by Ahdaf Soueif
‘A fabric. A tapestry. Pharaonic —’
‘Oh, yes, yes. I know the one you mean. No? Really? You mean they’re a pair?’
‘I think so. I can’t be sure, though. Can you bring yours with you next time you come over?’
‘But it’s a huge thing —’
‘Come on. You can roll it up. I need to see them together.’
‘But it’s framed —’
‘Unframe it. You’ve got that handyman — what’s his name —’
‘I’d rather pay for you to come to New York.’
‘But I can’t. I’m taken over by this trunk. I’m practically living inside it. When I read the journals I feel as if I’m there, a hundred years ago. I’m putting together the whole picture and I know everything that happened and wasn’t written down —’
‘Great. Yalla. Let your imagination run away with you.’
My grandmother had received the message, sensed the danger there was to her husband from the day’s events, thrown on her habara, got into her carriage and driven to her mother’s house, leaving her baby behind — with a houseful of nannies and maids, I imagine. Her entry is undated, and I believe she wrote down the entire story later, as a record and a testimony. Not so Anna, who wrote in her journal at the end of every day, and sometimes in the middle.
13 March
I woke up from what must have been a deep and peaceful slumber and my first thought on waking was that I had slipped into one of those paintings the contemplation of which had given me such rare moments of serenity during the illness of my dear Edward. There above me was the intricate dark wooden latticework and beyond it a most benevolent, clear blue sky. I stretched and found that I was covered with a large woollen shawl in a subtle grey with a thousand small pink rosebuds strewn over it in delicate embroidery. A moment later my circumstances and the fact of my captivity came flooding back into my consciousness and jolted me out of my indolence and I rose to a sitting position with — I believe — the intention of trying the door of the chamber to see whether it was locked. But as I sat up, my altered perspective brought me once again into the world of those beloved paintings, for there, across the room, and on a divan similar to mine, a woman lay sleeping. She had not been there the night before, of that I was certain for I had gone all round the room with my lamp and was assured of my solitude. She must have come in while I slept. I wondered who she was and whether she was the owner of this house I found myself in. She was Egyptian, and a lady — the first I had seen without the black cloak and the veil. She had pulled a cover of black silk up to her waist, her chemise above that was the purest white, and then again, her hair vied with the silken cover for the depth and lustre of its black. Her skin was the colour of gently toasted chestnut, and she lay on cushions of deep emerald and blue, and the whole tableau was framed, yet again, by the lattice of a mashrabiyya. That she was something to do with the young men who had brought me here I felt I could be certain of. But what? What had she to do with my abduction? I had been abducted as a man and in the Oriental tales I have read it has happened that a Houri or a princess has ordered the abduction of a young man to whom she has taken a fancy. She would have him brought to her castle beyond the Mountains of the Moon, and there she would offer him marriage. And if he doffed his disguise and was revealed to be a woman? Why, they would fall laughing into each other’s arms and become sworn sisters from then on.
My bandages had become entangled in my hair and I was sure I presented a sorry sight. I worked my hair free and brushed it through with my fingers. I decided that — whoever this Houri was — it must be she who had with such consideration covered me as I slept, and the feeling that I had the night before that I was somehow in safe hands in this house entered my heart again, and this time it did not seem so unreasonable.
I OPENED MY EYES AND found her looking at me. A beautiful European woman, her hair flowing to her shoulders in free golden waves, the bandages it had been tied up in last night fallen in an untidy heap to the floor. Her white shirt was open at the neck, and she sat with her arms crossed in the lap of the brown riding trousers, her feet steady on the floor in their heavy brown boots. I turned on my side to be more comfortable, smiled into her serious face and wished her good morning in Arabic. She repeated my greeting instead of responding to it and when I asked if she spoke Arabic she shook her head with a small apologetic smile. I pointed at myself, said ‘English’ and shook my head too. We gazed at one another, then I said ‘Vous parlez Français?’ and her face was lit up by a wide smile of relief.
‘Oui, oui,’ she said eagerly. ‘Et vous aussi, madame?’ She tilted her head slightly to one side, waiting for my answer.
‘I have lived in Paris for a while with my husband.’
‘Ah, this is most fortunate,’ she cried, clasping her hands together — and so we started, in this strange situation in which we found ourselves, to pull at the edges of conversation and to weave the beginnings of our friendship.
I explained to her the circumstances of her abduction and apologised for it most fervently. I said that I would wish to set her free upon the instant but that the two young hot-heads pacing outside — her abductors — were completely opposed to this, that I thought their prevailing motive now was fear, and that I had sent word to my brother’s house that he should come here as soon as he could. I assured her that upon his arrival this situation would be ended and I promised her that no harm whatsoever would come to her or her servant.
What I find important to record here is that no mark of fear ever showed itself upon her. In fact, I was surprised that it did not seem that her first interest was the regaining of her liberty. She was completely natural in her looks and behaviour and so interested in her own abduction — in the events that had led up to it, in the house in which she found herself, in my opinions with regard to the whole event — that I found myself quite forgetting that she was a stranger. And what a stranger: the British Army of Occupation was in the streets and in the Qasr el-Nil Barracks, and the Lord was breakfasting in Qasr el-Dubara. Because of them my uncle had been banished and my father cloistered in his shrine these eighteen years and now my husband was in jail. And here I sat with one of their women, dressed in the clothes of a man, snatched in the night by my husband’s friends and imprisoned in my father’s house — and we sat in my mother’s reception room and felt our way towards each other as though our ignorance, one of the other, were the one thing in the world that stood between us and friendship.
During this first meeting, it was she who was the more curious and the more full of questions, and it was easy to talk to her; her mind was quick, her sympathy was ready. I told her the stories of our family and she asked about the details and I felt she wove each one into a picture in her head and by the time, just after sunset, when I heard the noise of the carriage wheels and general commotion that signalled my brother’s arrival, I had learned too of her mother’s early death, her father’s saddened life, her marriage and the circumstances of her widowhood and her great regard for Sir Charles, the father of her departed husband, may God’s mercy be upon him. I had learned of Egypt’s attraction for her and formed an idea of the life she had lived since she had come here. She spoke simply and with sincerity and when she turned to the window, her eyes, which seemed oddly dark with all that golden hair, took your breath away with their deep violet light.
I had stumbled — no, I had been abducted into a house I did not know — an event I did not understand. Presently, however, the fair occupier of the opposite divan awoke and, with a smile, bade me good morning in her native tongue. She soon revealed herself, after some dumb-show, to be as reasonably well-versed in French as I and, this being established, she was much at pains to put me at my ease and was clearly relieved that I did not fall to fainting or screaming, but in truth I did not feel I had need of such stratagems — abhorrent to me by nature in any case. For it seemed so odd just to sit there — in one of my beloved paintings, as it were, or one of the Nights of Edward Lan
e. I took the same pleasure in my gentle jailer that I would have done from those: her appearance, the formal courtesy of her gestures, the melodious intonation of her voice — I had the oddest sense that I had seen her before. And she seemed so utterly unaware of her charm; she gathered her silk robes together with such simplicity and pushed her small foot into a dainty gold-brocaded slipper as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She called for a breakfast of clotted cream and honey and served me with winning gestures; but then the tale she told was not out of the mediaeval East but very much of our times. Her name is Layla al-Baroudi, she has been married for five years to her cousin (the son of her mother’s brother), a young lawyer by the name of Husni al-Ghamrawi (it appears that a woman here does not take her husband’s name upon marriage. Layla did not seem to see any necessity for this. ‘Why would I leave my name?’ she asked. ‘When it is suitable, I am Madame Ghamrawi, but I am always Layla al-Baroudi’) and they have a son, Ahmad, who is one year old. Her husband studied law in Paris for a year and she accompanied him there and made it her business to learn French. On the circumstances in which we found ourselves, she tried to explain to me their cause, but I asked so many questions, and she was a teacher of such wakeful conscience, that we found ourselves roaming through the entire nineteenth century and into Turkey and Europe and Japan and Suez, and I understood that even with what I already know about this country there was much that I did not know and perhaps might never learn.
Of my abductors, I learned that they belonged to a group of young Radicals who wished to retaliate for the jailing of my hostess’ husband (during a peaceful demonstration) by holding an Englishman hostage, and that she did not like their methods, and she was sure both her husband and her brother would take her view.
I believe that the procession that had held up our carriage on our way to Abdin Palace, and that we had taken for a celebration of some kind, was in reality that demonstration.
‘THEY’VE GOT ONE OF OURS, we got one of theirs.’
As I hurried down the corridor, I heard Ibrahim’s voice, the younger of the two, pretending he did not care, pretending to be nonchalant.
‘They arrested one of ours, we abducted one of theirs.’
My brother’s voice was precise and clipped. I stood behind the mashrabiyya, looking down into the entrance hall: he was in the formal dress of the Council and had not even taken off his tarbush yet. I knew my brother; he was angry, but he was trying to be reasonable. Ibrahim spoke again:
‘What difference does it make? At all events we were only trying to secure —’
‘It makes a big difference. They acted within the law and you acted outside it. You want to secure a fair trial for Husni Bey? You want to ensure due process of law — by breaking the law?’
‘Ya Basha, the law serves the English.’
‘The law serves no one. The law may be bent — or got around — but if we wish the English to respect our law we cannot suddenly put it to one side and say, but this time we will act without reference to it.’
‘They occupied our lands through violence and they won’t leave except through violence —’
And now my brother no longer hid his anger. He turned full towards the younger man and his voice dropped and a new and menacing note came into it:
‘Are you going to make a patriotic speech, ya Ibrahim, here in my house? Have you forgotten who you’re speaking to? And what is it you are defending? If even an abduction you were not up to? You want to snatch someone, snatch an officer — or at least a soldier, not a woman who’s come to look at the pyramids and go away!’
Ibrahim and the other young man with him, the one I did not know, looked down at the floor. ‘We did not realise,’ the other young man muttered.
‘And how dare you bring her here? You carry out an abduction and bring the person here? To my family’s home? Without my knowledge?’
‘It was a mistake,’ the young man muttered.
‘A mistake that you have to put right. Now.’
‘We shall put it right, ya Basha.’
‘Good. What do you propose to do?’
The two young men looked briefly at each other.
‘We are waiting for your opinion, ya Basha,’ the younger one said.
‘My opinion is that you should go and hand yourselves in — and take her with you. Return her to her Agency and surrender yourselves to the police.’
The two young men glanced at each other again.
‘Ya Basha, it would be an honour to die or to be banished in the cause of one’s country …’ Ibrahim hesitated.
‘Yes?’ prompted my brother.
‘But to be jailed for years for an act without consequence — an act that made no difference — what heroism is there in that?’
My brother turned away. He paced the hall, his prayer beads hanging from the hands clasped loosely behind his back. He paced the width of the room two, three, four times. When he stopped and spoke, it was in a gentler voice.
‘What I want you to understand,’ he said, ‘is that abducting — or in any way harming — ordinary people is never an act of heroism. It is wrong. And it has repercussions. This is not the way we want to go. It goes in the balance against everything we have tried to do over the last eighteen years. What the British want is to accuse us of fanaticism. If we give them reason, we lose out.’
‘Your history is well known, ya Basha,’ Ibrahim and his friend muttered in respectful voices.
‘And I don’t want it jeopardised. Understood?’ my brother said.
I waited, and presently Layla — with what friendly ease that name comes to me already — reappeared. She slipped into the room, closed the door behind her and sat down on the divan opposite me again. ‘I think my brother will be coming soon,’ she said. And within moments there was a scampering sound as of someone moving hurriedly away from the door. Firm, loud footsteps approached — and paused. A loud cough, and then a knock.
Layla opened the door and said something which ended in the word of welcome that I have come to recognise: ‘Itfaddal’, and after another pause he came in. He bent to kiss his sister’s head and then, as she hung on to his arm, she said, in French, ‘Anna, this is my brother Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Abeih, I present to you Lady Anna Winterbourne.’
‘Madame,’ he said, turning to me with a slight bow, ‘I beg,’ he said in perfect French, ‘I beg that you will accept my sincere apologies.’ And it was at that moment that I understood my feeling that I had met his sister before; for there was that face that had arrested my attention at the Khedive’s ball and that I believe I saw fleetingly at the Costazi just moments before I was overpowered by the music. As proud as the devil, I thought …
‘Monsieur, there is no need for apologies,’ I replied, ‘and certainly not on your part. In your house I have met with nothing but kindness.’
I am glad that I spoke with seeming presence of mind, but in truth, though his eyes rested on me but for a moment, it was enough to bring me to a consciousness of the strangeness of my appearance, my man’s riding trousers and shirt — unseemly in themselves, and hardly fresh now, having been slept in and worn for two days — my hair unwound from its bandages but tumbled and unbrushed. The thought came into my head that Emily would be mortified if she witnessed this little tableau, and I kept my eyes on the floor and trusted to that instinct I have observed in Oriental gentlemen that after the first look he would look directly at me no more.
‘My sister has told me the story,’ he continued. ‘She has explained that you have not yet been missed?’
There was a note in his voice — disapproval is too strong a word, but it was clear he considered my escapade pure foolishness — that I had put myself in harm’s way, as it were, and somehow not being missed made it worse. I felt as though he would have preferred it if I had been missed. I said nothing.
‘I do not know what your wishes are,’ he continued, ‘with regard to reporting this matter to the authorities. If you choose to do so w
e will, of course, confirm your account and lend whatever assistance lies in our power. But the first thing to do is to return you immediately to your hotel. And to ensure your safety, I will accompany you there myself. Tomorrow, you may wish to think about the proper course —’
‘There is no need for that, monsieur,’ I said. I glanced up and caught his look of surprise, and Layla’s too. I think he is not used to being interrupted — or contradicted.
‘There is no need,’ I repeated. ‘As to reporting this incident, I do not wish it as I fully understand the circumstances, and as no harm has come to me but on the contrary it has given me the opportunity of making the acquaintance of your charming sister. And now, if you would be kind enough to order our horses to be prepared, Sabir and I can continue our journey and need impose no longer on your kindness.’
Brave words. Why then, even as I uttered them, did a cold finger touch my heart and the journey ahead seem so arduous an undertaking?
‘Surely you cannot mean to go riding off into the desert now?’ Layla was at my side and gazing earnestly into my face.
‘But yes,’ I said, ‘yes, I do.’
‘May I sit down?’ he asked, indicating Layla’s divan.
‘Itfaddal,’ I said and was rewarded by a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth and a muffled laugh from Layla.
‘But seriously, Anna,’ she said, as she and I sat side by side facing him, ‘after all this?’
‘If I go back now,’ I said, ‘Emily, my maid, and Mr Barrington at the Agency both knew my intentions. Where would I say I had been — what account can I give of the last two days?’
‘The man can be silenced,’ he said, ‘And you can tell your maid you lost heart and decided to turn back.’
‘She thinks I am with a group.’
‘What the maid thinks is of no consequence,’ he said impatiently. ‘What matters is your safety.’
