The Cairo House

by Samia Serageldin

  The wedding was given by the groom, as Egyptian custom dictated, but it was held at the Cairo House rather than at a hotel, partly because the Pasha was still under house arrest and it was the only way he could attend. Gigi looked at her watch. It was so late, and she was tired. The heavy headdress and the veil were giving her a headache.

  ‘Yussef, don’t you think we should start taking our leave now? Because people must be tired and most of them won’t leave before we do.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Yussef agreed.

  Gigi got up carefully, adjusting the pearl-encrusted flowers in her headdress and sweeping the train of her skirt around so she would not step on it as she came off the dais. They stepped down and started to wind their way between the tables, stopping at each to take their leave. First the head table at which the Pasha presided, dapper in his bow tie and boutonnière, holding one of his trademark cigars. Tante Zohra, tall and resplendent beside him, had the satisfied smile of the successful matchmaker. The Pasha introduced Gigi to Prince Bandar, a brother of King Feisal of Saudi Arabia and a friend of her new father-in-law.

  Kamal Zeitouni sat beside his ex-wife Zeina, Yussef’s mother. At nearly sixty he was still a large, vigorous man, his black hair and moustache only beginning to gray. Zeina was impeccable with her sleek, black, upswept hair and her diamond-drop earrings. She straightened Yussef’s tie as he bent over to kiss her.

  ‘You look so handsome! But I’ve just had an argument with the photographer; I don’t think he did his job well at all, he didn’t light you properly. You don’t leave for England till the day after tomorrow. If the proofs he shows me tomorrow aren’t good enough, you won’t mind dressing up again and having the photos redone at the studio of another photographer in town?’

  Yussef shrugged. ‘If you like.’

  Gigi groaned inwardly. It might not be much trouble for Yussef to put on his tuxedo again, but for her it would be a time-consuming ordeal to get ready to be rephotographed: having her complicated hairdo styled all over again, the makeup, the heavy headdress, the layers of satin and tulle in this hot weather. Besides, she was planning on going home tomorrow to finish packing.

  She turned to Yussef. ‘Do you think it’s really necessary?’

  ‘I’ll have a look at the proofs and let you know,’ Kamal Zeitouni intervened in a decisive tone.

  ‘What time would they be ready tomorrow?’ Gigi persisted. ‘Could Yussef or I have a look?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ her father-in-law answered pleasantly enough, ‘I said I’d let you know.’ He had a look in his eye as if it had just occurred to him that he might have taken on more than he bargained for in a daughter-in-law.

  They moved on to the next table, where Uncle Hani sat with two of Papa’s brothers and their wives. Zakariah was the only one of Papa’s brothers to have inherited the flaming red hair of their Russian grandmother; in his youth he used to try to extinguish his glaring head with gobs of brilliantine. Nabil, next to him, looked like a black and white copy of Zakariah’s color print. His expression was as dour as Zakariah’s was good-natured.

  Near the dance-floor Mama and Papa sat at their table. Mama looked exhausted, relieved and anxious, all at the same time. She had been so engrossed in the preparations for Gigi that she had almost forgotten to pick up her own dress for the wedding from the dressmaker. Gigi had never seen her in quite such a frantic state. Happy as her mother was for her, she couldn’t hide her anxiety. Partly, Gigi realized, because she had suddenly admitted to herself that Gigi was desperately unprepared.

  ‘I don’t know how you’ll manage in England,’ Mama had fretted earlier that evening as she helped Gigi to dress. ‘You don’t know how to do housework or laundry, you’ve never been in the kitchen – the very sight of raw meat makes you sick, ever since that feast day when you were nine!’ She hesitated. Clearly there was something even more worrisome on her mind. ‘Gigi, did you understand that booklet I gave you about birth control? I mean, you have some idea?’

  Gigi’s éducation sentimentale, as it was referred to in French novels, was limited to precisely that, novels. She knew that most of her girlfriends had more specific information – though not necessarily any more practical experience – than she had. But Gigi had always been a little apart, less curious and more sheltered. The other girls called her a Sainte Nitouche and stopped whispering and giggling when she came into the room.

  The booklet on birth control and Gaylord Hauser’s 1940’s primer on conjugal relations were Mama’s total contribution to Gigi’s education in intimacy. Neither had been of much help. But when Mama had posed the question, Gigi had nodded quickly to spare them both further embarrassment: she had intuitively understood, even as a child, that Mama had certain limitations and tabu that even a sense of motherly duty could not prevail upon her to overcome. For her mother, the world in general, but in particular the world of the senses, was a place fraught with unspoken dangers which could only be traversed safely under the protective bubble of blind innocence. Thus she would justify thrusting her daughter into marriage in complete ignorance like a lamb led to the slaughter. But now Gigi could see an eleventh-hour doubt in her mother’s eyes as she kissed her goodnight.

  Papa was looking immensely proud of her, and had the air of a man who felt he had done his duty. Gigi gave him a big hug.

  ‘Will you miss me?’

  ‘Not in the least.’ Then he added: ‘Don’t ask silly questions.’

  The newlywed pair wove their way through the tables, Gigi’s short train sweeping the grass behind her.

  ‘Jolie comme un coeur, bellissima,’ Madame Hélène rearranged Gigi’s veil. The governess was wearing a dramatic gown with rhinestone shoulder straps, clearly exhumed from her pre-war wardrobe. She sat at a table with Gigi’s maids of honor: her cousins and schoolmates. The long white tapers they had carried in the bridal procession lay, extinguished, on the table.

  ‘Ooh, you’re so lucky,’ Leila Tobia whispered in Gigi’s ear. Dina, whose blonde hair and ‘liberal’ upbringing were both attributed to her English mother, drew Gigi aside.

  ‘Who’s that tall boy over by the dance floor?’

  Gigi followed her gaze to where Tamer was standing with his hands in the pockets of his suit.

  ‘That’s a cousin of mine, Leila’s brother. He’s only sixteen.’

  ‘He can’t be just sixteen! I don’t care, ask him to ask me to dance anyway, will you?’

  Gigi beckoned Tamer over and transmitted the message. ‘I’m going now. Wish me luck? Goodbye, Tamer.’ She stood on tiptoe and gave him a peck on each cheek.

  Yussef took her elbow and pointed her towards another table where some of his relatives were seated. It took over an hour to say goodbye to each of the two hundred guests. Finally they were in the limousine heading for the hotel. Gigi leaned back against the seat of the car. Yussef bent over to kiss her, and she moved her head away awkwardly, pretending that her veil had got in the way. ‘I still don’t feel married,’ she thought, a little panicky.

  6

  London

  Toute femme est une île…at least every romantic young girl is an island; she dreams away the hours, scanning the horizon for a sail, waiting to be discovered, waiting for life to begin. When the beachhead is breached abruptly, when the flag is planted by a careless or a callous hand, she turns inward, away from the horizon, her hopes crushed.

  From their wedding night on, Yussef did not seek to win her or woo her; because he was content to take from her only what he could, it was all he would get from her. All that had been soft and impressionable in her closed and hardened against him like a scar over a wound. In turn he retaliated for her indifference with deliberate neglect and occasional meanness. The dynamics between them quickly locked them into a vicious cycle which neither of them was willing to be the first to break. Gigi was too inexperienced with men to resort to feminine wiles to get the upper hand in their relationship. She crawled into her shell, too confused and too proud to con
fide in anyone. She was very lonely, for the first time in her life.

  Gigi switched on all the lights in the little ground floor flat in a quiet street off the King’s Road, although it was early afternoon. She could not get used to needing electric light during the day. Outside it drizzled steadily, as it seemed to have done every day since she had arrived in London. She turned her attention back to Machiavelli’s The Prince. The paper was due in two days but she should have no trouble finishing it on time; unless, as she had a tendency to do, she got carried away with the reading, not leaving herself enough time for writing up.

  Machiavelli was wrong about one thing, she thought: when he claimed that a man will more easily forgive a ruler the killing of his father than the stripping of his possessions. Machiavelli argued that the death of the father is soon forgotten, whereas the loss of fortune rankles every day. Gigi’s experience did not bear this out. Nasser had done everything to her family, and others like them: confiscation of property; stripping of political and civil rights; house arrest; internment. The Pasha had even been condemned to death by a revolutionary tribunal, but the sentence had been commuted.

  Men like her father had remained patriots. Gigi remembered the night they had watched Nasser admit, in a televised speech, crushing defeat in the Six Day War. The unthinkable had happened: enemy troops had occupied Egypt. Her father had been devastated.

  ‘You should be thanking Allah instead,’ Mama had blurted out. ‘If he had won the war, Nasser would have thrown you and your brothers in an internment camp and tossed away the key. In defeat, he doesn’t dare to.’

  ‘Don’t speak that way in front of the child!’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. You’re too idealistic.’

  Nasser had died three months after Gigi had left for London. He was gone, that omnipresent bogeyman of Gigi’s childhood. As far back as she could remember, his over-sized features had loomed in the background of her waking hours and her nightmares. His name was whispered: Nasser, El-Raiis; his thousand eyes and ears were everywhere. Every time he gave one of his three-hour harangues, she had strained to pick up the buzzwords that would tip them off that her father should pack the overnight case he kept under his bed, or that yet another sequestration decree would be imposed on their lives. Now he was gone. Egypt was waking as from a long spell.

  Yet to the man on the street Nasser had remained the charismatic demagogue. In Nasser the masses had seen their champion, their vindicator, their father. His genius had lain in finding successive scapegoats on whom to blame the eternal misery of his people.

  This bitter reality had come home to Gigi in the days after Nasser’s death. Apparently Om Khalil had come by to visit Papa; she made the rounds of the family’s houses to collect a regular stipend now that she was too old to work. When the subject of Nasser’s death came up she had sighed loudly and declared that ‘our father is gone’.

  When Gigi heard of this she had been dumbfounded. It had never occurred to her that Om Khalil, who made her livelihood from the family, could have been harboring such sympathy for their avowed enemy. It made Gigi think of Julien, in Le Rouge et le Noir, hiding his picture of Napoleon under his mattress in the house of his employer the duke. Om Khalil, however, knew she could express her feelings with impunity before Papa. Gigi put down The Prince and picked up Hobbes’ Leviathan. Suddenly the lights went out and the clunky radiator shut down.

  Gigi tried to make out the hands on her watch. Was it five o’clock already? This morning the notice posted on her door announced the power outage schedule for the day: three hours on, three hours off, starting at 8 a.m. The power workers union had been on strike for weeks, and before that it had been the rail workers union, the nurses union…Gigi closed her book, it was too dark to read. She pulled the comforter off the bed and drew it around her. She debated going to sit out the three hours with friends in Kensington, where the power outage schedule was reversed. She decided against it, it was too much trouble to walk down the King’s Road in the cold to catch the tube from Sloane Square.

  She reached under the bed and felt around for the extra blanket in its case. Her hand came into contact with a small metallic object and she drew it out. It was a heavy silver earring. Not hers; she didn’t have pierced ears and in any case she never wore that kind of jewelry. It must belong to one of Yussef’s former girlfriends. He had not hidden from her that he had made the most of his months in London before their marriage to ‘live it up’. What better place to do it than in swinging London?

  ‘But he’s clean,’ his friend Bassil Sirdana, a resident at St Mary’s Hospital, had assured her. ‘I made him promise to live like a monk for at least a month before the wedding, then I ran all the tests on him. After all, I told him, it would be criminal to risk passing on something nasty to a girl like you. I mean –’ He trailed off as Gigi flushed in embarrassment. But she liked Bassil, with his stocky build and his blunt manner.

  It seemed to Gigi that, far from making a secret of his English girlfriends, Yussef was deliberately careless about leaving telltale items lying around: notes, hair combs, a lipstick. She guessed it was a misguided strategy to make her jealous. It had the effect of chilling her to the core. He did not seem to understand that she did not have enough feeling for him to experience jealousy; it was her pride that he hurt. He did not understand her at all, or try to.

  She heard a door slam in the basement flat, which looked out onto the small garden in the back. One of the two tenants, Jonathan or Jeffrey, must be home. Jeffrey had brought her a pie yesterday, made with sour gooseberries picked from the bushes in the garden. Jeffrey, the thin one with the nasal East End accent, was in charge of cooking. Jonathan, whose auburn shag had been transformed to a platinum frizz this week, was the handyman.

  Gigi reached for a date-filled biscuit from the box Mama had sent with a friend; they were the traditional buttery kahk prepared in great quantity for the Lesser Feast. These were probably made by Om Khalil, Gigi decided, the crisscross pattern on top of each little cake was her signature. She bit into the biscuit then put it down quickly, a wave of nausea washing over her. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, it had been happening all the time lately.

  She got up and threw off the comforter. She went into the kitchen, where there was a little more light, emptied the rest of the gooseberry pie into the garbage, rinsed and dried the plate, then filled it with some of the butter biscuits. She would return the dish to Jeffrey. At home one never returned a dish empty.

  Gigi took the dish and an umbrella and made her way down the stairs to the door of the basement flat. It was neither Jonathan nor Jeffrey who opened the door, but a burly man with a reddish beard and a reddish nose.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Jeffrey? Or Jonathan?’

  ‘Here’s a word to the wise, love,’ the man leaned forward with a grin. The smell of his breath made Gigi recoil. ‘You’re wasting your time on Jonathan and Jeffrey. Know what I mean?’ He winked.

  ‘Oh! You don’t understand, I’m their neighbor upstairs. Would you just give Jeffrey this dish?’

  ‘Come on in then and be neighborly,’ the man took Gigi by the elbows as she clutched the dish and started to lift her over the doorstep and through the doorway.

  Jeffrey appeared behind him. ‘Put her down, you awful man! Can’t you see you’re scaring her to death? Put her down, I said! Her husband’s an Arab, and you know what they’re like about their women.’

  The red-headed man released Gigi with a belly laugh. She shoved the dish into Jeffrey’s hands and fled up the stairs.

  In a few minutes Jeffrey rang her doorbell and stood at the door, apologizing. ‘That was me brother-in-law. He’s harmless, really, only he was a little the worse for drink, as you may have noticed. My sister threw him out last night and he came over here. He says to tell you he’s very sorry indeed, he was only fooling, he meant no harm. Oh, and thanks for the biscuits, such a treat! We’ll save some for Jonathan.’

  As he turned to
leave, he added: ‘Oh, my brother-in-law thinks you’re ever so pretty. What a smashing neighbor you have, he says. I says: “You should see her husband!”’

  Gigi closed the door behind him and sat back down on the bed, pulling the comforter around her again. The nausea came back. She closed her eyes and lay back.

  When she opened her eyes again all the lights had come back on in the flat, and it was pitch dark outside. She looked at her watch. It was past eight o’clock. She got up. She should fix something for dinner. Then she sat down again. If Yussef did show up for dinner, she would just reheat yesterday’s uneaten fish fingers and peas in white sauce. He had come home at eleven last night, saying he had already had a bite. Why didn’t he ever call her so she wouldn’t wait? But it was no good her asking him. He seemed to feel that it was important to assert his independence.

  Suddenly Gigi got up and picked up the phone. It was rather late to call Egypt but she dialed the number anyway.

  ‘Gigi?’ Mama’s voice sounded wide awake. ‘Hello, darling! Is everything all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes, everything’s fine, only I really wanted to talk to you and Papa.’

  ‘Is something wrong, dear?’

  ‘Can I come home for a while? I’m just very homesick, and miserable. I just need to come home for a while.’

  A pause.

  ‘Does Yussef know about this?’

  ‘I haven’t talked to him about that yet. Things aren’t working out very well between us just now, I just need to leave for a while.’