Cairo Stories

by Anne-Marie Drosso

  ‘As you think,’ her brother said, shuddering at the thought of such a meeting.

  ‘Thank you for your phone call,’ she stated, clearly signalling that she wished to put an end to the conversation.

  Formal goodbyes were exchanged. The conversation was aborted on that sour note.

  * * *

  For a moment Joe’s grandfather thought of calling his brother and his sister, but decided he didn’t have the energy to do so. His conversation with Lizzie had sapped it all. Putting up with Paul’s verbosity and Mary’s histrionics was, at the best of times, a challenge. He would call them later in the week. The three of them had really messed things up this time. They had followed Joe’s advice too precipitously. It had seemed like a good idea though.

  Joe’s grandfather sighed, thinking of the time he had wasted, rummaging in his storage room, till he had finally unearthed the copper lamp. He experienced a tinge of guilt at the thought that he, as well as Paul and Mary, had chosen to send Lizzie ‘seconds’ so-to-speak; they were all items they had, more or less, discarded. But wasn’t the gesture supposed to be mostly symbolic? Surely Lizzie didn’t really want any of their parents’ possessions, which she had never liked? Her apartment was lovely as it was.

  ‘Enough of these ruminations,’ he told himself. It was best for him not to dwell on the subject, as it upset him and might cause him palpitations. His wife would tell him he’d been foolish to call in the first place. She would be right to say so. Yet he was not going to give her one more opportunity to tell him ‘I could have told you so’ – her favourite line. He would call Joe though. The boy was sensible and well-meaning, and had a way of putting a positive spin on things. Hearing his grandson’s voice would cheer him up. He would call him immediately.

  * * *

  ‘Oh, hi Grandpa. How are things?’

  ‘As well as they can be at my age. You’ll know what I mean when you get to my age.’

  ‘Did you hear from Aunt Lizzie?’ the young man asked, somewhat hesitantly.

  ‘I called her. She’s not pleased. I suppose that’s how things sometimes work out. You try hard but get knocked about in return,’ he replied, trying to sound light-hearted about the whole affair.

  ‘Grandpa, tell me, but only if you want to, why is it that she got nothing from your parents’ house? I don’t mean to pry, but I must say that I’m curious.’

  ‘It’s simple, Joe. When our mother died, your Aunt Lizzie expressed zero interest in what was in the house. More than that, she acted as if any such interest was beneath her. I remember her saying, at a family reunion, that she found the process of dividing family possessions akin to distributing spoils of war, that it was abhorrent to her. So what were we to say or do?’

  ‘What about the money and the jewellery?’ Joe asked, emboldened by his grandfather’s seemingly candid answer.

  ‘Again, she behaved as if she was above all this, and she intimated that acquiring more material possessions meant nothing to her, since she had no children and no need for money. Her husband had done quite well in his line of business.’

  ‘That’s curious! She told me the opposite, that having no children shouldn’t have been held against her.’

  ‘Well, she’s free to change her mind, but why blame us?’

  ‘And what happened between her and Uncle Paul?’ By now, Joe felt free to ask virtually any question.

  ‘Frankly, Joe, I don’t know. All I can say is that she is, as you know, a very precise sort, and he’s a man of many words – too many probably. There’s often a discrepancy between what he seems to be promising and what he actually delivers. Now, what exactly transpired between the two of them, I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘What about her relationship with her father? She does not have many good things to say about that. What was the problem?’

  ‘Problem is too big a word. They had no affinities. It can happen between a parent and a child. He loved her, but he couldn’t understand her, couldn’t understand her inclinations, her left-wing politics, her never seeming motivated by material things, her generosity, her bookishness. He was much relieved when she got married to Samir, a practical man, who, my father hoped, would be the voice of reason in the marriage. She, on her part, saw our father as a ruthless businessman – which he was, in many ways, but there was more to him than that.’ Joe’s grandfather quipped, ‘As you can see, family tensions didn’t start with your generation. We had a flavour of them too. More than a flavour!’

  Joe laughed and said, ‘My own experience is limited, since I am an only child.’ Then Joe asked, timidly, ‘Did Aunt Lizzie want children?’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ his grandfather replied. ‘She very much did, but it was not meant to be.’

  They didn’t speak of Aunt Lizzie after that. Their conversation turned to soccer.

  * * *

  Joe never again tried to play the part of the mediator between his aunt and her brothers and sister. She never completely cut her ties with them. They continued to call her, although more and more episodically. She was usually polite to them but icy. There were times though when she would tell them, with hardly any preamble, that she was simply not in the mood for conversation. Whenever she heard that one of them was unwell, she made a point of calling to inquire about their health, but always in a remote tone of voice. She evidently wanted to make it clear to them that concern was not the same as affection.

  When she died from complications following a bad bout of bronchitis, just less than a year after Joe had delivered the notorious presents, the contents of a note she left came as a surprise to her brothers and sister. In the note she went out of her way to specify that she’d given the birthday presents to her maid so they shouldn’t waste their time looking for them. They couldn’t understand the fact that she thought it necessary to make mention of this.

  But Joe understood, having discovered, several weeks after her birthday, that the presents had been objects relegated by his grandfather, granduncle and grandaunt to their storage rooms, which his Aunt Lizzie would have known. This discovery had given him a hint of where some of the problems between Aunt Lizzie and her brothers and sister may have resided. However, he kept his thoughts to himself when he heard family members comment that Aunt Lizzie had always been a touch odd.

  Fracture

  ‘Doctor,’ his diminutive patient asked, ‘would you care for more lemonade?’ and, without waiting for an answer, she got out of her armchair with an agility that confirmed to the doctor – a man in his late thirties, more like an accomplished athlete than a doctor – that the time had come for him to put an end to the bi-weekly visits that had gone on for over six months. The fracture in his patient’s hip had healed as well as could be expected. It was apparent that it would leave her with a slight limp but, from a medical perspective, his visits had become unnecessary.

  ‘Perhaps, for a change you would rather have a small glass of vermouth?’ his patient offered, eager to rush to the kitchen for more refreshments. Her desire to prolong his visit was written all over her face.

  The doctor observed – in silence – that months of quasi-immobility had not altered her shape. ‘Light as a feather,’ he had observed when he first came to assess the severity of the injury to her hip; she had slipped on her bathroom’s wet tiles. She had made it clear to him, in the course of that visit, that she did not wish to have surgery, even after he had explained to her that, without surgery, she would be at home for a good six months and in significant discomfort for the first few weeks; nor could he guarantee how well the fracture would heal. But it was up to her really. He hadn’t tried to talk her into having surgery. Far from it. He was a surgeon who didn’t hide from his patients his belief that avoiding surgery was generally a very good thing. It had pleased him to meet, in this small woman, a like-minded person with such a remarkable determination to let nature take its course, regardless of the pain and of how well her hip would heal.

  To her anxious brothers waiting outside her bedro
om, he had said, reassuringly, that her being so light would help speed the healing. ‘But she’s no longer young,’ one brother had exclaimed, emphasising, ‘She was born in 1889! She’s fifty-one years old!’ The other brother had mumbled, ‘And what if she’s left with a noticeable limp? I suppose marriage is no longer in the cards for her.’

  In Cairo’s Greek-Egyptian community – the woman was Greek, and so was the doctor – the story went around that she had squandered her youth and money on her two brothers, refusing this suitor, then that suitor, then that other suitor, all because she had been too consumed by her brothers’ lives – first, helping them get established, then propping them up whenever they ran into difficulties. People said that she had never had a serious sentimental attachment – let alone an affair.

  Did she look her age? To the young doctor, who had achieved fame in town not only for his skills but also for his looks, his liaisons and his beautiful wife, this fifty-one-year-old woman would have seemed old – definitely on his first visit. She had even seemed to exude what he would have described – if pressed to describe her – as that hard-to-define spinsterish quality that makes a woman undesirable in a man’s eyes. Then gradually, over the course of the six months during which he visited her twice a week to make sure that her recovery was proceeding as it should, she seemed to lose that quality. He, at least, no longer saw it. What he saw instead was a woman falling in love with him. He could tell the signs for he was used to women succumbing to his charm. It was not a figment of his imagination. He was not a vain man. Self-assured, yes, but not vain. Good looks coupled with an air of confident virility, a quick wit and an ironic sense of humour from which he did not exempt himself, endeared him to all. It would have been surprising for a middle-aged woman, confined to her home, not to be stirred by his powerful presence, or touched by his generous solicitude. He took to charging her only minimal sums for his visits and only because she insisted on paying him.

  His patient’s infatuation with him had not been burdensome in any way. Reserved and unassuming in the extreme, she had behaved impeccably, never showing any signs of possessiveness. The doctor was confident that she would raise no objections whatsoever to his announcing to her that his regular visits had become superfluous, as she was in good enough shape to see him in his clinic – if this was needed. She would accept his decision with good grace. Nevertheless, he realised that the news would hurt her, which he would have liked to avoid.

  There was no pressing reason for him to stop the visits. They did not inconvenience him. He stopped by when Cairo was still resting; neither he nor she liked taking naps. The visit would begin with his having either a cup of coffee or a cold drink and always some pudding her maid had prepared for him. Then, after examining her, he would chat with her for half an hour or so, in Greek, about all sorts of innocuous subjects, though once he found himself talking about politics. Not that she had a particular interest in the subject but she seemed so engrossed in anything he had to say that telling her about his political convictions had come naturally. He had gone so far as to divulge to her his association with a group of Communists that was trying to set up a Communist cell for Greeks in Egypt. ‘Are you sure it is a safe thing to do?’ she had asked alarmed and, in a tone suggesting she was prepared to shed her biases, had gone on to ask, ‘Tell me, what makes a person become a Communist?’ About politics, she knew very little, but was eager to listen and learn.

  Over time, his visits had acquired a personal dimension. No medical reasons were needed for him to continue dropping in on his patient. The prospect of people gossiping about them – very unlikely in the circumstances – was no cause of concern to him. He never worried about what people said. Nevertheless, he did think it wise to end, or at least space out, his visits, while he was still feeling good about them. He didn’t want them to turn into some constraining obligation. Besides, the longer he waited before telling her that he would no longer drop by as he had, the harder it would be for her.

  ‘So, a little vermouth?’ she repeated, surprised that he seemed lost in thought. This was not like him.

  ‘You know I don’t drink,’ he answered, ‘Only beer on occasion. Very rare occasions.’

  ‘I might have a beer in the icebox,’ she said. ‘Or I could send for one.’

  He smiled, ‘Let me stick to my vice, cigarettes. I’ll smoke a cigarette, then I must go. Come and sit down, though moving around is good for you.’ And after this preamble, he continued, ‘It looks to me like you’re in pretty good shape. Almost back to where you were at before the fall. You could easily come to the clinic now, though you might need to walk with a cane at the beginning. So why don’t we try it that way for a little while? For the next couple of months, you come and see me at the clinic. How about once every ten days or so?’

  She sat down. Now it was her turn to seem deep in thought. ‘So you think all is fine?’ she asked, avoiding his glance. ‘You think that I’ve recovered fully?’ She still wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘What do you think?’ he answered. ‘You tell me. I trust your judgement.’

  She looked at him and, nodding her head, she said, ‘I think you’re right. I’m fine, though it seems like I fell only yesterday. Time has flown since that first visit of yours.’ Then, shaking her head, she said softly, ‘And I who feared, at first, that the six months would never end! Things never quite happen the way you expect them to.’ Then she changed the subject, insisting, ‘But I must get you something to drink, some lemonade,’ and she got up again, making an effort to make her getting up look effortless. When she walked towards the door, she tried to suppress her limp.

  He let her get the lemonade, guessing that she wanted to compose herself.

  After she returned, he talked about Metaxas and Mussolini and their different fascisms. He predicted that Italy was about to enter the war and speculated on how this would affect the British position in Egypt. He ended up saying much more than he had intended, divulging his idiosyncratic views on the subject and conveying the sense that he was taking her into his confidence.

  Just before leaving, he decided, on the spur of the moment, to ‘forget’ his car gloves. It would give him an excuse to return later in the week and check on how she was doing.

  She, however, noticed the gloves. ‘Don’t forget your gloves,’ she said as he stood up. ‘They’re on the side table.’

  At the door, he told her that she was his most courageous patient.

  From behind the curtained window, she watched him walk towards his car, then climb into it. As he drove off she wondered whether he was going to stop at his mistress’s place on his way to the clinic. The rumour in town was that he often did.

  In fact, he was intending to call to see his mistress, but with reluctance. Indeed, if you had asked him he would have said that ‘mistress’ had become a misnomer for the woman he was seeing just about every day on his way to his clinic. A long-standing liaison ripe enough to turn into a friendship: this was how he had come to feel about that attachment, as he was not a man who liked to sever all his ties with the women he had once loved. The problem was that his mistress didn’t see it that way, still wanting what was no longer on offer.

  That late afternoon, he felt even less inclined than usual to pay his mistress a call. He dreaded her accusatory glances which she alternated with a sad gaze, though she sometimes managed to put on a show of extreme cheerfulness, unconvincingly extreme.

  He drove slowly to his mistress’s place, thinking about his patient. He would miss those visits; he would much rather still be visiting her than going to his mistress. He now recognised that it was not only out of concern for his patient’s feelings that he had had qualms about telling her that his visits were, more or less, over. He himself had come to depend on this woman’s warm welcome, her silent but palpable gratitude, and the seemingly unconditional admiration in which she held him. For the first time, he wondered whether she really had had as barren a sentimental life as people said she had. He tried to
picture her when she was younger.

  By now he had arrived in front of his mistress’s apartment. He hesitated for a moment before he opened the car door. When he got out he seemed preoccupied. Looking out of the window, his mistress saw him walk towards her building. He looked up. She quickly stepped back, and went straight to the nearest mirror in the room to tidy her hair. Trying to put her mind at rest, she told herself, ‘Well, he’s bound to enjoy being here, for it’s Tuesday, so he must have just finished visiting the old maid.’

  Turbulence

  Cairo–London in early March: I was counting on the flight being half-empty; it was packed. Not a single empty seat, though it was neither the beginning nor the end of the holiday season. Just the normal flow of people going to London. Quite a few businessmen as well as tourists, despite the war in Iraq and fundamentalism and al-Qaeda. During a tedious business dinner held on the evening of my departure, a government official had informed me, proudly, that tourism was at a record high. Eight million tourists had come to Egypt that year, the antiquities’ inspector had declared, reflecting on ‘how just four years ago, after 9/11, the hotels were empty; Luxor was empty; Sharm El Sheikh was empty. And now, you have to book, months ahead of time, to get a room.’

  I was very tired the next morning; the dinner had lasted well past my bedtime, and I had barely slept after having the stupidest of arguments with Jack over the phone. I had woken him up. I knew I would, but I wanted to tell him I was missing him a lot that evening, and also about a conversation I’d had with a cab driver earlier. My missing him had something to do with that conversation. Jack’s tepid reception of my call – understandable at that time of the night – had upset me though. And when he told me that he wouldn’t be home for lunch or dinner next day – he was tied up at work – I got huffy. Without rhyme or reason, I suggested that, had he really wanted to, he could have easily taken a short break to join me in Cairo; I could have shown him many things about the city he still knew little of. As if this not-so-veiled complaint was not enough, I then proceeded to blame us both for letting our work get the better of our lives. He interjected in his most paternal tone – a tone I really dislike – ‘Don’t dramatize things. We’re doing alright.’ That killed my desire to tell him the cab driver’s story.