by Louisa Young
I couldn’t stay there. If I couldn’t participate, protect her directly, then I was wasting time, displacing, procrastinating when I had no tomorrow to procrastinate to. She’d be no better off for me sitting on my arse out here when I could be trying to make sense of my own predicament.
I stood, and said to the bumfluff cop who had diverted me to the sofa in the first place: ‘I must go, I have some business to attend to. I will come back. Look after her.’ And I left, and I went out the door, and down the filmstar staircase, and across the first side of the Corniche, and across the flowerbeds in the middle, and across the other side of the Corniche, and along to the ma’adeyyah landing place. A small boy in charge of a small motorized iron barge (Nefertiti), lined with floral chintz cushions, tried to win my custom, but I had had enough of the special expensive tourist ways; I wanted to be united with Egypt now, to be as near as a khawageyya can be to a bint balad, a daughter of the country. At the very least, crossing on the public ferry. I had to laugh at myself for being confused about my identity here. An Englishwoman fretting about who she feels she is in relation to Egypt when the Egyptians live with the questions every day: are you urban or country, modernizing or traditional, religiously liberal or fundamentalist, veiled or bareheaded, gallabeyas or trousers, open to the West or protectively nationalistic? Where, along the lines that connect these poles, do you place yourself? Where do you get chucked by fate and circumstance? How frequently, and with what pain, do you get moved? To what can you cling? An Egyptian novelist, Waguih Ghali, wrote years ago that the reason Cairo looks cosmopolitan is not because of the foreigners, but because so many Egyptians feel and act like strangers in their own land. Unsure which way to go. Something Sa’id said, a while ago: ‘How do you think it feels for a nation to sit where it has always sat, knowing that you all think we are on your edge?’
I noticed that the bumfluff police lad was accompanying me, but at a more than decent distance. I caught his eye and smiled at him; he looked away quickly. I didn’t mind.
So I crossed the Nile. I looked out as I went for kingfishers, because I always do, but there weren’t any. Around me thronged the populace: the women wrapped up in black, carrying packages, black eyes and green checking me and quiet comments sneaking out, with giggles and nudges. The men-gallabeya’d, trousered, busy with their business. No one eating, as they would be doing any other time of year. A handful of animals. Some fuss with a bicycle which had caught against someone’s crate of chickens, resulting in some friendly joshing about how if they can’t even hold it upright how do they intend to ride it? The bicycle owner squatted down and kissed the bamboo chicken crate: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘they’re not upset now.’ A few years ago we would all have been squashed in between cars and taxis. No cars, not any more, because of the bridge.
The great ancient ark slid turgidly across, awash with greetings and gossip and the exchange of news. Beneath its strong and rusty hull slid the river, which was today the colour of amber, iron and almonds. I looked north towards Qus, Qft and Qena, to Dendara and Abydos, to Sohag, Assyut, Al Minya and Beni Suef. And Cairo, and the Delta, where the stem of the Nile swells into the lotus bud, and to the Mediterranean, the great sea that Allah put there for a purpose to separate the Muslims and the Christians. And I looked south, towards Esna and Edfu, Kom Ombo and Aswan, the dams and Lake Nasser, drowned Nubia, dead cataracts, Abu Simbel, Wadi Haifa, Sudan, Shendi, Khartoum, where the Blue and the White Niles came together out of Ethiopia and the mountains of the moon. Up there is where the giraffe (from the Arabic: zarafa, lovely) was caught that Muhammed Ali sent to the King of France in 1826. I daydreamed about the little giraffe, sailing down the Nile and across the sea to Marseilles, strange and beautiful to the French. I listened to the rackety babble around me, let the sun shine on my face. None of these people would seem that out of place on the Uxbridge Road. How out of place am I? I don’t feel it.
London is my home only because it was, like for the newly hatched orphan geese, the first pair of Wellingtons I saw. My blood is English. But my heart and mind and inclination take me anywhere. Anywhere. Specially right here, among these people who know perfectly well that I don’t belong here, but would welcome me anyway. For a moment I saw myself, surrounded by my books and my CDs, in white Nubian pyjamas, living in Sa’id’s white marble-floored house, looking out from cool shade, through the window towards the tumbling yellow ruins of Ramses’s funerary temple, Ozymandias, King of Kings, visible from our bed, and the palms arching and swaying in a mass down by the river. Saw myself crossing every day to the market, gossiping with these women. Saw Lily tapping away at bits of alabaster and making the workmen laugh as they showed her how to do it.
Stopped myself. Education? Language? Asthma? Harry? The heat, the hideous melting inferno of the heat, in the summer? Putting myself – and Lily – entirely in his hands? Flies, dirt, poverty, whatever? Ageing parents alone at home who’ve already lost one daughter? A man who doesn’t even know I’m pregnant yet? Always being the khawageyya – the outsider. Always. Even if I were to become Umm Ibn Sa’id – Mother of the Son of Sa’id.
Stop it. This may be a subject for thought, but it is not a subject for fantasies about black curls and white pyjamas and the view of the Ramesseum.
And then when we landed something happened which made me feel quite ill.
Among the passengers was a European woman of fifty-odd, Scandinavian perhaps. Nice-looking, well-dressed, exchanging a few phrases of tourist Arabic with the people around her, friendly, cheerful, looking slightly excited. At the landing stage she was noisily hailed by a young man, I mean young, early twenties, skinny, dark, moustached, good-looking. Newly washed and pomaded. Her name was Ingrid. ‘Inaga-reeda! Inagareeda!’ he called. He fought through the throng to get to her, and when he did, kissed her loudly, publically, pretty much sexily. She quivered in his embrace, half embarrassed, very pleased. He grinned triumphantly. The gaggle of women I was sitting with looked, kissed their teeth, caught each other’s eyes and made their opinion quite clear. His mother would be ashamed. His father would be ashamed. He should be working for a living, not … And that woman. But she’s our sister now, she’s a guest, she likes him so much … too much. But he should be ashamed. What’s wrong with the fields and the workshops if he wants to make money? What’s wrong with work? Times are hard now, but things will get better, insha’Allah, and look at him, in public, in Ramadan, selling himself like a … for all to see.
They were married, this couple. He put her in the car (did she pay for it?) and got in beside her, playing with her fingers, smiling up at her under his little moustache. She just fluttered with delight at him.
These women, in public, are as quiet as water in a zeir, a water pot. I know what they’d be saying in Cairo though. (She’s not bad-looking, for a meal ticket. Ah, but what grandchildren will his mother have? Well, there’s a miracle we don’t expect. Not for lack of trying, by the look of it. Why would we want to look?)
And they went on their way. I stood staring after the car.
That is not us, I said. No one would see that in us. If he were here with me now no one would be kissing their teeth that way, no one would say that of Sa’id. It’s not the case, it wouldn’t even look like it was the case. That is nothing to do with us.
But how could that woman not see, not hear? Is she looking at other couples and saying, ‘That is not us’?
And that man – he knows. He must know. And yet so public – he must not care. Or – no, I know what it is. He thinks he’s clever. He thinks that he’s a ga’dda, a big clever fellow to have got such a catch, and that they are just jealous.
This morning’s black snake seemed to have followed me across the river. It seemed to be laughing at me from the middle of the road. I felt slightly winded.
I went up the hill a little to see if I could get some juice, and stopped to get my breath. When I looked up a young lad was trying to catch my eye. He was making a slightly odd face at me. I had noticed h
im in the crowd on the boat, noticed him noticing Ingrid. Oh my god, he thinks he’s giving me the eye.
‘Ramadan karim,’ I said to him. He melted away. The snake laughed and laughed.
Within five minutes I was hitching a lift to the fabrique in the cab of a pickup truck full of gas canisters. The driver kept hawking and spitting out the window on to the road. I tried to imagine that he was being devout, not swallowing, but he wasn’t, he was just being disgusting.
‘Tourist?’ he grunted, grinding his gears as we turned right past the colossi of Memnon.
‘Bint el Araby,’ I said. Daughter of the Arabys, literally. Friend of the family, loosely. Though saying it gave me a bit of a turn. Daughter of the Arabs. He grunted again, and spat a bit more.
When we got there he wouldn’t take any money. Any friend of the Arabys was, he implied, a friend of his. He waited for a while, I think wanting someone to see that he done this favour for their friend, but no one came out and he went off again, bearing my thanks and leaving me as ever in two minds about this country. And wondering, what do I mean, ‘this country?’ I lived here. This country used to be, to some degree at least, mine. The fruit of this country is within me.
*
I suppose I had hoped that Sa’id would come out, alone, by some miracle, and by some miracle it would all be all right. As it was there was no one out the front except the figures painted on the low white wall, sun-bleached multicolour against the whitewash, tomb-painting-style ancients striding and offering and smiling their enigmatic smiles. I stood for a moment at the verge of the low flattened dunes of glistening white alabaster dust which surround the building for several yards all around, by-product of generations of carving and grinding and polishing. I had a moment of alabaster reverie, breathing in the powder of crystallized peach, fractal ginger, oily green. I looked up to the two dark basalt hounds that guard the entrance, and considered walking into the shop. Decided against. Perhaps he is in there selling ashtrays to Dutch people. Perhaps Hakim will jump on me like a puppy. Oh no, he’s gone to Aswan. Went round to the side instead, where a whitewashed alley leads into the courtyard. Went in.
It was Abu Sa’id who was sitting on the divan, in the shade, resting. My feet were quiet on the alabaster dust of their territory, but he heard me, and looked up. His face was a little more seasoned than ten years ago, a little darker, a little tougher. Though I had seen him only two and a half months before, it was his face from longer ago that was in my memory. The white hair above his ears was a little wirier, his beard a little wispier. His eyes carried their wisdom a little slower, his mouth could have been cut in rock. And he smiled, and his smile lifted his face like a fountain lifts water in a still pool. It was Sa’id’s smile, the one Sa’id had not been giving me, and it was the cool water for which I thirsted. A line of poetry came to me: ‘waka’anaha bardu al-sharabi, it is as though she were the very coolness of drink itself.’
‘Angelina,’ he said, and he held out his hands and stood, and I made him sit again, and said, ‘Abu Sa’id,’ and the name in my mouth, carrying his son’s child, seemed to me so full of respect: Father of Sa’id, I said, mother of Sa’id’s child. Umm Ibn Sa’id. I wanted to tell him. I wanted so badly to tell him. This kind man. This first of the family that I knew, this host to me and my sick friend all those years ago when Sa’id and Hakim were children and Sarah was still a ghost, and Mariam moved through their house like a fish in dark waters.
‘I am glad to see you here,’ he said, and I knew that he was, that he remembered every curious thing about our curious brief friendship from years before. But does he know what has happened since? And if so, what does he think of it?
The smile was broad and brown and calm. What he said, however, knocked me sideways. ‘You funny modern woman,’ he said. ‘You come yourself for your groom? Have you no one to send? Have you come to ask me for yourself?’
I think my jaw may have dropped.
‘Abu Sa’id!’ I think I said.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Abu Angelina! Maybe! Who knows? Do you want my boy? My big stupid beautiful boy. But …’
‘What?’
‘Will you take him away?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know if he wants me, Abu Nil,’ I said. The old nickname, Father of the Nile, not Father of Sa’id, was easier for me. ‘I don’t think he would let me take him anywhere he didn’t want to go.’
‘We can do without him,’ he said. ‘Don’t let him pretend that we can’t. Hakim will be sensible very soon. Don’t let him claim to be indispensable here.’
‘I’m too old for him,’ I said.
‘Love is ancient and timeless,’ said the father.
‘I have a child already.’
‘Your dead sister’s child. It is right that you take her in.’
‘I live far away.’
‘This is the modern world. We fly like birds, north to south, south to north.’
‘I am a Christian.’
‘I don’t think that you are. And – Christian is not a bad tradition. You have one God. You have love and charity.’
‘You and Sarah couldn’t do it,’ I said, knowing as I said it that I was pushing my luck.
I swear he curled his eyebrow as he paused, and looked, and laughed, and said: ‘Hope springs eternal. I still believe in el infitah. At least between individuals.’ The infitah was Egyptian government policy in the mid 1970s. Open door. Foreign investment, Western cultural influences, that sort of thing. Around the time Sa’id was a child. Then: ‘I have seen my son these weeks. What he lost when you left, he needs. He will do as I say. He knows I am right.’
Suddenly it was not quite right. The surge of support I had felt turned into …
‘Please don’t tell him what to do,’ I said. ‘Please let him make up his own mind. Please …’
‘Of course,’ said Abu Sa’id. ‘But whatever I do, he will be aware of what I want. He is my son.’
Family is here. Here is family.
‘I am so sorry,’ I said, ‘about the … trouble that I brought …’ I was echoing the words Hakim used when he came to stay with me in London. I tried to change the tune. Hakim had brought me very little trouble, really. ‘I am sorry the police were here.’
‘Oh, those boys often come to visit. They are not a problem. They did not suspect my sons of anything. And Hakim brought his own trouble on his own head. That is not your fault. We do not blame you. For anything.’
‘Sarah seemed to,’ I murmured, thinking even as I said it that I shouldn’t.
I sat on the divan, and he sat with me, and took my hand, and held it, very kindly. I wished I could put his hand on my belly and whisper within to the shrimp: this is your grandfather. Instead I led the warmth of his touch up my arm and down inside me to the child.
‘I used to blame her a lot, too,’ he said. ‘Now not so much. Now I understand better.’
‘Have she and Sa’id been … are they?’ I asked.
‘I believe so,’ he said. ‘I believe so. Talking. And Hakim is all in love with her and with England. And says as Sai’d went to Paris so he must go to London. He wants to be English now. I told him Sa’id earned his own money to go and study.’
I hadn’t known that.
‘Sa’id will be back soon, insha’Allah,’ he said.
Oh. He’s not here.
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
‘Your friend telephoned for him this morning. He went to meet him. I don’t know where.’
My friend?
Which friend?
‘Ari?’ said Abu Sa’id.
Harry!
‘Oh,’ I said. Merely filling a gap with a noise, in order not to be rude. ‘Oh,’ I said again, because I didn’t know what to think of that bit of news.
Abu Sa’id was watching me. ‘Is that good for you, little one?’ he said, and I shook my head, more in surprise than in the negative, and then sighed. It became the sort of moment which normally would have been rescued by the ordering of tea
or the offer of food, but it was Ramadan, and none of these easy let-outs were available.
‘Stay till he comes,’ he said. ‘I must go in now. I’ll send you some tea,’ and he shuffled off. I wanted to call him back. I wanted to ask him about Sarah, about their life and their separation, about bringing up his sons, and why he is talking now so easily about them leaving him?
‘Abu Sa’id,’ I called. He turned.
‘I’m sorry about … Hatshepsut,’ I said.
He was silent a moment.
‘No one has slept,’ he said, ‘since then.’
He moved through the mosquito nets into his room, disappearing from the sunlight into the shade.
*
I lay back on the divan under the shade of the whitewashed wall, my feet tucked up under me, with the muffled banging and singing of the men in the workshop behind, and the high morning sun shining so hot just beyond me, and the fresh cool smell of the mint in the tea which arrived in a moment brought by one of the boys – Omar, I think was his name. Normally, I would have dozed. But with Abu Sa’id’s words in my ear I could not. I rested my head, and let all that had happened ebb and flow in my mind, hoping, and praying, that confusion might subside and clarity might rise to the surface.
FIFTEEN
Ezwah
When I looked up, they were both there, standing over me, looking down at me. Harry, in ancient Levi’s and a faded grey-green t-shirt, very tall, very out of place, very calm. Sa’id, in a white gallabeya, as spotless as only people from very hot countries can manage, very harmonious, very cool, very detached. Me, in a daze, very hot, very dopey, very confused. Clarity had not risen. The green canvas under my cheek was damp even in the shade. The noon sky glowed azure (from the Arabic: azraq) behind them and I could not see their faces.
My first thought on seeing them surprised me so much I had to close my eyes again. Through the heat and against the sky, I thought: ‘Why can’t I have both of them?’