by Ahdaf Soueif
I think we must be in some great warehouse by the river.
7.30 p.m.
I have told Sabir, who has been sitting on the floor by the wall utterly dejected, that it would be best if he informed our captors of my true character, for I feel certain that in their eyes this will entitle me to some privileges — at the least to a bathroom and some hot water, and at the best to a more speedy release. I believe he is speaking to them now.
9.30 p.m.
Sabir returned with much shaking of the head and muttering, and from what I could make out, his revelations seem only to have made matters worse and put an end to any possibility of our being released tonight. However, he had gained permission to show me to a small cubicle, where I found a jug of cold water and made myself as clean and comfortable as I could. He then brought me to this new chamber and placed in front of me some bread and milk.
Well, they would not feed me if they intended to do me harm. Oh, how I wish I knew where I was, and how I wish it were light! For this is a room of noble proportions. I have travelled around it with my little lamp and found high windows and recessed divans, rich hangings and a tiled floor leading with dainty steps to a shallow pool, and I feel, rather than see, the presence of colour and pattern. But it is all so dark and Sabir is so unhappy and I am now so sensible of exhaustion that I can do no more than choose one of the divans, lie on it and hope, eventually, to fall into a restoring sleep.
It is, I believe, a stroke of good fortune that, since both Emily and Mr Barrington know that I am intent on an expedition of several days, it will be some time before the alarm is raised. It may be possible, if our release is secured in good time, to prevent this matter ever becoming public knowledge — and to prevent the wrath of the Lord being visited on Mr Barrington and poor Sabir, who has made me come to the door and shown me how he proposes to sleep in the corridor, stretched across the threshold for my protection.
She is so calm. I did not have Anna down as an Intrepid. But there is no note of panic here. I cannot help thinking that when she chose to step off the well-trodden paths of expatriate life, Anna must have secretly wanted something out of the ordinary to happen to her. And now it had. But Sabir had not wanted any of it. I imagine him, plunged in misery. The expedition he had been forced to go on in the first place has gone horribly wrong. The effendis outside refuse to put their minds in their heads and fear God. And his charge, this Englishwoman, kidnapped and locked into a storeroom, what does she do? She sits down and opens a book. At first he had thought she was trying to comfort herself by reading the Bible. But then she started writing. Writing! The daughter of the madwoman! Truly they must be made of a different dough —
Anna does indeed fall asleep. Not so the young men, who are thrown into horrified confusion by the discovery that the young British gentleman they have kidnapped is a woman. They must have deliberated, discussed, even argued. They could not let her go, it would be foolishness, she would go straight to the Agency and the repercussions would be terrible. But they dare not simply keep her in their custody for a whole night. Yet what other course is open to them? And in the morning — if the morning should ever come — what will they do? They cannot advertise the kidnapping, send their demands to the Ministry of Justice as they had planned — their hostage is worthless to them now, for they can never say ‘we are holding a woman’. At last, they send a messenger (ride quickly but without arousing suspicion) — they send a messenger to a house in the fashionable district of Hilmiyya, and if he should not find the Basha at home, he should go to his sister’s house for he might be there. And he is to speak with no one, no one except the Basha or the Hanim, his sister, and tell them what has happened.
The messenger rides off into the night. The young men pace the floor. Sabir says his prayers and stretches out on the floor. Anna sleeps.
And now it is time to turn to yet another narrative: the sixty-four pages covered in close ruqa script in black ink. I have seen some of my grandmother’s Arabic writings before: scraps of verse, sections of articles. I have read her words and taken pleasure in the elegance of her hand and her mind. I ease the grey volume open, and place a paperweight at the corner of the page to pin it down — a small, bronze Pharaonic cat that my youngest son used to take such delight in and that we bought together one sunny afternoon at the museum in Tahrir Square. I start to translate my grandmother’s words for Isabel:
WHEN I FIRST SAW HER she was still dressed in the clothes of a man. I saw a man lying on the diwan, curled up on himself, his hat placed so that it covered his face and hair. And even though they had told me the whole story and how they had snatched an Englishman, then found out he was a woman — even though I knew that was the essence of the problem — it still felt strange to come upon an Englishman asleep in my mother’s haramlek, and I felt so ill at ease that I turned and went back out of the door and nearly banged into the manservant who must have been standing very close behind it and now leaped away looking even more miserable than he had when I first arrived. I pushed the door to and looked at him.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘Sure of what, ya Sett Hanim?’ His eyes on the floor just in front of my feet.
‘Sure that what’s inside there is a woman?’
‘Of course I’m sure, ya Sett Hanim: a woman and an Englishwoman and an important woman as well. My Ingelisi holds her very dear. He says her father has done him great favours and their house in England is very grand and now we’ve fallen into this catastrophe and how will we get out of it?’
‘May God protect us,’ was all I could say. I took him out on the open terrace and sat down and pointed to a spot on the floor. ‘Sit down,’ I said, ‘and tell me everything you know.’
‘I swear by God I don’t know anything. By the head of our master —’
‘Tell me what you know about her.’
‘An Englishwoman. Her name is Lady Anna — Sett Anna, it means. She came here two or three months ago and my Ingelisi knows her and knows her people and he said look after her like your eyes — my Ingelisi speaks Arabic and he said look after her like your eyes. I looked after her — but a lady like that, her father is a good man and her people are good people, what’s the need to dress in disguise and make problems? He said she wants to know your country and movement is always difficult for a woman —’
‘So you’ve done this before?’
‘Twice. Twice only, I swear by our Lord. Once we went up el-Darb el-Ahmar and she went into the old mosques, the antiquities, and once we went on the tram to the pyramids —’
‘And no one suspected you?’
‘Never. She rides like a man: donkeys, mules, horses, anything — and I tell people an Ingelisi who can’t speak —’
‘Can’t speak?’
‘Her voice, you’ll pardon me, the voice of a woman, what can we do about that? I tell them he fell on his head and lost the power of speech. They say, may God cure him. Like this also if anyone sees the bandages under the hat —’
‘She bandages her hair.’
‘There’s light upon you.’
‘And this time, where were you going?’
‘She wanted to go to Deir Sant Katrin.’
‘To Sinai?’ I could not hide my astonishment.
‘But first she wanted to sit in the coffee shops and listen to the storytellers. I said to him — to my Ingelisi — what will she get out of this? Stories and songs in Arabic and she only knows — you’ll excuse me — two words. He said, She’s put it in her head to go. I said, We get her the storytellers here. She sits like this in the garden like their queen — God have mercy on her soul now — and we get her the storytellers and she can choose what she wants to hear, she can listen to Abuzeid, listen to Antar, listen to a mawwal and make of it what she can; he said no, she wants to listen in a coffee shop. And now we’ve gone and what’s happened has happened and what shall we do now, ya Sett Hanim?’
I took off my shoes and habara and sat on the other diwan, across the room
from her, with my mind going round and round and not ending except on ‘May God protect us all’. The only hope I had was that my brother was due back the next day. What he would do I did not know, but he was my only hope. He had gone to take our mother to Tawasi in Minya to visit her brother and her lands, and he would come back to find, instead of one disaster, two: Husni, my husband, in jail and this Englishwoman in our father’s house.
I contemplated the sleeping figure: in the dark I could make nothing of her except that her build was slight and that she slept very peacefully; she had not moved a hand or a foot. I went to my mother’s room and fetched a woollen shawl which I spread over her. I said, The most important thing is when she wakes to make her feel safe and comfortable until my brother arrives to advise us. I sent orders to the young men that they should stay in the shrine with my father. They could not stay in the house, but I did not trust them not to get up to more foolishness if I let them go. I arranged some cushions for myself, covered myself with my habara, loosened my hair, and lay down with prayers in my mind for my husband and for us all.
11
The years like great black oxen tread the world
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
W. B. Yeats
Cairo, 29 June 1997
Sleep did not come easily to me last night. I came back from my night on the town with Isabel, kicked off my shoes, undressed, had a cool shower and found I had no wish whatsoever to go to bed. In the living room I switched on the television and the unmistakable voice of Umm Kulthum swelled into the room: there she was in black and white, her head thrown back, her hair swept up in the trademark chignon. I fixed myself a drink with lots of ice and sat out on the dark balcony, listening. ‘Nazra — a glance I thought was a greeting/and would quickly pass …’ I could see into the lit-up living room of my neighbours across the street: father, mother and grown-up children sat in a semicircle, the television hidden from my view catching their outlines in its flickering blue light. ‘Nazra.’ El-Sett lingers and lingers on the ‘n’. Her voice rises and falls and trembles and sways with the one consonant. When she finally completes the word ‘nazra’, the audience roars. Down below, the young men sit on the cars. An aeroplane drifts lazily through the sky. Something has come back to me. Some sense of — possibility. I look down at my hands: one of them is gently stroking the other.
Whatever it is, it’s very tentative and perhaps best left in the dark for a while. Maybe it will grow. A glance I thought was a greeting/And would quickly pass/But in it were promises/ and vows/and wounds and pain —
Sucking on my last piece of ice, I switch off the television and go to my bedroom. I look through the last pages I’ve written and I am tempted to sit down and continue, but my eyes hurt and I know it would be unwise. I get into my bed and lie there, under a cotton sheet, thinking about my grandmother — or, rather, following a chain of thoughts set off by the thought of my grandmother. That March night in 1901, when she snatched up her habara and ran into her carriage and entered the haramlek of the old house and saw Anna for the first time, she would have been in her twenty-seventh year and married to my grandfather, Husni al-Ghamrawi, her maternal cousin: a radical, French-educated young lawyer and a fully paid-up member of Lord Cromer’s ‘talking classes’. My father would have been one year old. Headed for the Walida school, then the Khediwiyya, then the Military Academy and later the Cavalry Division. He met my mother, Maryam al-Khalidi, during a visit to our cousins in ‘Ein al-Mansi in Palestine, and married her in a splendid Jerusalem wedding in 1935. My brother was born in 1942 in the Khalidis’ big house in West Jerusalem which I have only ever seen in photographs, although I know it is still standing. When the war ended and the threat to my mother’s homeland became clear to everyone, my father resigned from the army and led a volunteer battalion into Palestine. He fought in Birsheeba, al-Khalil and Bethlehem. After the disaster of ‘48, when families and communities dispersed across the globe, and my mother was among the thirty thousand Arabs who lost their homes to the State of Israel, my father brought her and their son to Egypt, retired from the army and settled on his land in Tawasi. I was born there, in the house on the farm, in the year of Nasser’s revolution. There should have been two more of us, whether sisters or brothers I don’t know. But my mother had miscarried of them both, one in ‘45 and the other in ‘47. I think of them sometimes. I used to think of them more while my mother was alive — on her behalf, really, wondering whether it would have made her lot any better to have more children around her after my father died and she and I were left alone. They had sent my brother to Eisenhower’s America in ‘56. They might have sent him to Russia, for the music there was just as good — maybe better. But he spoke English, and America had just stopped Britain, France and Israel bombing Suez and Port Said, so they sent him to America and he stayed. Not through any particular decision, but step by step: college, the Philharmonic, the almost instantly successful career. He had come to us from time to time to visit, and he had performed in Cairo. When I was thirteen, on his last visit before my father died, he played for us in Hilmiyya, on the old piano that had always stood in the house and that was always kept tuned although no one used it between my brother’s visits. I remember my father settling down to listen, his eyes soft with pride, but when I glanced at him later I thought I saw something like regret move across his face. I wondered then how much my father missed him and whether he found it strange that his son’s life was firmly anchored there: in New York.
She had wanted to go home, my mother. I only realised that towards the end. She had spoken about it, of course, about Palestine: her school, her friends, her mother’s room rich with tapestries, her father’s library, the theatre, the park on the Jaffa Road where the municipal band played in the afternoons, the picnics at the olive groves in the harvest season, the house filled with the sweet smell of newly pressed oil, the jars full of the thick, luminous liquid. And I had listened, I suppose, first as children do, storing up the images, then later with adolescent cynicism to those tales of an earthly paradise where everything was always as it should be. But it was only in ‘67, after the war, when our world was filled with the voice of Fayruz lamenting the fall of Jerusalem ‘of the light-filled houses, flower of all cities’ and my mother embarrassed me by suddenly breaking out in sobs with a bar of Nabulsi soap pressed to her nose at the grocer’s, that I realised she was homesick.
I loved my mother, and I lived with her for twenty-two years, but it seems to me now that I only ever saw her dimly or in part. I wish I had listened more carefully. I wish she had left me something; a letter, perhaps, written on a quiet evening, when I was out and she was alone. A letter that I would read when I was older, and more able to understand.
It was later, much later, when the need to return was upon me and I yearned for the great, cool hall of our house in Tawasi, for the smell of the fields and the black, starry night of the countryside before the High Dam brought electricity to the villages — when I yearned for Cairo, for Abu el-Eia bridge, for the feel of the dust gritty under my fingers as I trailed my hand along the iron railing, for the smell of salted fish that met you as you drew near to Fasakhani Abu el-Ela, for the sight of fruit piled high in symmetrical pyramids outside a greengrocer’s shop and the twist of the brown paper bag in which you carry the fruit home, when I yearned even for the khamaseen winds that make you cover your face against the dust and with bowed head hurry quickly home — it was only then that I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return?
My mother died. Just as I finished university, she died. And I went abroad.
And then came back to piece together what I could of the Cairo where I had grown up. A flyover squats over Abu el-’Ela bridge and renders it obsolete. They’re even thinking of selling it for s
crap. The greengrocers still pile the fruit high but mostly they give it to you in a thin blue plastic bag and they don’t throw in an extra piece On top of the sale’. But the salt-fish shop is still there, and the old banyan tree in Zamalek still stands, although it is so beleaguered by concrete that I cannot see where its coming tendrils can take root. I had sold the house in Hilmiyya many years before and a great concrete car park had risen in its place.
I said to Isabel, ‘Come on then, let’s see if we can find bits of my Cairo for you.’
In the afternoon we went to the Muallaqah. We listened to a guide tell a group of schoolchildren about Noah’s Ark and Noah’s family. The pillars supporting the pulpit, he said, are for the Disciples. They are in pairs because Christ sent them out to preach the Word in pairs. And the black pillar in the middle is because the Word came to save black and white alike. Judas Iscariot has made way for political correctness. We sat in the quiet pews and walked round the chapels and tried, once again, to get the Virgin’s eyes to follow us. At the baptismal font Isabel stopped. ‘Look,’ she said. I looked where she pointed: a series of wavy lines.
‘Water,’ I said.
‘The hieroglyph for water,’ she said. We looked at each other in delight: another layer.
In the early evening we walked the length of Shari’ al-Muizz; we ate sandwiches of clotted cream and honey off the stall by the Mosque of Sultan Qalawun. We sat in the small goldsmith’s shop and watched him mend and polish a pair of earrings that had sat in their box on my dressing table for two years. We crossed Shari al-Azhar and plunged into the Ghuriyya and beyond to the Khiyamiyya and bought a small green and blue tapestry and were treated to tea. We walked down Shari Muhammad Ali and looked in the shop windows at the lutes and tambourines inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and we followed the sounds of drums and zagharid till we came upon a wedding and we joined in the clapping and the singing and the eating and had our photograph taken and the earrings made a good present for the bride, who even now must be in bed with her new husband.
