In Their Father's Country

by Drosso, Anne-Marie;

  Whenever I am in Cairo, I walk past the building where she lived. Her apartment, on the ground floor, has been converted into a travel agency. She got a bit of money for it when she gave it up, only very little though. The man who took it over had had designs on it for years before she finally agreed to move out. She had no one to back her in her dealings with him except for her cousin George and he was eager for her to move into the home as quickly as possible. It would free him from feeling responsible for her well-being. She had no income other than the rents two boarders paid her, and a tiny monthly sum bequeathed to her by a brother of his, to whom she had been engaged in her youth. So when the man who wanted to turn her apartment into a travel agency renewed his offer, George Conti encouraged her to take the money and move. Both he and Nuni were well into their eighties by then.

  I can imagine Nuni in the evenings, sitting by her window, the shutters half-open, watching the comings and goings in her lane, her cheek firmly pressed against her hand, very still. When I was a child, I sat by that window too, with her by my side. During my teenage years, if I happened to be walking in her lane at five or six o’clock in the evening and did not have time to drop in, I would talk to her from underneath the window. As I think back on those days, it occurs to me that I failed Nuni long before I left Egypt, for there were times when I avoided her lane if I was in a rush, or not in the mood to talk. It was mean of me to deny her this little pleasure; she had given me so many pleasures all through my childhood. Sometimes, I even walked down the lane very fast on the sidewalk opposite her window, accelerating my pace in the hope she would not see me. If she noticed, she never complained, never once said: ‘How easily you forgot the sweets I gave you behind your mother’s back, the family tales I filled your child’s head with, the visits to my old friends you seemed so keen on, my hand stroking your hair whenever you put your head down on my lap. Now, you run past my window without bothering to say even hello!’ She never uttered a single reproach.

  A life of self-abnegation and unswerving loyalty to family: people used to say that she was mad to give as much as she did and not look after herself. Even my mother, the beneficiary of much of that selflessness, used to say so.

  At the end of her long life, did Nuni have any regrets? Most people would say she ought to have had many regrets. She ought to have wept a lot, wishing she could re-live her life all over again but altogether differently this time. It seems to me though that Nuni would have been unable to imagine doing it any differently than she did. Maybe she cursed the fate that befell her and forced upon her the life it did, but regrets in the sense of thinking ‘If only I had done this as opposed to that’, I doubt she had. I doubt she ever came to view the conduct of her life as a matter of choice. I believe that she was too old-fashioned for that sort of thinking, too tied to a notion of family solidarity which few of us today can really understand – let alone embrace. But then I may be wrong. At the end of her life, she may have come to question everything she held dear. Not having been by her side, I have no idea what thoughts crossed her mind as the end drew nearer.

  My father was sixty-two years old when I was born and Nuni was in her mid-sixties. By the time I got to spend time with her, she limped on account of two fractures in her fifties. Young girls are generally acute observers of what adults wear. Through my child’s eyes, Nuni always looked the same because she wore, day after day, if not quite the same outfit, very similar outfits – even on festive occasions. The seasons changed yet her outfits hardly changed. A dark blue or black skirt that covered her calf, a white or beige blouse always with sleeves, short sleeves in the summertime, long in the wintertime. On cold days, she would wear a woolen cardigan, often blue or black but sometimes gray and occasionally beige. She rarely wore a coat. She seemed to suffer neither from the heat nor from the cold. Small and light, she did not look particularly fragile. Her gray hair was tied in a bun set low on her nape. She wore no make-up but for a hint of kohl powder outlining her lower eyelid. And no jewelry except for inconspicuous brooches – so inconspicuous that they hardly counted as jewelry in my child’s eyes. She usually dabbed some light, lemony cologne behind her ears; I could smell it when we kissed. The scent suited her. Even without the cologne, she smelled nice: fresh and clean. Her features were angular, her lips thin and finely chiseled, her complexion was milky, her forehead large. Though she gave the impression of being the sort of woman who spent little time in front of the mirror, her appearance was always tidy – from her spotless and well-ironed blouses to her soft hair gathered in a neat bun.

  I saw a picture of Nuni taken when she was sixteen years old, in the garden of the villa where she grew up. I myself was sixteen when my mother showed me the picture. I remember exclaiming: ‘It cannot be Nuni; it cannot be! If it is, will I too change as much?’ The only recognizable thing about her was her small build. The very young woman in the picture looked graceful and had the slimmest of waists – the size of waist that Scarlett O’Hara struggled to preserve. Her dress was charming – white, with an intricate lacy pattern on its bodice and a stand-up collar that might have looked too severe on an older woman, but in her case accentuated her youth. Her hair was full, gathered at the top of her head with little curls framing her large forehead. While her features in the picture were a bit fuzzy, I could tell that their overall effect was attractive. What stood out was the feminine and self-assured way in which she carried herself. Both the pose and the dress bespoke a young woman entering a more mature phase of her life on an extremely favorable footing. I saw other pictures of her when she was a bit younger, also in the garden of the family villa, in the company of another girl, a neighbor who would marry King Fuad and become queen of Egypt.

  Large families often have a Nuni – the unmarried aunt who lives her life vicariously through the lives of married brothers and sisters. Always present but in the background, necessary to the family’s functioning but resented for that very reason, these maiden aunts usually end up in that role because they are at a disadvantage in life right from the outset: they are unattractive; or without money; or a bit slow; or fragile health-wise. But Nuni was none of these. There was money in the family, at least until her father died, and a little while after that too. It would have taken some time before her mother, together with my father, squandered the family fortune, as the legend has it. Her looks would not have been the problem – quite the contrary, as I found out from the pictures I saw. She graduated from one of Cairo’s most exclusive girls’ schools and won several prizes upon graduation. Outgoing and uncomplicated, she was remarkably good at languages, had a knack for drawing and was perceptive about people. Judging by her character in her sixties and seventies, she had a cheerful disposition. At the outset, a good-looking girl with quite a lot going for her. At the end, an old woman, impoverished and alone. And, in between, steady social decline resulting in an increasingly narrow life lived through a confining web of close-knit family relationships.

  She was born in 1887; she died in 1978. The oldest of four children – two girls and two boys – there was Nuni, then my father, who was close in age to her, then a girl called Helene who was five or six years’ younger and died in her thirties, and last Nicolas, about ten years’ younger. She survived them all, looking after each one of them, in some way or other, at different times in her life. She herself was endowed with a very strong constitution. I never heard her complain about her health, never heard her mention a headache, a stomachache or a sore throat. I never saw her take pills. Her bones were brittle; she did of course see doctors when she sustained fractures, but only then. Despite her fractures and the cane she began using in her sixties, she walked long distances, climbed stairs without ever sounding out of breath, carried grocery bags as well as heavy serving trays all the way from the bakery’s oven to our place. She would serve herself only the smallest of portions of the oven-baked potato dish, the pasta with béchamel sauce, or the rice pudding and chocolate mousse she had prepared for us. What she liked best was fre
sh bread with a slice of cheese or a tiny bit of hallawa.

  Of her father, she always spoke reverently, describing him as handsome, thoughtful and kind, and saying that his premature death at the age of fifty had been disastrous for the family. I have no idea what he did for a living. He might have been a landlord. There was money on his side of the family and he had married a girl with money, the only daughter of a Greek landowner of Upper Egypt.

  She did not speak as kindly of her mother, whom she described as spendthrift, selfish and irresponsible in the conduct of the family’s affairs. She had obviously resented her mother’s special closeness to the first-born son, my father. Maybe her mother had been selfish and unwise and even irresponsible. I will never forget a scene between Nuni and my father concerning her. Whenever they talked about very personal family matters, Nuni and my father spoke to each other in Greek or in Arabic. It was not just because they did not wish other family members (such as my mother) to understand, although that must have been a factor. They would speak in these two languages to talk about personal matters when they were alone too. The reason was, I think, that they were the languages they had spoken with their mother; the languages that sprung from deeply felt emotions. French was the language of their schooling; the language for social conversations.

  Like many of the family scenes I witnessed or overheard in my childhood, the scene concerning my grandmother took place at home in the dining room. It had begun with Nuni saying to my father in Arabic that their mother, long since dead, used to enjoy drinking a glass or two of wine. The tone of the remark was not overly critical but faintly suggested that their mother had had her weaknesses. In no time, my father and Nuni were raising their voices – he accusing her of maligning her and tarnishing her memory, she retorting that she was calling a spade a spade, as opposed to burying her head in the sand and pretending that their mother had been a saint. In the end, my father demanded that Nuni withdraw her scurrilous statements. She refused, repeating what she had said with even more vigor. So he gave her an ultimatum to withdraw the statements or to leave the house immediately. Nuni got up and left, as I expected she would.

  Even when, after a particularly big quarrel with him, she stayed away, she would still send us sundry dishes and goodies for lunch. As usual, she carried them to our building but, instead of bringing them herself, she would have the bawab carry them up. If my mother was at home when the bawab showed up at the door, she would tell me to run down, catch up with Nuni and insist that she come up. But Nuni always refused, saying, ‘I swore I would not set foot again in his home.’ And I would reply, as my mother had instructed me to, ‘But it’s not just his home; it’s ours too and we want you to come up.’ Nuni would give me a big hug and say, ‘One day maybe; but not today.’ At home, my father would ask me how she was doing with an air of distant concern. Then he would pay her a visit; the next day she would return, telling my mother, ‘It’s for your sake that I came back, yours and the children’s.’ And so normal life would resume, until the next time.

  Of Helene, her much loved sister who died in her thirties, Nuni had only good things to say, extolling her beauty, her voice (she sang like a Diva, Nuni claimed) and her fundamentally good character which, to me, suggested that Helene had not been so easy. Helene died years before I was born so I only saw her in pictures. She looked very unlike Nuni: a full body and a broad face; a big mouth and an air of languor in her gaze, which could strike some as sensual and others as artificial. Helene, too, never married. She was the ostensible cause of the break-up of Nuni’s engagement to their cousin Joseph, George Conti’s brother. What Nuni related to me about this chapter in the family’s history is as follows: the husband of one of Joseph’s many sisters took a fancy to Helene, then in her early thirties, and started dropping by their place almost every day. Apparently Helene was not interested in the least in the gentleman. Besides being married to her cousin, he was short and ugly. Still, rules of hospitality required them to welcome him whenever he knocked on their door for, after all, he was their cousin by marriage. His wife got wind of the visits and took umbrage. Her brothers, including Joseph, began casting aspersions on Helene’s character. Nuni defended her, insisting she was blameless. Yet the two sisters continued to entertain the gentleman and, once, they even had to hide him behind a wardrobe when my father unexpectedly dropped in on them; they feared that my father would have made a scene, had he found out that he was still paying them visits. The criticisms grew. Nuni did not waver in her defense of Helene’s reputation, and her engagement to Joseph broke up as the matter developed into a real rift between the two branches of the family.

  ‘But Nuni, why did you continue to entertain this man?’ I asked her every time I heard the story, which I often asked her to recount. I always got the same answer: namely, that he was a most insistent sort who told them that all he wanted was a sympathetic ear. Besides, what could they do to keep him out of their home? And there was nothing going on between him and Helene anyway. On one occasion I persisted, ‘But Nuni, your engagement was at stake.’ She raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Helene mattered more to me than Joseph.’ ‘But you loved him, didn’t you?’ I probed. And she answered, ‘Not as much as you think,’ to which I replied, ‘But if this man did not matter to Helene, I don’t see why you let him come between you and Joseph.’ ‘Well, I did,’ she said, signaling that she would not divulge more than she had. Perhaps there was nothing more to divulge.

  The gentleman’s assiduous visits to their home came to an abrupt end when Helene began to feel unwell. Her heart was causing her troubles. The doctors diagnosed a fatal condition. The whole family rallied, including the Joseph branch. Years after the event, various family members still talked about how Nuni had looked after Helene night and day, hoping against hope that her condition would improve. It did not. At the end of a long year during which poor Helene suffered a lot, she died, with Nuni by her bedside. And soon after her death, their mother became ill and Nuni looked after her for a few months, and then the mother died too.

  To Nicolas, the younger brother, Nuni gave an inheritance that an uncle had left her as a small dowry for the day she would get married. This is the same uncle who had left much of his money to Cairo’s Italian community. When Nuni gave the money to Nicolas, he had a good job but wanted to start a business on the side. Since he loved cars and had a mechanical aptitude, he thought of opening a garage and Nuni was more than happy to help. He was her ‘adored little brother.’ This is how she referred to him years after his death, never expressing regrets about the money she lost in the failed business venture. The rare times she mentioned to me the loss of that money, it was in a matter-of-fact way, without attaching blame to Nicolas. She blamed the Frenchman Nicolas had hired to run the business. She used to talk to me a lot about Nicolas’s death. Helene’s death she came to terms with, viewing it as an incomprehensible act of God that she had to accept. Nicolas’s death was another matter. She seemed to think that, with proper care, he would have survived. Basically, she blamed Gabrielle for not doing the right thing, for not feeding him the right food, for not taking his complaints about his health seriously, for forcing him to lead an active social life when what he needed was rest. She made no bones about the fact that, after he died, she could barely look at Gabrielle. In her grief, Nuni turned a deaf ear to the doctors’ hints that the operation had revealed much worse than ulcers. While they never uttered the word – almost unspeakable at the time – they tried to tell the family that Nicolas had died of cancer. Nuni, however, continued to believe, steadfastly, that he was not meant to die.

  Right from the beginning of Nicolas’s marriage to Gabrielle, there had been little affection between the two women. Forceful and possessive, Gabrielle resented the slightest interference in her husband’s life. She wanted him wholly hers. I suppose that my mother, endowed with a conciliatory character, had been so accommodating that Nuni found it all the harder to adjust to Gabrielle’s style. I gather that, caught between Nuni an
d his wife, Nicolas sided more often with his wife than with his sister, though he apparently always made sure not to alienate her. She never acquired, in his household, the influence – probably ‘role’ is a better word – she had come to acquire in ours.

  There are those who probably saw Nuni as a self-important meddler. I, on the other hand, think that she simply could not conceive of watching from the sidelines whenever her brothers needed help; she could not dissociate their interests from hers, out of a profound and unshakeable sense of family solidarity. It would be unfair to conclude that her involvement and interest in their lives stemmed from the relative emptiness of hers; that she latched on to theirs because she had no life herself. From her perspective, it was in the natural order of things for her to do all she did.

  After Nicolas’s death Gabrielle refused to let Nuni or my father see Aida. Nuni did not yield. By enlisting the help of a mutual and understanding friend of theirs, she would secretly see my cousin. Then, one day, Gabrielle appeared at her door with an olive branch: would she mind looking after Aida the days she, Gabrielle, had to work long hours? Overjoyed, Nuni agreed. My cousin ended up spending many hours, even some nights, at Nuni’s place. As far as I know, these were very happy times for both. Tensions between Gabrielle and Nuni subsided but did not entirely go away, with each saying unflattering things about the other behind her back. Still, they found a way to interact that benefited my cousin and permitted Nuni to lend a helping hand; she even took to preparing desserts for Gabrielle’s receptions.

  Also to their credit was their behavior about Nicolas’s failed business venture. After his death, Nuni made no claim on his assets, deeming that Gabrielle, with a little girl to look after, should keep everything. Gabrielle, however, insisted on giving her some compensation in the form of modest monthly payments over a period of years. In the end then, the two women behaved – if not entirely well – at least in a civil manner towards one another.