In Their Father's Country

by Drosso, Anne-Marie;

  ‘Why don’t you have Dr. Ramzi look at them?’

  ‘I did. It’s arthritis.’

  ‘Exercise is what she needs. She’s far better off working than staying at home. Her children drive her crazy and exploit her.’ Still standing, Gabrielle said in a cryptic way, ‘Well, I have several things to do this morning. I must be going.’

  Claire did not ask her sister what she had to do. Gabrielle was secretive about both the small and big things in her life.

  ‘Thanks for dropping by,’ Claire said.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at five o’clock. We’re expected at the club at 5:30.’

  ‘Don’t count on me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not feeling up to it.’

  ‘You have the whole day to rest. How can you prejudge how you’ll be feeling? Staying at home all day long can do you no good.’

  ‘We’ll see, but, as I said, don’t count on my coming.’

  ‘You’re being difficult,’ Gabrielle said before leaving in a huff.

  ‘At least it did not degenerate into a quarrel,’ Claire told herself. ‘How she does not see that she kills any pleasure I would derive from her company is beyond me. How can she be so insensitive? I would have gladly gone to the club, but I cannot bear the thought of more friction.’

  Later that morning, when told of the car accident in which Gabrielle had died on the spot even though Osta Ramadan, her driver, was barely hurt, Claire was at first incredulous.

  She was in the midst of sorting old bills when the doorbell rang. Zeinab went to see who it was and returned all flustered to say that two men and a shaken Osta Ramadan were at the door.

  ‘Turn left, left I say!’ Gabrielle had apparently screamed at him. Rattled, he had not seen the oncoming truck running a red light. That was Osta Ramadan’s version – a plausible version considering Gabrielle’s urge to control his driving, his tendency to ignore her instructions, and Cairo’s frenzied traffic.

  ‘But where were you going?’ Claire asked him.

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ he said while dabbing his eyes, ‘to the cemetery. Yes, the cemetery. Sitt Gabrielle – may the Almighty Lord be good to her – had ordered repairs to be done to the family vault and wanted to check on the work.’

  ‘The family vault?’

  ‘Yes, her husband’s. Hadn’t she told you? To fix the damage it sustained after the earthquake.’

  ‘At least, she did not suffer. Rest assured, she did not,’ one of the two gentlemen told Claire. A doctor, who happened to be present at the scene of the accident, he had felt compelled to accompany Osta Ramadan back to the apartment. The other gentleman was a security man, one of the many keeping an eye on Cairo’s streets.

  Claire walked to her bedroom, sat on her bed and looked at the windows with their closed shutters. It occurred to her then that she was free, completely free to do as she pleased, at the age of eighty-eight. That was when the tears began trickling down her face.

  ‘What’s a life?’ Claire Sahli wondered. The answer seemed obvious to her: ‘if you’re young, it’s the future; not so young, it’s the present; old, it’s the past; and very old, it’s the deaths of all those who mattered in your life.’ As she now saw it, that’s what a life seemed to be. A succession of deaths, one after the other.

  Zeinab came in and sat next to her. Zeinab sitting close to her on the bed reminded Claire of the day, seventy-five years earlier, when she and Gabrielle had sat next to one another, mourning their father in quiet harmony. A major sense of failure, more profound even than when Alexandre died, overcame her.

  More than any other deaths in her life, Gabrielle’s death would make Claire reflect on the inexplicable nature of love. Despite everything, she had loved Gabrielle, but she was not so sure that Gabrielle, caught up in proving to herself and the world that they were different, had loved her. Would it have made a difference had she been more demonstrative of her affection for Gabrielle? Might this have disarmed her sister? That the two of them had not got along better was such a terrible waste, Claire kept thinking as the tears continued to trickle down her face.

  The one and only time Gabrielle had raised the subject of her death, it was to say, in Claire’s and Aida’s presence, that she wanted to be buried with her husband, in the Conti vault. She, Claire, wanted to be buried in the Sahli vault, where her mother and father were buried. The two sisters’ separateness in death would thus bear out their emotional separateness in life.

  Claire’s three daughters came to attend Gabrielle’s funeral and left with promises to return soon. Simone, a simultaneous interpreter and on her own – her children were grown up – was between jobs and about to move to New York. Djenane, partnered both in work and in life with a professional mime, was scheduled to perform in a festival in Germany; she had no children and used as a pied-à-terre a small house in the south of France. Charlotte, whose children attended university in Montreal, divided her time between Montreal and and Morocco where she was doing anthropological work.

  During their short stay in Cairo – a mere few days – the three girls had convinced Claire to hire help round the clock. Both Zeinab and Azza were willing to work longer hours and offering to find additional help, if needed. Gabrielle’s car was apparently salvageable so, with Aida’s accord, Claire’s daughters decided to keep it as well as keep Osta Ramadan on a part-time basis, their joint present to their mother.

  There had been no mention of Claire moving in with any one of them. She had not expected them to offer. The very last thing she wanted was to saddle them with her infirmities and re-enact her mother’s last years. The thought of becoming dependent on them was intolerable to her. She was determined to spare them having to look after her, even if that meant going into a home. On days when her need of Gabrielle had weighed heavily upon her, she had entertained the thought of moving into a home, only to defer acting upon it in the hope that death would intervene.

  Was Claire, nevertheless, hurt that her daughters had not offered to take her in? There was a flicker of sadness but no more than a flicker. Her daughters’ well-being mattered more to her than the relationship they had with her. Once, in a discussion with Gabrielle, she had said she could understand a mother cutting off all ties with her child, if that were necessary for the child’s happiness. She thought herself quite capable of doing just that. Gabrielle had said she did not believe a word of it.

  After Gabrielle’s death, Aida stayed in Cairo for a month during which Claire saw her every day. Unhappy in her third marriage, Aida was consumed with guilt towards her mother for having had a series of unsuccessful unions when Gabrielle had valued marital stability above all else. ‘I caused her upset needlessly,’ she confided in Claire. ‘I might as well have stayed with my first husband. How could I have made such a series of mistakes?’ Claire believed there was a simple answer, namely, that making a major mistake in life tended to put one on the wrong track. As far as Claire was concerned, the idea that one learnt from one’s mistakes was more myth than reality. She said so to Aida, with whom she felt she could speak without censoring herself. With her daughters, she had to be more careful.

  Aida left and the days seemed never-ending despite the occasional outing, frequent phone calls from friends and regular visits from the most faithful amongst them. Though she wanted them, she sometimes turned down those visits when making the effort to look presentable and show interest in other people’s lives seemed both colossal and futile. The one visit she always looked forward to was that of a friend who brought her books and articles, the wife of a man much enamored of Claire years earlier and now dead. The wife had known of his infatuation but never held it against Claire. She had had her own dalliances.

  On Sunday mornings, Iris called her from Geneva. Greatly diminished physically, Iris remained as fond of Claire as she had been when she was twenty and Claire thirty, the summer they had spent together in Alexandria bicycling and reading Proust on the beach at Sidi Bishr. The line at the end of the first
chapter of The Fugitive that reads ‘... but thought tires and memory decays’ had made Iris exclaim one evening, her cheeks ablaze, ‘Oh, to die before that happens.’

  Iris’s memory had not decayed. From Proust, Camus, Kant, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, she could still quote entire passages. Her heart, though, had hardened. She had come to view her siblings with mistrust, feeling that they had given her much less than they had got from her. Anger at her father for having loved her badly – if at all – overflowed since the death of her husband. In her affection for Claire, she remained constant, calling her every Sunday morning before going to church. Malcontent, Iris had turned to religion – a subject she and Claire avoided discussing. She called Claire even when she felt unusually low or bitter, which happened more and more often. When they were young and she was upset about something, she used to want Claire to appease her. Now she wanted Claire to espouse her views and sanction her anger. That Claire resisted playing that role did not seem to put her off, as Claire took her seriously.

  To Claire, Zeinab and Azza had become indispensable. Not just for the services they rendered but also for their mere presence. Whenever she was on her own in the apartment – usually between their two shifts – her anxiety bubbled to the surface and would only abate once she heard a key clicking in the entrance door to the apartment, announcing the arrival of either one of them. She would hear the click because she waited for them in the entrance room. She did not quite understand why she was so anxious. She did not think she feared death. But why then was she fretting every day about medication, about finding the right doctor or the right physiotherapist? ‘Because I don’t want to suffer,’ was the only answer she could think of. ‘Yes to death, but no to pain and suffering. That’s why.’ Still, that answer did not explain her profound unease at being left alone in the apartment, her need for a presence, silent or lively. Living had become a tedious exercise in survival that made little sense, and yet she kept at it, albeit without zest.

  Sometimes Zeinab, not one for mincing her words, would tell her, ‘You cannot count on children nowadays. That’s why I had none. Trust me, you’re much better off here, mistress of your own affairs than in their care, however well-intentioned they may be.’

  Azza, on the other hand, kept wondering if Charlotte might at some point think of coming to Egypt for an extended period. ‘Couldn’t she do some of her work here?’ she often asked Claire.

  Zeinab and Azza had radically different temperaments which was a good thing, for when Claire grew tired of one, the other would arrive and the atmosphere change. Married four times, Zeinab was capable, assertive, never at a loss for words or an answer and endowed with a strength belied by her tiny but muscular build. She loved doing errands, supervising tradesmen, and would much rather move furniture and polish wooden floors than cook. Azza was big and timid. She was married to a man who had taken a second wife. Deeply hurt, she had nevertheless accepted that second marriage as being part of the fate she had to endure. Baking pastries was what she did best. Claire much admired that skill, having tried her hand at baking pastries late in life and found it a challenging task. It upset Azza that Claire no longer enjoyed baking, though they still discussed recipes.

  Every now and then, thoughts of suicide would go through Claire’s mind, but in an abstract way. She knew that she lacked the courage needed for that. Never before had she toyed with the idea of suicide, neither after ending her affair with Guy, nor in her grief over the death of little Yves.

  She still read, though with less pleasure. Over the years, she had jotted down her opinion of the books she read: ‘excellent, very good, good, mediocre, poor.’ In recent months, there had been fewer ticks in the columns reserved for ‘excellent’ and ‘very good’ books. She did not know whether to attribute this to the fact that she was no longer choosing her own books, or to her sinking morale.

  Of Gabrielle she thought a great deal, every time returning to the same question, ‘Why did it have to be the way it was between us?’

  Four months after Aida had left, Zeinab died in her sleep. Zeinab’s much younger husband came one morning in tears to give the news to Claire. She was stunned. First Gabrielle, now Zeinab, when she – not Zeinab – was the one with a weak heart. ‘My sister will fill in for her,’ the husband offered between sobs. He seemed profoundly shaken. Claire was moved to see him so shaken. ‘I liked Zeinab a lot,’ she told him, meaning it. ‘I lost a lot by losing her,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘People didn’t understand why I married her as she was much older than me. They all thought I was after her money and her little plot of land near the Pyramids. But they were wrong. I loved her.’ After he had calmed down, he sat in the kitchen, staring at the floor.

  Azza made him a cup of tea. She was the one crying now. Claire too sat in the kitchen. ‘I also lost a lot by losing her,’ she told Zeinab’s husband. Moving into a home was probably unavoidable now.

  Two days later, an unexpected offer from Aida, unrelated to Zeinab’s death, would throw Claire into a state of great confusion.

  ‘I left Max,’ Aida told Claire over the phone. ‘It could not go on. I realized this after Mother’s death. It took me some time to gather the courage to do it. He has moved out. Aunt Claire, we’re alone, you and I. We get along, we always have. I think you should come and live with me in Paris. I need you.’ Aida had not heard yet about Zeinab’s death. Anticipating Claire’s objections, she hurried to add, ‘You’ll tell me you don’t have the strength for such a big move but Paris is not so far from Cairo. The apartment is big. You’ll have your own room and bathroom. There’s no reason for you to live in Cairo on your own and for me to be in this big apartment on my own. Besides, you love Paris. Whenever you visited, you seemed to feel quite at home.’

  ‘Aida, you’ll get over your break-up with Max. You two might get back together and, even if you don’t, you’ll remake your life.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ Aida interjected. ‘I won’t live again with a man.’

  ‘This mood of yours will pass. Still, it’s enormously kind of you to invite me to come live with you, even if it’s unrealistic. I would not be easy to live with – not at my age and in my condition. Gabrielle had reasons to get irritated with me. It’s not as if I am not aware of this. Yes, I love Paris, but Paris at my age?’

  ‘Please, think about it. I’m serious. It makes absolute sense for us to be joining forces.’

  ‘Except there are no forces on my side, darling.’

  ‘Aunt Claire, you’re remarkably fit, perhaps not physically but in all other ways. The children would love you to come to Paris, particularly Vincent who talks about you often. I’m sure I’ll get to see much more of them, if you come. So your presence would benefit me in more than one way.’

  ‘Poor Zeinab died,’ Claire said.

  ‘Oh no! How? When?’ Aida asked.

  ‘Just two days ago. In her sleep. The death I wish upon myself. I was about to call you to tell you.’

  ‘It grieves me very much,’ Aida burst out. Then, after a few silent seconds, she said, ‘Remember how she used to try to mediate between Mother and me. She was quite something. She wasn’t in the least afraid of Mother. She could scream as loud as her and did! They were both so energetic. They both seemed eternal.’

  ‘She was in her sixties – late sixties probably. Her death has affected me more than I would have thought and not only because of the loss of her services. I liked her.’

  ‘How are you managing without her?’

  ‘Her husband sent me his sister the very afternoon he came to tell me the news.’

  ‘Are you satisfied with his sister?’

  ‘So-so. But I’m not in a position to be fussy. I get the feeling she’s trustworthy enough. She must be in her forties. Her name is Abla. Azza does not seem to mind her, and that’s important.’

  ‘Aunt Claire, do think of coming here. It’s not an impulsive offer. Believe me.’ Aida hesitated before saying, ‘It should not pose a problem as far as Simone, Djena
ne and Charlotte are concerned. Their lives are less settled than mine,’ and, with the hint of a laugh, she specified, ‘geographically, I mean.’

  Claire did not doubt Aida’s sincerity and knew her to be the sort of person to live up to her commitments, but she could not imagine foisting herself on Aida in her current condition. That they had perhaps more in common than Claire had with her own daughters was not enough for her to feel comfortable at the thought of Aida looking after her in her dying days, which was what it would amount to. It was less frightening a prospect than that of imposing that burden on any one of her daughters – in Aida’s case there would be at least an element of free will. Still, she could not put herself and Aida in that situation.

  And yet, after their telephone conversation, she thought about the offer all the time. It was on her mind from the minute she woke up to when she went to bed, including when she tried to read. It even kept her awake some nights. It put her in the same tortured state of mind into which she had sunk, some thirty years earlier in Beirut, except that this time her being so tormented made no sense whatsoever. It was totally out of proportion with the objective situation since she had already decided that the offer was not viable, however tempting it was.

  Every day, she would go through the pros and cons of leaving Cairo to go and live with Aida in Paris, as if it were a choice she was actually considering. Telling herself that it was pure madness for her to be obsessing about a choice she had already ruled out did not have the desired calming effect. She came close to begrudging Aida her offer.

  One morning, studying her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Claire said to herself resolutely, ‘Looking at that face should be sufficient to disabuse me of any crazy notion of going anywhere. Here I’ll stay till the end.’

  The mirror recipe did not work. Claire continued to let the lure of Paris torture her. Gabrielle was often on her mind during those days and nights – a Gabrielle resentful of the idea of her moving in with Aida. She felt disloyal towards her sister for contemplating that idea, even in hypothetical terms.