Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  If I told these police that he was wanted, would they hold him? And then what?

  But the police here know he’s wanted, and they have chosen to do nothing about it.

  There’s nothing I can do until something changes.

  Pantarea. A Greek word my mum taught me. It means: everything flows. Sit, while it flows. I leaned my head back and tried to breathe better.

  Sa’id’s policeman went on his way.

  ‘The convoy leaves in an hour and a half,’ he said.

  I looked up at him. His eyes were steady. That steady pale look. I said: ‘I’m not happy leaving them alone. It frightens me.’

  ‘They are alone now,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you want me to ask the boys to keep an eye out? Do you fear for her safety?’

  ‘Maybe … what could you tell them? I don’t want it to become chaotic. Chaos would not be good.’

  ‘Do you want to drink tea? They won’t come out for a while.’

  I looked up towards the temple, its long low steps, and long low frontage, with the scattered bits of town around it and the desert wide and huge beyond.

  ‘OK.’

  And the knowledge flowed into me: bollocks to feeling responsible for Chrissie, I was just happy to have a reason to be near Sa’id.

  TWELVE

  Abydos

  We sat inside the teashop, at the back. If they came out, they would have to walk past the proscenium arch of the front of the café; we would see them, they would not see us. I had sweet black tea, shay koshari, in a heavy glass. The fresh mint that came with it was astoundingly green and lustrous in this dusty place: an oasis in the middle of a tin table. Sa’id sat with the stoicism of Ramadan. I realized that I couldn’t drink, now, with him beside me. Stupid: the pregnant, the sick and travellers are excused fasting anyway. And anyway I’m not Muslim. But I never said I wasn’t confused.

  Meanwhile the tea sat and grew cold.

  ‘Aren’t you drinking?’ he said, after a while.

  I shook my head.

  He gave a little snort. ‘It’s not that simple,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I know you know,’ he said. ‘I mean altogether.’

  I sat for a moment saying nothing. Is he talking about our future? That future that we may – or may not – have?

  ‘I don’t for one moment imagine that anything is simple,’ I said.

  A tiredness washed over me. Here I am. I have found him, and seen him, and spent the night with him, we have misunderstood each other and come through it, and here we are, sitting. No magical impulse has thrown us together. He has stopped sulking but he has not melted. I have, but he is taking no notice. It’s all gone wrong. Here I am in a teashop, unable to go into my favourite temple, unable to kiss my lover, if he is my lover, unable to understand or protect my new friend, if she is my friend, far from my child, unable to impede my enemy. I am powerless. And yes, it really has all started up again. That bloody man, Eddie Bates, root of all and constant disturbance in my life.

  I wondered about what Sa’id had said about Russian roulette. Is it true? My … connection, shall we call it, with Eddie. Was that it?

  Well, maybe it was. But was is the important word there.

  Certainly I hate him. But hate is not enough. I want to feel nothing for him; to feel no hate, and no fear.

  A big-eyed child was peering round the doorway from the kitchen, checking me out. I greeted her and she ran away. Two minutes later she was back, with her mother, who looked about eighteen. I greeted her, too, and she ran away. Then back they came, with two more small children and another young mother. Rows of black eyes like olives, eyeing me. I smiled.

  The old man in charge asked Sa’id if there was anything wrong with the tea. He said no, I had just become suddenly devout. The man eyed me too. What am I? I saw myself through their eyes for a moment and it made no more sense. I don’t know. I’m not a dancer any more. My child is not with me. I never became an archaeologist or an anthropologist, despite my studies. I am … pregnant. Thirty-five. And here.

  One of the young mothers beckoned to me. Relieved to do anything, I went with her into the back, where she wanted to show me her oven: a great clay beehive, hot and fragrant. She showed me her bread, and her tiny baby, a red-faced amoeba in a grubby shawl. I took it and held it. Samira. She blinked, and I smiled, and the other children brought me their schoolbooks one by one, and I said how clever they all were. They were amazed and delighted that I spoke to them in Arabic. One boy – deaf and dumb – was learning English. Here is a cat, he has written, in pencil, in a book with a picture of a cat, its belly fat and its tail curling, like a capital Q, black on white. The little girls billowed in their efforts to hide behind each other. An old woman appeared, and I told her, in the roundabout way necessary, that her daughters were beautiful. They said my dress was beautiful, and gave me a loaf of bread. I sat on a low caked-earth wall, in the half room half yard of their kitchen, and felt the baby’s breath against my body, and smelt the bread and goat smell. The girls were beautiful. All eyes and cheekbones. You don’t want to go on about it though because it makes the gods jealous, and they may send bad luck. Amasis – a Pharoah, a very cool one by all accounts – had a friend who was so fortunate that even when he tried to make his own bad luck (to avoid aforementioned jealousy, on Amasis’s advice) by throwing away a ring that he valued above everything, the ring came back to him, in the belly of a fish delivered to his kitchen. At that Amasis said, sorry, mate, I can’t be your friend any more because I will not be able to bear the terrible tragedies which are undoubtedly going to come to you to pay you back for all this luck.

  They wanted me to eat the bread but I said no, and they thought I was really making Ramadan, and covered me with blessings. How many children did I have, they wanted to know. Bint, wahda, I said, just the one daughter. Alhamdulilleh. Showed them the picture in my wallet. Oh! Beautiful. Masha’Allah. Your husband is a fine man and you are young, you will have many more, insha’Allah.

  I joined in the chorus. Insha’Allah. I felt very much in the lap of the gods. Whose lap would I prefer? None of those men gods. Got to be Isis, like Osiris in the painting inside the temple. Beautiful clever Isis, who tricked Amun Ra into telling her his secret name, who saved Osiris and fought Set and bore Horus and did every damn thing on her own, yet clever enough to bring in help when she needed. When she went to Syria, and Osiris’s body was in the tree trunk, and the king had made a column of it, and the wood smelt so fabulous. Isis was always the one for me.

  And Hathor, smiling cow-headed Hathor, with her horns made for garlands, her calmness, and deep strength. Mother and lover Hathor. I’ll sit in the lap of the goddesses.

  The kitchen soothed me, even though the flies buzzed around and the smell of goatshit wafted in from behind. I felt safe in there, as I do in my own. I thought of Harry, sitting in kitchens, bottles of beer small in his big gnarly hands. London Harry, with his London intonations and his London wit. Imagined an Egyptian woman falling for Harry because she had fallen for London, for the angle of fine rain under a streetlight at night, for suburban roses turning from yellow to pink to orange over red-brick walls, for walking from Notting Hill to Westminster all through parks. For cherry blossom against white stucco against biscuit-blue sky. Quite possible, quite possible.

  I didn’t want to sit with Sa’id. He scared me. Eddie and Chrissie scared me. I wanted only to be put to bed. The tiredness which hijacked my legs that day in Portobello was returning, coiling me in its tendrils, wrapping me in its cloak, leaving me dark with inability.

  What am I calling inability? Twelfth week, I’m making a central nervous system in here. I’m busy. Busy within. Inability is only external. But, fuck me, is external unable. I closed my eyes, and leant against the wall, and listened to the women murmuring, and the heat hum. Lap of the goddesses.

  *

  I woke from my doze to an adjustment in the murmuring. A differen
t noise. New? Yes. But not only new. I awoke, in fact, to Eddie’s voice.

  I had not expected ever again to have that particular voice do that particularly intimate thing of making itself heard by me. Piercing the fearful hollow of my own ear. It was speaking French. Saying: ‘Sa’id el Araby – quel surprise! Qu’est-ce que tu fais ici? Pas de tourisme, non, ça n’est pas pour toi …’

  It recalled the first moment I met him, in his Pelham Crescent drawing room, with his Chagall and his Degas, and he spoke my name, and I thought, ‘This is why my parents gave me this name: for him to speak it.’ How it rolled off his tongue then, like honey; how Sa’id’s rolls off now. Patrician, Shakespearean. Evangeline. Patronizing, cosmopolitan, Sa’id el Araby. Tutoying him, even.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ said Sa’id. My mind’s eye saw him, looking up, otherwise unmoving. I didn’t want Eddie to witness that cool pale-eyed look. I wanted it. Not aimed at me, but – I wanted to witness it.

  ‘Lovely temple you’ve got here,’ Eddie was saying. Speaking the English an educated cosmopolitan patronizing Frenchman would use to a foreigner who he assumed didn’t know French. ‘I have just been to the Osireion. Very spooky down there. Do you know it? Of course you do – I’m forgetting my manners, it’s your heritage, isn’t it? Though in fact I’ve never been to the Arc de Triomphe. A great many Parisians haven’t. Like the English and the Tower of London. They are too busy going to Florida and Majorca. There’s a big fish down there, in the floodwater, a big grey one like a submarine, rather like those golden carp in Shanghai – have you been to Shanghai? The hotel filled the lake with them and they all turned grey again, through exposure to normal conditions – they returned to their natural dullness. All the special breeding and glamour was gone. Like a woman when she takes her party frock off! Ha Ha!’

  He chats, he laughs, he does his French thing though he knows that Sa’id knows he’s English. God, how I can read him. I don’t have to see him. He’s sitting there, insulting Sa’id without missing a beat, insulting women – did he give Sa’id a look when he said that? A look to say yes, I have seen that woman we both know without her dancer’s glad rags? If Chrissie is with them – is she? – does he even notice now the pain he flicks out, or has it become so much second nature, so minor in comparison with his real crimes, the crimes he does – or did – for a living, that he doesn’t even register it?

  If she’s not with him, I could try to find her. Where would she be. Toilet. Where. Oh yes; new little concrete block, down the front. I could go out the back, intercept her. Except that I am frozen in place. Melted with inability, frozen with fear.

  He was still talking. Small talk from hell.

  ‘Enfin, Sa’id – have you heard from … our mutual friend?’ he was saying.

  He doesn’t know I’m here. Chrissie hasn’t told him.

  He doesn’t know I can hear him. He may scare me but he doesn’t scare me to death and he has never won. He’s never beaten me. Hold on to that, and keep breathing.

  A pause.

  ‘I don’t believe we have one,’ said Sa’id. I smiled despite everything.

  Eddie tutted.

  ‘My wife has been seeing her,’ he said, and my heart lurched, ‘in London.’ Unlurched again. Comparatively. ‘Have you met my wife?’ said Eddie. ‘Christina, this is Sa’id el Araby.’

  So much for the interception.

  ‘How are you?’ said Sa’id. Giving it a little weight, as if he wanted to know.

  ‘Hello,’ said Chrissie. ‘Angeline’s told me all about you.’ Giving nothing. I couldn’t tell.

  This is some new kind of hell. Some new way of sitting helpless. Trapped under a web of unknowingness, possibilities singing around me. Will either of them give away that I am here? Will Chrissie give away to Sa’id that I am pregnant? Has she told Eddie that I am pregnant? Will Eddie say something? Between them, I was immobilized. Say nothing, I prayed. Stop this chitchat.

  I sent out little tendrils towards her, like a vine to creep up her leg and into her mind: Chrissie, what’s going on? What do you want, Chrissie?

  And to Sa’id: ‘Read her. Read her. Do we rescue her? Or can we run away now?’

  ‘She tells me they get on well,’ Eddie was saying. ‘Tells me it was Angeline who told her I was not dead at all. Irresponsible really, don’t you think? Loose talk costs lives, don’t you know.’ I was so glad I couldn’t see his face as he said that. And anyway he’s so fucking cavalier with his secrecy … ‘I’m sorry, that’s an English reference. From the war. Was Egypt in the war? I can’t remember. Were you still part of the Empire then? I remember you were under Napoleon – my history is shockingly bad …’ Of course there is no reason why Eddie should know that after Egypt won independence in the 1920s the British pretty much – in effect – refused to leave; that there were 140,000 Commonwealth troops stationed in Cairo in 1941. That the British ambassador openly referred to King Farouk as ‘The Boy’, and British soldiers would sing along to the Egyptian national anthem thus: ‘King Farouk, King Farouk, Hang his bollocks from a hook …’. Cairo practically burnt itself to the ground rioting against the British in 1952, just before the Revolution. But why would Eddie know that? Why would he care?

  ‘Not that I mind seeing my wife,’ he was saying. ‘There’s something pleasant in a familiar fuck. Alongside everything so very unpleasant. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll indulge her.’

  With most men, you might imagine that this meant his wife was not present. With Eddie it meant nothing. He could perfectly well be giving her his cruel little look. Or not bothering to.

  My back was melded to the dusty wall. The family had disappeared.

  ‘Really, Eddie.’ It was Chrissie.

  And I could not judge her voice. Was it a familiar little, slightly flirty, slightly ticking-off voice, the habit she has had for years for getting through living with him? Or was it a new and separate voice, just a way of getting through this moment?

  And then Eddie said, very quietly, in his ordinary old English voice: ‘And how’s my money, Sa’id? Making the most of my generosity, are you? Because if you need some more, you know, my offer is still open. There’s plenty to be made, and it’s up to you, of course, how you spend your share. Be plenty for those good works of yours. I just need somebody with a business here, an infrastructure, a brain … And we’d only be selling to nastier, greedier even more corrupt people than me, making a profit out of them. No conscience problems, I promise … A little straightforward manufacturing, a little import/export. As I said, nothing you couldn’t handle …’

  As I said? Offer still open?

  Sa’id hasn’t told me about this.

  And fear sneaks down my spine. Is Eddie doing to Sa’id what he has done to all of us? Is he corrupting him, too? Is Eddie’s money, which I gave Sa’id, turning him to the bad? Sa’id likes money. He’s good at it. It’s one of his strengths, and his weakness. I remembered Harry’s doubts, and my own. Remembered how Eddie made Chrissie abort the children she wanted, how he made Janie do all those things she did, how he made me … How he makes us do the worst things.

  Two thoughts. One: why is he trying to corrupt Sa’id? Hasn’t he noticed that he is a very pure man?

  Oh – stupid. He’s trying to buy what is not for sale. As he did with me.

  Two: maybe he has succeeded in his purchase. Maybe that contributes to why Sa’id is so not happy to see me.

  He got me, after all, didn’t he?

  And then I remembered, very vividly, fucking Eddie, and how wild that was, and how wrong, and I went quickly out the back of the kitchen, out into the empty land beyond, and was sick, by a thorn bush. One of the women appeared. Samira’s mother. I had the presence of mind to hiss: ‘Don’t tell my husband.’ God bless the sisterhood of women. She said nothing. Brought me water. The sick, after all, are excused.

  Then I washed my face and mouth, wrapped my scarf around me in complete purdah, took Samira’s mother by the arm and walked round to the fro
nt of the café. Just two female figures, wrapped in cloth, at a little distance in an Arab landscape. I couldn’t really see the three of them sitting, in the dimness right at the back, framed by the arch that Sa’id and I had thought would protect us. I stared at where they would be, knowing he would feel me, look up and see me, and respond. I wasn’t wrong. I was glad – hard gladness. It was a victory against Eddie that it was Sa’id who felt my stare and not him. After a moment or two Sa’id rose and after another moment moved away from the table and towards me. I held on to Samira’s mother’s arm.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

  She was Aisha. Lovely name. Evening, life, bread. Leila is night. Beautiful names. If Nippyhead is a girl I can call her garden of nightingales, beloved of the prophet, morning star, tree of pearls. Though Shagaratt ad Durr had the most dreadful story. She was a slave, thirteenth-century, married the Sultan, who died of a fever. She kept his death secret for two months, long enough to call back his son from Syria, and took up with the head of the Mamluk guard. But the son was no good, and demanded that she give up her jewels: the Mamluks murdered him, and for eighty days the Tree of Pearls ruled as sultana. Then she married her Mamluk captain, made him divorce his wife (Umm Ali, after whom the delicious pudding is named) and made him Sultan, if only in name. But then, seven years later, he decided to take a Turkish princess as his wife, and so she had him killed, whereupon Umm Ali’s son (Ali) roused his father’s troops and delivered Shagaratt ad Durr to his mother, who had her beaten to death with wooden clogs and thrown into the moat, where she was left for three days, wearing only her crimson sash with pearls on it. Somebody came and stole it. It smelt of musk. In the end she was buried in the beautiful tomb she had had the foresight to build in the City of the Dead. It’s there now, dusty and neglected, ask for Mr Nabil at the green house to the right if you want to go inside. A glass mosaic of a tree bears fruit of inlaid mother of pearl: ‘Oh ye who stand by my grave, show not surprise at my condition,’ says the folded and beautiful text: ‘Yesterday I was as you. Tomorrow you will be as me.’ When she knew it was all up for her she ground up her jewels in a mortar, to stop anyone else from getting them. While waiting for her stepson to come and take his revenge. Just another soap opera.