by Louisa Young
Sa’id didn’t look at me. He was looking under his eyebrows towards his departing father. He said nothing about what Abu Sa’id had just said. Nothing pro, nothing con. Nothing at all.
The moment was gone. Abu Sa’id’s words floated off into the blue. It was as if we hadn’t heard them. If only, I thought, I could take Sa’id in my arms, this would be all right.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said.
He looked at me sideways. ‘No,’ he said. ‘First we save you. Insha’Allah. The …’
It occurred to me that he hadn’t eaten for hours. He was getting the Ramadan face.
‘We have a lot to talk about,’ I said.
‘First we save you,’ he interrupted. His face had taken on the condensed muscularity which means he has nothing to say, he has retreated. Then he stood, and said: ‘Wait one moment.’
He disappeared, and returned with the holdall. The same one, full of the same money.
I looked at it.
He pushed it towards me. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’
‘I don’t want it,’ I said. ‘Don’t give it back to me. I don’t want it.’ The sight of it made me panicky. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I can’t take it to England. What if I’m stopped? What if Shezli finds it? I don’t want it. Please. Please don’t look at me like that. Please don’t do this hard polite thing. Please don’t be sorry you couldn’t help me. You have helped me so much …’
In a second, he was tender again. The hardness fell off him like scales.
‘How?’ he said.
‘With Janie, with Eddie, with death and responsibility, with how to behave. With knowing myself. Ya habibi, I don’t love you for nothing. I don’t love you for nothing …’
He closed his eyes. Pain on his face.
‘So what shall I do with it?’ he said, very softly.
‘Give it to Magdi Yacoub’s children’s heart fund in Cairo. Anonymously.’
‘Meshi,’ he said. OK.
We sat in our silence.
‘Come,’ he said after a while. ‘I’ll take you down.’
‘I’ll go back over,’ I said. ‘But I want to see you … I want to see you …’
‘Be honest,’ he said. ‘You want to see me in England. You want to see me in England, two months ago, when everything was unreal.’ Well, I laughed.
‘Sa’id,’ I said, ‘I’m yours, I love you and I understand all this. All of it. Get used to it.’
He swore gently in Arabic. ‘Bint el …’ Daughter of … what? A dog? Happiness? Both are common phrases. Shaking his head. ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Go away. Come on …’ and he put me in the Merc and drove me down to the dusty landing stage, humming, and paid a small boy to take me on a boat back across the river, over to the bright lights strung like a necklace along the bank, and he looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. As I crossed over the river, looking back to see him turning and walking away under the arcs of the palms, an old song came to me: all the trees are laughing, they laugh with all their might, laugh and laugh the whole day through, and half the summer’s night.
But in the car he had been humming a different melody: Umm Khal-thoum, of course. Not ‘Enta ’Omri’, You are my Life. ‘El Atlal’, The Ruins.
SIXTEEN
I don’t think you understand
Halfway across the river I said to the boat boy: ‘Take me back.’
‘But Mr Sa’id said take you other side,’ he objected.
‘Take me back.’
He took me. A long skinny taxi driver was sulking in the café, looking utterly ready for Iftar.
‘Would you take me to Deir el-Bahri?’ I said. He stared at me.
‘Hatshepsut closed,’ he said. He didn’t like to be asked.
‘El Nobala,’ I said. Tombs of the Nobles.
That seemed OK to him. ‘Meshi,’ he said.
Up the road again. Past the colossi again. Stopped at the ticket office. I wouldn’t need a ticket because I wasn’t going into any of the tombs, but I didn’t want to have to explain anything so I bought one. Turned right, and sailed past the fabrique. His car parked outside the front, the basalt hounds, the dust-coloured mosque across the way. Heading up towards el Qurn, the horn-shaped peak at the top of the Valley of the Tombs of Nobles, for which Qurnah is named.
I jumped out at the end of the tombs. The driver said he would wait. Half an hour, I said. I waited until he had subsided and lost interest in me before I began to scrabble up the hillside to the right, following the route that Sa’id and I had taken two and a half months before, when we walked out here by moonlight, to be alone and to embrace. Up here on this hillside is the last place where Sa’id and I made love. That’s not why I had come.
The afternoon sun was hot and the land was dry and difficult, but the climb was not long. Within fifteen minutes I stood on the prow of this particular sphinx-limb, looking down to the Temple of Hatshepsut in the valley below.
I have never much liked this temple. I like Hatshepsut herself, with her fake beard and her long poem in stone, but not her temple. It reminds me of Italian fascist railway stations, big and pale and stark and arrogant. See me? I’m here so fuck off. It seems to be trying to boss the mountain out of which it is carved.
Well, this day I couldn’t see it. Even as I turned to look my eyes filled with tears and my legs gave way beneath me, and I found I was sitting on a bare hilltop and weeping. I turned my back on it. Wept.
After a while the taxi driver appeared in front of me. He stood a little way off, his eyes filled with tears.
‘You have … family?’ he said. Delicately.
‘La’ah,’ I said. No. ‘Kolena wilet Adam we Hawa.’ I was just extending the family a bit. ‘We are all sons of Adam and Eve.’ Sons of Adam, in Arabic, means human beings. Including women and infidels. You know – what I am.
‘Madame,’ he said, holding his tears.
I wanted to say a prayer or something but I couldn’t do a thing, so in the end I stood up and we walked back down together, taking care not to let loose stones on one another’s ankles. He drove me back down to the landing stage and there was the Nefertiti boy, and I graced him with my custom and was wafted in isolation back to Luxor.
*
How does it go, ‘El Atlal’? The word actually means The Deserted Desert Camp, after the people have moved on. The classical Arab odes start there; they go on to lost love, the fineness of camels, the hardship of the journey … but this song is all about being drunk with love. Drink with me in the ruins … Has love ever seen drunkenness like ours, we built fantasies and dreams, we walked on a moonlit road and saw happiness jumping ahead of us; we laughed like children and leapt ahead of our shadows. Something about how his beauty offends beauty. And then: Give me back my freedom, let loose my hands; I gave everything, I held nothing back. You are making my wrists bleed. Umm Khalthoum sang that verse five times to Nasser in 1968; you can hear the applause on the recording. Crying out, the voice of Egypt.
And then – how did this love overnight become history?
And: We meet like two strangers, and each goes his own way. Don’t say we willed it. Fortune willed it.
*
I rang him the moment I got to the hotel, from the foyer so I didn’t have to see Chrissie or Harry.
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘I’m hopeless,’ he said. ‘I’m mad. I’m mad in love with this woman, she’s driving me crazy, I don’t know what to do, she’s just been here today and there’s this other man she should be with, it would be so much better, it makes so much sense, and I don’t want to ruin her life …’
‘Why would it be better for her to be with him, if it’s you she loves?’
‘Oh, she loves him. She loves him. It’s a different love. And they’re older than me, they should be thinking of these adult things, they have a child. And they’re both English, they could be at home together. She thinks she could live here, bring her child, desert the child’s father … she couldn’t l
ive here. It would ruin her. She’d hate it. You know, foreigners can’t swim in the Nile. Maybe in the middle, where it’s fast-moving, if they splash about and get out again quickly. But if they go into the shallows, the still calm parts of the river, and stay there, they catch bilharzia, and they lose their strength and their own body fails them, they die … Do you know about Khaum Nakht?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Her mummy was found in the tomb of the two brothers. She died of bilharzia, and now research is being done in Manchester, using her tissues, tracing the development of the disease … we have so much to offer, you know.’
‘So much to collaborate on,’ I said.
‘On some levels,’ he said.
‘Why not this one?’
Silence.
Then: ‘I’m the grit in her oyster,’ he said. ‘I should just disappear …’
‘The mummy’s?’ I asked, momentarily confused.
‘Yours, habibti.’
‘Pearl,’ I said. A pearl on my tree.
He laughed, softly.
‘We could live together in another place,’ I said. ‘Paris, or …’
‘What, and add another culture to confuse your child? And then you and I have children, what are they? Where is their home? English Arabs in Paris?’
‘Where I come from there are all kinds of cultures living together. English and Arab and everything you could imagine.’
‘All in exile,’ he said. ‘All stateless. Homeless.’
‘All building and contributing to their new homeland,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Naive!’
‘I am not naive,’ I declared. ‘I live there. Call me optimistic, but I am not naive. People do it. I’m not saying it’s easy or simple, and certainly, what do I know, I’m white and English, but Sa’id, people do it. They land in it, stay in it, ebb and flow with it, suffer and survive, give and take, live and die. Who says life would be any easier anywhere else? I was born in the city everyone else comes to, habibi – my home is the most welcoming and most indifferent place in the world; we have the grandest theories and the most terrible failures, the best intentions and the worst tragedies, we have no ghettoes and yet our boundaries are strong – but they are mobile, they are flexible. In my home, everybody is other. Sweetheart – it is a long slow journey, but we are all building and contributing to this homeland. By surviving. By still being there. All of us. All of them. The whole world.’
‘My world is here,’ he said.
‘I can’t believe you’re being so parochial …’
‘Not parochial. Truthful.’
‘But you’ve lived abroad, you’ve …’
‘Exactly,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Multiculturalism is a luxury you can afford. We are clinging to our culture,’ he said. ‘Habibti – multiculturalism is a Western idea.’
In all our conversations around these subjects he has never before stated it so starkly, nor applied it to me. Against me. So political, so personal.
I only wanted to be personal.
‘Do you feel homeless, my darling?’ I asked.
‘No. This is my home.’
I closed my eyes and tried to look out through his. Absent mother. English blood. National service. Years in Cairo, years in France. Decline of great empires: the ancient Egyptian, the Arab. History of invasions: the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, Mamluk and Ottoman, the French, the British. Tourism and economic dependence. The violence of fundamentalists. All those languages. Seen through insecurity.
‘Sa’id,’ I said. ‘Are we discussing our future, and how it might work? Or are you telling me we have none?’
He laughed again, so quietly.
‘Why do you ask me?’ he said. ‘Do I know? Is it my decision? The future will come, insha’Allah, First we save you. Now go away.’ And hung up.
I leaned back on the foyer sofa and listened as my blood rippled through my veins, and my muscles rippled up and down my body, and my child swam silently through his private salty sea. I wanted to roll over on to my front, and hold myself in my own arms for a while, and lay my head on my own shoulder. But I couldn’t. So I went up to see if any of my compatriots were around. They weren’t.
*
I found them down by the pool, on sunloungers. Together. I hesitated behind a cloud of mimosa, wondering what he had told her for it to be OK for him to be lying around with her. He wouldn’t have told her he was a cop, so, what, who could he be being? Eddie’s old running boy who’s turned up here? What, by chance? Oh, sure. Or with Eddie? No, she wouldn’t be lying around with him if that were the case. She’d be scared witless.
They looked for all the world like holidaymakers. Chrissie, in an orange bikini, was even reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (though I had noticed on previous occasions that she sometimes had her AA handbook concealed behind this less-revealing fascia). Harry, in his ancient jeans, was dozing, lying back with his head sideways and his arms flung above his head, biceps like great peachstones under his white blue-veined skin. I could see part of ‘Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains’, snaking dark turquoise round his upper arm. Angeline was hidden, there on the other side. Victory was invisible.
I slunk through the palms round to the swimming-pool bar, and settled myself out of view. A waiter glided over to me.
‘Madame?’
I asked him politely to go quietly and bring me that sleeping man over there. He looked only very slightly disapproving, but even so I whispered to him in Arabic, ‘It’s all right, he’s my brother.’ He giggled, and glided over.
Peering round, I could see Chrissie look up, and Harry rise, shrug to her, and follow the waiter over, pausing only to pull on his t-shirt. I was glad he did that. There’s something unpleasant about half-naked bodies walking around in public in Islamic countries. Even bodies that are pleasing to look at, like Harry’s. Even by pools built for westerners.
I watched him as he walked. He moves nicely. I teased him once about the silent way he lopes about. ‘It’s my training,’ he’d said.
An image sprang into my mind: it lasted about three seconds. Sa’id, Harry, and me. I felt it, physically. It made me gasp.
Harry looked up.
I was thinking which one I would want where: which above, which below. Which in front, which behind. Which on which side of my neck. Whose hair, brushing me where. Four of those pointless, delicate male nipples. Two girdles of shoulder, held by bands of taut muscle. Two breathing ribcages, two beating hearts. All those limbs, all those buttocks, all those – oh please.
He was with me now, looking down at me. I swear I was scarlet.
But if I want both of them, I can’t really want either of them.
‘Hi,’ I said tightly, but the images wouldn’t leave my mind. A waist for each of my arms, a mouth for each of my ears, or one for the small of my back and one for my belly, two long backs, and four shifting shoulderblades, so many hollows of shadow around collar bones and between ribs. Four hands. Four arms, muscled with peachstone and rope, two honey-brown, two milk-white, one of them tattooed with my name.
I could picture both men, very clearly.
‘Oh fuck,’ I said.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’ I couldn’t look at him. Looking at his knees was bad enough. His knees, I remember, look like elephants’ heads. All his joints are large in his long limbs. Big knots of sinew and bone. Such a surging physical memory of how we had been, together. Me and him. Me and Sa’id. I felt sick. Sick with lust.
He sat on the end of the neighbouring lounger.
‘Are you all right?’ he enquired.
‘Yes,’ I said, scrabbling for sense. ‘What did you tell her?’
He grinned, his triumphant grin. He used to have a Triumph t-shirt – Triumph motorcycles, you know – and he’d wear that, and the Victory, and this grin, and he would look just the cockiest fuck you ever saw in your life. Actually this might be the same t-shi
rt, with the lettering finally faded away completely. It looked old enough. In my mind the whole shirt faded away. Oh lord.
He reached across his chest and hoicked up his left sleeve a little with one big-knuckled finger. There I was. Angeline. Dark tattoo turquoise on blue-white. Only a little faded.
‘I told her I was your devoted ex-lover,’ he said, ‘reformed after an unfortunate interlude of crime, and desperate to regain your good graces and save you from a dreadful fate of single motherhood. I told her I had rung you, here, as a matter of course because I never normally let you out of my sight, and joined you as soon as I heard. I confided in her, deeply. She loved it. She wants to be fairy godmother to our rediscovered love. She told me all about Sa’id, and warned me of the terrible rivalries ahead, largely based on him being so good-looking and not at all some burning-eyed camel-driver, which was what she’d expected, but promised to be on my side because she doesn’t want you moving to Egypt forever, she wants you to stay in London and be her friend. We’re deeply bonded now. She wants to be our bridesmaid.’
My name, there on his arm.
‘You’re going to burn,’ I said stupidly. ‘You should put on some suncream.’ It was the first thing that came into my head. I only said it because his body was on my mind, and I was trying to divert the direction my thoughts were taking with it. Fat lot of good it did.
‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Would you …?’
The images flooded back, of both of them. But this one, the reality, the actual physical man of him, with his weight and his warmth and his concrete solidity, was right there, saying something that might require me, as an everyday courtesy, to put my hands on his warm, hard body …
I don’t know if he saw the look on my face.
But I’m in love with Sa’id.
Enough already. I stood, and kicked off my shoes, ran to the pool and dived in.
*
Chrissie was squinting at me when I clambered out, pathetic with my dress clinging to my thighs and my eyelashes sticking together. It had worked. I felt nothing but cold and wet and stupid.
‘What’s that for?’ she asked.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I said, ‘don’t ask. Are you all right?’
