by Rasha Adly
The waiters began to serve the meal. She saw everyone unrolling their napkins, so she followed suit. After the soup, the waiters removed the plates while others replaced them with another dish; and so it went, as waiter followed waiter, and course followed course. She was overcome with nervousness, as she had never used silverware before, but with a glance at how the people around her held their forks and knives, and since she was intelligent, she managed to pick
it up.
As she sat at the long table, she thought of their round table back at home, around which all the family gathered, and how they only used their hands to eat—hands were good enough for everything, after all. Here, there was no conversation while eating, no sound but the clink of fork and knife, one ate with one’s mouth closed, and one’s teeth performed their function slowly, not like the threshing machines that her family’s jaws became as they chewed their food. Her family loved to talk with their mouths full, as though there were no better time for conversation.
The meal ended when the final dessert dish was served. It was an odd kind of sweetmeat, shapeless in form and texture, but it was delicious, so she demolished it to the last spoonful.
Napoleon rose, announcing the conclusion of the banquet, and everyone followed suit. The musicians started playing again, and the glasses started making the rounds once more. Someone came up to Alton and asked for a word with him; he excused himself from her and left, promising not to be long.
She had only been standing alone for a few moments when Napoleon’s private secretary came to her and asked her to follow him. She reluctantly followed him, trembling like a leaf in the wind. What fate awaited her? What did this man have in store? Her mother’s words rang in her ears: “Don’t trust him. Beware of him.” Her hand crept up to her neck in terror, but she shook her head sternly, dismissing the idea. Certainly Napoleon would not harm her. Why should he? If he had wanted to hurt her, why did he have her taught French? Perhaps to hear her beg for her life in a language he could understand?
She ascended the marble staircase and walked down a long passageway. It was carpeted with a long, red rug with an Oriental pattern, and on either side of her, the walls were lined with paintings. There were small side tables bearing statues of genuine Limoges porcelain. She walked slowly, hands lifting the hem of her dress. They reached a room at the end of the passage. The man stopped and knocked at the door. A male voice came from inside: “Entrez!” The major-domo left her to her fate, but not before he had looked long and searchingly at her with a question in his mind: What does the general want with this girl?
She found herself stepping into a strange room, a mix of East and West so complete that it would have been hard to tell where one was on this great Earth. The rug on the floor had an Oriental pattern; the bed was in the French style; the lantern in the ceiling was arabesque; the vases were Limoges with a Romeo and Juliet pattern. Not so strange, after all, for a man who would appoint himself Emperor of the East and West, to bring them together in this tiny corner of the world. Had he not given a speech to the Muslims on the day of the Prophet’s birthday, handed out gifts and largesse, and worn a turban and a caftan? Today, he was celebrating the anniversary of the French Republic, raising a glass and drinking wine.
He stood with his back to her, looking out of the window of the palace, legs slightly apart. At last he had set his hat aside: his thinning hair was smooth and chestnut-colored. He left her standing in the sea of her shyness for a few moments, and she said not a word. Then he turned to her. His hair was creeping down over his forehead and partly covering his eyes. There was no trace of the renowned cruelty in his features, nor the strength and courage he was known for. He had the face of a shy and innocent boy. Could appearances truly be this deceiving?
He approached her and took her hat off, tossing it onto the bed. Then he whispered her name into her ear. “Zeinab. . . .”
She had never heard her name said so sweetly before. Could the man saying it in such tones be Napoleon, the great warrior? Slowly, he ran the tips of his fingers up and down her cheek and neck, a pleasant sensation. The scent of musk and ambergris still clung to her from where the slave girl had added it to her bathwater that morning and burned it in incense, and now it hung in the air between them.
He came closer and put his nose to her neck, inhaling her scent in ecstasy. “How wonderful you smell,” he murmured, “how lovely you are!”
He took her by the hand and gently led her to sit next to him on the bed. She found herself sitting close to his medals, proudly hanging from his uniform jacket. Conflicting feelings rushed through her: pride and guilt, confidence and unease, panic that stopped her breath at what was about to happen, like a tiny fish in the presence of the vastness of the sea.
The room was lit by candlelight. The overpowering scent of his masculine perfume filled her nostrils, and he was only a few breaths away. He took off her hoop earrings, opened her small hand and placed them into it. Then he began to undo her braids one by one, lock after lock of hair coming free, and with every lock, he plucked out the cloves that Maliha had braided into her hair. He pursued this task with great care and patience, making sure not to hurt her when he separated the tangles in her hair. Silence weighted the room down, making her feel as though time was passing impossibly slowly, as if it had stopped. One question filled her mind: What was to come after undoing the braids?
Finally, her hair hung free, cascading like a waterfall down her back. He gently stroked it, then said, “Go now.”
Had the greatest and most powerful man in the world truly been undoing her braids with matchless care and patience, like a man preparing his lover for a night of love, taking off her earrings, inhaling the perfume of her body, loosening her hair? How much time had he taken, undoing her braids? Nearly an hour. He had not spoken a word in that time. Then to ask her to leave?
She stepped outside the room, sighing with relief, still flustered and shrouded in fear. Down the long corridor she went, trying to gather up her loose hair and twist it into a bun at the top of her head, jamming the hat down on top of it to hide it. It was no use, though; her hair slipped out, long locks of it straying free. She hurried down the stairs, although she was aware that no one had noticed her disappearance, just as no one had noticed her presence. They were dancing joyously, well into their wine by now.
She had been wrong. One person had noticed her disappearance, and after searching for her everywhere, had convinced himself that she must have had to leave in a hurry without saying goodbye. All of a sudden, as he lifted his glass to his lips, he caught sight of her coming down the stairs, flustered and uneasy. Their eyes met; she saw a question in his eyes and a cynical smile. For the second time, she slipped and would have fallen, if Bonaparte’s secretary had not caught her—he had been waiting at the bottom of the stairs until his employer had finished his rites of passion with her. He caught her and propelled her to the carriage that was waiting outside to take her home.
The carriage rattled all the way, scraping against the walls of the ancient houses on both sides of the narrow street. The moon disappeared behind a cloud in the black velvet sky. August was hot and humid, and the darkened streets were swallowed up in mist, but for the light of an oil lamp here and there. Everyone was deep asleep at such a late hour of the night. Only this girl of fifteen was awake, asking herself all the way home: Was what happened real, or was it a flight of fancy? Did I truly sit close to Napoleon? Did he take off my earrings and undo my braids? Did he kiss my neck and inhale my scent? And the handsome artist, did I truly meet him? Was what happened real?
A few days after that celebration, the stiff festoons put up for the celebrations were shattered by a gale, leading people to be optimistic that this heralded the end of the rule of the French.
8
Cairo: Autumn 2012
When he left her that day, he was heavy with sorrow and consumed by a terrible sense of guilt. How could he have remained so ignorant all the time they had been together? H
ow had he not understood that a terrible secret lay behind the sorrow on her face, her sudden silences and preoccupied air?
He tried to fall asleep, but ever since he’d given up drinking and sleeping pills, sleep had been slow in coming. It was always the same: no sooner did he lie down in bed than he was flooded with everything that had happened that day and the days before that, if not even further back in time. Sometimes the memories were pleasant, but most of the time they were unhappy, and if he did manage to fall asleep, a sensation of falling would take hold of him. But that night, his insomnia did not bother him: he was happy to stay awake because it allowed him the opportunity to think about her. It was time to rethink their relationship. He had always blamed her for breaking it off in such a humiliating manner, laboring under the delusion that he had been the perfect lover; but how could he have been, without ever realizing that his beloved held a terrible secret of such magnitude?
Throwing off the bedclothes, he climbed out of bed and went to the window. The weather had changed again, and a light rain was falling. The leaves on the trees shone wetly in the moonlight.
“I’ve been selfish,” he muttered. “Yes, I have. I’ve been selfish.”
He padded to the kitchen and began to make coffee: it was no more use trying to sleep anyway. When she had come into his life, he had been in the iron grip of a new phase, which he had dubbed his ‘Purification Phase.’ He had decided to reinvent himself as a new man, a different person. If she had known him when he was younger, she would certainly never have left him. He would have given her everything she could possibly need or want.
He had been twenty-four when he had gone abroad to do his postgraduate studies, not out of a love of learning but a desire to escape his surroundings: his society, his friends, his family, his relatives, his country’s problems. In short, his whole life. His joy had been indescribable when he got accepted into a Swedish university, one he had applied to some time before in an endless search for architecture scholarships in Europe. The acceptance letter arrived along with a class schedule and a notification that the scholarship would cover half his tuition and provide housing, the rest falling to him. He did not waste time thinking about how he was going to cover the rest of the tuition or come up with living expenses. His father was a simple government clerk who would barely be able to come up with the money for the air ticket.
He had known that the cost living in Europe was high, but he had not realized that it would be that expensive. From the very first day, therefore, he decided to look for work. He had a BA in architecture and was a postgraduate student at the foremost university in Sweden, so no doubt some important job awaited him, or so he thought. His dreams were shattered, however: all his interviews ended in failure, and when he finally lost hope of getting a job commensurate with his abilities, he was obliged to take several jobs in his first year: a supermarket checkout clerk, a salesperson at a store selling athletic shoes, a room-service waiter at a hotel. One day, the hotel posted a job for a waiter at the hotel bar. The pay was excellent, so he applied and was accepted, having already proved himself in room service. Times were tight, so he never spared a thought whether it might be a sin to work in a bar and serve alcohol. Even the unpleasantness of the drunken customers he managed to put up with without a murmur. The drunker they got, the better they tipped.
The day he saw her, his life changed. She was older, dark-skinned with long black hair and a voluptuous figure. Their eyes met and he could tell from the way she flirted that she was taken with him as well. Her nationality was a mystery to him: if he had had to guess, he would have said Italy or Mexico—she was certainly not Swedish. When he approached her to set down a few glasses of vodka at her table, she was talking on her cell phone in Arabic, her accent that of the countries of the Arabian Gulf. At first, he couldn’t believe his ears. She kept talking, and loudly too. When he became certain she was Arab, he said, “Welcome,” to her in Arabic.
“And to you,” she said in the same language. “Are you Arab?”
“Yes,” he said, “Egyptian.”
She gave a coy laugh. “I guessed as much.” She asked his name and what brought him to Sweden; he missed speaking in Arabic, which made him chatty, and in a very short time had told her his entire life story. He talked about his hometown, his family, his career, and the circumstances that brought him there. Finally, he left her and went back to work. When she asked for the check for herself and her friends, he brought it in the little leather folder, and she put in two cards: her credit card and her business card. The former he gave to the cashier; the latter he kept.
He could hardly wait for the end of class the next day. He dialed her number, afraid she might be sleeping—he assumed that the types who spend their nights at the bars slept all day. However, she sounded bright and lively, contrary to his apprehensive expectations. “I’m on the way to an important meeting,” she said, “but I’ll expect you in the lobby of the Hilton at two o’clock.”
On their first date, she told him everything about herself. Her father was Arab and her mother Swedish; she had spent most of her life moving back and forth between the two countries. After university she had opened her own business, a real estate development and construction company that specialized in building resorts and buying and restoring old mansions to convert into hotels while preserving their appearance and architectural character. She made him an offer to join her company. As it happened, he had only a few days left until graduation, after which he would be free to accept.
A few days later, Nirvan, for that was her name, told him she did not want to spend the night alone, and led him to her room in the villa where she lived. He was inexperienced and his shyness and apprehension only made matters worse. She took the lead and laughed when they were done, kissing him on both cheeks: “You’re going to need some training, that’s for sure!”
That might have been true at first, but in a few weeks, he became an expert in the rules of the game, and excelled, not just in bed, but in his new job. He learned quickly that with enough money, anything is possible: commissions over and under the table—and from the side and round the back as well—paved the way to buying government-owned plots of land. Old historic houses were assessed at a fraction of their real value, and every tender the company took part in, they won.
He was to spend half his life country-hopping from airport to airport all over the world: he met with Wall Street brokers in the morning, and agents in Milan in the evening. The morning after would find him in a new town with new people to broker a new deal. With the slew of titles and positions that introduced him to clients, no one suspected his veracity or cast doubt on his integrity: he was, after all, an expert in architecture and construction, a consultant and assessor with a postgraduate degree from one of the world’s foremost universities.
In a short while, thanks to Nirvan and to his own acumen, he went far. The fame and fortune he achieved came at a cost, however. The greatest sacrifice was his own peace of mind. He could not sleep without being plagued by nightmares; he could not eat without indigestion. After a checkup, he was diagnosed with an ulcer, brought on by stress, exhaustion, and constant anxiety. Meanwhile, his relationship with Nirvan only grew stronger, helped along by the fact that there was no possessiveness on either side, except for the moments when their bodies became one, leaving each free to go their own way when they weren’t together. She never asked him whom he had been with, and he never asked her whom she had known. Although he had slept with many women much more beautiful and many years younger, the blond cover girls offered to him by his clients by way of a thank you never satisfied him the way she did. There was a certain affection between them that he could not name: it did not deserve the name love, but perhaps admiration or gratitude for the immense opportunity she had offered him. His whole life, he had never dreamed of being half as rich as he had become.
He could not deny that he had been drawn to the jet-set world at first: its parties and soirées, its trips and jaunts, w
ere all like dunes of soft sand pulling him deeper and deeper down. As time passed, he realized that money in and of itself was these people’s ultimate goal, and money was all they believed in. Money could buy anything: happiness, ambition, security, love, and marriage. It was a world he had regarded with curious interest while still on the outside, looking in: he remembered wondering what life meant to these people. He had wondered, more mundanely, what paths they traveled, which countries they visited, which doctors they went to, and on and on; now that he had come into this world and become one of them, he knew for a fact that it was empty. Oddly, their lives, like their thinking and even their appearance, were all the same. It was hard to tell their women apart, for they went to the same plastic surgeons to remake them all in the same mold: the same nose, the same perfectly pouty lips, even the same shape to their eyes. They had the same bleached blond hair, fake tans, acrylic nails, and augmented breasts and hips. Their men were not much different, similarly stripped of any individuality: they wore clothing in the latest style, owned the most expensive top-brand watches, smartphones, and other electronics, and sported tattoos over their gym-built, toned bodies while their hair gleamed with product. They all spoke in the same fake, polished tones, their body language languid and mechanical. This was how they chose to present themselves: they saw and heard nothing of the world’s sufferings unless it was through their own blinkered view. As for their romantic lives, they were something of an incestuous clique, one within a very large family: this woman was X’s girlfriend today, Y’s girlfriend tomorrow, and the same with the men, all traveling within the same circles.
Sooner or later, one must tire of such a life, devoid of all feeling. Five-star hotels and restaurants, fortunes in every currency accumulating in numbered accounts, the latest model of luxury automobile, beautiful plastic dolled-up women: one must tire of all this, and of one’s own self. At the same time, there is no outlet for one’s anger, and no way out of this fake world.
