Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  ‘Not?’ I said. ‘Why would you not?’ There were, after all, a few possible reasons. Maybe in some mad way I wanted him to use this to keep me in Egypt. To refuse to let me leave, even though it spelt misery for me. As if he were a crazy possessive lover, to whose passion I could succumb.

  And how curious, that he is giving me, as a great gift, the freedom to go, to leave him, when all that I want is to be with him. To stay, or to take him with me. I haven’t yet done my job, the thing I came for, and yet I am grateful that I can go, grateful to him for arranging it … something is wrong here.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it. But will you do something for me?’

  ‘Da enna ashilak ala ramoush enaya, ya habibi,’ I said. It means, I’d carry you on my eyelashes, my love. I’d do anything for you, you know that.

  Fool! Herod to Salome, Isaac to God, every myth and legend, every fairy story: first lesson, don’t promise until you know what you are promising.

  He closed his eyes and smiled, and the smile drifted away.

  ‘Don’t come back,’ he said.

  Silence. Mine.

  ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He shrugged. Hands wide.

  ‘Habibti,’ he said.

  Silence.

  ‘There is a flight to Cairo at nine tonight. Get your tickets.’

  Silence.

  ‘I know you understand,’ he said. ‘Don’t …’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said. Why is not a question I ever need to ask him. ‘But listen. I know that you understand.’

  ‘I know what I am losing,’ he said.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  And I couldn’t tell him. I know I should have. I knew I should have earlier. But I couldn’t. ‘Forgive me,’ he said.

  He didn’t look at me. Just walked back down to the pontoon. I heard the engine of the boat. Sat, until the cannon went for lmsaak. The gates of heaven open at this hour, they say. Angels come and go. There goes one.

  Nothing more, after this. Too late. The fast begins.

  And what is my fast? What am I renouncing now? What am I called upon to renounce?

  You’re not meant to lie, during Ramadan.

  Him. But not forever, whatever he may say. I have his child.

  Love. But not all love. Love is still with me. Hold to that.

  I am losing a pearl. Or maybe, a tree is losing me.

  I sat most of the day in the same place on the wall. After a while the felucca men stopped offering me their services, though it occurred to me that floating on beauty, suspended in time (like travelling, like being broken, incapable, in traction, protected from the necessity of action, but among beauty) might be a good way to spend this impossible day.

  My mind was full of what I must give up.

  Harry came out and offered me things, this or that. Brought me water. Chrissie came and talked to me, but I don’t know what she said. I was madder than her that day. I thought about Janie a lot, and about what Harry had said in London, about me wanting things to die since I had faced death, about not being able to give myself to things or claim anything as my own. He couldn’t say I haven’t tried here. Oh god, but he could … When he appeared the next time he did.

  I was sitting looking out over the Nile, thinking about figs, and he put his arms around me from behind, two arms folded round my neck, resting on my shoulders, his chest warm against my back. I rested my head against his arm, and he rested his face against the side of mine, temple to temple. When I had first found him again, after Ben Cooper had sent me to chum up with him in order to chum up with Eddie, I had gone to a nightclub we used to frequent, and spotted him, and manoeuvred myself in front of him, and he had slipped his arm around my waist from behind. Our first touch in ten years.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said.

  But I was busy looking over the water.

  ‘What’s going on, Angel?’

  Only Harry can call me Angel.

  ‘We can go,’ I said. ‘He’s arranged it. Shezli will let us leave, because Sa’id wants him to. Which he does. He wants us to go. He wants me to go. He said. He said …’ and I gulped a little as I repeated his words, ‘he would have Shezli do this, if I promised not to come back.’

  Harry’s arms tightened a little bit.

  ‘But you haven’t told him,’ he said.

  ‘How can I tell him now?’ I cried. ‘How can I tell him? He’s made it clear, I can’t – how can I?’

  He put his large left hand on the top of my head. I felt he was holding my brain in place in my skull.

  ‘How can you not?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Is that pride?’ he said. ‘You didn’t make the situation. You’re letting him control it when he’s not fully informed. You are – you are exactly doing what I said before. Life-denying. Literally. Denying to him the existence of his kid. Think onwards a little. Take it forward. Will you never tell him? Will this child have no father? Because of the way you love each other now? You’ve known each other a few months … you have years to come.’

  He never ceases to surprise me.

  I turned round in his arms and pulled away.

  ‘Do you want me to be with him?’ I cried. ‘Do you know what it means? He won’t come to London – I would come here. I would stay here. And Lily. Do you want that?’

  He looked me straight in the eyes. Touched his teeth with his tongue. Closed his eyes briefly. His Mongolian face: all cheekbones and inscrutability. DI Makins gives nothing away.

  ‘I spoke to Shezli,’ he said. ‘Our passports will be at the airport. We get them when we’re on the plane – nine o’clock, to Cairo. Then overnight to London. We’re not to leave the airport when we change.’

  ‘He thinks of everything,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Go and talk to him again before we leave. He loves you.’

  ‘He says you love me.’

  This time he turned away. Then: ‘Every time I look at you I see him with his hands in your hair, murmuring in your ear, “Why is he looking at you like that?”’

  I thought about that for a moment.

  ‘You are not free to be loved,’ he said.

  And I thought about that.

  ‘I’ll go and pack,’ he said. ‘Please don’t stay here. Come in, or go over. I’ll go with you.’

  ‘Not going,’ I said.

  I stayed.

  *

  An hour or so later he came out again.

  ‘He’s young,’ he said. ‘He’s young. Don’t blame him.’

  ‘I don’t blame him.’

  Silence sat with us.

  ‘What do you want from him?’ he said.

  Strangely, I found I couldn’t answer. What does a woman want from a man?

  ‘There’s one thing I know,’ he said, conversationally.

  After a bit I said, ‘What?’

  ‘The opposite sex,’ he said, ‘is opposite. A foreigner is even more opposite. He is as opposite as you can find, the most opposite, and so the most attractive. He is, forgive me, a dusky stranger …’

  ‘He’s not a stranger …’

  ‘Yes, he is. Take it from me, he is. I know he’s a good bloke and your heart’s desire, too, but he is also a slinky Arab love god. He just is. He can’t help it, any more than you can help being a blonde bombshell. Maybe what he is for you is the other side of the coin. But you can never get both sides of the coin, you turn it over, and the first side has disappeared. And again, if you turn it over again. I remember you talking about Egypt and Islam and stuff, so close and yet so far, the other side of our own Mediterranean, our missing thing, the religion which shares half the prophets of our religion, the language which is so alien and yet so connected, the place where culture lived when it deserted Europe a thousand years ago, the place where so many things we share were invented, all that stuff you’ve told me about … I think you feel an obligation, a desire to close the circle, join the
gaps … you want this to succeed in order to prove that it can succeed, but you know … if you two are free just as a man and a woman, and not as the stereotypes you might be to each other, then you are as free to fail as you are free to succeed. You are not obliged, for any political or cultural reason …’

  The egrets were beginning to buggle buggle da, the light to change.

  ‘But I love him,’ was all I could come up with.

  ‘Of course you do,’ he said. He let that sit for a moment. ‘I think what I’m saying is – all that stuff, cultural differences, history, religion, gender – you can’t ignore them just because you disagree with the interpretations that have always been put on them. They still exist. You just have to find your own way of dealing with it. We all do. Like – um, racism. You can be against it; doesn’t mean all races are the same. Branches on a tree, trees in a forest. Men and women – equal, but not exactly the same. Got baggage. Habits. Assumptions made about us, by us. I’m not being very clear here. Or, say, Ramadan. I’m as infidel as they come, but I still get woken by the bloke with the drum in the middle of the night. I’m affected by the fact that no one round here eats all day, and that affects their mood. So, I mean, you and Sa’id have these things going on, you have to deal with them, here they are.’

  I murmured.

  ‘If it doesn’t work out for you two, it doesn’t mean that East and West hate each other forever. You’ve had some unity. You’ve made this kid. It’s not like the end of the possibility of harmony between nations. It’s just a broken romance and another kid with a complex domestic life. Nothing you haven’t dealt with before.’

  Brutal sod sometimes, Harry.

  I brought my legs up on to the wall, sat crosslegged.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked him after a while.

  ‘For you to be safe, and all to be well,’ he said.

  I smiled at that.

  ‘Oh, don’t ask me,’ he said, with the tiniest snort of exasperation. ‘I’m biased.’

  After a bit I said, ‘Why am I talking about this with you, not him?’

  ‘Good question,’ he murmured, and then raised his head suddenly, and said quite firmly: ‘If you won’t talk to him, we’re to go home, babe. Deal with this from home ground.’

  ‘Home is where the heart is,’ I said, with a little laugh.

  His face changed quickly, his eyebrows solidifying, his cheekbones turning firm.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘Are you going to stay here, against his wishes, alienated from him, deserting Lily, and have Chrissie face a murder charge, and you face whatever comes in its wake? Pregnant? On your own with that psychotic woman? Are you? Love is great, Angel, but there’s love and there’s bollocks. This is bollocks. Listen,’ he said. ‘All that stuff with Eddie. All the stuff with Ben, with Janie, with Preston Oliver … I can see how you have had to do things you wouldn’t want to do, how you have had unpleasantness forced on you, and you have fought it and dealt with it, my god, like a fucking ten-armed warrior goddess, but if you volunteer for this, Angel, if you volunteer for this danger with the same gusto you have managed to face unavoidable danger with up till now … Sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Come home and stay sane. Or stay here and lose it. That’s your choice.’

  He stopped suddenly. He seemed surprised to have found himself at so final and presumptuous a conclusion. For a moment he seemed to weigh where he had found himself, and at the end of the moment he found himself to be right. He looked at me to confirm his arrival at that point of view.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.‘I try so hard not to …’

  ‘Not to what?’ I said.

  ‘Not to invade you, not to boss you, lose it, throw chairs out the window at you,’ he said. ‘Make demands on you. Require things of you. But Angel.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Oh god, I’m about to quote Merle Haggard.’

  ‘You can’t. I’m the one who quotes country and western lyrics at ridiculous moments.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do. Maybe it’s just one of the many stupid things we have in common.’

  I snorted a little.

  ‘Well get on with it, then,’ I said.

  ‘I know you are an independent-minded woman. I try to respect that even when you’re being a fool. But. I was going to say,’ he said, glancing away and back swiftly, with a self-conscious but fuck-it-so-what smile, ‘and I know it’s flawed. But. “Don’t confuse this gentleness with any sign of weakness in your man.”’

  ‘You’re not my man.’

  He smiled again, wider, and harder.

  ‘Tell him about his child,’ he said. ‘And see if it changes his point of view. And if not, we go home. That’s all.’

  *

  I just sat. My fantasies were spinning around me. I tell him, now, and he’s happy, and we go and live in Paris and Harry comes at weekends for Lily; she gets a Eurostar season ticket … He takes the job in Brighton and we all go and live by the sea, Sarah becomes my best friend … we move to Cairo, and Lily goes to the American School … oh no, Sa’id wouldn’t like that … and spends holidays with Harry … I take up archaeology again, get a job on the Tomb of the Sons, or in Alexandria on Cleopatra’s palace that they found in the bay …

  They all started with me telling him, and him being happy. But I haven’t told him, and he’s not happy.

  These fantasies are based not on orientalizing, but on the basic fantasy that he wants me.

  But it’s not a fantasy. He does want me.

  But he’s sending me away.

  But he loves me he said so.

  *

  At about five he came. Presumably word had seeped across the Nile that his khawageyya girlfriend was sitting on the Corniche like a colossus, and about as unlikely to move. He took my arm and helped me down from the wall, and we walked along a little further, past some building sites, quiet now, with the end of the day and the suspension of … everything, after Hatshepsut … and down to another landing stage, and he peered at the moored feluccas in the declining daylight and said: ‘Ta’ali.’ Come.

  He found one, and unloosed its painter, and said, ‘You will have to be my crew, can you crew for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can do anything for you.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t do anything for me except what I have asked.’

  ‘So why are we here?’ I asked.

  The wind was low. There’s never wind at dusk. It was cold anyway. Him regal in his dark lapis-coloured scarf, me in the white one. Yes, he wrapped it tighter around me. The big canvas of the sail flapped loosely against the white-painted mast.

  We drifted out. He leaned back against the bulwark and steered with his beautiful bare foot, as they do, as he had done the night we had first arrived from Cairo. He held his arm out to me. I sat by the mast and I refused him.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘A moment,’ he said. ‘An interlude.’

  ‘What interlude?’ I asked.

  He said nothing. Sailed us on up river, not far, and then drew into a reedy bank and moored the boat on to a branch of a tree, the sail still up, creaking slightly in the remains of the breeze. Some birds cackled at the outrage. Egrets were hanging like handkerchiefs, white, clean and triangular in the creeping dusk.

  ‘Between joy and sorrow,’ he said, though it was good fifteen minutes since I had asked the question.

  ‘What, drink with me in the ruins?’ I said. ‘We are already in sorrow.’

  ‘You can go home,’ he said finally. ‘I have spoken to Shezli. It’s done.’

  I was just looking at him.

  ‘Don’t come back,’ he said.

  Silence all around me.

  ‘I get no say,’ I said.

  ‘I know what you’d say. You’ve said plenty. You love me, you’ll stay here forever, you’ll bring Lily, Harry can come and go, you’ll do what is needed.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

>   ‘I’ll believe you,’ he said, with a bitter little laugh. ‘So no, you get no say.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I can’t talk to you. This is unspeakable.’

  Then: ‘What if I say no?’

  ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘It’s Chrissie’s life.’

  ‘And mine,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Oh, it’s my life all right …’

  The river air trickled down my spine. Loneliness and fear gathered over me like vultures.

  ‘You want rid of me so much?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I had no idea it was so bad.’

  ‘Nor had I,’ he said.

  ‘You blackmail me, bully me, betray me. After all this.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘But you love me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And you think you can make me hate you.’

  He smiled at that.

  ‘I don’t care what you think of me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not talking about what I think of you. I’m talking about how I feel about you. I won’t hate you,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t help it.’

  Silence all around, and the sun slipping westward into the desert, into Libya.

  The cannon went. Iftar. Green and crimson and gold across the sky, darkness entering my heart. A swift dusk.

  He opened a little bag he had with him. Took out a small package: dates. A bottle of water: Baraka. It means blessing. Two flat breads. Two tomatoes. A twist of paper with do’a – salty spices. A knife. He washed his hands in a handful of water, opened the bread, sliced a tomato, handed me the food. Poured water into a cup. In Ramadan you don’t drink from the same vessel. At any time, if a man and a woman drink from the same vessel, the last to drink will follow the first for the rest of their life. If you drink the water of the Nile you will always return. We ate. We drank. Contributed our silence to the great silence of Iftar.

  After a while his arm rose in the air between us. He wasn’t looking at me. Found the back of my neck. Took hold of it, his hand.

  ‘Whether or not you understand,’ he said, ‘there are some things I want to say to you. I owe you this. I don’t mean to be unkind … You know … I love my country. There are things I want to do. It is only right here, at home, that an educated man can speak to, or for, the people of his country. Do you know we were expelled from the Arab League because we sucked up to the US? Yes – they moved the headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. And do you know how the rest of the Arabs looked at us during the Gulf War? We were trashed. For the keenness with which our government turned on an Arab country. Not Saddam Hussein. I’m not defending him, God forbid. But the people of Iraq. We lost Nasser, we lost Sadat, whatever you think of him, we lost the Six Day War, we lost Suez, we lost Sinai, for a while … We have been too dependent on outside things, economically, politically, culturally. We have been losing ourselves … we have been offered blind adherence to tradition or blind devotion to innovation and consumerism. This is no choice. We are not blind …’ He drifted off for a moment.