light. Sometimes, that fresh aspect is consistent with the overall picture one has of oneself, sometimes not. Young, Claire had not been interested in the material side of things. She would not have married Alexandre otherwise; would not have been about to turn her life upside down for Guy, a young man without money; would not have rejected, at the age of thirty-five, the advances of one of Egypt’s wealthiest men known for the munificent presents he lavished on his mistresses. She had worn her relative lack of means with appealing unconcern, sewing her own gown for the Bal des Petits Lits Blancs in 1944 – a particularly grand occasion – without feeling hard-done-by. Her concern about money surfaced as she approached fifty, which also happened to be the time when, thanks to Nasser, her world began to disintegrate. That concern was becoming more than just concern, bitterness was taking hold of her. A bitterness that was making her question her uncle’s integrity – whether he had been honest in his dealings with her, Gabrielle and their mother – as well as almost regret the many hours she had spent over the years lending him an attentive ear since not a piaster from his estate would she inherit. While waiting to board her plane, acutely aware of and distressed by the depth of her resentments – bitter at being bitter – Claire reckoned that she ought to have attached importance to money when she was young, she would have been all round – even morally – better off for it. ‘Disillusionment with oneself is harder than disillusionment with others,’ was her next thought.

  The irony that she should cast such a negative eye on her uncle just as her cousin Iris was beginning to see virtues in him did not escape her. Iris was attributing her father’s relatively serene acceptance of events in Egypt to a laudable transformation in his character. Claire had a different take on it. His affairs had started to flag before Nasser. Age had dulled his business instinct. He would have felt some relief at no longer having to put his business acumen to the test – hence, his philosophical stance. Besides, he had not been as affected as many others in Egypt’s wealthy class. Not yet, in any case. Yes, the agrarian reform had hit him hard and he had lost a great deal of money on the stock market following the government’s freeze of that market. But the bulk of his assets – the real estate he owned – had not been touched. There were rumors he was being protected by a political intelligence service agent, the son of his office handyman. All in all, he had been relatively fortunate. He would have been better off to get his money out of the country before the government restrictions came into force,
but he had lacked that foresight. His assessment of the situation had been poor. Very poor.

  When, soon after the 1952 coup, the military junta passed a decree limiting the ownership of agricultural land, Yussef Sahli insisted that the agricultural reform should not be taken as a signal of more threatening changes elsewhere.

  Two years later, he shrugged off General Naguib’s removal from the presidency, his confinement to house arrest and the fading of any hope for a civilian government. He chose to believe the allegations implicating General Naguib in an attempt by elements of the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate Nasser. ‘We should take it as a good sign that the Americans seem favorable to Nasser. They understand that Egypt is not ready for democracy,’ was his line. He was a touch troubled however by news of the death in jail, during the mass arrests of Muslim Brothers, of Om Batta’s son Mahmud, whom he had known as a child. It troubled him less to hear of the imprisonment, for communist activities, of the son of Alexandre’s friend, Maher. ‘Why was the grandson of an ex-prime minister consorting with communists?’ was all he had to say about the incarceration of the young man for joining a reading group eager to decipher Das Kapital.

  In 1956, nationalist sentiments – somewhat out of character – put him squarely in Nasser’s camp. He was all for the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and incensed at the tripartite aggression, going so far as to declare Nasser a great man.

  Six months later, the process of ‘Egyptianization’ of the economy would give him some cause for concern. So would the sequestration of the assets of some of his friends, Egyptian Jews. Yet, to his son-in-law Anastase who, from Switzerland, was urging him to leave Egypt, he wrote at the time:

  It’s premature; let’s not rush to any conclusion; after all, we have just come out of a war; it will take a little while for tempers to simmer down, but I’m sure they will in due course.