In Their Father's Country

by Drosso, Anne-Marie;

  Nuni and my father, the two siblings who lived the longest, who were closest in age, who looked alike even though he was tall and she was short, fought a lot and yet seemed indispensable to one another. She never told me she loved him, yet often told me how much he loved all of us. When she felt good about him, she cited the many prizes he had won in high school; mentioned his successful, albeit short, career as a civil servant; recalled how King Fuad had acknowledged his valuable services; alluded to his love stories with attractive women; and pointed to his generous disposition. When she was upset with him, she bemoaned the fact that Nicolas had been the youngest; declared that my father had not been up to the task of keeping the family affairs on a sound footing; decried his impulsive nature; blamed their mother for spoiling him; and portrayed my mother as an angel for putting up with him. I am not sure what she thought of him deep down, but she certainly stood by him throughout his life.

  My father, who got married to my mother late in life, was incapable of filling the traditional role of provider – some said through his own fault, while others blamed his bad luck. When this happened, Nuni did not stand by passively. She took over the provisioning of our household – from fruits, to the finest cuts of meat, to hearty desserts. Thanks to her, we ate exceedingly well. She never skimped. On the contrary, she made sure there was plenty of tasty food on the table. To this day, friends and relatives who had meals at our place remember the abundance of food and, in particular, the tender steaks that were served at lunchtime. She went daily to the grocery store, the meat man, the bakery, and the fruit and vegetable vendor. Some dishes she prepared herself; others were prepared by our household help under her supervision. She ate lunch with us every day and sometimes dinner too. My mother worked, came home for lunch, had a short nap, returned to work, came back home in the evening, had a light dinner with us and, more often than not, went out later in the evening. She never had to give a thought to our meals. The only times I remember her fretting about what would be served for lunch or dinner were when we had guests.

  What feelings did Nuni and my mother have for each other? Nuni seemed genuinely fond of my mother – fond and admiring of her beauty and intelligence – and in turn, my mother admired Nuni’s selflessness. But there were no real affinities between them. Nuni was twenty-three years older than my mother, whose progressive views on a variety of subjects stood in sharp contrast to hers. This was not a source of conflict, my mother not being the sort who tried to hammer her views into anyone. Still, they belonged to different worlds, certainly in terms of how they lived their lives and the interests they had. I presume that they both felt indebted to one another: my mother, for obvious reasons; Nuni, for less obvious but equally powerful ones – for staying with my father, for maintaining a semblance of family life, and for making it easy for her to help. During my childhood years, I never once heard them exchange harsh words, never heard them say nasty things about each other in each other’s absence. Nuni had plenty of ammunition against my mother; she could easily have alluded to my mother’s liaisons but she never did, at least not in my presence. When, as a result of a particularly tense confrontation with my mother, my father moved in temporarily with her, Nuni continued to drop by our place loaded with fruits and assorted dishes, even though she would have lunch with him, at her place.

  Nuni and Gabrielle had far more in common than Nuni and my mother. They were both conventional though in a somewhat different way. Perhaps their very conventionality stood in the way of a smooth relationship, for while Nuni’s reference point was the extended family, Gabrielle put the marital bond above all else. Infinitely more freethinking than either, my mother could adjust to equivocal situations and accept unorthodox compromises. That made it easier for Nuni to get along with her than with Gabrielle.

  When my father died, Nuni grieved with restraint. She was eighty years old then, had started to feel the weight of her age and would have been wondering how much longer she could continue providing our household with all she had been, how much longer she could keep going between her apartment and ours. Her two boarders were paying exceedingly low rents. Whatever little reserve she might have had would have been entirely used up by now. My father’s death solved a problem that would have seemed insoluble to her: how to stop helping us, without seeming disloyal. Cruel as it may sound, his death was timely for her. She had reached the end of her resources – both financially and physically. At the funeral she barely cried. She visited us regularly after he died, probably twice a week, and never came empty-handed. She would bring us pastries, cheese puffs and bâtons salés, handing us these treats apologetically, as if she ought to be giving us more. Sometimes, she would agree to stay for lunch. By then, our household consisted only of my mother and me – the rest of the family was scattered. My sisters and cousin were in Europe and Gabrielle traveled a lot. Nuni rarely talked about my father after he died.

  In addition to visiting us, she continued to visit the other branch of the family. These visits took place every Thursday, in the early evening when one of her cousins named Rosalie held tea receptions to which all family members were invited. Those tea receptions became an institution in the Conti family. Except during the period when the two branches of the family had had their famous quarrel, she attended virtually all of Rosalie’s Thursdays. I sometimes went with her to these tea parties, divine occasions for a child with a sweet tooth. All the old aunts and uncles would heap sweets on my plate; I was the only child there. In between sweets, I would get whiffs of family gossip. And I got to know Joseph, Nuni’s fiancé of long ago. By then in his early seventies, he would walk her back home. I could not imagine what Nuni had seen in him. I found him dull beyond belief. During their walks, he and Nuni would have animated conversations, mostly concerning family matters. Sometimes, the conversations turned into arguments. Once, he said something unflattering about my father, something to the effect that my father had behaved irresponsibly. I don’t remember in what context. The remark made Nuni angry and, by the time we reached home, they were not speaking to one another. They made up the following Thursday. A good-natured woman, Rosalie made sure they did.

  Family and love were the two subjects Nuni talked about at length – not only her love for her father, brothers and sister, but also romantic love; its nature, follies, mysteries. Yes, romantic love was very much on her mind. True love, she would say, rules out petty calculations and caution. There has to be a willingness to commit without holding anything back. You have to listen to the beat of your heart and to nothing else. Never try to figure out love. Never ask someone why she loves whom she loves, for ‘love has its reasons which reason does not know.’ When was the first time that Nuni hummed this line in my presence? I must have been really little since I cannot remember that first time. And did she use the word ‘love’, or the word ‘heart’? Did she sometimes sing ‘love has its reasons ...’ and other times ‘the heart has its reasons ...’? It is strange how I so vividly remember her humming that line while she stroked my hair or held my two hands in hers, swinging them sideways, left to right, then right to left, yet I cannot remember whether she sang ‘love’ or ‘heart.’

  One day, while we were discussing Joseph, Nuni said to me, ‘You think I loved him: well, maybe I did, but the man I really loved was Aristote. Don’t get funny ideas though; it was a platonic love, only platonic. Still, him I truly loved.’By then, I had already heard her use the term ‘platonic love.’ which she used frequently and had tried to explain to me, as much as it can be explained without spelling out what sexual love is about.

  That was how she confessed to having loved Aristote, Bella’s husband, a well-known surgeon and a pillar of Cairo’s Greek community. Bit by bit, she would tell me more about that love of hers. The first time she fractured her femur, Aristote came to see her. She was in her fifties. He was in his forties; a big and handsome man, who liked to tell his patients to tough it out, be strong, forget about their aches and pains and, above all, to avoid medication.
Nuni was small but tough and said no to surgery. He was impressed. She was immobilized at home for a few months – first in bed, then hobbling around that apartment, apparently holding on to a chair. I have no idea why a chair and not a cane. During those months that promised to be terribly tedious, a pattern developed. Aristote would drop by her place almost daily to check on her progress. She would have her household helper serve him his favorite dessert, milk pudding. As soon as she got better, she prepared the pudding herself. So he came by, ate the pudding, and they talked about one thing or another – always in Greek. That, in those circumstances, she would fall in love with the man is hardly surprising. And Aristote? It would be far-fetched to think that he came to view her in a sentimental light. She never claimed he had shown any sign of this. Still, I would like to think that he derived some pleasure from his visits. He was the kind of man who would have basked in a woman’s quiet admiration. That they talked in Greek would have constituted another draw for a man who valued all things Greek. For once then, the gods were kind to Nuni. What could have been a frustrating period in her life became a cherished period – one she would always associate with Aristote’s visits. When she got better and started going out, his visits did not end altogether, though they became infrequent.

  When Nuni hummed ‘love (or the heart) has its reasons which reason does not know,’ did she have Aristote in mind? Was it because she had loved, in her fifties, a younger and successful man – a married man – whom she could never have expected to return her love?

  Nuni is the one who taught me how to pull out a daisy’s petals, one by one, saying, ‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me ...’ The first time we did this together, the flower said, ‘He loves you’ and I asked excitedly, ‘But who is he, Nuni?’ To which she replied, ‘All the men who will count in your life’. I then asked, with false innocence, ‘All the men? So there will be more than one?’Her answer was categorical: ‘There will be only one you will truly love. As for all the others, you may believe for a little while you love them, but only one will remain locked in your heart forever.’

  Every child should have a Nuni – the one grown-up who gives you treats every time you ask, who tells you family tales no one else would, who never scolds you, who makes you feel grown-up by talking to you about love. Yes, every child should have a Nuni, but Nunis deserve better than to be just Nunis, for the children will outgrow them and then what? My Nuni was buried, in my absence, in the Greek Orthodox cemetery in the Conti family crypt. There are two sides to the crypt – two sides for the two branches; the one that kept its money, and the branch that lost its money – her branch.

  I realize that there is much I do not know about Nuni’s life. I do not know how old she was when she got engaged; why her engagement was a very long one; whether she ever considered working; whether she knew sexual love.

  Her engagement was problematic from the beginning, as it met with some opposition from Joseph’s mother who did not get along with Nuni’s mother and worried that her son might end up saddled with the financial mess likely to result from his cousins’ extravagant habits. How much had Nuni herself wanted the marriage? She never said that the break-up broke her heart, but nothing can be inferred from this. She was too proud a woman to say such a thing. On a couple of occasions, she told me wistfully, ‘He was very much in love with me once.’

  As for work, when she was young, it would have seemed beneath her station, for what sort of work would have been available for a young woman in Cairo at the turn of the century? A lady’s companion? A dressmaker? A milliner? A housekeeper? A governess? All these possibilities would have been ruled out. She was asked once whether she would consider working as a lady’s companion but her brothers objected despite the prospect of her traveling to Europe on a luxurious boat. More acceptable activities would have included tutoring or teaching in schools. She had been a good student. I saw some of her school reports. I doubt though she ever seriously contemplated working when she was young. And when she got older, she was kept too busy by mother, sister and brothers to work.

  Late in life she took boarders, a solution of last resort to her increasing financial problems. It had the advantage of being a discreet solution. Few people knew she had boarders, whom she came to regard as a necessary evil, treating them in an offhand fashion. They were single men of modest means and humble origins. They paid little and expected little. She made it obvious to them when they had encroached on her space. Yet she could be good to them, accepting deferred payment of their rent, advising them on family matters and listening to their sentimental woes. Often though, she set arbitrary rules concerning their use of the kitchen or bathroom or living room. Occasionally, she would threaten to evict them or raise their rent substantially, which she never did. The boarders were a constant reminder of the dramatic downturn in her family’s fortune. No wonder she was sometimes gratuitously hard on these men. Except for her bedroom and theirs, she gradually stripped the apartment of furniture and knick-knacks so that, by the end of her life, it was virtually empty. She sold the furniture and knick-knacks because she needed the money.

  I will not speculate on whether the pleasures of sexual love were known to her. I have no clues. She would have minded my speculating on this subject.

  I have a hypothesis about Nuni and my father that may not apply to Helene and Nicolas, whom I never got to know. The hypothesis is that, both for Nuni and my father, money was a dirty subject and, for the longest time, they thought they were above money. The example of the other branch of the family so keen on making money would have reinforced those feelings. It could have worked very differently, driving them to do the same as opposed to the opposite and set themselves apart as they did. Setting themselves apart was more in keeping with their perception of themselves as superior – a perception they would have had from early on in their childhood, since they were the ones who had gone to the most exclusive schools, who had had friends in high circles, and who had grown up in the more elegant neighborhood. Thus, the image I have in mind is that of a close-knit extended family with two branches behaving like two children, each taking on a different role to establish their space and mark the difference. Fanciful? Perhaps, though plausible in a way.

  Whatever the case may be, Nuni was a proud-hearted woman. I want to believe that she remained so till the end, but I do not know. I do not know whether it is possible to remain proud in poverty and loneliness. Of all the persons I have known, it strikes me that she was the most equipped to remain so in such circumstances.

  1998: Gabrielle

  Gabrielle came out of the car that dropped them off in front of the side entrance to the Ghezireh Sporting Club first, then Claire. They had been members since 1955, spending much of their leisure time there. To their daughters, the club had been a second home, the site of their first loves, where they could play any sport imaginable or just hang around.

  The two elderly women headed towards ‘the tea garden,’ not arm in arm as many women their age do – Gabrielle abhorred that habit – nor even side by side. Ninety-year-old Gabrielle led the way.

  Leaning on a cane, her eyes studying the pavement for bulges and potholes, Claire slowly followed. She was hoping that the friends they had arranged to meet would be on time. Her tête-à-têtes with Gabrielle tended to bring out a belligerence that was more contained in public than in private, although there were times when even the presence of third parties did not inhibit Gabrielle. A week earlier, at a supper organized by friends, Gabrielle had shown a frightening lack of self-restraint, spending much of the evening complaining about Claire, describing her as self-absorbed in the extreme, a bundle of absurd anxieties, senselessly medicating herself, and letting the household help get the better of her. All that had been said with such vitriol and an intensity so uncalled-for in a social gathering that Claire was mortified – not so much on her own account as on Gabrielle’s for seeming on the verge of hysteria. For a moment, Claire had actually feared that Gabrielle would lose it. Th
at Gabrielle’s chronic irritability and touchiness could turn some day into something much worse, namely an uncontrollable fit, was an old and recurring fear of Claire’s, brought on by Gabrielle having frequent outbursts hugely disproportionate to the apparent trigger.

  Claire’s presentiment at the time of Nicolas’s death had come to pass: over the years, she had become a target of Gabrielle’s generalized aggressiveness. And why should she have been spared when others, from their mother to Alexandre and Constance and even Nicolas, as well as assorted maids, cooks, tradesmen and drivers, had been the butt of it? Something about certain people seemed, however, to neutralize Gabrielle. That something seemed to be money and status. She never lashed out at a Yussef Sahli, or a George Conti, or her cousins Iris, Bella and brother John.

  Her aggressiveness grew worse after Claire developed heart problems and came to depend on her. With all their daughters outside Egypt – Charlotte had stayed in Cairo for only six months back in 1978 – and the two of them living on the same floor in the same building, Claire found herself in the unenviable position of needing Gabrielle to accompany her to the doctor, help her organize the few bridge parties she still threw, pick up books for her from the French library, and put her car and driver at her disposal when finding a taxi was too daunting a prospect. All this Gabrielle did, though with bad grace.

  But for her hearing, Gabrielle herself was in formidably good shape, still energetic, still keen on fashion, clothes and accessories, still unwilling to admit to any limitations of age. Hardly ever in need of a doctor, she seemed to take Claire’s physical deterioration as a personal affront and the mark of a character deficiency. ‘If only Claire could get a grip on herself’ had become her refrain. This reaction to Claire’s ailments was not unlike her reaction when her husband had fallen sick, except that she was yet more intolerant of Claire’s condition as it reminded her of her own mortality. Claire’s constant state of anxiety about her physical decline – besides her heart problems, she had a sore hip and almost continual ringing in one ear – incensed Gabrielle, who could not stand the manifestation of any vulnerability, physical or mental.