Desiring Cairo

by Louisa Young

  ‘Hakim, it’s over. If you have any more argument with Eddie – François – he may come back for me. Don’t do that to me. Forget your argument with him, for my sake. He didn’t know you knew me.’

  Or did he?

  Hakkim was bullocking: swaying his head in obstinate male youth, thinking bollocks.

  Did Eddie know?

  ‘When did you meet him, Hakim?’ I asked.

  ‘A few months ago,’ he said.

  Oh. Oh oh oh.

  ‘Why did you come to my house?’ The danger may be over but … did I know what it had been?

  ‘Because you were nice before. Just because you were kind. I wanted you to help. You did help,’ he said, and smiled. For a moment he looked like his brother.

  ‘He didn’t send you?’

  Realisation hit him slowly, like speeded up film of a flower unfurling.

  ‘No no no no,’ he said. ‘Absolutely just no. No. He didn’t know – he didn’t even know I was in your house. He just thought I was in a hotel. He gave me my mobile phone, you know, so he could ring me all the time. That was him! I was going to tell him I had been in the hotel but save the money. I gave it to my mother! I was just doing my work for him and my work for Sa’id. No connnection was made. No connection.’

  ‘What was your work for him?’ What difference did it make? Did I care now?

  ‘I went round the place and posted some things for him and …’

  My curdled coffee spluttered from my mouth.

  ‘Posted? Posted what?’

  ‘I don’t know. You know I don’t read English.’ He was peeved that I had brought up the subject. I was picturing us at that breakfast table, me naturally assuming that the anonymous letters were something to do with him. Not that they were from him …

  Ha bloody ha.

  I couldn’t blame Hakim. I don’t suppose he had even looked at the envelopes.

  Ha bloody ha.

  ‘Hakim, habibi,’ I said. ‘He’s promised me to leave you alone. Leave him alone too? Please? Because if you don’t my life won’t be worth living. Promise me. Hakim – we’re human beings. All we are is how we are to each other. Promise me.’

  I called Sarah in. She witnessed the promise. Wanted to know what it was. Never to go near that man again, I said. I’ll drink to that, she said. I would have felt a surge of pity for her if I had any feelings to spare.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ I asked her.

  ‘Giving up any hope of anybody explaining to me what has been going on around here,’ she said. I told her that Hakim would tell her. He knew enough for public consumption. His could become the official version.

  ‘I want Sa’id,’ she said. This sulkiness was unbecoming. If understandable.

  ‘Give him time,’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah.’

  She was waiting for ‘later’. She would spend her days in the Egyptian Museum, admiring canopic jars, she said, until he deigned to talk to her. Yes, I like them too, I said. The alabaster ones, and the tiny little gold and lapis coffins that go inside each one.

  Looking at her, and her strange position here, I thought we might have been friends. I think she did too, because she sighed and wondered would I like to go with her. No, I said, I’m going to Luxor. With Sa’id.

  She looked at me as older women must have looked at younger women for generation on generation. With incomprehension at how we were going to repeat their mistakes, even though they had made them, and shown us and told us how pointless the exercise was. Well sorry, darling. We do what we do. All of us. Over and over.

  I did want to know her story. I did. I just …

  Maybe later.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s that then.’

  ‘Sarah,’ I said, not pleading, but with a touch of … something.

  She looked at me.

  ‘It was very, very difficult,’ she said.

  Yes.

  Perhaps I’ll ring her in five years and ask.

  ‘Will you go and see him?’ I asked her. I meant Abu Sa’id. She knew I did.

  ‘What for?’

  I had no answer. For your babies, I might have said, but her babies are grown.

  *

  We took the night train, with the money between us on the seat. And in Luxor he changed again. Going over to the West Bank in the early early morning after arriving he took a friend’s felucca and sailed us, though it would take twice as long as a motor launch. ‘Enough of engines,’ he said, and instead we had the creak and silence of the dawn, lined with reeds and egrets. Mist encircled us, and the sunrise seeped crimson and gold through it. He gave me his scarf again, against the chill. Invisible in the mist loomed the grandest ruins in the world: Karnak and Luxor, the temples and the tombs, the sacred lakes, the avenues of sphinxes, Ozymandias, King of Kings; the colossi and obelisks, the pylons and stelae, the kiosks and pavilions and hypostyle halls, the sanctuaries and Nileometers and the giant scarabs and the endless ranks of statues of Ramses the Great. Hatshepsut, Medinat Habu, the Ramesseum. The red granite, the white marble, the limestone. Thousands of years’ worth of the glory of the ancestors, thousands of years old. Invisible in the mist.

  The river was like wet concrete stained with watery blood. Eau de Nil is a great many colours. If a mafioso had buried his enemy here, this is how the evidence would creep out. And once again Sa’id’s eyes matched the river, bloodshot with the sleepless night on the train, sitting up as mile upon mile of Egypt was consumed beneath us. Tea at Esna, bread at Edfu. Traction again, though it shouldn’t have been because the only business I had was with the man next to me. It’s just we weren’t dealing with our business. Hiding in our own mist.

  He steered with his foot, like the Nile boatmen do, manipulating the great sail and the wide pale boat as Nile boatmen do. Why wouldn’t he? He is a Nile boatman. He was born here. He couldn’t have been a boy here and not learned to do that. There is practically no wind but he knows where he is taking us. He could negotiate the first cataract against the wind; he can sing. He could make me stay here. His linen is pristine though he has been on a train all night. He eats bananas half the fruit at a time, and smokes his shisha out of the side of his mouth, his top lip hardly touching. This is what he is.

  I remembered what he said: ‘Do you mind, that I am an Arab and you are an Englishwoman?’

  ‘Enchanted,’ I had said.

  Even through the blood, his eyes were exactly the colour of the palm tips, now I had the opportunity to check. Aswan at dusk, Luxor at dawn. Apart from Lily, I don’t think I had ever loved anyone so much.

  Abu Sa’id met us at the dusty landing stage on the West Bank. Thebes. My past self was so happy to see him but my present was too bound up to notice. I can’t even remember how he was with me. Mariam was at the house. She brought coffee. Ariha. A little sweet. Not very.

  Sa’id went into the shop and worked all day. I went and took him to lunch.

  That evening we walked up on to the hills behind, on the scrubby lunar land between the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahri, and we looked down on to its great terraces and ramps, and told each other all the bits we knew of what she had written on the walls there, and on the great obelisk across the river, about her voyage to the land of Punt in search of myrrh, about her fake beard and her insistence on Amun Ra being her father, so that she could rule even though she was a woman, and how her nephew had chipped away every picture of her on her own temple, because he had grown to hate her, waiting so long to inherit. We walked for hours in the dark. He held my hand and the sand bit my ankles with tiny nips. We fucked in the sand, wrapped in his gallabeya and his big scarf, under the moon, no longer crescent, lying on its back in its southern way. Orion – Osiris – above us, and the empty tombs below. It was not comfortable but it was magical. Hatshepsut, he said, was an Englishwoman.

  The next day he worked in the morning, and I sat upstairs at the workshop, poking through boxes of antiquities, o
r fake antiquities, or antique fakes stone-baked in faience. Little dark figurines, tiny Anubises, Sekmet and Bastet. Thoth, heavy and dusty. Weird things.

  ‘They are fake, made for tourists in the nineteenth century,’ he said, drifting up behind me like a ghost. ‘So they are now genuine, valuable fakes.’

  ‘Are they valuable?’ I wondered.

  ‘Depends to who,’ he said.

  Later that I day I watched him selling a couple of unpolished vases to a German couple. He knew I was watching. He was good. Of course he was.

  ‘But how much does it cost?’ the girl kept demanding, sitting on the leather sofa in the shop, as if a price were a lump or a measurement, an absolute truth. As if he were tricking her by keeping some genuine concrete price secret from her. She just wanted to know where she stood. Sa’id was sweet with her. ‘It costs something between what you will pay and what I will accept,’ he said. She didn’t get it. In the end they paid … a good price. She wanted a camel too. Sa’id said he could get one for her.

  ‘Can you?’ I asked later.

  ‘For her, no. She doesn’t want one.’

  After that I went and sat in the yard and watched the transformation of alabaster, and thought about Nadia, and the nature of stone, and the nature of other less tangible things, about the past, and about the future, and about Lily. There is something fantastically long about the past in this neck of the woods. Of the desert. I felt I was sitting on Set’s lap, Set god of the desert. The vicious stripe of green by the river, then the dust, the clean dust and the thousands of winds, and the hidden mysteries beneath it. The tombs they’re still uncovering.

  Then Sa’id came and we went out for lunch, so we could be away from the population of the workshop, and he told me about the tomb of the Sons of Ramses, only uncovered in 1995, full and promising. Maybe 50 sons in there. He had a friend who was working on it. I don’t know. Maybe he was offering me things to keep me interested. As if I wasn’t interested. As if that were the problem.

  We sat in the dusty garden of a cheap hotel within spitting distance of the colossi of Memnon, the statues that don’t sing any more. Where the friends of Oscar Wilde’s swallow are waiting for him, where he should be, instead of distributing bits of gold leaf to starving children and sick artists, torn from a heartbroken statue in the middle of winter. October. It’s a good time to go south.

  I told him I wanted him to give Eddie’s money to a charity in Cairo. Something for children. Not too religious, if possible, but it didn’t really matter. Really I wanted to go the top of the minaret at Ibn Tulun and scatter it like rose petals, like shreds of gold leaf, over the city. Fluttering like the waters of heaven on the beauty and the pain. But I knew I wouldn’t. So – the sensible equivalent.

  ‘You want me to do it?’ he said, under a green vine.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t?’

  There was pause.

  A melamine table, a tin ashtray, a cricket scritching.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  It wasn’t entirely clear what he was asking; what I was saying no to.

  But I said no.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The End, and the Beginning

  I cried all the way back to London. All the fucking way, wrapped in his scarf that he wrapped round me on the river bank. On the boat, on the train, in the cab, at the airport, on the plane, in Athens, on the next plane. ‘Enta ’Omri’ running through my head: ‘Elli shuftu, elli shuftu, abl ma teshoufak enaya …’ What I saw before my eyes saw you. The way Umm Kalthoum sings it, the length and beauty of her phrases, makes the melody sound how written Arabic looks. The artistic elongations, the arabesques, the stretching. And the release, the compression, the fitting of the language into a separate form, for its own beauty. Floriate, foliate. Like Hakim’s Qur’anic aya, tear drop from his neck.

  This is how I felt. Elongated into a beautiful form.

  He didn’t ask why I was leaving him, or try to stop me. He’d expected it. It was me who hadn’t. I’m not talking about the end of half term.

  The hejeb on his throat.

  I had a lot of imaginary conversations through my tears. Continuations of our conversation on the Corniche el Nil. In my version he called me habibi, told me I hadn’t let him help, let him love me, and do his duty as a lover, and if I hadn’t then, I never would; and I told him that that was his pride, that my problem was solved so why did it matter how, that anyway he had helped, hugely, comprehensively, that I couldn’t have done anything without him. It made no difference.

  I was silently, semi-consciously aware that I was weeping for more than him.

  After a while it was for Janie: for her, not for myself about her. Because she was ashamed and jealous, and now she’s dead and unforgiven, and she never knew her child.

  I lingered on unforgiven. Whether it was the right word. Remembered what Sa’id had said about the dead: ‘God has taken him, leave them to it.’ And asked me something like ‘could I leave her alone’. We didn’t finish that conversation either.

  Another line from ‘Enta ’Omri’: ‘Through you, I have reconciled with my days, Through you, I have forgiven my past.’

  Unforgiven. Maybe not.

  Sa’id, how could you think you didn’t help me?

  And I cried for Mum.

  For Lily.

  For my leg and the imminence of death. For loneliness and loss.

  Several times I found myself turning to him for comfort, and he wasn’t there. I knew he was turning too, and nor was I.

  *

  Harry and Lily met me at the airport. I didn’t have the energy to be surprised. He carried my bags to the Pontiac.

  I cried even more.

  ‘Was Egypt really horrible?’ Lily asked. No, I said.

  Then she said she liked it when I cried, because she could be specially nice to me. I hugged her to me as if she were the last child on earth, and cried more.

  ‘You left him there, then?’ said Harry.

  I looked at him through my pall of tears and said, ‘Well spotted.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve stopped crying,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, you’re going to stop?’

  ‘I hope to,’ I said.

  It didn’t seem that he was being unkind, but I don’t think I would have noticed either way.

  ‘Did you find my daddy there?’ Lily wanted to know. ‘Did you bring him back?’

  There was an enormous billboard on the Uxbridge Road: it said, ‘I wish I was in Egypt.’ Pictures of temples and sphinxes and stuff.

  I cried all night.

  I was still crying when Harry came round the next morning. Crying at my little pretend garden, my view over the fucking A40, at my kitchen, empty and untouched for a week. It was finally cold and wet.

  Lily wanted to know why I was crying. Not surprisingly. I told her. Told her Sa’id had had to stay in Egypt and I had to come home and I was sad. But that I wouldn’t be forever. Which I knew I wouldn’t be, because you’re not – hell I even got over Harry – and because I prefer in my soul to be happy, so I would be. Because it’s that simple. Somewhere. I had just lost the way.

  Lily was very kind to me. Interested. She brought me handkerchiefs a lot and was pleased to be useful. I tried not to suffocate her in desperate embraces; tried not to clutch her too tight. It’s not fair to make a child bear all its parent’s love.

  Harry came the next morning too. On the Ducati. I heard the crack of the exhaust coming like a figment from the past. He made my coffee for me and said my mother wanted to talk to me and said could I ring her, or answer the phone. I agreed I probably would. Soon. Ish.

  Also he wanted to talk to me. I must have lit up. Certainly I felt my heart lurch.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we haven’t heard yet.’

  ‘But due soon?’ I asked.

  ‘Next few days.’

  Oh boy.

  When it was time to take Lily to school he walked along with us.
I wondered if he was practising. When I looked at him sideways he didn’t look back at me. We are awaiting the outcome and till then we could do nothing. Nothing. I understood that.

  On the way back the tarmac had a dull glow to it, and the sky sat on our heads. Dead leaves waiting to fall. Ten past nine, Tuesday morning. Reality biting at my heels again. Imaginary birds flapping round my head.

  ‘Have you stopped crying?’ he said.

  I wondered whether I had, and thought probably not. It struck me that he is very patient with me.

  ‘For the time being,’ I said, gingerly.

  He suggested a cup of coffee. We ambled along through the wetness to the Serbian café. Hatchet-faced young men sat in groups, wearing anoraks and talking about football. Men with faces which said they had stories, stories they would never tell. We settled in a corner.

  ‘So what happened with Eddie?’ he asked.

  One of those little questions. One of those innocent, simple questions. Like ‘how are you?’ As if I had a clue about any of what had happened with Eddie, since the first moment that he impinged on my life, trying to kill me. One day, maybe, if I achieve great wisdom and understanding, I will realise that along the way I have learnt something of what happened with Eddie.

  But in the meantime, for now, I could give it an innocent simple answer.

  ‘All done,’ I said. Saying it made me feel better. Hell, it was all done. I believed it really was. Not all understood, but all done.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Told him to fuck off and leave me alone.’

  He smiled. I was glad he did.

  ‘Was that all it took?’ he asked.

  ‘It was quite a lot, actually.’

  Yes, wasn’t it. The focusing of fury, the discovery of one of his rare human spots. And how did I discover it? It wasn’t so clever of me. It was fluke. No, it was … emotion. My anger and my sense of honour found it. Nothing to do with me – with the me that I control. My poor over-valued head. As with the last time I hit on one of his rogue specks of humanity, when he first told me about Janie being a whore. He had become utterly, humanly sympathetic, just for a moment. Real, and kind, for a count of eight in the middle of his madness. Because of my pain. My uninfluenceable pain. So it was the liberation of emotion from the deadweight of intellect that did it.