‘We’re almost there,’ Gabrielle announced in a gruff voice.
Still talking to her daughter, Claire said, ‘His being so difficult the last couple of years is typical of people who have had strokes. The doctor said so.’ Then she added, as though in passing, ‘He introduced you to the world of cinema. Remember the year I was in Beirut, when he allowed you to skip school and took you to the cinema instead? You got to see a series of Russian movies, one based on a Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Lapdog; he wrote to me about that movie, saying how much he had enjoyed it.’
‘I remember that movie. I remember liking it. We also got to see several Yussef Chahine movies. Many featured Faten Hamama. I thought she was wonderful. Even better than Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind,’ Charlotte said, warming to the subject.
‘That was the year you dreamed of becoming a movie director.’
‘After my degree in anthropology perhaps,’ Charlotte said, ‘I might do documentaries.’
‘I think you should,’ Claire said. ‘Youthful enthusiasms can take you a long way if you cultivate them.’
‘I’ll drop you and park the car,’ Gabrielle said, her tone still surly.
‘Perhaps I should walk over to Constance’s place,’ Claire said as she stepped out of the car.
‘She’s waiting for you at home. With Batta. They have become inseparable,’ Gabrielle said. ‘You come with me to the garage. I might need your help.’
Charlotte looked at her mother.
‘Go with your aunt,’ Claire said and, with a quick gesture of the head, indicated to her daughter not to make a fuss.
Since the death of Uncle Yussef, the building in which Claire lived was becoming grubbier by the day. His son took no interest in the building whatsoever. ‘Why would I and how can I, if I cannot raise the rents? I will the day they do away with rent controls,’ he explained whenever the subject came up.
Time had not inured Claire to the building’s degradation. She felt both shame and revulsion at her surroundings. Most buildings in downtown Cairo were suffering from neglect but none as much as hers. The glass panes of many windows in the stairwell and landings were broken. The windows overlooked an internal courtyard with a secondary staircase intended for service people. That courtyard was now littered with garbage, in which mice and cockroaches nested. Instead of the old marble fountain at the building’s entrance was an ugly kiosk rented to a man who sold cold drinks and peanuts.
On entering the building that evening, Claire paid no attention to the state it was in. She was thinking of Alexandre, trying to relive the man he had been when they first met. She found herself listing characteristics, but that was the extent of it: tall, sinewy, dark-haired and fair of complexion, often wearing the tarbush, often with some clever repartees, often doing the handsome thing; well-read, and well-informed; sought after in salons, impetuous but soft-hearted; in sum, a man with plenty of charm to make up for his lack of means and obvious career trajectory after he had left the civil service, where he had held the position of permanent secretary in the law department of Egypt’s prestigious Ministry of Public Works. It was the death of that man years earlier, not his death the day before, that struck Claire as the truly terrible thing, as she waited for the only working elevator in her building to reach the ground floor.
Omar, the doorman, a quarrelsome sort with whom Alexandre used to argue almost daily, paid her his condolences and, standing quietly by her side with her suitcase in hand, managed even to look affected.
Constance and Batta were sitting in the hallway when Claire let herself in. They both got up. Next to ample Batta dressed in black, Constance, also dressed in black, looked like a miniature. With a small limp due to two consecutive fractures of the same hip, she walked towards Claire. Batta followed.
Claire kissed them both. Constance’s eyes misted. Crying, Batta said, ‘I’ll miss him. He had a short fuse but a good heart, and that’s what matters. I’ll never forget his wise words when my husband took another wife, “Batta, you’re too good for him. He does not deserve you. He’ll come to that realization sooner or later. Then he’ll be knocking at your door and you may not want him back.” He was right.’ After dabbing her eyes, she added, ‘I’ll go and prepare some fresh lemonade, but first let me put your suitcase in the bedroom.’
‘Did he suffer much?’ Claire asked Constance.
‘No ... well, perhaps a bit ... not much though, not much.’
‘What happened? In the end, I mean?’ Claire asked.
‘Kidney failure, the doctor said. If he had not been such a heavy smoker, things might have turned out differently.’
For a moment, the two women, both still standing, were silent, each looking pensive.
Claire broke the silence. ‘Thank you for all you did. It could not have been easy for you. You were very close to each other.’
Constance nodded, her eyes again misty. ‘We quarreled a lot though. We always did. But I suppose that’s natural; we were so close in age. He was my mother’s favorite. Of the four of us, she liked him the best. She spoilt him and he humored her. After my father died, the two of them squandered the family’s assets. She never, never thought about tomorrow. He let her do as she pleased. He shouldn’t have. He was after all the oldest son.’
‘So, she’s still begrudging him that,’ Claire thought.
The two women were quiet again.
‘He could have been a real somebody,’ Constance suddenly said. ‘He had so many talents. To think that when he graduated from the Jesuit school with prizes in French literature, philosophy, history, Arabic, Latin and English too, the principal told my mother he had a brilliant future ahead of him.’ Constance shook her head. ‘Who would have predicted it? Who? If only he had stayed in the ministry where he was much appreciated but no, he got it into his head that the working environment was no longer congenial and quit even though they wanted him to stay on.’ Constance sighed then said, ‘Well, you know the story.’
‘Yes,’ Claire said. She knew the story, one version – Gabrielle’s version – being that Alexandre had wanted to quit anyway to go roaming in Europe, which he did for a couple of years. That was when he fell in love, in Switzerland, with the woman called Charlotte, apparently a countess.
‘I know that Gabrielle thinks he resigned on a whim because he’d had enough working. She’s wrong. He liked his work and was much respected. Would King Fuad have awarded him a decoration, if he had not been highly regarded?’ Constance asked. ‘Would he?’
Claire speculated, ‘Perhaps he left because he knew that, as an Italian, he would start facing difficulties in the ministry. Times were changing. Nationalist sentiments were running high. It was the Saad Zaghlul era. It was 1924 after all. Perhaps he thought that, for men like him, the writing was on the wall.’ She felt dizzy all of a sudden and said, ‘Let’s leave the past alone, now we must organize the funeral. I ought to talk to your cousin George since he is in charge of the Conti crypt. I presume he knows about Alexandre.’
‘He does. He came to the hospital twice.’
George Conti was a rich man. Unlike Alexandre, who quit studying law to work in the Ministry of Public Works, George completed his law studies but never practised. He was interested in making money. Always discreet about his wealth he would escape notice under the Nasser regime. Had Alexandre outlived him, as his one and only first male cousin he would have stood to inherit a substantial fortune. The two men were exactly the same age.
‘It was really good of George to come to the hospital,’ Constance said. ‘As you know, he was barely on speaking terms with Alexandre. But family is family, and George is a family man.’ After breathing a heavy sigh, she went on, ‘His mother and ours were as different as can be. His mother was a penny-pinching Copt, who never touched a drop of liquor; ours, a spendthrift Greek, who did not mind a glass or two of wine. No wonder they never got along. We would have been infinitely better off with a mother like George’s. Alexandre would have hated to hear me
say that. We would have ended up in a big fight. He was blind to our mother’s faults and she to his. I loved her but I loved her with open eyes.’
Claire had heard all this before. ‘I expect Simone will be able to make it to the funeral, but I’m not sure Djenane will. Her theater group is touring in France. It’s her first big role,’ she said apologetically.
Extremely protective of Claire’s three girls as she was of Gabrielle’s daughter Aida, who had just got married and was living in Washington D.C., Constance leaped to Djenane’s defense: ‘Djenane should do what is best for her. He would understand.’
‘Would he?’ Claire was not so sure.
‘He loved you deeply,’ Constance said unexpectedly.
Claire bowed her head. For never-married Constance, love seemed such a straightforward thing: he loves her; she loves him; she does not love him; they love each other ... Constance had no difficulties seeing love, or the absence of it.
They heard the click of a key. Gabrielle and Charlotte walked in.
‘Well, I’ll go home now,’ Constance said and got up.
‘Charlotte, walk your aunt home,’ Claire told her daughter.
‘No need to. Batta will walk with me part of the way.’ Constance hugged Charlotte.
‘Good evening, Gabrielle,’ she told her sister-in-law.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Gabrielle offered.
‘No, no, Batta will.’
‘As you please then.’ Gabrielle was visibly annoyed by what she took to be a rebuff. ‘Doesn’t Batta want to go straight home though?’
Just then Batta appeared in the room, shrouded in her melayah, insisting that she would walk ‘Mazmazel Constance’ home.
Gabrielle stormed off to the kitchen.
Claire walked them to the door, saying to Constance, ‘I don’t need to tell you that you’re as welcome here as you have always been. You have the key.’
‘I know, I know,’ Constance said, looking all of a sudden grief-stricken though she did not give way to tears. Batta put her arm around her. ‘I have some things for you,’ Constance continued. They’re in an envelope. Alexandre’s keepsakes. When he moved in with me a few weeks ago, he brought the envelope along. I’ll bring it tomorrow. I meant to today, but it slipped my mind.’
Just before starting down the stairs – like Alexandre, she avoided elevators – Constance turned around to tell Claire, ‘I was the oldest of the four and yet I’m still here, and they’re gone. That’s not right.’
The first time Claire met her, Constance had been standing next to her sister Helene and their mother on the landing of their apartment on Ramses Street not far from the train station: from their balcony, the three women had seen Claire and Alexandre enter the building and were waiting on the landing to greet the couple whose marriage was to take place only two days later. Constance was in her early forties, Helene in her mid-thirties, and their mother in her sixties. Wearing somber clothes, their hair pulled in severe buns, without any make-up except for some kohl, they had seemed ancient to eighteen-year-old Claire, the daughters barely distinguishable from the mother. At first, Claire had not known what to talk about – neither to the mother nor to the sisters. They had given her the impression of living such a cloistered life. There were no books in sight in the apartment, which had surprised her as Alexandre was a big reader. Constance and Helene had gone to her school, La Mère de Dieu. This would give her a subject of conversation but barely. Half-way through the visit, on discovering that Constance loved to draw and finding her sketches really quite good, Claire, who also drew well, had warmed to Alexandre’s older sister. Yet, when the visit was over, she had asked herself whether she was doing the right thing to be marrying into a family so different from hers, and also whether Alexandre had so delayed introducing her to his family for fear she might get cold feet.
Standing by the entrance door of her apartment, as Constance had on that first meeting, Claire wondered what had become of Constance’s drawings, then heard Gabrielle, in the background, telling Charlotte that dinner was on the table.
Bread, cheese and watermelon were laid out on the dining-room table.
‘You must be hungry,’ Gabrielle told Claire.
‘Not really,’ Claire said, ‘but thank you all the same.’
‘Not feeling well?’ Gabrielle asked. ‘You look pale. Charlotte, get your mother a glass of water.’
‘I think I’m getting a migraine.’
‘Eat something then. It may ward it off.’
Claire would have preferred to go and lie down in her room, yet, out of politeness, felt obliged to take a bite.
‘When are you thinking of holding the funeral?’ Gabrielle asked.
‘It will depend on when Simone gets back. We should be hearing within the next twenty-four hours.’
‘How long can you stay?’
‘They authorized a one-week leave but I would think that, in the circumstances, it can be extended, though I would not count on it. They want me out. That’s clear. They’ll do all they can to drive me into the wall and corner me into resigning.’
‘You must go and see your lawyer first thing in the morning.’
‘First thing in the morning, I’ll go to the hospital, though it’s true that he goes to his office so early that I may be able to catch him on my way. Where’s Charlotte?’
‘On the phone probably. By the way, I bumped into Marie Sussa on Kasr al-Nil Street yesterday. She just returned from Beirut. There’s apparently turmoil brewing in the Palestinian camps. People are saying that this was bound to happen; that Lebanon would become an indirect casualty of the Six-Day War.’
‘So you’re suggesting that I’m better off in Minya than I would have been in Beirut,’ Claire said. Gabrielle had been against her moving to Beirut.
‘I am merely telling you what Marie said, namely, that there are problems on the horizon in Lebanon. There’s instability in the air.’
‘I think I ought to lie down’, Claire said. ‘I cannot afford getting a migraine now.’
‘Would you like me to come along to the hospital?’ Gabrielle asked.
Knowing how much her sister dreaded hospitals since Nicolas’s death, Claire declined. ‘Can you send a telegram to Iris though? She was fond of Alexandre. So was Anastase. Bella happens to be in Geneva right now so she’ll find out from them. As for Aristote, I am certain that Constance will contact him.’ Claire fell silent, recalling how Bella and Aristote had met through Alexandre, and Anastase and Iris through Aristote. The love matches – she and Alexandre, Bella and Aristote – had failed, whereas the marriage of reason – Iris and Anastase – had succeeded.
Rather than to her room, Claire went to Alexandre’s at the far end of the apartment. She sat on the narrow single bed next to which hung his mother’s old cross. Not much of a churchgoer, he was nevertheless quite attached to the cross. The room was badly in need of refurbishing, the paint uneven, the hardwood floor peeling, and the few pieces of furniture were ill-assorted. Claire had offered, several times, to refurbish the room but each time he had refused, saying it was not worth it, not worth her assuming any extra financial responsibilities. Over the years, he would refuse to come out of his room the few evenings a year she gave dinner or bridge parties. ‘How can I show my face at your gatherings? Put yourself in my shoes,’ he screamed once, after she had suggested he might at least put in a brief appearance. Entitled to a substantial pension on leaving the ministry, he had cashed in the biggest chunk he could and spent that handsome sum on travel and high living in Europe in his mid-thirties. For several years after he came back, he worked – mostly for Yussef Sahli – and what he earned, he spent. Once he stopped working, without a penny other than the derisory amount left in the pension, joining gatherings attended by men of means – some courting his wife – was too painful a reminder of his social fall.
‘You put yourself in mine,’ she had retorted. ‘Am I supposed to relinquish all of my social life?’ She had gone on throwing parties �
�� not as often as she would have liked – during which he would stay in this bleak room.
He was in his early sixties when he quit working for Yussef Sahli and no other job came his way except for the occasional translation. From then on, his morning routine would consist of waking up at five o’clock, showering – always with cold water even during the coldest months of the year – preparing breakfast for the girls, paying a quick visit to Constance if they had not had an altercation the previous evening, then going to the Café Riche where he read the French and Arabic papers, and met men his age or older. They were all retired. The men in his group, Muslims and Copts, included an Azhar scholar and a couple of ex-diplomats who, like him, had fallen upon hard times. The only Khawaga in the group, he fit right in thanks to his impeccable Arabic, tarbush, and years of public service. At lunch, he would return home, spend the early afternoon buried in his dictionaries or some biography. The evenings he would spend at Groppi’s with the same set. They would talk about the past and international affairs, avoiding the dangerous subject of domestic politics. Now and then though, they slipped and discussed contemporary events in Egypt, after which they would joke, with some nervousness, that their age should shield them from trouble. Alexandre had not been particularly opposed to Nasser but then why should he have been, having nothing to lose? After Groppi’s, he would stop by the grocery store to buy cheese and olives, by the bakery to get some fresh bread, then, from a street vendor standing by the bakery, he often bought a lottery ticket before returning home for dinner. He would be in bed by nine o’clock or 9.30 at the latest – just as Claire was getting ready to go out. That had been the rhythm of his life during its last fifteen years.
In its austerity, its down-and-out quality, his room resembled Claire’s hotel room in Minya. ‘Enough,’ she thought, ‘Enough!’ and got up brusquely, which was unusual for her. Instead of going to lie down as she had intended all along, she grabbed her handbag in the dining room and told Gabrielle and Charlotte that she was going to Constance’s place and would be back in half an hour.
In Their Father's Country Page 14