Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

  My Cairo of then is thus a landscape that is highly selective, entirely personal and only tenuously connected either to the reality of the time or the city that has overtaken both today. Indeed, there is almost nothing left of it, now. The lions on El Tahrir Bridge (Khedive Ismail, back then). Cairo Museum. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun. The Beit el Kritiliya. The zoo. But gone entirely is almost everything that gave it the flavour that remains most powerfully with me. The lines of white houseboats moored to the banks of the Nile – restaurants and cafés and places in which people lived – and the constant passage of feluccas gliding up and down, with those swooping sails. The river is almost empty, now. The ubiquitous traffic tangle of trams and gharries and carts and army trucks and a few cars. No tangle today, but a ceaseless crawl of cars, trucks, lorries, buses without even the intervention of traffic-lights or pedestrian crossings – the most daunting urban traffic I have seen anywhere. The elegant complicated façades of nineteenth-century mansion blocks, and the shady tree-lined pavements. Swept away, for the most part, and replaced by functional concrete.

  The zoo survives, which once was a focal point of my life.

  It is always appallingly hot in the lion house, and there is that rank smell which is like nothing else. The animals slink to and fro, and a keeper in the zoo uniform of tattered dark-blue cotton sweater and khaki drill shorts pushes hunks of meat through the bars with a sort of gigantic toasting fork. Favoured children (whose parents have slipped him five piastres) are allowed to climb over the barrier and help him do this. Not me, thank you – even if there are lion or tiger cubs on offer.

  Once, by myself in the farthest limits of the garden at Bulaq Dakhrur in the dusk, I thought I smelled it, that unmistakable smell. My hair stood on end; I froze to the spot. There haven’t been lions in Egypt for hundreds of years. I know that. They are always telling me that. But there are cobras, aren’t there? And jackals. And rumours of hyenas. Why not a solitary lion holding out right here in our garden? I belt towards the house, given wings by primeval terror.

  Plenty of lions in Egypt once, of course. Desert lions, living off the gazelle and antelope and ibex. Herodotus talks about them, and there they are in abundance on tomb wall-paintings, being hunted by Pharaohs. I may well have seen such representations, in the museum or at Saqqara, and formed my own views about surviving fauna, according to my own imperfect concept of time. After all, there was much other wildlife in those paintings which you could still see on all sides. Ducks and egrets and ibis and indeed the occasional gazelle, even, in the desert.

  And, of course, the lion is an atavistic image. I can still experience lucid dreams of pursuit by lions, and wake up with thumping heart. An analyst would of course raise a knowing eyebrow at this. All right. And maybe a lion is also a lion, in the wilds of the subconscious, for those of us raised on the fringes of Africa.

  The senior elephant patrols the footpaths, escorted by his keeper. You are invited to offer the elephant a screw of paper in which you have wrapped a few peanuts and a five-piastre piece. The elephant takes the screw of paper from your outstretched palm – the feeling is both alien and oddly intimate, warm and hairy and deft – doubles back its trunk in a salaam and then hands the screw of paper to the keeper, who unwraps it, pockets the five piastres and allows the elephant to eat the peanuts, after which it salaams once more.

  The hippos float in a small lake. Summoned by their keeper, they approach the shallows, molten mud streaming from their backs, and they open pink maws edged with craggy brown teeth. For a few more piastres you can buy a scoop of potatoes from the keeper which you then hurl into the gaping mouths. This is great sport – a test of aim but also a matter of trying to target the small hippos – females and infants – who get shouldered aside by the dominant males. When sated, the hippos shut up shop – you hear a great scrunch as their jaws close – and slide away down into the water until there is nothing visible but nostrils and an oval of glistening snout.

  A zoo that was heavily into visitor-participation. Or was it simply that the keepers had devised a system to supplement inadequate wages? I fed the hippos at Cairo Zoo again, a few years ago, but this was a shameless setup by a film unit who were making a film about the history of the British Council, which began life in Egypt in the 1920s. I’m not at all sure how or where this episode was to be slotted into the sequence of British Council activities, or if it ever was, but the shoot took place, with much commotion of a Land Rover cavalcade of cameramen and equipment into the traffic-prohibited paths of the zoo. The hippos had been deprived of their breakfasts so that they should be properly receptive, and I duly pitched potatoes at them. The lake was not a lake at all, but a large pond, and the hippos too were half the size that I remembered.

  The lions, the hippos, that elephant were part of an accumulated familiarity, along with the entire backcloth of the city – a rich continuous clamour of people and places, shot with the vivid detail of intimacy. The Gezira Sporting Club, with the intoxicating expanse of a real, chlorine-reeking, blue-tiled swimming-pool, and green swards of grass with blinding white fences, and a babble of English voices. Groppi’s, where you had tea and cakes in a garden covered with a vine-hung pergola and set out with marble-topped tables and precarious iron chairs. The array of patisserie was as sumptuous and ornate as a jeweller’s window, and I would be driven frantic by the constrictions of choice – two, and two only. So which? The boat-shaped ones with the rich cream filling? The ones topped with sugar-dusted chocolate logs? The brimming éclairs? And then there was Lappas the grocer, where sugar, tea, coffee, raisins were measured into midnight-blue bags and closed with a twirl. And Cicurel, the department store where Lucy bought the lengths of material out of which she made my clothes, and the ribbons with which my hair was tied. I resented having to wear a hair-ribbon, but was entranced by the lavish choice – silk, satin, velvet, ribbed, embroidered – as tantalizing to the eye as Groppi cakes were to the tongue.

  And then there is that other kind of intimacy, when suddenly the place is hitched to something more immediate, to the echo of emotion.

  Lucy and I walk beside the Nile. She will not speak to me. I have done something wrong, something appalling. Lucy is tight-lipped and silent. She has said that she is going to leave. She is going to pack her bags and leave. She will tell my mother when we get home. I am filled with cold fear. I believe her, utterly. I trot alongside, pleading. I am sorry, I weep. I am sorry, sorry, sorry. But she is implacable. I trail behind her now, no longer able even to weep, with a hard, tight knot of fear in my stomach. The white sails of the feluccas on the river swoop against the brown water. My feet crunch on the fallen leaves of eucalyptus. Cairo shouts and clatters around us. Everything is quite normal, but steeped in unreality. I walk in a daze of horror, and of guilt. You’ve no one to thank but yourself, says Lucy.

  I can retrieve that emotion quite clearly. The horror, the desolation of abandonment. Goodness knows what I had done. In fact, Lucy threatened to pack her bags quite frequently, but this occasion must have been of a different order. And I see now what lies beyond it, why it is so potent. I see what it is about – the insecurity of children brought up by those who are not their parents. And I see too that Lucy was wrong to trade on this, however fearful my transgression. She knew that she wasn’t really going to leave; I did not. In truth she was devoted to me and had she left the precipitating factor would not have been my behaviour but her ambivalent relationship with my mother. But children who are thus cared for know deep in their beings that something is out of order. Parents do not walk out; others can and do. And so far as I was concerned Lucy was the centre of everything. My parents were peripheral. Walking beside the Nile that day, clenched in anguish, I never gave them a thought.

  Children do not contemplate an alternative to the status quo. It never occurred to me that it might be a more natural arrangement if my mother looked after me. In fact, the idea if proposed would have been appalling. The only threat to security was that Lucy should not
be there. Unthinkable, and terrifying. And for the most part it was unthought. Lucy was there, day in and day out, and throughout my hoarded vision of Cairo she is always at my side, sometimes sharply so, sometimes just as a cloudy, reassuring presence.

  I am confronted by a glass case in which there is the stuffed form of a Nile catfish of great size – a vast grey creature with cascading whiskers, displayed against a setting of weed and gravel. I am mesmerized. I do not want to go on looking at this thing, but I have to. I know that it is going to haunt me, but I cannot tear myself away. Come along, says Lucy, somewhere above and beyond. I stand there, shuddering.

  Where can this have been? A museum, an aquarium? The sight is quite detached now from any setting. But it did indeed pursue me. The river, thereafter, was tainted – a place of secret horrors. I studied its grey-brown surface uneasily for a glimpse of the sinister shapes that lurked below. Could they perhaps crawl out, in the dusk? The evening walks along the Gezira corniche became less enticing. Years later, I read Beowulf and recognized Grendel’s mere immediately – that alliance of water and monstrosity. Of course, the Nile.

  We are in Ezbekiya Gardens, on a bench. Lucy is knitting. We have brought a picnic tea. Tomato sandwiches, and a Thermos. Babies in prams parade before us on the gravelled paths, and courting couples, and children with skipping-ropes. ‘Don’t wave that sandwich around like that,’ scolds Lucy. High above us in the hard blue sky there float the city’s scavenging kites. The kites have perfect vision; they can home in on anything, and plummet down. Lucy knows of a child who had her finger taken off, along with her sandwich. I tuck the sandwich in a fold of my dress, and foil the kites.

  We are at the Beit el Kritiliya, for which I have a passion. I would rather go there than anywhere: the Club, Ezbekiya Gardens, the Citadel. Groppi’s even. The place fascinates me – the suggestion of strange, alternative lives. The couches covered with opulent, velvet-textured rugs. The vine-hung terraces on to which you emerge and see, below and around, the teeming hidden Cairo roof-life. And above all the secretive lattice-work windows overhanging the narrow street, from which you can see but not be seen. I want to go and live in the Beit el Kritiliya. I tell myself stories in which I do precisely that.

  The Beit el Kritiliya was, and is, one of the few surviving domestic buildings of the Mameluke period. It is in fact two interconnected buildings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, alongside the entrance to Ibn Tulun Mosque. They had been rescued from dereliction by the Committee for the Preservation of Arab Monuments which had then allowed Major Gayer-Anderson Pasha to live there, restore the houses in 1935 and use them for the display of his own collection of oriental furnishings. Gayer-Anderson had lived in Egypt since 1907, first on secondment to the Egyptian army and later as Oriental Secretary to the British Residency. He was a fervent collector and the Beit el Kritiliya, now known as the Gayer-Anderson Museum, still houses the bulk of his collection, which he left to the Egyptian government. But a crucial item found its way to the British Museum: the Gayer-Anderson cat, a superb black basalt statuette with a gold ring through its nose which lives in the Egyptian Hall. I pay it a ceremonial visit once a year or so. Gayer-Anderson had been a close friend of my paternal grandmother and indeed family folklore had it that the cat had been loaned to her before being donated to the British Museum and stood for a while in the centre of the dining-room table in her house in Harley Street.

  When I went to the Beit el Kritiliya on my first return to Egypt I could barely recover at all that mystique it once held. The windows I found so intriguing were of course the mashrabiya windows which are the most prominent feature of the architecture of that period and beyond – carved screens which surround tiny galleries projecting into the street and enabling the harem dwellers within both to enjoy any cool breezes going and oversee the street life below. They are delicately ornate, as well as being functional, and it is thus that I see them now, but without that intoxicating quality that I can only just recover. But every now and then it did come smoking up, as I toured the museum – a whiff of it from an alcove lined with Turkish rugs, another gust from the courtyard, from the roof-garden, from the floor-tiles. And there on a wall amid a clutter of oddly assorted pictures was a drawing by my grandmother, who was quite a good amateur artist, of my aunt Margaret – a further eerie personal resonance.

  My childhood reaction to the Beit el Kritiliya smacks of romantic orientalism, it now seems to me. This would have been inspired by the Arabian Nights – I owned the Andrew Lang version, with line drawings of trousered and turbaned figures, and girls in diaphanous garments. Courtyards, fountains, and no doubt the occasional glimpse of a mashrabiya window. I must have seen the Beit el Kritiliya not as fact but as fiction made manifest – a marvellous concrete version of my own entrenched habit of internal fantasy. For a while, I plunged into a long-running private fiction in which the action of the Arabian Nights was carried out in the Beit el Kritiliya, with me starring as everybody.

  I note now that this was an entirely literary vision of the orient. It did not occur to me at the time that it had any relevance to the real Middle East in which we lived – as indeed it did not. I saw a fascinating confirmation of the emotive power of stories. These things were so potent that there could come to life, just as I had always suspected. But to visit the Beit el Kritiliya as an adult was to find that the Arabian Nights had been relegated to a decorative mythology – and quite right too, I suppose. There indeed were lamps of the kind that you rub to summon up a genie. There was a scimitar. There was a fountain. But they were lamps and scimitars and fountains, not hallucinations. Now, my concern was to try to sort out the complexities of the post-medieval history of Egypt, and the tangled sequence of the construction of Cairo.

  Several Cairos, in fact. The first city of all was Helio-polis – pharaonic, Greek, destroyed by the Persians and surviving today only as a sprawling suburb of modern Cairo. A centre of scholarship, once, known to Herodotus and to Plato – quite extinguished except for its name. It was succeeded by Babylon, where the Romans built a fort which survives on the extreme southern side of the modern city. This was Christian Coptic Cairo, and there was also a synagogue from which there exist still parts of the ancient Torah, dispersed around the great libraries of the world. Babylon was captured in the Arab invasion of the seventh century, but its huddled defensive site did not suit the Arabs and now, at the beginning of the Muslim period, Cairo moved again.

  Fustat, just to the north of Babylon, was Muslim Cairo from then until it was burned down in the twelfth century. Today it is nothing but a fuming rubbish heap patrolled by pi-dogs where the intrepid visitor can still find a harvest of Islamic potsherds. I have a treasured fragment given me by a friend – a piece a few inches across which was the base of a shallow dish on which two little black fish leap against a background of creamy glaze. Fustat was burned down by its own ruler in an attempt to persuade the inhabitants to move into the newer city to the north, el Qahira, which could more easily be defended against attackers, and the only buildings left standing were the mosques of Amr Ibn el ’As and Ibn Tulun. Cairo took another step to the north, and arrived now at what is still the old city – the dense and cluttered quadrangle between the two ancient gates of Bab Zuwayla and Bab el Nasr. This was medieval Cairo, the Cairo of the Fatimids and then the Mamelukes, of which the basic structure at least remains, along with mosques and sections of the original encircling wall. Every contemporary tourist visits Khan el Khalili, which has been a bazaar since 1400.

  The Citadel broods above the city on a spur of the Muqattam Hills. Saladin built it towards the end of the twelfth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth Mohammed Ali, the Albanian soldier who effectively ruled Egypt on behalf of the Turkish Porte for over forty years, trapped five hundred Mamelukes in it and slaughtered them. Mohammed Ali created European Cairo, in the sense that it was he who invited and encouraged European interest, especially French. There now began that accelerating expansion of the city which
was to produce the dizzying population leaps of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – from a quarter of a million to nearly 600,000 between the Napoleonic census and the end of the century, over 2 million by 1947, 4 million in 1966, 14 million today. European Cairo was the Cairo of the boulevards and the Frenchified mansion blocks, of Garden City and Zamalek, but the invasion of European capital and investment was also the prompt for the galloping expansion of the city and the process whereby the overwhelming dominance of an agricultural society was to cease. By the end of the twentieth century there would be almost as many urban-dwelling Egyptians as fellaheen.

  It was European Cairo that I knew, for the most part, with the occasional emotive taste of something else: the Beit el Kritiliya, the City of the Dead, the Citadel. I knew nothing of sequential Cairo, but sensed in some way, I believe, a palimpsest. It was clear that Cairo – all of Egypt, indeed – was a disorderly place in more senses than one. It was a place of cultural confusion – I was battered throughout my childhood with nationalities and allegiances. British, French, Greek, Syrian, Lebanese, Turkish. Church of England, Muslim, Coptic, Jewish. All different, in significant but unstated ways. I placed them within the only context that a child has available – the personal context – and sorted them out into some kind of order. British was us, and most of the people we knew well. Egyptian was the world at large, the myriad faces of the city, of the cultivation. French was the scented, chauffeur-driven mother of a wealthy family we sometimes visited, who spoke with an interesting accent and kissed my mother on both cheeks. Less appealingly, French was also Mademoiselle, who gave me French lessons in Alexandria. I revelled in Les Malheurs de Sophie but hated Mademoiselle, who had bad breath and corsets that faintly creaked as she moved. Lucy connived in my dislike, feeling her territory threatened.