by Amin Maalouf
“I don’t have an accent when I speak Arabic. In our family, we rarely spoke the language, though my father was from Byblos and my mother from Damascus. They spoke only French—to each other, to their brothers and sisters, to their friends, it was always French, like Russian aristocrats in a nineteenth-century novel. They only spoke Arabic to their driver, their cook, and their doorman. In the circles they moved in, it was commonplace. Worse still, when they talked about the locals, they said ‘the Arabs,’ as though they themselves were British or Greek.”
“But when your father went to cabarets as a young man, got drunk and climbed on tables, I assume he didn’t sing in French or English or Greek …”
“No, you’re right, he sang in Arabic. And when he took his dancer, whose name was Noureleyn, in his arms I’m sure it was in Arabic that he whispered sweet nothings. You do, too, actually.”
Adam looked at her, intrigued.
“Yes, you too,” she said, “you can only whisper in Arabic. We spent the whole evening speaking French, but when we went to bed …”
“Probably. I don’t really notice. But now you mention it, it’s true that all my terms of affection come from Arabic.”
“Even when you’re with someone who doesn’t speak the language?”
“The problem did arise when I first met Dolores. She would sometimes criticize me for being silent when we made love. I explained that affectionate terms occurred to me spontaneously in Arabic, and I didn’t want to say anything since she didn’t know the language. She thought about it and said ‘I want you to whisper them in my ear as though I understood.’ And I did. Then she wanted to whisper them too. At first, she learned what she had heard, speaking to me as though I were a woman. And her accent was laughable. But little by little I taught her the right words and the correct pronunciation. Now we make love in Arabic, which creates a singular complicity between us.”
Sémiramis gave a little laugh and Adam felt a sudden panicked twinge of regret.
“I should never have told you that. She wouldn’t care about the rest, but for me to tell you what we whisper to each other in bed is a betrayal.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t mention it.”
“That’s not enough. You have to make me a solemn promise.”
“I swear on my father’s grave that I will never reveal a word of what you’ve just said. Not to Dolores or to anyone else. Will that do?”
“It’ll do. I’m sorry for insisting, but I’m angry with myself for talking about such intimate things. It’s not something I usually do.”
“Relax, Adam, it’s me, Sémi, your friend, your loyal friend, you’re allowed to let your guard down for a few seconds. I tell you my secrets, you tell me yours, neither of us need suffer, it will simply bring us a little closer together.”
She gently laid a hand on the leg of her passenger, who was thoughtful for a moment before asking:
“How old were you when you left Egypt?”
“Barely a year old. It was just after Nasser’s coup d’état. My father had done something foolish, and he didn’t dare stay in Cairo.”
“Something foolish?”
“Very foolish, yes.”
She smiled and said no more, Adam allowed her to collect her thoughts.
“Obviously, I don’t remember any of this, but I was told the story so often that I feel as though I lived it.
“Back when my father was a student, in the 1940s, there was a lot of political excitement. He never personally belonged to a political party, but among his university friends, there were communists, Islamists, monarchists, nationalists. He used to tell me that some days, you’d see dozens of students show up dressed in yellow, or in green, trying to march in step, shouting slogans—and you knew a new political party had just been founded. Most of these groups were more ridiculous than frightening, and they usually disappeared within a few months.
“The Ikhwan—the Muslim Brotherhood—was much more serious. Thousands of young men joined them, and when the Free Officers led the coup d’état in 1952, everyone assumed that Nasser, Sadat, and their cohorts were members of the Muslim Brotherhood in uniform. According to my father, some of them were; but once they had seized power, they distanced themselves from the movement, in fact they did their best to temper its influence in the country. To such an extent that in ’54, the year I was born, disillusioned Islamic militants fired shots at Nasser while he was giving a speech. They missed, but not by much, and the incident was followed by a brutal crackdown. Thousands of militants were arrested, and many of the leaders were summarily executed.
“One of the conspirators, a nineteen-year-old named Abdessalam, was the younger brother of one my father’s closest friends. After the attempted assassination, he had managed to flee; the police and the army were hunting him, and there was no doubt that, if he was caught, he would be lynched there and then. So my father decided to hide him in our house.”
“You’re not telling me he hid the man who tried to assassinate Nasser?”
“Very foolish, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s a little more than foolish … It’s sheer lunacy! What can possibly have been going through the head of a nice middle-class Catholic man for him to risk his own and his family’s lives by hiding not only a killer, but, worse, an Islamist?”
“That was precisely his logic—he assumed the authorities would never think to look for Abdessalam in the house of a nice bourgeois Christian family. And he was right, they searched the mosques and the working-class districts with a fine-tooth comb, but it never occurred to them to search our house.”
“But why did he do it? Was he sympathetic to the Brotherhood?”
“Absolutely not. He cordially despised them before this happened, and went on despising them for the rest of his life. If he sheltered Abdessalam, it was because he was nineteen and shaking with fear, and his best friend had begged him to do so.”
“And your mother agreed to this?”
“My father never asked her. His friend showed up one night with his kid brother, who had shaved off his beard to avoid capture and now looked like a prepubescent boy, though with eyes like a hunted animal. We lived on the ground floor and, in the back garden, my father had a studio where he painted in his spare time. He was really good, actually, I’m sure if he’d been born in Europe he would have been an artist. Anyway, the young man hid out in this studio and never set foot outside. My father secretly brought him food. This went on for several weeks, and no one in the family noticed anything. Not even my mother, who never went into her husband’s studio.
“When things had calmed down and the authorities gave up hope of finding him, the fugitive left. My father later found out that he left Egypt for West Germany, which was where most of the exiled Muslim Brotherhood settled at the time.
“My parents were never questioned, but my father was uneasy. He was convinced that someday or other, the story would leak out and the authorities would make him pay for providing succour to the enemy. So he sold the house, the business, everything he owned, he took his wife, his children, and his money, and he left.”
“Did he regret doing ‘something foolish’?”
“Actually, no, believe it or not, he never regretted it. Quite the opposite, he was pleased. Because of the incident, he had been forced to quickly sell off everything. A few months later came the first round of nationalization, then the Suez crisis. My father’s cousins and my mother’s brothers and all foreigners—or those who were considered foreign—were forced to flee Egypt in a mad rush leaving everything behind. The Greeks, the Italians, the Jews, the Levantine Christians … Their factories were appropriated, their lands, their shops, their bank accounts. They lost everything. My father, by doing something foolish, had sold everything before ‘the deluge,’ and so he kept his fortune. That was how he was able to buy land when he moved here, and build several houses, including t
he one that I converted into a hotel.
“A thousand times, I heard Egyptian immigrants congratulate my father for his foresight and his shrewdness. So, because of what you call his ‘sheer lunacy,’ he acquired the reputation of a wise man, a reputation that stayed with him all his life.”
“I’m guessing he never told these people why he had to leave Egypt so hurriedly?”
“Absolutely not! By the time we settled into this country, Nasser was considered a demi-god, his photo was plastered everywhere, he was worshipped more here than he was in Egypt. As you can imagine, my father was not going to boast about harbouring the man who had tried to assassinate the saviour of the Arab nation. He would have been torn to pieces. He only began to mention it in the 1980s, when Nasser was long dead and forgotten.”
“Did your father ever go back to Egypt?”
“He never set foot in the country again. It was strange, actually. When he talked about Egypt, his face lit up; he never tired of saying it was the most beautiful country in the world. But he never went back, and he never wanted his children to go there.”
“So you’ve never been?”
“I have, but only after he died. I wanted to see the house where I was born, the house I had heard so much about. I went to see it, but I didn’t feel anything. I thought, given all the stories I had been told as a child, that I would feel moved. But nothing. No tears, no lump in my throat. The place where I did feel moved was in Upper Egypt, in Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, looking at the frescoes. That’s where I was left speechless. I suddenly realized why so many men had dreamed of this country—conquerors, travellers, poets … But my parents’ nostalgia left me cold. In Egypt, they lived like outsiders, and they were treated like outsiders.”
“Things are never that simple.”
“Oh yes, they are that simple. When you look down on the local population, refuse to speak their language, sooner or later you’re driven out. If my parents had wanted to carry on living in Egypt, they should have become Egyptians, rather than hanging out with the British and the French.”
In her voice there was a tinge of a slow-burning anger that had never guttered out. After a few seconds of pregnant silence, she continued:
“If I’m honest, I should lump my father and my mother together. He used to tell me exactly what I’ve just told you, that they should have integrated with the local people—and in fact he had friends, and probably lovers, from all walks of life. But he was one of the few people who took that attitude. In his family, and even more so in my mother’s family, most people felt like outsiders, and behaved like colonists. When the colonial period ended, they had to pack up and leave. You might say they reaped what they sowed …”
“I’m in no position to defend your family, but in every situation, there are faults on both sides. What you’ve just said could easily be reversed: if they behaved like outsiders it was because they were always treated as outsiders. When people refuse to integrate, it is often because the society they’re living in doesn’t allow them to integrate. Because of their name, their religion, their accent, their appearance …”
The two friends were pensive for a moment. Then Adam said more cheerfully:
“But let’s get back to you. You could have had a career wiggling your hips in the cabarets of Cairo.”
“My father was adamant; it was pointless to even try and argue. But I don’t hold it against him, he was a product of his time, and he thought he was acting in my best interests. Besides, I never really had the ambition to make it as a professional singer. I love singing for my friends, I’m flattered when they say I have a beautiful voice, but I wouldn’t have left my parents to entrust my life to an impresario. When I was young, I had a very different ambition: I wanted to be a surgeon.”
Adam remembers now. When he had first met her, Sémiramis was in her first year studying medicine.
“I’d read somewhere that there were almost no female surgeons, and I wanted to be a pioneer. At university, the professors and the other students all tried to put me off, telling me that, when they place their lives in someone’s hands, patients need a reassuring—meaning male—figure. In short, there were careers that were unworthy of me—singer; and careers that I was unworthy of—surgeon. But it didn’t put me off, I studied furiously, relentlessly, I wanted to be the top of my class. And in the second semester, I was.”
“Then you got bored with it …”
“No. Then I met Bilal. Then we fell madly, hopelessly in love. Then he died. And then, for three years, I was devastated. By the time I crawled out of my black hole, the war was raging, and it was too late for me to go back to medicine. I felt like I’d forgotten everything I’d learned. I never went back to university, and now I’ve ended up as a hotel manager.”
“Chatelaine,” Adam corrected.
She smiled.
“Sorry, I’d forgotten your title for me.”
“Chatelaine. My beloved chatelaine.”
“It’s done me good, you coming back here, even if only briefly. I should be grateful to Mourad for phoning you. I’ll remember our champagne dinners for a long time.”
Her voice was sad. Her friend turned and saw she had tears in her eyes.
“Don’t you think it’s a little early for us to be saying goodbye?” he said. “I’m not leaving anytime soon. I’ve still got my room here for a while …”
She smiled. Paused. Seemed to hesitate before saying:
“I had a long conversation with Dolores this morning.”
“You phoned her again?”
“No, this time, she phoned me. You’d only just left. It was like she could sense that we’d spent the night together. And …”
She trailed off. There was a long silence. Adam had to prompt her:
“And?”
“And it’s been decided that from now on you’ll sleep in your room and I’ll sleep in mine.”
“It’s been decided,” Adam echoed with a smile as ambiguous as the feelings stirred in him.
“I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” Sémiramis apologized, “and you’ll have to pretend we never had this conversation. But I need you to help me keep my promise.”
When Adam said nothing, she insisted, her voice at once apologetic and exasperated:
“Forget your male pride for a minute and just say: I’ll help you.”
He grumbled, then gave a heavy sigh and said:
“Alright, I’ll help you.”
In an instant, the driver’s tone shifted to playful and coquettish:
“It goes without saying this does not exclude longing, desire, compliments, tenderness, and even courtship. In fact, everything except …”
Her passenger apprehensively waited for the crude words that would follow, but she said no more. She had finished her sentence.
“Everything except everything except everything except,” he said over and over, trying to make the word sound as preposterous as possible.
When he set down the conversation in his notebook, Adam observed:
During the conversation, I was careful not to tell Sémi that I had already reached the same conclusion after my emails with Dolores. Etiquette dictated that I was meant to pretend to be disappointed, and more importantly, not let it be seen that, in my cowardly way, I was relieved not to have to tell my lover that our idyll was at an end. Not for the first time, the complicity between these two women has spared me from rudeness and remorse.
I make myself a promise to respect this pledge of abstinence; but, if I’m honest, I’m not completely sure that it is one that I can keep in all times, all places, all situations.
I will let life be my guide.
-
The Tenth Day
-
1
When morning came, Adam was still fully dressed. The night before, he had collapsed on his bed without eating, w
ithout brushing his teeth, and without closing the shutters as he usually did to avoid being woken early by the harsh, raw sunlight.
He had not had the strength to write a detailed account of his meeting with Brother Basil. He had done so when he woke at 5:00 a.m. When it was done, he phoned down to order breakfast, then checked his email.
During the night, he had received a laconic message from Naïm stating that he would be flying out of São Paulo on Wednesday morning, and would arrive on Thursday evening after a brief layover in Milan. Adam was delighted. The reunion was beginning to take shape, and sooner than he had hoped. He hurriedly replied that he would be at the airport to welcome Naïm.
Then he called Sémiramis.
“I hope I just woke you!”
“No such luck!” she laughed. “I’m already halfway through breakfast. Next time, try phoning earlier?”
“I’ve got more good news.”
“Let me guess—Albert or Naïm has written to say they’re coming. Am I right?”
Adam was taken aback.
“You’re right. But you spoiled my surprise.”
She laughed.
“You seem particularly perky this morning.”
“I’m out on the terrace, there’s a gentle breeze, the birds are chirruping, and the coffee is strong. If I thought I could trust you, I’d invite you to join me.”
Ten minutes later, he was sitting with her. Everything was as she had painted it—the breeze, the chirruping, the aroma of the coffee. Additionally, the table was laden with food, and Sémiramis’s nightgown was slightly open. Adam felt a pang of regret when he remembered that the “parenthesis” of their affair was over.
“So, Naïm will arrive on Thursday night at about seven. And Albert won’t be far behind; since he’s already told the institute that his ‘adoptive mother’ is at death’s door, he should be here soon. So, it looks like the reunion will be next week. I can hardly believe it. A couple of days ago I was talking in terms of months, and now I’m just waiting on flight times. I feel like I’m living in a dream. It’s wonderful, but a little scary.” Silence. “Maybe it’s time to seriously think about the practicalities.”