III
The casino was in one of those old buildings with venerable pasts, which often still housed cultural institutions and organisations dedicated to reconciliation between peoples.
Gazing at the lights trained on the tables and at the young men and women dealing the cards, Samir realised why the word ’casino’ had always entranced him.
All eyes were on the tables. The air was filled with cigarette smoke, and with the deep sighs and mute dialogues of people continuously fighting with themselves. They all needed courage, whether they were miserly, rational, heavily in debt, or merely skilful gamblers who had promised themselves to stop gambling. A single question hung unsteadily in the air, ’Should I play this time or not?’
Instead of lusting after the women dressed in their best and showing off their curves, the men pleaded with the numbers that were everywhere: in their bank accounts and their pockets, as well as on the gaming tables. The money bled away, slipping through the players’ fingers, and their faces turned gloomy as their mood changed.
’It’s like a wake!’ said Samir. ’Let’s go, Amira.’
She smiled and took him into another room where there were slot machines round the walls, making sounds like popcorn-makers. Tables and chairs were dotted about, and waiters brought drinks and sandwiches. The monkey, which Samir had named Cappuccino, was there too, under Samir’s coat and scarf.
It was only when an acquaintance told Amira of Umm Ibrahim’s death that Amira found an empty place and sat down with the other women.
Umm Ibrahim had taken up going to the casino when her son died young; she had found it an appropriate solution to her sorrow and loneliness: open all night, it was the only place that she could enter without any obligation to entertain others or be entertained by them. ’The casino is the only thing that makes me feel alive,’ she used to say. ’I sweat with fear and joy there, and it’s the one place where I can climb the stairs without using my stick.’ Then one night she had stayed away from the casino, and died as she lay in bed watching the hail falling from the London sky and thudding on the windowpanes.
The conversation moved on to Mr Kubani from Nigeria. Rumour had it that he was going to visit the casino as soon as he arrived from Miami, where he had been given the sobriquet Goldfinger. Or so they’d been told by a relative of his, who’d been losing heavily for a week now. Goldfinger was in the habit of giving tips of thousands of dollars to everyone he encountered: masseuses, flight attendants, entire bands of musicians.
Amira stood up and circulated between the slot machines and gambling tables, shaking a hand here, ignoring an acquaintance there, asking about such-and-such a person. She left Samir sitting near the old women who were resting from playing the machines, the wives waiting for their husbands, looking sullen and bored, and the beautiful Arab and foreign girls, who gathered there when they were not strolling about, drinking and eating, keeping an eye on what was happening at the tables so that they could come back and report.
The monkey, which had been quietly settled in the warmth of Samir’s coat, began to get restless. The waiting wives and the women who were spying on the winners and losers gathered round the moment they saw the monkey; it was a welcome diversion, even if all it did was turn its head from side to side, and examine its tail, or blow kisses in the air. One of the women was daring enough to want to hold it. She knew it was a capuchin, assuring Samir she’d been brought up in India where she’d had dozens of monkeys as pets.
When the monkey refused to let her hold it, Samir joked, ’It’s a female. It likes men.’
The waiter noticed the monkey and asked Samir anxiously how he’d got past the door. ’Monkey? What monkey? This is a dog that looks like a monkey,’ teased Samir.
Amira called the waiter over and pressed something into his hand, whispering that Samir and the monkey were part of a prince’s household - a very generous prince - who would be joining them shortly.
Amira looked at her watch. There was not a single clock in the casino. She hadn’t found anyone to prey on so far that night and Nahid hadn’t shown up as she’d promised. Amira loved the casino’s clientele, whether they were miserable or ecstatic when the roulette wheel stopped turning, and she often took one of the casualties home in a taxi, cursing aloud because she didn’t know what time it was, so he would give her his wristwatch, pleased to discover that he was still capable of giving.
In the casino a cancan was playing. Behind the bar a tapestry depicted monkeys: one pulled a peacock’s tail, one cast a fishing line into the water, others aimed rifles at birds in the trees.
Samir’s monkey, with its black-and-white markings and its fur shining in the casino lights, looked itself as if it were dressed in a white shirt and a black shantung jacket. However, Cappuccino remained a skinny and puny creature, even with its marvellously agile tail, curled like a lock of Louis XV’s hair. Samir smoothed down the fur on the monkey’s head, trying to cover the slight bald patches that were creeping over either side of its forehead. He could tell that the monkey loved this warm place, and that it loved him, especially tonight, when Samir himself was acting more like the monkey than ever, with his rapid gestures and inquisitive eyes, making the women laugh with the sounds he produced, as he regaled them with fictitious tales about Cappuccino.
The cancan was still blaring out. Amira enticed Cappuccino to stay with her by offering the monkey some food but the music and the noise and the women clustered around made the animal want to break free. Amira did her best to hold on to it, for fear the monkey would run away altogether. However, the monkey had no thought of escaping and it stood where it was, on the table, and bowed low as if to royalty. When it was sure all eyes were upon it, it picked up its tail like the hem of a dress, and made the rounds of the astonished women. It held out a hand with an imploring look in its eyes. It singled out one woman and began opening and closing its nostrils in front of her. She offered the monkey some food, which it promptly ate, but it didn’t move away. The woman didn’t know what to do when the monkey continued to look at her pleadingly, then intently. She gave it a gambling chip she had in her hand. The monkey held it close to his face, then threw it on the floor and held out a hand again. She searched through her bag but the monkey finally lost patience and moved on. When the next woman had her donation of a paper handkerchief rejected, she reached back into her bag and gave the monkey a pound. The monkey held it up to its face, then nodded gratefully, so another woman gave it a fiver and it beamed and grasped her arm, while everyone waited expectantly. The monkey turned its head from side to side, uttering little noises, and made as if to go towards Amira, then changed its mind and turned back to the women to go through the same routine all over again. Finally it bounded back to Amira and clung on to her, and they all laughed.
’Amira!’ said one in mock reproach. ’You’ve even taught a monkey your love of money!’
’I swear to God, I didn’t know he was such a devil. When Samir was teaching the monkey these tricks, I thought he was mad!’
Amira covered up the monkey in Samir’s scarf and coat, afraid of the two security guards who were looking suspicious. The monkey kicked out inside Samir’s coat. Amira cursed and gave it a shake, and the monkey let out a shriek that stopped everyone in their tracks, even the players who were on the point of losing. At the sound of the monkey’s cry, Samir rushed over. The moment Cappuccino heard Samir’s voice, it broke free of the coat with a jubilant expression, opened its clenched fists, and released the money into its master’s palms.
’So there really is a God,’ said Samir humbly, embracing the monkey. He wanted to weep, but could not, as his astonishment was so profound it overpowered the emotion he felt at the love the monkey was showering upon him. The monkey must have known that Samir had lost ten pounds on the slot machines: a twin always knew what the other twin was thinking.
Chapter Four
I
The sun coming into the car was the same sun that had dried the windows of Westminst
er Abbey that morning. The light it cast over everything seemed more vigorous because people had missed it so much and complained about its absence. Lamis saw the tourists staring up at Big Ben as if they were keeping an eye on it, while the inattentive ones looked enviously at the cars rushing past, not guessing where Nicholas was taking her.
Lamis’s heart went out to the Iraqis who were gathering in Trafalgar Square, men, women, children, holding banners protesting against Saddam Hussein, and demanding that he should be tried for crimes against humanity, and she tried to choke back her tears. She was a spectator, looking at the Iraqis just as the English did, and the tourists, before their attention went elsewhere - as if she were not like them, as if she’d never been scared, or looked into the darkness of the night wondering, ’Where shall I sleep tomorrow?’ and ’Where shall I wake up?’
She was a tiny bird that found itself in its nest every morning, but with creatures other than its own kind.
Her feelings, as always, fluctuated between sadness, guilt and great relief - that actually she was not one of the protesters, not one of the Iraqi refugees who appeared in the news in a suburban church in London. Her mother used to sigh, homesick for Najaf, ’I even miss its dust,’ but every time her mother heard of an attack or more trouble in Iraq, she felt secure, at peace, and even happy, because she’d left.
’But, darling, if you’re that sad, why don’t you show solidarity. Join the Iraqi demonstrations. My feeling is that you don’t care that much; your sadness doesn’t last. It’s how you respond when you hear the news, or read the papers, or see a demonstration,’ Nicholas said.
’I don’t know. I never felt I wanted to be in a demonstration.’
’It’s very easy. You should make a decision. You go, or you don’t. But perhaps there’s another reason. Perhaps you don’t want to bump into your ex-husband or mother-in-law?’
’Him and his mother? There are different classes of Iraqis ... even of refugees. They don’t do that kind of thing.
When Lamis was married, the sitting room in her flat used to become a reception centre for the men: every morning fifty different brands of cigarettes circulated while the rattle of prayer beads sounded like the men’s ripples of laughter as they recalled what the papers had said about Iraq, Saddam Hussein and the opposition groups.
Her husband would appear in his best suit and tie, and sink comfortably into the sofa, his watch twinkling like the visitors’ gold teeth. They all used to sit there, silently sizing up their fellows: he’s a millionaire; he used to be a millionaire; he’s the son of an ex-minister; that family are all ambassadors; they’re from the real old families; they’re new money. All of them wanted to take Iraq away from Saddam Hussein.
Lamis’s relationship to these gatherings had been mainly confined to observing them from a distance and complaining about the smell of cigars. Sometimes she had not been able to stand her home being occupied for hours on end, and had marched into the room and flung open the windows in protest. The moment the last of them left she attacked, emptying the ashtrays and plumping up the velvet cushions, as she compared her husband’s gatherings with the groups of newly arrived Iraqi refugees whose anti-regime publications she read and admired.
’I don’t understand what you’re telling me. This is all very contradictory. Are you telling me that your husband’s family would stay aloof from the refugees because they looked down on them, and yet that this same family didn’t care that you were from a different class? Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I haven’t forgotten that for your husband you were a trophy wife but, according to what you’re saying, they would’ve rejected you if they’d thought you were a poor refugee stranded in Lebanon.’
Lamis could not understand why Nicholas bothered. Why did he take these things to heart? Why was he so serious about it?
’Well, my ex-mother-in-law concocted a story about me, and then she believed in it herself: she decided that my family was very well known for being wealthy and scholarly in the Marshes and Najaf, but when we fled, we left everything behind. In private, though, she never ceased putting me down, even though I bore her a grandson. If I ever showed any sign of independence, she sang ’ "Oh window, give me a piece of bread" - it’s a well-known song about a poor girl, who married a prince who fell in love with her beauty. But she couldn’t forget where she came from, and whenever she heard a vendor selling bread, she used to leave the table, which was crammed with the most extravagant dishes, caviar, peacock’s liver, and hurry to the window to stretch out her hand singing "Oh window, give me a piece of bread".’
They entered a building and she read its sign, ’Oriental and India Office Collections - British Library’.
Nicholas asked for a book, reference OP5323, reading the number out of his little notebook.
The woman behind the desk looked it up in the catalogue. As soon as she raised her eyes. Nicholas said quickly, ’I know it’s not available to the public. Is Miss Porter upstairs?’
’She’s moved to the British Museum. Do you know Dr Baker? If he’ll sign the form, I can get you the book.’
The place was filled with long tables. Hunched over them were academic types who looked as if they’d not left the building in a lifetime. Nicholas put his and Lamis’s coats on a chair at the back and then led her to a locker for her to leave her bag. They went into the canteen.
’You’ve changed the tablecloths.’
The woman at the till smiled at him and nodded without speaking. The tablecloths were garish plastic.
They returned to the first room and Nicholas bestowed a relieved smile on Lamis when he saw Dr Baker enter carrying a dark-red box aloft, holding it as a mother does when she wants to keep a plate of cakes out of the children’s reach. Dr Baker asked them politely to take great care of the manuscript. He made sure that they had no pens with them, and wished them an interesting time. Like an obstetrician lifting a child out of the mother’s stomach, Nicholas drew out the manuscript. It had a thick cover, the red of watermelon flesh.
He propped it up on the bookrest in front of him and glanced down the first page. Lamis peered at it. Nicholas was expecting a reaction from her, but she didn’t know what to say and felt awkward. The rules of Arabic grammar were a mystery to her. She’d never really concentrated at school in Damascus and Beirut; she’d passed the time hoping that the teacher wouldn’t write her name on the blackboard, mortified by her Iraqi accent, which the children mocked, and by her American second-hand clothes.
Too bad. I’ll read it without the proper endings if he asks me. He can’t read Arabic anyhow, she thought defensively.
The letters and words were delineated clearly and were as decorative as the pictures next to them, painted in black, gold and red, but Nicholas flicked quickly through the pages, only giving her time to read the titles and to glance at the accompanying drawings: Triangulum, Pegasus, Canis Major, Argo Navis flashed past her; Canis Major, the Dog, looked out at her and she read the headings, ’What is visible from earth’ and ’What is visible from the sky’.
Nicholas pushed the bookrest along so that Lamis found herself forced to look at the manuscript properly. Nicholas’s hand stopped at the constellation of ’The Woman with the Chair, Cassiopoeia’. Lamis read, ’She is sitting on the back of the camel where she nestles amongst the brilliant stars ...’ and Nicholas’s hand moved down to her thigh. As Lamis went on reading, ’which make up her face, her neck, the side of her breast, her hand ...’ his hand moved on very slowly, until it rested between her legs, ’and her other hand resting on the sceptre, or on the edge of the seat, and the crook of her arm, the end of her plait of hair, and finally the tips of her toes,’ and Nicholas’s hand found where it wanted to be, only to withdraw when Lamis became engrossed in the manuscript.
According to the text, Cassiopoeia was a woman sitting on a camel litter, although there was no image of a woman shown in the picture alongside, which depicted the constellation ’as she looks from earth’ and, on the facing page, to illustr
ate the position of her stars in relation to the surrounding constellations, ’as she looks in the sky’.
The manuscript, Suwar al-Kawakib, Pictures of the Stars, by Abu’l-Husayn Abd al-Rahman Ibn Ummihi al-Sufi, dated from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Lamis marvelled at the fact that the Arabic language was still the same as when she’d left it thirteen years before - clear and familiar to the eye, and in her mind. The letter sin - ’s’ - was like a wave of the sea, a carnation flower, a bird’s wings. This book must have been passed from hand to hand, from crate to crate, from camelback to horse’s saddlebag, from little boats to big ships, until it came to rest on a bit of land by the Atlantic Ocean, or the ’sea of darkness’, as she was taught in school, the terrifying sea where Arab ships dared not set sail, for fear that they would be lost amid its huge waves, overcast skies, lashing rain and bitter cold, and never see land again.
Lamis felt as if she could smell jasmine: in the past they said that the smell of jasmine made people more aware, quick-witted, edgy. Her mind was alert and teeming with thoughts. She had never seen an ancient manuscript like this before, with its pages the colour of brown sugar and yellow lemonade, even though her grandfather’s attic in Najaf had been full of old books - serving as teapot stands, close to the brazier, making the letters on the pages leak out and spread because of the heat from the tea. Although the manuscript was so old, reading the Arabic, she saw that the language was still as it had been hundreds of years ago: she read the sentences with the greatest of ease; her heart pounded with affection for her language. So it was true, then, the picture that they’d painted at school, of the way Arab civilisation flourished in the past - here was a proof of its long history. She thought about the hands that had turned these pages, and felt a sharp pang of regret that, when she’d been in Dubai, she’d thought that being Arab was an obstacle in her life.
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