The Map of Love

by Ahdaf Soueif

  My mother was at the wedding of Mustafa Pasha Fahmi’s youngest daughter. I sent for her. I put Nur to bed and made Hasna stay with her. She was no use downstairs and kept calling, ‘Sidi! Sidi el-Basha!’ I told Nur her father was fine and her mother was looking after him and he just needed to sleep. Coming down the stairs I leaned on Ahmad, but my heart had been wrenched loose and was stumbling and banging itself against the walls of my chest. I could only draw my breath in short, shallow pulls. I was whispering ‘ya Rabb, ya Rabb’ continuously. I put water to boil and I said to Ahmad, ‘It is a wound, just a wound, Khalu is strong and the doctors are on the way’, but fear was a tight band round my chest and my heart kept banging into it.

  As I went downstairs I heard the galloping outside. All night the horses were galloping to and from our house, and as I went into the salamlek Milton Bey hurried in, already opening his bag.

  Three bullets. Two in his stomach and one in his back. Milton Bey and Sa’d Bey said they would have to take them out and Mirghani went upstairs to bring the boiling water and Husni came and they lit a spirit lamp and they said Fudeil and Mirghani and Sabir should stay and we should leave. Ahmad would not leave his uncle’s side. Anna and I went outside into the courtyard and stood close by the wall. And we prayed and prayed and his first clenched cry of pain threw Anna into my arms and we held on to each other crouched by that wall until Husni came and said, ‘They’ve done everything they can. They will wait outside if you want to go in.’

  Milton Bey and Sa’d Bey stayed all night with us. At first he was not conscious, then he came to and spoke with Husni. Then he spoke with me and he told me — he told me what a good and gallant brother tells the sister he knows would give her life for him.

  Then he spoke to Anna, who was kneeling on the floor at his side.

  ‘Anna, listen to me.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Anna, listen. You have made me —’ He stops.

  ‘Please don’t talk. Please, please, don’t talk.’

  ‘Be quiet. Be quiet and listen. We have been good together. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers, ‘yes.’ The word catches in her throat. ‘I have been so happy with you. So happy.’ She is kissing his hands, rubbing her forehead into his arm, rubbing herself into him.

  ‘I want you to live your life —’

  ‘I love you, I love you —’

  ‘I know. Hush. You have to be brave now. For Nur. Remember your promise.’

  ‘This is my home.’

  ‘This was your home. Because of me. I don’t want her to have to fight so hard.’

  ‘I want to stay.’

  ‘No. Anna. It won’t do. It only worked because of me.’

  ‘You are so arrogant —’

  Sharif Basha raises an eyebrow and gives her a look and she puts her hands in his hair. ‘Oh, please,’ she begs, ‘please, try —’

  ‘Bring her up — like you.’

  ‘My love,’ she says, ‘Oh, my love, my love …’

  OUR MOTHER CAME INTO THE room and he lifted his eyes to her. ‘Mama?’

  She bent over him, reached for his hand. ‘Sharif. Habibi. Ibni. What happened?’

  He raised her hand to his mouth. ‘Pray for me, ya Ummi’, and his sigh was like when he sat down in the entrance hall and took off his boots after a long ride on a hot summer’s day. My mother put her other hand over his eyes and said the shahada for him before her legs gave way —

  Dawn breaks and the sun comes up on a house of keening women. Their voices rise from the salamlek, loud with anguish, tailing off into despair: ya habibi, ya habibi, ya ibni ya habibi, my son, my brother, my beloved, ya habibi.

  * * *

  AND AS FOR ME, A hundred — a thousand times a day I think of him. I think I’ll ask Abeih this, or Abeih will laugh so when he hears that. I wait for his step when I hear the sound of wheels on the gravel. When the coffee runs low I think we had better get — then I remember. I see him in a turn of Ahmad’s head, in the look he has started to give me — and I catch my son to me and hug him and kiss him and turn him away before he can see me weep. He has grieved for his uncle and taken the parting from Nur very hard and asks whether he might not go to study in England.

  Anna writes to us often. With news of Nur. For herself she has no news, she says, only news of Nur. She paints. And she looks after her old kinsman — Sir Charles. And her garden.

  My father is in his shrine. We do not know whether he understands what has happened. My mother is grown very quiet. She prays a great deal. But Ahmad and Mahrous can still make her smile.

  Mabrouka has grown into an old woman overnight. She sits by the door of my father’s shrine, where Anna’s loom used to stand. She mutters incessantly, whether the Qur’an or spells we do not know. On the day after my brother’s murder she rolled up Anna’s tapestry in three bags of muslin. One she gave to me ‘for Ahmad’, she said, ‘and his children after him’. The other she gave to Anna for Nur. I do not know what she did with the third. The loom itself we carried into the shrine for my father would not allow us to remove it. Sometimes he sits at it, threading a ball of silk as he used to watch Anna do. But he has made nothing.

  Sabir is heartbroken and blames himself. But he threw himself over my brother and was wounded in the shoulder. What more was there for him to do?

  Husni is very tender and very good to me. They have not yet found out who did it. They say it could be Coptic fanatics in retaliation for Boutros Basha’s assassination. They say it could be Muslim fanatics for my brother’s position on women’s rights and because he married Anna and was known to wear her image on a chain round his neck — and so that the Copts would be blamed. They say it could be British agents to get the Copts blamed and increase the divisions in the country and rid themselves of a national leader. They say it could be the Khedive out of spite — and not fearful of consequences, since Lord Kitchener would be glad to see my brother dead. They say it could be bigger people than all these. They say — they say. My mother has stopped listening. Husni says my brother’s last orders were that nobody should be allowed to make use of his murder.

  Husni says there will be war. And that will be our chance to get rid of the Occupation. He says I should try to organise some more lectures for women at the university. He says I should start a new magazine and get Anna to write for us from England. And Juliette from France. He says Abeih would have liked that. El-Basha would have liked that, he says.

  El-Basha. My brother. Sometimes I open the partition curtains and peep through the mashrabiyya into the salamlek, as though I might find him there, as though maybe if I wait, if I wait long enough, the great doors will swing open and there he will be, handing his cane and his tarbush to Mirghani, his head lifted to listen for the sounds of life, for the sounds of us women inside, here, in the house.

  Tuesday 2nd Safar 1332

  [agreeing with] 30

  December 1913

  An End

  And so I beg the darkness

  Where are you, my loving man?

  Why gone from her whose love

  Can pace you, step by step, to your desire?

  Song, Egypt, 1300 BC

  And so he dies. And Amal, who has known the ending all along, yet has loved him like his mother, like his sister, like his wife, mourns him with fresh grief. She reads and rereads Anna’s last entry:

  I have tried, as well as I could, to tell her. But she cannot — or will not — understand, and give up hope. She waits for him constantly.

  She scans the page and the pages beyond it, willing Anna to write more; to write to her again. But there is nothing. Anna’s letters to Layla, where are they? And what o. Nur? And Ahmad, her own father? And Mahrous? There is nothing more. Amal finally has to close the journals. She smooths down each sheet of each letter and cutting and arranges them neatly in files. But she has not the heart to bury them back in the trunk. They remain in her bedroom, on the table by the window. Her brother will want to see them.

 
; She goes to the family mausoleum in the City of the Dead. A special visit for Sharif Basha al-Baroudi; the old resident sheikh chants Suret Yasin especially for him.

  Cairo, 21 August 1998

  He holds Amal’s eyes as he feeds. He sucks hard and fast on the bottle, his hands curled into fists, pumping from time to time with effort. His face is clear and open, his eyes hold hers. When the teat folds with the pressure and she eases it out of his mouth, he protests and wriggles for the moment that it takes to fill with air, then gasps with eagerness when she touches it once again to his lips. He sucks a few times, then lets the teat lie idle in his mouth. And then the decisive push with the tongue and he turns his face away, interested once again in the light and the moving shadows. Holding him close against her shoulder, patting his back, Amal walks around the room crooning to the baby until two deep burps tell them both that all is well.

  Amal lowers Sharif into her arms and looks at him. He gazes back at her with wide-open black eyes. ‘So? You don’t want to go to sleep yet?’ She shakes her head at him and he stretches out a hand. Her older son used to do that: wake up at three in the morning, feed and then fuss until she put him in his chair and sat opposite him, chatting, singing, playing with him. ‘Let’s go and change your nappy, then.’ She holds him to her and walks down the long corridor, quietly past the room where Isabel lies sleeping and into her own bedroom. She lays him down on the bed and plants a kiss on the sole of each soft foot. ‘OK, son of Omar al-Ghamrawi. Don’t you dare pee on my bed.’

  Later, she stands by the window. The glass is closed but the shutters are open and she lowers the baby’s feet to the table, holding him upright against her so he can look out at the stars. The day is the twenty-ninth of Rabi’ al-Thani and the moon is nowhere to be seen. Tomorrow a crescent so thin as to be almost indiscernible will rise once more into the sky, but for tonight, all is blackness. The baby stamps his bare feet against the table, against Anna’s journals, against the files. He looks down and, following his gaze, Amal picks up the bronze statuette. In her hand, the cat sits erect: the front legs straight, the back a graceful slope from the pointy tips of the ears to the tail curled gracefully round the haunches. ‘This belongs to your cousin,’ she says. ‘Yes, yes, you don’t know it yet, but you have cousins and a brother and a sister. Lots and lots of people, and they’re all going to love you so much -and it’s too heavy for you to carry so don’t even try.’ She moves the cat away from the baby’s reaching hand and bends to place it under the table where he will not see it. As she straightens up, his attention shifts once again to the table: to the shiny black oval pebble. ‘Your papa gave me this,’ she says, holding it out on her palm, the baby safely enclosed in the circle of her arm. ‘Yes, he did,’ she says, ‘we were walking on the beach and he found this and gave it to me.’ The little hand stretches out and feels the stone, but the fingers slip on the shiny surface when he tries to grasp it. The feet kick against the table and the eyes lift to Amal’s. ‘And he gave me lots of other things,’ she says to him as she brings her face close to rub noses gently. She lifts him up against her chest and starts to walk around the room. ‘He played with me when I was little and helped me out when I was big and he’s been my bestest friend and bestest brother — well, only brother — and he’s your papa too, and he’s brave and he’s handsome and he makes music,’ she sings softly as she walks and rocks the baby, ‘wonderful music …’ She rocks the baby.

  She lays the sleeping child by his mother and places a long pillow at his other side. Asleep, Isabel stirs and places a hand on Sharif’s leg.

  The light from the newly opened pharmacy downstairs spills out on the road. Men are unloading cartons off a van and carrying them into the new supermarket. Down the road the small grocer’s shop is still open. The young men sit on the cars, their hands in their pockets, their feet kicking rhythmically at the bumpers. Warda’s voice and the drums and castanets surrounding it swirl around them: ‘I’ve stopped loving you/Loving you/So don’t love me/Take back your heart/ Oh your heart/And set me free —’

  In the living room Amal picks up the newspaper she has not had a chance to read. Monica Lewinsky and her blue dress take up two pages. Sudan should not be partitioned. Clinton vows to avenge America on Ben Laden. Albright threatens action against Iraq. Torture in Palestinian jails — she folds the newspaper and throws it into the big wastepaper basket. It is very hard, Anna had written a hundred years ago, not to feel caught up in a terrible time of brutality and we — Amal edits — are helpless to do anything but wait for history to run its course. She puts the tape her brother had brought back from Ramallah into the tape player, stretches out on the sofa under the ceiling fan and lights a cigarette.

  ‘I have a ship

  In the harbour

  And God’s forgotten us

  In the harbour —’

  They have not heard from Omar since he left Sarajevo. In the soft light of the table lamp the iced hibiscus tea is as red as blood. Will he stay long enough to read the story? To imagine Anna with her? Anna, on the boat back to England: The child sleeps. Nur al-Hayah: light of my life … She waits for him constantly … And Layla. Amal had wept over Layla’s last pages. She had her husband and her son, but her brother, her beloved Abeih Sharif, had been snatched away from her. And Anna had taken her daughter and gone. Did they live in England? How did Nur meet her Frenchman? Did she and Ahmad never meet again? Did Anna decide that Nur would leave the East behind her for ever, would keep her world in one place — or was it the war that decided for her, for them all? And the old Baroudi house grown silent once again — would Omar want to see it? Isabel would surely want to take him there —

  ‘My pipe in my hand

  And a fur on my back

  Filled with silver

  Filled with cash —’

  On the wall Anna’s tapestry, still in three pieces, hangs from the makeshift batten Madani has rigged up for it. Yet again Amal wonders about that middle panel, about Horus. Where had he come from? She tries to put the question out of her mind. She reminds herself of Harry Boyle’s letter — of how that had been a puzzle for Sharif Basha and his friends, and how she had stumbled upon the answer ninety years later. But once more she goes over the possibilities. She had not put the panel in Isabel’s bag. She is sure, at least, of that. But could Isabel have done it? And if so, when? And where had she found it? In the trunk before she brought it to Amal? But when they had gone through the trunk together and found the Osiris panel, Isabel would have said. She would have said, ‘Oh, there’s another one. I left it in New York.’ Could she have found it later, in New York among her mother’s things? She still would have said. Why should she hide it? No. Isabel was surprised to find it in her bag. Amal is sure of that. Or is she?

  ‘I have a ship

  And God’s forgotten me

  In the harbour

  Come, little flower

  Come with me —’

  Amal has intuition. She has imagination. Does she still believe that every question has an answer? She goes again over Layla’s words: ‘Oh the day after my brother’s murder Mabrouka rolled up Anna’s tapestry in three bags of muslin. One she gave to me “for Ahmad”, she said, “and his children after him.” The other she gave to Anna for Nur. I do not know what she did with the third.’ Layla had given the Isis panel to Ahmad and he had given it to Omar. Anna had not given the Osiris panel to Nur. Or if she had, it had still ended up wrapped inside her trunk and been passed down to Jasmine. What had Mabrouka done with the third?

  They have not yet told Omar that it has appeared. It seems too strange a thing to mention casually over the phone. They have thought perhaps they should surprise him. Stitch the whole thing together, iron it, and have it hanging there for him to see.

  ‘Come, little flower

  Come with me

  I mean you well

  And my heart is whole —’

  When would he come? When would he call? Isabel is not worried, but she has not known him l
ong enough. She does not realise what a solitary figure he now cuts. Beloved by many, hated by many, but essentially solitary. How else could he have ended up — living where he lives, doing what he does — except alone in that no-man’s-land between East and West? For her it has been different. She has not had a public life. She has concentrated on the boys, and she has translated novels — or done her best to translate them. It is so difficult to truly translate from one language into another, from one culture into another; almost impossible really. Take that concept ‘tarab’, for example; a paragraph of explanation for something as simple as a breath, a lifting of the heart, tarab, mutrib, shabb tereb, tarabattatta tarabattattee, Taroob, Jamal wa Taroob: etmanni mniyyah / I’ve wished / w’estanni ‘alayyah / I’ve waited / ‘iddili l’miyyah / I’ve counted … Amal catches herself falling asleep and considers whether she should go to bed — or would the baby wake and get her up again immediately? She cannot wait to see Omar with him. She has grown used to worrying about her brother over the last few years. She worries, and then he phones. He will phone soon. She looks up at the tapestry. Tomorrow they can stitch it and have it ironed. They can put little Sharif in his bouncer seat under it. He would look at it as Nur used to look at it when she was a baby, lying at her mother’s feet in the courtyard watching the balls of silk jumping on their threads. Once more Amal sees Anna sitting in the sunshine, working at her loom, old Baroudi Bey beside her, his eyes on his rosary, the baby in the basket, the sounds from the house drifting into the courtyard. She sees Sharif Basha coming through the doorway, pausing to take in the scene and to feel his heart flood once again with love. She sees Anna take each finished panel from the loom. Mabrouka holds one end and the two women roll the length of cloth carefully between them. She sees Sharif Basha lying on the diwan in the salamlek and she sees hands draw a white sheet over him and she hears the sobs of the men and the keening of the women. She sees Mabrouka in her room, tying wrappings of muslin around three long rolls of cloth, weeping, pausing to dash away the tears that blind her, muttering, muttering all the while. Amal makes out a few of her words: ‘from the dead come the living’, ‘the branch is cut but the tree remains’. Mabrouka weeps and wraps and mutters, ‘The precious one goes and the precious one comes.’ The tears make their ragged way down the lines on the old face. ‘The Nile divides and meets again,’ and again, and again. ‘He brings forth the living from the dead’ — the baby’s cry sounds through the house and the sudden fear that seizes Amal’s heart is so strong that it jolts her off the sofa and to her feet.