by Ahdaf Soueif
‘Again?’ I say. ‘Again, ya Tahiyya?’
‘By God, I never wanted to,’ she protests. ‘We said four and we praised God and closed it on that. It’s God’s command, what can we do?’
‘But hadn’t you put the loop? I thought —’
‘Yes, I had put it, but I had blood, blood coming down on me and they took it out and said take a rest for a while — and you know what men are like. Then God’s command came to pass.’
She tests the tea. It is the colour of burgundy and she pours it into our glasses and spoons in the sugar.
‘There are some biscuits,’ I say, and she brings the plate to the table and hands a biscuit to her son.
‘By the Prophet, I can’t keep up with them all,’ she says. ‘Yesterday the little girl had a temperature and was fretful all day and at night this boy kept me up all night coming and going. The plaster — you’ll excuse me — makes his leg itch. All night I’m carrying him and patting him and calming him down until Madani was about to say to me, “May God help you.” ’
‘That’s good of him,’ I say.
‘What can he do, ya Daktora?’ she asks. ‘All day he’s working, and he’s got diabetes. His health isn’t what it used to be.’
I can hear Isabel: his diabetes didn’t stop him getting her pregnant. When his health was what it used to be, did he wake up and soothe the kids at night? But is it Isabel? Or are these my thoughts in Isabel’s voice? Of course termination doesn’t even come into it. ‘Haraam ya Daktora,’ Tahiyya would say, ‘it’s a soul after all.’
‘How far gone are you?’ I ask.
‘I’m not sure.’
I look at the scan. ‘Eleven weeks,’ I tell her.
‘Look at it for me,’ she says, ‘and read it for me. Tell me everything it says.’
‘It says you’re eleven weeks pregnant and the baby is normal.’
‘Praise God,’ she sighs.
‘What does Am Madani say?’
‘What will he say? He says “How will we feed them?” and praises God.’
‘God provides,’ I say.
‘It’s known,’ she agrees, and gets up to wash the glasses.
‘Yakhti, laugh,’ I say. ‘What do we take from it all?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Man is destined for his God.’
‘And they’ll be five in the eye of the enemy —’
The buzzer goes again and I get up to answer it.
Isabel comes in as Tahiyya is collecting the clothespegs and wiping the crumbs from the floor. They smile at each other.
‘Hallo,’ Tahiyya says loudly in English, straightening up and smiling, raising her hand to her head, miming a greeting in case Isabel doesn’t understand.
‘Hello,’ says Isabel. ‘Izzay el-sehha?’
Tahiyya’s eyes widen as she turns to me: ‘She speaks Arabic!’
‘See the cleverness,’ I say.
‘Yakhti brawa aleiha. She looks intelligent.’ Tahiyya beams her approval. ‘Is she married?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Like the moon and not married? Why? Don’t they have men in Amreeka?’
‘Maybe she doesn’t want an American,’ I joke.
‘Khalas,’ says Tahiyya. ‘We marry her here. You find her a good bridegroom among your acquaintance and we’ll make her a wedding that shakes the whole country.’ She bends to pick up Abd el-Rahman. ‘Shall I do anything for you before I go?’
‘Thank you, Tahiyya, there’s nothing.’
‘Then I’ll excuse myself,’ she says. She settles her son on her hip, manoeuvres his plastered leg around the door. ‘Salamu aleikum.’
‘She’s always so cheerful,’ says Isabel, ‘and she works so hard.’
‘Yes, she does,’ I say.
‘She was washing down the stairs the last time I was here. Of the whole building.’
‘It must have been Thursday. Do you want — shall I get you a drink?’ It’s just after seven.
‘I thought we might go out,’ says Isabel. ‘Let me take you out to dinner.’
‘I’ve got some stuff here —’
‘Let’s go out. Do you never go out?’
I shrug.
‘There must be some place you like?’
‘Come to New York,’ Isabel says. ‘Come and stay with me.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
‘You can do your own thing,’ says Isabel. ‘There’s a lot of space. We’ll only meet when you want to.’
I shake my head.
‘You can see your brother.’
‘I’ll see him when he comes to Cairo.’
‘But he doesn’t come often.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you taken a vow or something?’
‘I just decided to come home. I’ve had enough of travelling.’ And would I go to New York without stopping in London? And would I stop in London without seeing my husband?
‘You’ll come one day. I’m sure of it.’
‘Will I?’
‘You’ll come when they’re showing my film.’
‘Sure.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Isabel. You don’t even know the rest of the story yet. You don’t know how it’ll turn out.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I can see it. The way you describe it, I can see it.’
I shake my head. I seem to be always shaking my head. But it’s brave of me to come even here, just across the river; to this restaurant where we had dined together. Where he had kissed my hands and I had pretended not to notice the stares of the waiters.
‘You want to bet?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘There you are, you see. You won’t bet.’
‘How are you doing with your work? Your millennium?’
She glances up at me, and we pause as the waiter loads the table with stuffed vine leaves, houmous with a sprinkling of oil, baba ghanoush, cheese and tomato salad, soft bread and toasted bread. ‘Did I feel a loaded pronoun there?’ she asks gently.
I smile. ‘She looks intelligent,’ Tahiyya had said.
‘Well, it is more yours than mine,’ I say.
Isabel helps herself to two vine leaves and some houmous. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I know there’s an awful lot I don’t know. That’s a start, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’ And I am, for I — with my banners of ‘fair-mindedness’, of ‘no prejudgement’ — have been always, primarily, seeing her as ‘the American’.
‘How is it going, though, your paper?’ I ask.
‘I’m not sure. People I’ve spoken to have been very cautious. They talk mainly of technology and I have this feeling they’re not telling me what’s really on their minds.’
‘It’s very difficult.’
‘But why? Why is it so difficult?’
‘Because you’re American.’
‘But I can’t help that.’
‘Of course you can’t. But it makes it difficult to talk to you about some things.’
‘But it shouldn’t. I have an open mind. What kind of things?’
‘It’ll be OK. Listen, we’ll find a way,’ I promise.
‘Anyway,’ Isabel says after a short silence, ‘I’ve gotten interested in so many other things now. I’m not giving up on it — but there are other things I want to do.’
‘But, Isabel, may I ask you this? You — you manage? With all this travelling and everything?’
‘Oh, my dad left me some money. And I’m selling my parents’ apartment. I’m not wealthy, but …’ She smiles and her perfect teeth sparkle in the light of the glass-covered candle on the table.
A candle-shade of opaque glass. Bell-shaped. Frosted. It was Anna’s brush that, dipped in aquamarine ink, traced the cunning, curving letters: gliding with the stem of an ‘alef’ bursting into flower, following the tail of a ‘ya’ as it erupts into a spray of fireworks that scatter the text with diacritics. She knew enough by then to make out the characters, but she could not yet readil
y tell where one word ended and another began.
I lift my head and look at Isabel, beautiful in her dusty pink velour top across the table. A dead father and a mother as good — or as bad — as dead. We are both orphans, she and I. A dead brother and an absent brother — I touch the underside of the wooden table quickly, secretly: my brother is absent but alive. A broken marriage — we share that too.
‘You know,’ I say, sounding casual, trying it out, ‘we used to come here, my husband and I, whenever we came to Cairo. It was our favourite restaurant. This is the first time I’ve been here without him.’
‘You’re divorced?’
‘No. But we’ve been separated for a long time.’
But I have sons and she hasn’t. Though my sons are not with me and I try not to spend my days waiting for them — waiting for the phone call: ‘Mama, I thought I might come and see you —’ Isabel’s hair falls glossy and straight to just below her jawline, and around the graceful neck lies a thin silver chain. She is at her beginning and I am close to my end. I smile at her.
‘You know, I’m really glad I got to know you,’ she says.
I reach out for a moment and pat the hand lying on the table between us. ‘You amazed Tahiyya with your Arabic,’ I say.
‘I’ve learned the alphabet and they’re giving me lists of words,’ she says, ‘but …’
‘But?’
‘I haven’t got a handle on it. How it works.’
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘you know the alphabet and you’ve got a dictionary. Everything stems from a root. And the root is mostly made up of three consonants — or two. And then the word takes different forms. Look —’ The old teacher in me comes to life as I hunt in my handbag for paper and a biro. ‘Take the root q-l-b, qalb. You see, you can read this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Qalb: the heart, the heart that beats, the heart at the heart of things. Yes?’
She nods, looking intently at the marks on the paper.
‘Then there’s a set number of forms — a template almost — that any root can take. So in the case of “qalb” you get “qalab”: to overturn, overthrow, turn upside down, make into the opposite; hence “maqlab”: a dirty trick, a turning of the tables and also a rubbish dump. “Maqloub”: upside-down; “mutaqallib”: changeable; and “inqilab”: a coup …’
So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you’re blown away —
‘Is there a book that tells you all this?’ Isabel asks.
‘I don’t know. There must be. I kind of worked it out.’
‘That’s really useful.’
‘I think so. It gives you a handle.’
‘So every time you use a word, it brings with it all the other forms that come from the same root.’
Yes, they come swimming along in a cluster, like ovae: the queen in the centre, and all the other eggs, big and little, who will not, this time, be fertilised …
‘Yes. Vaguely. Yes. Always look for the root: the three consonants. Or two.’
‘I’m going to work on this,’ she says.
‘Tell me what you come up with.’
Isabel folds the paper and puts in her handbag — her ‘purse’, she would say.
Outside the plate-glass windows night has fallen and along Maspero the cars are fewer and the trees no longer look dusty. The lights of the Bateau Omar Khayyam and el-Basha gleam on the river. The odd small boat drifts quietly along, and by the railings couples linger; the men in short-sleeved shirts, the girls in big headscarves. Single young men walking by turn their heads to stare.
When we leave the restaurant we walk in single file along the narrow pavement to where the car is parked by the Rameses Hilton. I decline Isabel’s offer of a drink. I’ve laid enough ghosts for one day. I want to get back to my flat, to my room.
We do a U-turn in front of the television building, still barricaded with sandbags since ‘67, and head back towards Qasr el-Nil bridge.
‘How’s Anna doing?’ Isabel asks.
‘You’re out of touch,’ I say.
‘I am not. You said she’d gone to Egypt — come to Egypt. I’ve read the Alexandria bit.’
‘Well, she’s in Cairo now, and she’s very much with the English set. The Agency and all that. The British embassy. She wants to learn Arabic’
‘Who’s she going to get to teach her?’
‘I don’t know yet. James Barrington knows Arabic.’
‘Has she found what she’s looking for — the Lewis stuff?’
‘Only a little bit; in the Bazaar. But not really, no.’
‘Will she? Find it?’
‘I don’t know. I hope so. But she stays a long time, so she must have.’
‘So there’s a scene in the Bazaar?’
‘Yes, complete with donkeys, and little old artisans and street cries and a frightened, disapproving lady’s maid and urchins yelling for baksheesh —’
‘You’re making fun of me.’
‘Only a little. And nicely.’
‘You know, you’re terribly like your brother.’
Ah. I’d wondered when we would get back to him. My brother.
9
… in this story of Turkish, Albanian and British rule in Egypt, it is Egypt that is really counting all the time. It [is like the story] of a public man with a clever wife. While she helps him he flourishes, and as soon as she doesn’t he falls, but it is not easy to show how this happened.
George Young, 1927
Cairo
25 January 1901
Dear Sir Charles,
It feels very strange these days not to be in England. I have a sense of momentous happenings — but somehow disembodied, for nothing around me reflects recent events except the lowered flags and general gloom at the Agency — but then I have not known it to be a particularly joyous place. The rest of the country continues, so far as I can see, as usual — the people celebrating the Festival of the end of the Fast of Ramadan, while I know that in England, even for those who have no part in them, the preparations for the Coronation and the Funeral must be stirring both hopes and fears of imminent change. It is most odd to think that the Queen is gone when she has always had such a fixed place in our firmament. I cannot say that I grieve for her; she was too remote — even when one met her — to inspire that emotion; it is more that I am surprised afresh every time the thought comes to me: She is no more.
Are you hopeful of a change for the better? You have always said that the Prince of Wales knows much more of what is going on in the world than his mother, or even Lord Salisbury. Will it be possible to stop the war in South Africa now? I spent the afternoon yesterday at the Sporting Club, and among the party was a gentleman from Finance by the name of Money (truly Charles Dickens himself could not have done better), who said that the South Africa Campaign has now cost us one hundred and fifty million pounds. I told him that at the beginning of the war you had estimated it would cost two hundred million and he said it might yet come to that. Pray do write and tell me what you think of all these events for, of my life in England, it is your conversation that I miss above all else.
Here, in Cairo, the days go on as usual. Today Mrs Butcher (of whom I believe I have written to you before) most kindly allowed me to accompany her on a visit to a wonderful old church, built upon the towers of the Roman Fort of Babylon in the old Christian district to the south of Cairo. It has a most curious wooden ceiling, like an upturned boat, and no domes of any kind. An old man there pointed out to us the image of the Virgin imprinted on a marble column. He spoke earnestly while pointing to it and Mrs Butcher later informed me that the Natives believe Our Lady left her image there as a token when she appeared in the year 969 to the Patriarch Abraham. The Caliph, al-Muizz, taking as his text Matthew 17:20, ‘Verily I say unto you. If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and
it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you’ — the Caliph had asked the Patriarch to move the Muqattam mountain, and the Patriarch had responded by secluding himself in the church to fast and to pray. On the third day, the Virgin appeared to him and a terrible earthquake shook the Muqattam. Al-Muizz was satisfied and ordered the church restored, and rebuilt the Church of Abusifin into the bargain. It is a pretty tale, but the image looks very like the icons of the time, and indeed the face is almost identical to that in another painting, hanging near the entrance to the church, of Our Lady, crowned, the infant Jesus on her knee, crowned also, and St John leaning forward to kiss His foot. Of this latter painting it is said that the Virgin’s eyes move to follow you wherever you go, but I put this to a practical test — as much as I felt was proper in a church — and I did not think her eyes followed me. It is a very fine church, though small and dark, and I saw that the inlaid woodwork of the panelling and the pulpit, the tiles on the walls, the oil lamps in their niches and the stone flagging of the floors have much in common with what I have seen in the older mosques. Would you not imagine that this points to some unity of divine impulse and aesthetic principle which has found expression in both?
The Muallaqah. Once on a school trip, many, many years ago, I too experimented with the Virgin’s eyes. I wanted them to follow me, but I couldn’t really say they did. I remember the guide that day telling us that the wooden rafters of the ceiling symbolised Noah’s Ark and the eight columns Noah’s family. He said that the thirteen marble columns supporting the pulpit were for Christ and the twelve disciples, and the one black column in their midst was Judas Iscariot. I felt then that I understood the building better. Now I am not sure how accurate he was, but it was a starting point. Against the warnings of our teachers we climbed down the uncertain iron staircase to the damp keep below, and we saw how the bottom had filled with stagnant water encrusted with thick green slime. Then a dark creature fluttered past our faces and someone yelled that there were bats down here and we backed off and hurried up the staircase. And what a relief it was to pass through the red velvet curtains and enter the dim comfort of the church and from there emerge once again into the light of day.
