The horses labored up the dunes, knee deep in the liquid sand, then slithered down the other side, breaking into a canter as they reached a flat stretch. After a while Luc signaled to her and they reined in their horses side by side. Immediately they were enveloped by the oppressive, dead silence of the desert. Their knees were jostled together as one or the other of the horses moved to stamp a hoof or swish a tail. Finally he asked:
‘So, you’ll be coming to Cyprus then?’
Senior members of Gigi’s department at work were planning to attend an international conference in Cyprus the following week, and a few days earlier the editor-in-chief and famous novelist, Yussef El-Siba’yi, had personally asked her to go along as an interpreter. Siba’yi, a courtly man with snowy hair, had known Papa, and it was his novels that Gigi had read, albeit reluctantly, as a teenager. Gigi was looking forward to the trip, in spite of the tensions surrounding the conference. There had been death threats against Siba’yi and other prominent figures who had participated in the delegation that had accompanied Sadat to Israel. But Gigi had her personal misgivings about this trip.
‘There’s a problem. My husband –’
‘You mean your ex-husband?’ Luc frowned.
‘I suppose so. But the divorce isn’t final yet. I think it’s called a decree nisi. It won’t be final for another three months, and only if he doesn’t contest it in the meantime. I don’t know how he’d feel about my going on this trip. When I started working earlier this year he was unhappy about it, he made a point of warning me not to accept any assignments that involved travel –’
‘That was then. Surely that doesn’t matter now?’
‘No, you’re right, I suppose.’
Luc’s assignment in Cairo had ended. He would be leaving for France in two days. He had mentioned, however, that he would have a couple of days off when he arrived in Europe and could make ‘un petit saut’ to Cyprus, if she were going. ‘It’s a beautiful island. I’ve vacationed there before. I could show you around.’
They had been standing still for too long in the sun. She felt dizzy. She told Luc she wanted to go back. They looked for Tamer in the distance. They could see him wheeling his horse in figure eights, taking wider and wider circles. Gigi suddenly felt a pang, remembering how tired he must be. They waved to him and he galloped over. Luc suggested they take the short way back to the main road and go down the hill; they could have breakfast at the old Mena House Hotel.
By the time they reached the steep road down from the Pyramids, it was crowded with cars inching along at about the same pace as the horses and camels the tourists were riding. The clatter of horses’ hooves and the blaring of car horns were unnerving after the dead silence of the sand dunes. Tamer was having trouble controlling his mare; she was shying away and kicking out in panic. Haj Hassan had not exaggerated her fear of noise and traffic. Tamer finally shook his head.
‘You two go ahead. I’ll take her back to the stables by the desert route and wait for you there.’
Gigi felt uneasy about going to the hotel for breakfast without her cousin and in any case it was getting late. They slowly made their way back along the crowded road. Before they reached Haj Hassan’s stables Luc stopped so she could go on alone.
‘I’ll be staying at the Nicosia Palace. Give me a call when you get there.’
Gigi hesitated. It disconcerted her that from the day she first met Luc he had seemed as familiar as an old photograph you glance at every day of your life; that from the start their exchange had been as easy and comfortable as if they had grown up together – which, in a way, they had, through Madame Hélène’s stories and letters and photographs. With Luc she felt free, she could breathe. She had been holding her breath, concentrating on getting through the divorce. Now she had begun to glimpse what lay beyond, and something within her rebelled against the prospect of falling back into a future of Tante Zohra’s match-making.
But meeting Luc in Nicosia seemed to be taking a step, taking their relationship a step further than she was comfortable with. ‘I don’t know. It depends,’ she murmured. ‘Peut-être…’
He laughed. ‘C’est pas la mer à boire, tu sais.’
She smiled at him. He was right, it was no big deal. Except that he didn’t understand that everything in her world was complicated. She cantered off, waving goodbye.
It was immediately apparent that something was wrong when she turned into the stables. Haj Hassan asked her grimly where her cousin was. She looked at him blankly until she saw the unruly mare, lathered up in sweat, saddle askew, legs quivering. Riderless. A sick feeling of apprehension gripped her stomach. If the mare had managed to throw Tamer and run off, he must be badly hurt. Haj Hassan and two of the grooms galloped off to look for him. She got into her car and drove to the nearest police station to telephone for an ambulance.
When she got back they had found him and laid him on some dirty blankets. He was half conscious, one eye covered in blood, his right leg at an odd angle which could only mean that it was broken. She made her way through the small crowd which had gathered, and knelt beside him, praying for the ambulance to hurry. A man in a tattered gelabeh murmured that the boy’s leg was obviously swelling by the minute and that they should get the boots off. She nodded gratefully and the man pulled off one of the boots. It struck Gigi as vaguely odd that he was pulling the boot off the good leg. Then he began pulling the boot off the hurt leg. Tamer cried out in pain and fainted. Haj Hassan rebuked the man sharply and, bringing out a knife, began ripping through the boot.
The man in the gelabeh muttered regretfully: ‘What a waste!’
Only then did Gigi realize that he had intended to steal the boots and that in order to do so he had knowingly hurt her cousin. Haj Hassan carefully ripped through the leg of the jeans up to the waist, revealing the horribly mangled leg and the incongruous swimming trunks. There was nothing Gigi could do but wave away the flies that would have settled on the bloody eye. The heat was oppressive. Finally the ambulance arrived.
Two days later she was visiting Tamer in the hospital. She opened the door tentatively, in case he was asleep. But he was awake, and alone. He turned his head and motioned for her to come over to the other side of the bed because he could not see out of his bandaged eye. His leg, in a cast, was suspended in a sort of pulley. He had stitches on a long gash running from the tip of his thumb to his wrist.
She gave him a careful peck on the cheek and sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. He winced.
‘Sorry!’ She grimaced in sympathy. She touched his cast. ‘Does it hurt a lot?’
‘Nah. They keep me pretty much doped up.’
‘Look, I brought you some marrons glacés.’ She put the box of candied chestnuts in silver foil next to the flowers on the dresser.
‘Thanks. You look nice.’
It disconcerted her a little, the unexpectedly adult way in which he paid her the compliment.
‘I had my hair cut. I’m glad you like it.’
The eye would be all right and the broken leg was set. When Tamer had turned back to the desert he had given the mare her head, figuring that he would let her race off her panic, confident that she would not be able to unseat him. But she had headed for a single low, scrubby tree in the open desert, and had tried to scrape him off on it. He had not ducked low enough and a branch had caught him just over his eye, knocking him unconscious. He had broken his femur bone as he fell, and gashed his hand.
Chattering voices in the corridor were followed by a loud knock on the door. Half a dozen young people, including Leila and Gigi’s schoolmate Dina, burst into the room at once, carrying an assortment of flowers, chocolates and music tapes. Dina brandished a box of crayons. ‘I’m going to be the first to autograph your cast!’ she announced to Tamer. She leaned over the bed, sweeping her long, blonde-frosted hair to the side, and began to draw a heart in fuchsia.
Gigi blew Tamer a kiss from the door. ‘I’ll come to see you as soon as I get back from Cyprus.’
He winked at her, or maybe he was wincing because a stocky young man had just tried to sit at the foot of the bed.
When Gigi arrived at home her mother was on the phone, placing an order with the baker for a kind of brioche which is distributed to the poor at the cemeteries. Gigi suddenly remembered that Wednesday of the next week was the anniversary of her father’s death. As tradition required, in the afternoon there would be the visit to the cemetery and the distribution of the brioche and money. Earlier, at home, there would be a reception for female relatives and friends. The first anniversary marked the end of the official period of mourning; the women in the family need no longer wear black.
How could she have forgotten? There could be no excuse for not attending the first anniversary of her father’s death. She would have to explain to the editor of the Ahram that she could not go to Cyprus. She picked up the phone and asked to speak to Dr Siba’yi. He sounded annoyed.
‘Gihan, perhaps you should reconsider. It’s not that we can’t find someone else to go in your place, but we’d have to do the visa and security clearance all over. For your own sake – well, it doesn’t look good. I asked for you personally.’
‘I understand. And I’m sorry. But I just can’t be away on Wednesday.’ She knew she would not be given another opportunity. After she hung up, for the first time she thought of Luc, who would be waiting for her to call.
On the day of remembrance the two salons were full of elegantly dressed women in black carrying on animated conversations in hushed undertones while a suffragi circled with trays of black Turkish coffee. From behind the Gobelin screen came a loud clearing of the throat. The turbaned fikki seated behind it, hired for the occasion, was indicating that he was ready to begin chanting verses from the Koran. The ladies reluctantly hushed till the next interval in the recital when they could resume their conversations.
An hour later, the visit of condolences over, the women began dispersing; the immediate relatives would go to the cemetery. Tante Zohra rose slowly from her seat, unfolding her long, lean, black-clothed figure to its full, imposing height. She moved with the deliberation of a woman who had to live up to a reputation for being formidable.
Tante Zohra asked Gigi to ride with her to the cemetery. Gigi understood from the tone of voice that it was a summons rather than an invitation. She ran upstairs to her bedroom to fetch the sheer scarf she would need to cover her hair out of respect for the dead, and some change for the caretaker’s children. She asked Khadra to give her a basket of the brioches and she was ready.
Gigi got into the car with her aunt, and they drove off. She recognized Omar, the Mukhabarat agent, behind the wheel. Although surveillance had been lifted from Tante Zohra years ago, and she could now afford to hire a regular driver again, Omar still drove her around from time to time, on his days off.
Eventually they drove through unfamiliar parts of the city, past the ruined arches of the ancient city wall of Cairo, turning into narrow alleys barely wide enough to accommodate a car. There were no street signs. Her aunt was talking to her but Gigi was barely paying attention: this part of ‘old Cairo’, as it was called, fascinated her. The car was crawling along because it was stuck behind a slow-moving donkey cart. A woman called out from the second floor of a rickety, centuries old house to a street vendor below. The car was further delayed while the woman lowered a basket on a rope; the vendor deposited his wares in it and she hauled it back up. The driver rolled up the windows against the rank smells and the dust.
The car turned into the maze of dusty alleys of the necropolis, row upon row of high walls shielding tree-shaded courtyards. Each family had its mausoleum which housed the separate monuments of its dead under one roof. A hut on the grounds was occupied by the caretaker and his family. The walls turned a blind face to the street and Gigi was never prepared for the moment when the car would suddenly stop before the unmarked gate that led to the courtyard of her own family’s mausoleum, where her father was buried. The City of the Dead, it was called; of the dead, and increasingly of the homeless living.
‘Gigi, you weren’t planning on taking a trip out of the country any time soon, were you? Because Omar has something to tell you.’
Her aunt’s question startled Gigi. So that was the reason Tante Zohra had insisted Gigi ride with her.
The week before, in the course of a routine check, Omar had stumbled across a piece of information which he immediately brought to Zohra’s attention. Her niece Gihan’s name was on the list of women who were to be stopped at the airport if they attempted to leave the country. By law, a married woman needed her husband’s signature on her passport to go abroad without him; in practice, airport authorities did not check for the husband’s authorization unless they had been notified by him to be on the lookout for a specific name and passport number. In that case, if the woman in question attempted to leave, she was detained, her passport confiscated and her husband notified.
Gigi stared at the back of the driver’s head as he delivered his warning. She couldn’t believe Yussef would subject her to such humiliation. She imagined with horror the scene at the airport, in front of Dr Siba’yi and her colleagues.
‘I can’t believe he’d do such a thing!’
‘You don’t have much experience of men.’
‘But why, Tante Zohra? We’re as good as divorced –’
‘My child, I’m afraid he never intended to go through with it. He was only playing for time, hoping you’d change your mind. But before the decree becomes final he’ll insist you go back to him.’
‘I won’t do that.’
‘But he can still refuse to divorce you. You could try through the courts, but you have no valid grounds. He can drag it out for years, free to lead his own life while you twist in the wind. Meanwhile, if you make one false move –’ Zohra shook her head.
The car stopped abruptly before a narrow wrought iron gate in the wall. They had arrived. Tante Zohra stepped out stiffly, helped by Omar. Gigi slipped the veil over her head and followed. The caretaker had heard them arrive and swung the gate open. Two small children hid behind him. Gigi held out the basket of brioches and they each grabbed a handful and ran off, giggling, to hide under the dusty olive trees.
Tante Zohra took Gigi’s arm to walk the few yards to the small house where the dead of the family lay buried in an underground vault. They entered the single, large room with its marble edifices in the form of a tomb and headstone. Even in death men and women were separated. The men’s headstones were on one side of the chamber, the women’s on the other.
A fikki sat cross-legged on a bench in one corner, murmuring over his rosary. Gigi stood by her father’s tomb and traced her fingers over the inscription on the marble headstone. She knew her father was not buried there. He lay in the crypt several meters under her feet, in a simple shroud. She felt as if Papa’s spirit had somehow intervened to save her from making a fatal mistake. She wished she could speak to him more urgently than at any time since his death. Now that she realized Yussef would not divorce her, she did not know what to do.
She closed her eyes and tried to pray, but she was breathing heavily, like someone who realized that she had just escaped an unseen danger. But it was only when she went back to the car that she understood that she had been doubly reprieved.
Gigi and Tante Zohra found Omar standing grimly by the open door of the car, his ear cocked to the news blaring from the radio. Gigi listened to the somber voice of the announcer. ‘At five p.m. today, in Cyprus, an undetermined number of gunmen opened fire on the Egyptian delegation headed by Dr Yussef Siba’yi. Dr Siba’yi was killed and several of his entourage were wounded. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack but it is well known that Dr Siba’yi had been under a death threat since his visit to Tel Aviv. Details to follow…’
PART II
EXILE
12
Paris
Some people’s lives are inexorably caught in the slipstream of the headlines. For
Gigi, even though she did not go to Cyprus, the course of her life was changed nevertheless the day Siba’yi was assassinated and Sadat saw the writing on the wall.
In his last year of life Sadat was a man in fear of his own shadow. The experiment in democracy was aborted. Towards the end Sadat’s prisons made for strange bedfellows: the right and the left, Nasserites and Communists, Islamists and Coptic bishops, journalists and students.
Even the Pasha, at his age, was not spared. A search of the offices of Heikal, the notorious Nasserite former editor-in-chief of El-Ahram, happened to turn up a calling card of the Pasha’s, attached to a copy of an article. Sadat claimed that the card was proof of a conspiracy against him and that there was a compromising message written on it. Heikal himself was the first to point out that the corner of the card had been turned down, as was the Pasha’s custom, to indicate that it had been left blank. But no one seriously doubted that the flimsiest pretext would have been good for Sadat’s purpose. The Pasha found himself sharing – with mutual cordiality – a cell with the Nasserite Heikal who had so often attacked him in the press.
When the end came for Sadat, it still blindsided him. The genie of Islamic fundamentalism was finally out of the bottle. Faruk had flirted with the Muslim Brethren; Nasser’s henchmen had patented new methods of torture for the Ikhwan in the prisons in which he had thrown them; Sadat had encouraged the Islamists in order to counterbalance the diehard Nasserites. He had forgotten that the antidote could be worse than the disease. Like the annual Khamaseen sandstorms sweeping out of the desert to reclaim the city for the sand dunes, religious fanaticism periodically launched an onslaught to reclaim the country for an atavistic Islam.
The Cairo House Page 14