Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  Habibti, el falous mish naga, el hob quel naga! My darling, money is nothing, love is everything … the ubiquitous Arab soap opera line. How we laughed about that. Worked out equivalents in every language. Senza di te, dentro di me, without you inside me, a line which appears in 90 per cent of Italian pop songs. Why, cry, die, goodbye. Ne me quitte pas. Recuerda me un poco tan lejos estoy. All around the world. He’d tried to explain the plot to me: ‘This one went to Switzerland for an operation on her leg. That one is her husband, they have a son. She wants to divorce him but he is a doctor so of course she can’t. This one is mad. His mother is the one we saw in the hospital, weeping at his brother’s bed – the soldier. He wants to marry the one with the eyes. The sad one. She has a daughter of seven, her husband stole her; she loves her very much. These are her friends, they are helping her to get the girl back. These ones are cousins, married to each other. They come from such a good family, they could only marry each other.’ This very drily.

  Chrissie was halfway up the Winter Palace’s semi-circular staircase, exclaiming at the fact of carpets on steps outside. I looked up after her, about to disappear through the revolving doors, and I looked across the river. I cannot be here and not be with him.

  I stood like an idiot in the drive. Ilexes and palms around me, fairy lights flashing.

  ‘One moment, Chrissie!’ I called up to her. She leant over the balustrade and I called up: ‘Check us in! I won’t be a moment.’ And I ran down, and across the Corniche, through the flowerbeds on the middle, across the pavement, down the steps to the bank, past the half-built (or is it ruined?) floating house that used to be (or will be, one day) a restaurant, and out on to a long rusty pontoon, feluccas sleeping quietly to one side, curiously dark flotels moored beyond, and I climbed over a boat or two at the end, and found myself on board I think it was Bob Marley, one of the long iron boats with cushioned seats, and a tented shade, and a little engine, that takes people across, or up and down. A little Nile barge.

  No one was around. I sat on its metal deck at the gap in the rail amidships, and hung my legs over the edge, among the orange-painted bicycle tyres that served as buffers. The mist rose around me, smelling of cool, depth and darkness. The rivery smell, like a Lorelei’s embrace. It was cold. Looking out I thought I could make out the warm orange spark of a small fire at the public ferry landing place way over on the other side. The mass of the mountains was just visible, black against the sky. He is there, on the other side, between the river and the mountains. I stared and stared, though I could see nothing. I just stared, and breathed the river mist smell until my lungs were cold within my ribcage.

  A soft voice at my shoulder.

  ‘Madame,’ it said. ‘You want go other side?’

  I was silent. I realized my body was swaying, almost as if I was going to tip myself in, and swim. Perhaps the boat boy feared I would.

  ‘Bokra,’ I said. Tomorrow.

  And I let him help me up, and I climbed back over the boats, and walked back down the pontoon, and across the bank, and up the steps, and across the Corniche, and in to the drive, and up the movie-star stairs, out of Egyptian Egypt and into the light and warm and welcoming foyer of the beautiful Old Winter Palace, bastion of reformed colonialism, with its absurd crimson Venetian chandelier, under which Chrissie was sitting with a plump and clean man of about fifty, in a blazer, who was trying to persuade her into the bar. She was resisting admirably, in a courteous way. A hotel factotum had a cool eye on the situation, as did Byron, en orientale, from a portrait on the pale wall. You are never alone.

  I wanted to go out into the night, to find the country, connect with it, love it. Find a felafal stand or a coffee house, and feel the dust, the rattle and smooch of the language, the smell of hot oil and fresh mint. I wanted to absorb and be absorbed. But I didn’t. I stayed inside the hotel, in khawaga paradise, because I thought that I couldn’t go back into the country until I had found the man.

  *

  I had taken a room on the Nile automatically because it was the most expensive, and now I wished I hadn’t. I lay between my cool sheets, flat and useless, unsleeping, unthinking, just a receptacle for a mass of unknowingness. At times during the night I found myself holding on to my bones: my collar bones, the strong girdle of my pelvis. Just to know their strength and solidity. Towards dawn, in the darkest of the night, I heard a distant musahourati, the public waker calling the time for sahour, the last meal before Imsaak, the resumption of the fast. Ramadan karim, Ramadan karim, he sang, beating his drum, way over yonder. Ramadan is generous, Ramadan is sweet. Then descended a calm: all over town there is eating, washing, smoking. (If you are truly devout, you do not even swallow your own spit during daylight in Ramadan. You don’t shout, you don’t have sex.) And of course there is some sleeping through. But however devout you are or are not, Ramadan is around you, affecting you with its sounds and its smells, its intensity. Even if your own senses are not heightened by the physical fast, everyone else’s are. Everybody does it, knows it, feels it. Everybody can be meditative, calm, harmonious. Everyone can renounce a little, according to their own way.

  I called room service and ordered a coffee. Ahwa turky, ariha. A little sweet, not too much. Like you, he’d said. The room service person said, ‘Madame make Ramadan? You want before Imsaak?’ No, I said. No, Or maybe I do. I just … I just. I didn’t know. I want.

  I’m not a Muslim and have never wanted to be – well, not often, and never for a very good reason. Only for the architecture, really: the domes, the courtyards, the fountains and the minarets. And the play of light and shade around and through them. And for the glorious communality of the call to prayer. Across the nation, across the Arab and Muslim world, five times a day, in time with the rising and setting of the sun, in unison, in stripes of unison across the time zones from Casablanca to Indonesia, the voices and the words rolling out over deserts and cities and jungles and slums, reminding every Muslim that God is great. And I like Ramadan. Ramadan is not a Vic and Bob TV special, a pile of shopping, Santa at Selfridges. It’s a living thing.

  Twenty minutes after Imsaak came the dawn muezzin: Allah u Akbar, God is great, it is better to pray than to sleep. How well I knew this sound from coming home from work in Cairo, night after night, years ago. As the muezzins started, one by one across the town, I was standing on the crumbly sand-coloured balcony, cold as can be, looking out, thinking: today I am going to change your life. Today, you become a father. This is the last morning you wake as a free young man. And you don’t know.

  Ramadan is not, of course, the ideal time to land this on a man.

  Dawn emerged from night as if the muezzin’s voice were calling up the colours, summoning the changes, choreographing. How the colours shift. Before dawn the red mountains are invisible, smudges of indigo that you know are there, inchoate against the indigo sky. Then floating peaks in the darkness, visible only because there is the most delicate of pale mists, looking Japanese, showing them up – but not quite. Then the sky behind the mountain suffuses crimson – why? This is west, and dawn. And stage by stage the dance of light continues, shifting in a different pattern of crimson and gold, lilac and the palest silvery blue, as it has every morning since Ramses, since chaos, since the sacred mound first rose out of nothing at Heliopolis and Atum masturbated and cast his seed on the world to make it live, before it settles into this particular day’s regular horizontal stripes of full daylight: blue sky, red desert mountains, verdant valley, mud bank, blue Nile. Stripes pierced only by the graceful silver fronds of palms, minarets, and the painted wood and canvas of the masts and lateen sails of the feluccas. Arching.

  The morning chorus was beginning. Chattering. Banging. Working. The day begins.

  I was so sad. So scared. I didn’t know what he would say. Jesus, I didn’t even know what I would say.

  *

  Chrissie came in at about eight thirty, to find me back in bed, lying like some mummy, immobilized for three thousand years.


  ‘Sleep well?’ she said. ‘No sickness?’

  ‘No,’ I said, to the latter not the former, but that was OK because she didn’t distinguish.

  ‘Are you coming down for breakfast?’ she asked. (I had a moment’s overconsciousness of the word: break fast. As if we ever had a fast to break. As if it counted.) ‘Only that guy, Helmut, last night – he’s taking some friends down to the Karnak Temples this morning, and said would we like to go? They’re going to go quite early before it gets hot – I don’t know, what do you think? If you had plans, or … Would you like to come?’

  It’s a curious thing to ponder one of the wonders of the world, a complex of temples as glorious as anything in the world, and not want to go there, even though it’s only half an hour down the road. But I didn’t want to go.

  ‘You go,’ I said. ‘It’s fabulous. Huge. Look out for the Temple of Khonsu, and the little Temple of Opet just by it. She’s a hippopotamus. Osiris’s mother. It may be closed but you can peer in through the rusty wire. Say a prayer for me.’

  ‘Will you be OK on your own?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled at her. I was pleased to be asked. ‘Take a jacket,’ I said, ‘it’s not that warm. And remember to give baksheesh. Just do. It’s part of the system, like tipping the waitress.’

  ‘I used to be a waitress,’ she said, with that look which women who used to be waitresses get when they recall the indignities they suffered. Then, ‘Gosh I must run, he said he’d come by at quarter to nine.’

  I was glad. Kept her out of trouble, left me free.

  *

  How do I do this? Do I ring him? Do I turn up?

  *

  I couldn’t do it. I was incapable. I lay in bed all day. I slept a little. I marked the muezzins, the movement of the sun, the shifting of the breeze, the murmuring of the voices. Somebody came and asked for laundry. Somebody came to make the bed and change the towels. Somebody came to bring sweet basil and a sprig of jasmine in a little vase. Somebody came to turn down the bed and leave a small chocolate. I put it in my bag for Lily, and thought it would squash. I dreamt of Lily. I dreamt I had lost my voice, and Horus was sitting on my shoulder in his guise of a hawk, talking for me. I dreamt that a flock of egrets had come from Nubia to visit me, and were saying to me witighiree, witighiree, sabah al’khir, witighiree, in low southern voices. More, more, good morning, more. But witighiree is not Arabic, it’s –I can’t remember the name of the language. A Nubian language. The one not drowned with Nubia under Lake Nasser, beyond the High Dam. I hate that fucking lake too. A huge spooky, wet, murderous thing. Look down through the wide blank surface and remember what lay below, what lies there still. Nubia, its people, its villages, its life. And Abu Simbel and Philae, how can you dig them up and transport them out of the way of the artificial water that is rising up around them, and just put them somewhere else, and expect them to sit happily there? How could the shape and topography of the huge surrounding stone and desert, the sine qua non of this whole land, not mean something to the nature of these temples, carved out of the self-same stone and desert? How could their position within their own substance mean nothing? How could the gods not be offended?

  I dreamt I was with Sa’id in the City of the Dead in Cairo and I had told him, and he had said, ‘Ya habibi’, in Umm Khalthoum’s voice, and when I woke that time I was so happy because it was all going to be all right. Then I realized it was a dream.

  Every now and then I stood up and I looked out. The streets were quiet, almost empty. No tourists. Vendors, felucca men, calèche drivers, not bothering to hustle after the custom that was not there. I had never seen it like this: everything available, and no one to take it up. This town has been bit, I thought. Smacked in the belly and winded. It’s reeling. I looked over to the other side. The sphinx mountain, riddled with the tombs of dead kings, just gazed away to the west, unconcerned with me, with the emptiness, with the men who live on its flank. I murmured el-Fatha, the opening verses of the Qur’an, in a kind of useless, yearning way. But mostly I lay, with my hands across my belly.

  Tomorrow, I said. Bokra.

  Chrissie came back around five. They’d had such fun. They’d gone to Karnak, then they’d gone on a felucca, they’d seen kingfishers and had a lovely meal moored on a sort of sandbank island, she was so glad I’d told her to take a jacket. Tomorrow they were going to Abydos and Dendara, taking a car, they’d invited her – and me, of course. These temples were just fantastic. And so empty! It’s an ill wind – of course everybody was talking about it, and it’s a dreadful thing, but a marvellous opportunity too, in a way, to see things in peace – Gosh what a selfish outlook. Awful for these poor people. But the carving! And the styles are so different, in London you just think they all look the same, but when you see them in the flesh, so to speak, the variety is marvellous – though of course eighteen dynasties is a bloody long time, and you wouldn’t expect European art to stand still for thousands of years, would you? She was glittery with pleasure. I suspected it wasn’t just the art, I suspected she had been flirted with, that Egypt had nibbled her earlobe with its kind manners and warm breezes, and that maybe a handsome policeman had made eyes at her and called her ballerina. She was exhausted from so much fun, and went for a rest before dinner.

  I’d like to go to Dendara. Hathor smiles down on you from the capitals of six times six great columns, four goddess faces – time-and vandal-ravaged as they are – to each capital, and you can climb up on the roof and listen to the call to prayer rolling away across the empty red desert, and think how much older are the gods on whose roof you stand than the prophet whose call you listen to. But I am not here as a lady traveller.

  How amazed the lady travellers would be to see Luxor now. Lucie Duff-Gordon, a Victorian invalid sent south for her health and abandoned here, used to live in a little house built on top of the Luxor temple. Everything was still awash with desert then, and when Thomas Cook started to bring a few visitors sailing up the Nile in the big, graceful dahabeyyas it was tremendously shocking and rather vulgar. Later, rich visitors might be invited to a grand dinner served on the top of a pylon: white table cloths, silver cutlery, Princess Marta Bibescu in evening dress, with gloves; servants gliding about with dinner among the sphinxes and the colossi, Ramses looking on, no doubt in approval, extravagant and grandiose as he was. The full moon sailing above; candles scarcely flickering in the light air, scent of mimosa on the Nile breeze. The whole regiment of lady travellers visited Luxor: cheerful Mrs Colonel Elwood, knowledgeable Annie Quibell, Constance Sitwell, bossy Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau to whom everything was interesting, clever Amelia B. Edwards, sensible Sophia Poole. And all of them regretted, yearned, in their various ways, in their different times, the loss of something which they perceived had been here before, but was now gone.

  They knew nothing of what we can regret in our time – the dams, the modern hotels (the Old Winter Palace itself was an architectural outrage), the concrete embankments and the bridge. Bit by bit the beauty, the glory of the ancients, is falling apart. It is said … I don’t know about this. It is said that the changes in the water table following the building of the dams and the consequent control of the Nile’s annual inundation have caused changes to the chemical composition of the ground; certain salts are creeping in where there were none before. The tombs and the temples, it is said, will not survive. They are being eaten, it is said, from within, by the very land of which they have been part for thousands of years.

  *

  I was a little surprised that people were being allowed to go out into the countryside. Normally in moments of tension freedom of movement is the first casualty and, even at the best of times, foreigners going through the countryside had to go as part of a convoy, police escorted, and be ticked off at every road block: ten Swiss and an Italian in a minibus, two English ladies in a cab. A memory came back to me: Abu driving Nadia and me back from – yes – Dendara, and there was a fat American lady who wanted to go via N
aqquada, because that’s where you’ll find the biggest dovecot you ever saw, with room for twenty-five thousand pigeons. (A note on pigeons: a tenth-century Fatimid Caliph of Cairo, Al-Aziz, when he wanted cherries, would have his vizier send a message by pigeon to Lebanon; the governor of Lebanon would send, by return, flocks of doves with cherries tied to their feet, which would arrive in time for breakfast.) Naqquada and its pigeon castle is on one bank, the approved and protected route is on the other. Security is expensive: you take the approved route. She – fat lady from the land of the free, based in Cairo and thinking she knew everything – wanted to take the Naqquada route. The policeman of our convoy said she couldn’t. She insisted. Her thinner friend giggled and encouraged her. The police made courteous radio calls, enquired of their regional chief. No, she may not go, we must all go home. She stepped out of her cab like a deposed queen and began to walk, determined fat hips swaying along the dusty road, palms swaying way above her fat head. (I’m not being fattist here, I’m being … anti-imperialist.) The little policeman begged her to get back in the car: ‘You’re just a small man with a big gun, think it makes you important,’ she said. Her friend continued to giggle, excited by the discourtesy and the possibility of conflict. ‘How you gonna stop me,’ she said. ‘Shoot me? So shoot me! Shoot a tourist in the back, why doncha!’ The big handsome policeman tried to joke with her. ‘Look at them playing soldiers,’ she said, her scorn so out of place it made me wince. The rest of us – two more cars of foreigners, and a lost Japanese man hitching a lift with a jeep – waited, and crawled snailpace along behind her, and waited, and crawled, along the banks of the eau-de-Nil Nile. The small policeman walked alongside her, cracking jokes, paying compliments, and pleading. Nadia and I kept our sunglasses on and smoked and listened to Abu’s tapes of Hakim, singing along. The handsome policeman came to apologize to us, bending down to look through the car window, leaning his weight on his two hands on the roof and peering in.