by Louisa Young
Written Arabic, the flowery fioriate and leafy foliate, the ordinary print and the neon signs, handwriting and the logo on a packet of twenty Cleopatras, makes patterns as beautiful as any artificial thing in the world. The language, Arabic, is built on patterns: from a root (usually three consonants) come words meaning everything to do with that root, including, often enough, its own opposites. Hence: ktb. Simplest form: kataba, to write. And thence: kattaba, to make someone write. Takaataba, to write to each other. Istaktaba: to dictate. Kitaab, book. Maktab, office. Maktaba, library or bookshop. Kaatib, clerk. Mukaataba, correspondent. Miktaab, typewriter … and so on.
Why was I thinking all this? Because there is always a pattern, from a root; because patterns can mystify, because trees grow from roots and bear fruit, because the right word is a pearl, and the Arabic language is a tree of pearls, and Sylvia Plath wrote a poem about sitting up a fig tree, admiring the beautiful figs that hung at the end of each branch, unable to choose which one she wanted the most, and one by one the figs dried up and dropped off and she sat there, hungry. Because any of us could end up in the moat in a crimson sash. Particularly if they go after everything they want. And at the same time anyone could end up stuck up a fig tree, watching the pearls drop off. And because I had had a shock, and too much sun, and it was about time someone took me and made me lie down in a darkened room.
Sa’id was approaching.
Aisha glided off as he arrived.
For a moment, when he came alongside me, I was going to turn around, stride back to the café, take Eddie’s head and tear it from his neck. I was going to seize the flimsy café knives and strike him dead. I was going to laugh at him and spit and dance on his corpse before I flung it over the walls of the citadel and left it to the hyenas.
I never used to understand why sex and violence were always bracketed together in talk of what was bad, from a censorship point of view, in films or books. I thought that sex was good and violence was bad, so why should they be associated? That was before adrenaline entered my life. Looking back towards the café now, hating Eddie, I realized it’s just excitement. Adrenaline. It’s just a chemical in my blood. That’s all. I saved his life when I could have let him be knifed. My heart and honour are bigger than my fear and hatred. They were, they are.
Then Sa’id was at my shoulder, pregnancy flooded out adrenaline, my strength drained off and it was all I could do to stand. I could have leant on him, climbed into his pocket. I could have hidden behind his ear. Ya habibi, take me to a darkened room.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘They’ll be coming out soon.’
Semi-conscious, I walked back to the car, trying to address my brain, but it wasn’t answering. Now that he was here the soft warm weight of my own body seemed to be all there was in the world. I climbed straight into the back seat and took my shoes off.
Sa’id was speaking to me, but I just curled myself up. I think I smiled at him. I hope I did. It was very hot in the car but I felt better because I felt on home ground. Damn, I was grateful to Eddie for reappearing to be our enemy, so that Sa’id and I could be on the same side.
But were Sa’id and I on the same side? Was it home ground?
I lay silent in the back and he stood by the open door. After a while my head cleared a little, and I sat up and said: ‘So?’
He sat himself in the passenger seat, one eye still on the cafe.
‘I’ve seen him before,’ he said. ‘It’s a small town. We have spoken before.’
‘What plan was he suggesting?’
He laughed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am not listening to him.’
Wasn’t he? I heard his laugh and felt my belief in him, my big, immediate, natural, irrational belief in him. It was still there.
‘Are you doing good works?’ I asked.
‘For God to judge,’ he said.
‘What about Chrissie?’ I asked. ‘Could you tell anything?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Very complicated, those two. A lot of layers, a lot of lies.’
I closed my eyes and lay back. Sod Eddie, sod Chrissie. Sod this whole situation, except that I am with Sa’id.
What do I want from him? Do I know? Can I remember?
That he love me again, so that I can tell him? Yes – keep it personal.
It was easy to think of that. Easy to think of love, filling all gaps, smoothing all edges, allowing all possibilities, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things …
The longer I don’t tell him … the longer I’m deceiving him. God preserve me I don’t want to deceive him.
Am I afraid he will feel forced by my pregnancy?
Oh but he is forced. And that’s not my doing, it’s the force of nature. The nature of nature.
‘Habibi,’ I murmured.
He was there, I could feel him. I could feel his concern at my swoony state. Passing out is absolutely not what I usually do. Oh lord, he doesn’t know that. He only knew me for a few weeks, a few weeks ago. How could he know me? How could he love me? This is an absurd and desperate situation.
I could go home again, I whispered to myself, inside my cloth and my miasma. (Away from Eddie, too.) I could go home, and never tell him. I could go home to Lily and this new person, this shrimp. I could, I said inside me, but I was absolutely unconvincing. There was amazing strength to my unconvincingness, given the weakness that suffused me in every other way.
He was giving me water.
‘Don’t be stupid, you’re ill,’ he said. ‘We’re going home now. The convoy’s leaving anyway. We’ll just go home. You sleep.’
During the journey I heard his phone ring several times; heard him speaking, in Arabic, English, French. Of course, he has a life. Luxor – the West Bank even – has many interesting inhabitants. The doctor at Qurnah is a sophisticated Copt from Cairo who amazed his friends by upping sticks (and books and music) to this dusty village twenty years ago. There are the archaeology lot; the pyramidiots in love with the temples; there are writers and poets and foreigners, addicts from all over who return again and again; the architect; the Frenchman who lives on the blue dahabeyya by the landing stage, and a dozen or more khawageyya wives of various kinds. Of course he has a life. And one in Cairo, too.
But I was very happy to be on the back seat of his car, wrapped up, being taken, my eyelids heavy moths, my legs molten Aswan granite. There’s always the question with that granite – how did they get those great lumps from Aswan hundreds of miles down the Nile to the Osireion? Or hundreds of miles further, to Cairo? The size of the sarcophagi in the Serapeum – it’s a mausoleum for bulls sacred to Serapis, a labyrinth lit by naked 1950s lightbulbs, great chambers off a deep passage, and within each chamber lies an Aswan granite block the size of a London bus, hollowed out, polished and carved: coffins for bulls. Mummified bulls. That’s what I feel like – a mummified bull. They found one intact – who was it found it, Champollion? There were fingerprints in the sealant on the door of the chamber. From two thousand years ago. New, by this country’s standards. The bull mummy is now in the museum of agriculture. Agriculture, I ask you.
No, I feel like Aswan granite. Heavy, helpless, and how did I get here?
I did wonder where – when he says home, does he mean the West Bank? I would like to wake in his house, on the flank of the sphinx mountains, on the verge of the Sahara, with a gallabeya’d boy bringing me sweet hot tea and a tin plate of newly washed apricots. The way droplets of water cling to the cheeks of newly washed apricots. I bet there’s a word for that in Arabic … from the same root as love, or caress, or something. Fil mish mish.
There was a girl at school called Natasha, who talked too much, all the time, and Zeinab and I would piss ourselves laughing because natasba is the Arabic for to unplug. Which these days almost means its own opposite: unplug the radio, it shuts up; unplug a blockage, it pours forth. Both could have usefully been applied to Natasha.
It’s not apricot season anyway.
After a w
hile we pulled in. I didn’t move, but I knew he looked back at me. ‘Dendara,’ he said. ‘We have to wait here, half an hour. You should eat.’
‘Don’t want to,’ I murmured.
‘You should eat,’ he said. ‘They’ve gone into the temple. Don’t worry, it’s a long walk back. It won’t happen again. I’ll see them when they come out. Come. You should get air.’
I so didn’t want to stand up. He took my arm, and he pulled me, to help me up. It was the first time he’d touched me since last night, that dream sequence – but maybe that had been a dream. This wasn’t. That line of ancient Egyptian poetry sprang to my mind – ‘He brings a blush to my skin, for he is tall and lean.’
As I came to standing every atom of my body started to fall towards him, to home in on him, to gravitate. My conscious instruction came like a voice from beyond the grave, telling my body to stand the fuck up and stop that. My body was not inclined to listen, it was inclined to him. My brain fought through this physical mutiny – I couldn’t think of the word. I was thinking menagerie. Stand the fuck up on your own feet.
Sa’id took my arm and led me quite firmly to a café, sat me on a wooden divan under a worn and sunbleached tented hanging. I lay down and hid my face; he sat on another divan across from me and ordered water, coffee, eggs and bread. The smell of hot butter revived me and he stared at me as I wolfed a scorching mess of hot yellow omelette from a thick black iron frying pan. He was leaning back again: that you-probably-think-I’m-relaxed-but-I-most-certainly-am-not pose. As he had been last night when he said: ‘You want my help. Do you want my love? Do you want to marry me and have my babies?’ He watched me eat as he had once watched me walk. And I felt, as I had felt then, that I was putty in his hands. But now I felt that he might not give a damn that I was putty in his hands.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘Is it just our lost love, or is it Eddie? Or something else?’
I glared at him for not more than half a moment, and then I stood up and shouted: ‘Our love is not lost. You don’t lose a love like that. You don’t–’ I couldn’t say anything. It was coming out as a Barry White song. ‘A love like ours doesn’t die.’
Those were extremely delicious eggs.
‘Sit down,’ he said. I sat. Mopped up some more butter with turtle bread. Fabulous.
OK, I am strong. This weakness goes in waves. I must remember to eat.
‘I want to dance with you,’ I said. ‘I want to hold you in my arms and touch your face and kiss you and fuck you and be with you forever and kill you if you ever leave me.’
Looking back, I suppose I was hysterical, feverish, or something. At the time I just looked at him, very straight, and thought, with the last little drop of sense and clarity left in my poor love-fear-and-pregnancy-pickled brain: Oh. Whoops.
His mouth moved, very slightly, and a muscle around his cheekbones hardened a little.
Well, I’ve done it now.
The mid-afternoon heat sat. A goat ambled by. The temple just was. The tattered hanging above me flapped, very gently, very slowly. Nothing here is going to let me off the hook.
‘I know,’ he said. Quite gently.
‘I thought you probably did,’ I murmured. Looking up, and not bearing to look at him, my eyes hid, and slunk off, to the right, past the sheltering piles of rock towards where Hathor gazed out, her six-times-four great faces looking out at me, kind and wise, and into the recesses of her own dark temple, roofed in stone, lined in stone, ornamented with the stars of the sky, the signs of the Zodiac, and the kings and queens of the human world. Cleopatra’s temple. Temple of love and single mothers, rising from the desert, which had been half swallowed by the desert for generations, and reclaimed from it only a few generations ago, with the stillness of the desert forever rolling in to embrace it. And up on the roof, way in the distance, insects above Hathor’s great multiple smiles, I saw Mr and Mrs Bates, standing against the sky. Like a lighthouse on a cliff, I thought. The captain of the ship knows that if he can see it he has moved in too close. Only I’m not moving. They are. I’m not too close: they are. Too close to the edge.
So in that flash I knew what was going to happen. Let me correct that: I knew something was going to happen.
I jumped up and called out something – her name, probably, not his – and ran like the wind up the dust path, past the ticket booth with its tourist police and soldiers, up the avenue of placid sphinxes, past the gallabeya-clad ticket collectors, shouting – them at me, me at Chrissie. Into the great dark hypostyle hall, the columns looming massy as cliffs above me, the dark corners, the rows of stone trunks, a petrified forest of immense stature: and inside, into the smaller chambers. Jesus – where are the stairs?
It’s almost a joke, a moment of panic in an Egyptian temple. For a split second it becomes Hollywood – temple of doom. Hierogyphics bearing in on you, dark doorways looming, not knowing which way to go. But Hatshepsut outweighed Hollywood, fear can be genuine, oh lord it can. But I do know this temple – I have sat here and read the paper, lain about here, just for the pleasure of the place. This is a place I know. There are stairs to the roof to both east and west. Round to the right – cut through – dark doorway – past where you go to the trapdoor down to the crypt – find the right dark doorway – and the low sloping stone steps, more like the bed of a stream, worn down and down, a low grey gleam like pewter, only two thousand years, not so long. They used to take the goddess up on to the roof for her to be looked on by Ra. The passage is dark and cool; the walls an encyclopaedia of hieroglyphic carving. Up. Out into the clear blue blinding sky: first roof. Round. Past one and another little temple squatting on the roof of the great temple like baby frogs on their mother’s back. I clatter up the external iron staircase, to the top, the high, wide stone expanse of the highest roof, the front, the field in the sky, supported by Hathor’s heads below, and with the desert all around spreading out below. The heat of the sun like a god’s breath. Clutching the iron railing as I pull myself up, the scene spreads before me. Chrissie is there, against the sky. Alone.
Behind me comes a hurly burly: tourist police, guides. They didn’t like it one bit; they hurled themselves after me. Hatshepsut had been only weeks before. They were jumpy, and wouldn’t you be? It was me they were after, because they didn’t know what I knew. Not yet. They’re at the bottom of the rackety iron stairs.
‘Chrissie!’ I called to her, and as I did her oxblood scarf billowed out against the clear blue sky in the breeze of the high place, and its movement seemed to drown my call.
I had a stitch. I went towards her, and then cut left, and went to sit, on the edge of this arena, not close to her, panting and panting. Her bag was at her feet. She stood on the ledge, on the two feet or so of edging stone from which any mother would warn her child. From thirty feet or so away, I watched her. We had a moment when only the boots on the staircase behind me disturbed us. She was looking out. Out, not over.
Someone else must have seen. Someone will be down there with him.
‘Chrissie,’ I called again … She turned round to me: Medea on the stern of her ship; Hera in one of her moods. It was a face you could have put on a shield to turn your enemies to stone.
She’s going over too, I thought in a rush, and I was up and with her, taking her in my arms, holding her as I hadn’t held her at his funeral, leading her to safety – of a kind. Away from the edge.
But she’s done it. She’s been over the edge. It’s done.
*
It wasn’t at all clear what would happen next. The hurly burly caught up with us; and started to babble and exclaim. Sa’id was there, his arm round my shoulder for a second, then gone. Chrissie was immobile in my arms, stiff, stationary. I was thinking about my baby, my shrimp, saying to it OK, sorry about that, I’ll sit still a moment now – did you get that adrenaline? I’m sorry if it was too much. Soothing it. Singing to it.
Then Sa’id was squatting at the roof’s edge just where Chrissie had been standing
, looking over. Not out, over. Voices came up from below; he called back down. There was a wailing from somewhere. Everybody else ran around in circles. A young tourist policeman, with his dusty indigo uniform and white spats and cheap-looking submachine gun, stayed by us. He stood weight on one leg, hip tilted, cuddling his gun. He reminded me of Hakim: tender.
After a while I asked him what was happening. I spoke to him in Arabic though Chrissie showed no sign of understanding anything so it made little difference to her, and I think it was her I was trying to protect. He said he thought the man was dead. He murmured a prayer, his eyes full of shock and sadness, but his stance pure and immutable duty.
Did anyone see what happened?
Sa’id came back to me, shaking out his trousers. His pale eyes were hot and distracted.
‘Dead,’ he said. ‘Absolutely dead. He’s broken, down there.’
For a moment I was laughing.
Remembering Harry telling me that day in the café near Scotland Yard: Eddie’s dead, and I was so – so blown apart because – apart from anything – I thought I had contributed to his death with my wallop on his head. And I had wept. And now.
I laugh.
But so swiftly that nobody notices.
Then I stood and walked quickly to the edge where Chrissie had been. Squatted. Looked over.
He was a distant small pile of limbs and linen. The proportions of him were wrong, and the angles. I hadn’t seen Janie when she flew through the air and landed dead. I’d been lying broken myself. But death is visible from a long way off.
People stood around him. His hat had abandoned him. I looked for it, and made it out, lying alone off towards the ditch full of ancient rubble and palm trees that used to be the sacred lake.
