Mother Nile

by Warren Adler

  “Don’t grow too attached to her, Farrah,” Mrs. Vivanti urged. “Give her away… to some good family. She is too much of a responsibility for a young girl alone.”

  “Never,” Farrah said, clutching the child protectively.

  Mrs. Vivanti shook her head.

  “The stupidity of human nature,” she muttered. She detested motherhood as well.

  Farrah got her old cubicle back and fitted the drawer of an ancient bureau as a crib for Isis. Lying awake in the early morning hours, too exhilarated from her dancing to sleep, she would wait for the baby to awake for its nightly feeding, draw it close to her milk-heavy breast, and connect it with this life-stream of herself. She felt wonderful. Now she had someone to love, a creation of her own. She could never give her away. Never!

  But the baby developed some discomfort, perhaps a colic, and would cry continuously. Nothing would placate the infant, and her screams echoed through the club and living quarters.

  “If you can’t shut the brat up, you’ll have to get out,” Mrs. Vivanti ranted. The crying had made them all edgy. By the time it had gone on for three days, Mrs. Vivanti was urging that she give the child away.

  “Never,” Farrah said, glaring with determination.

  “It’s stupid,” Mrs. Vivanti responded. “It will only hold you back.”

  “Never,” Farrah repeated.

  “It is ruining business,” Mr. Vivanti said.

  Finally, Mrs. Vivanti came to her one morning. Her features seemed inert, as if she was having difficulty keeping herself under control. She edged herself into her chair near the register and poured herself some tea.

  “I’m sorry, Farrah.”

  “She’ll behave. You’ll see.”

  “No, Farrah. It won’t work. Vivanti is right. A baby is a burden, in any event. It destroys the illusion.”

  There was no ultimatum. The alternatives had been clearly stated. Give away the baby or get out.

  “I can’t be responsible,” Mrs. Vivanti muttered, as if to convince herself. “He wants you to go,” she said, pointing to Mr. Vivanti, who sat at a rear table, looking glum and sipping wine. Turning her eyes away, Mrs. Vivanti unfolded a newspaper. Beyond, they could hear the sounds of the crying baby. Farrah’s eyes drifted to the paper. There was the king, holding a newborn baby in swaddling clothes. She could not read the words.

  “Well, the fat one has got his wish,” Mrs. Vivanti said, her thin lips curled in a sardonic smile. “A crown prince.” She held up the picture.

  She saw the gloating face of the fat king, his young bride, and the contented smugness of the baby. Suddenly, she remembered Thompson. She ran to her cubicle. Isis was crying pitifully. Without attempting to quiet her, she rummaged through the drawer where she kept her possessions, finding Thompson’s card. For some reason she had kept it. Although she could read the numbers, she had never used a telephone.

  When she returned to Mrs. Vivanti, she thrust the card in front of her.

  “Call him, please,” she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  The traffic seemed more unruly than usual as she elbowed her way through the crowds of downtown Cairo, in the direction of Shepheard’s Hotel.

  “The police are on strike. Things are a mess. Let’s meet at Shepheard’s. In the lobby.” Thompson’s clipped British accent and high telephone voice made him seem younger than he looked. Mrs. Vivanti had been generous in her severance, and the two women had embraced in farewell. There was even a film of moisture over Mrs. Vivanti’s hard eyes. She had, of course, turned away in embarrassment. To her, nothing in this world was worth tears.

  Farrah took the train to Cairo, holding Isis on her lap during the sweltering journey. At the train station, she splurged and took a droshky to her family’s place.

  She decided to leave the baby with her mother while she talked with Thompson. The confrontation was predictable, as was the stench, the noise, the horror of their existence. She avoided all explanations. The family had sunk deeper into decay. Her father sat listlessly against the wall, lost in a stupor. His hooded eyes offered hardly a flicker of recognition.

  “Whore,” her mother said. The baby’s presence was sufficient confirmation of that.

  “I’ll be back before the day is over,” Farrah said, counting out ten pounds. “Baksheesh,” she said, unable to hide the contempt for this life. Anything is better than this, she thought, buttressing her resolve to stay as far from it as she could.

  Before she left, she bent down and kissed her father’s forehead.

  “Your grandchild is the daughter of a king,” she whispered. He was beyond comprehending.

  “You have disgraced us,” her mother said as she hurried away. But she held Isis with instinctive care. Farrah had learned the power of that. Her baby, at least, would be safe.

  Shepheard’s Hotel was a refuge for the British, and the swarm of tourists who continued to view Egypt as an antiquity and the people of the present day an incidental annoyance. Liveried employees and the pink arrogant faces of the guests eyed her suspiciously as she walked up the ornate portico into the large neat lobby.

  “The natives are restless,” Thompson said, his half young, half middle-aged face forcing a brave thin smile. His once elegant striped suit was creased and shiny as he led her to a little table. Sitting down heavily, as if weariness was about to consume him, he snapped his fingers and without asking her preference, ordered two Turkish coffees. Then he lit a cigarette and puffed deeply, blowing the smoke out of his nostrils like a dragon.

  “The place is erupting,” he said, turning his rheumy blue eyes on her, the veins like red tributaries. “Your fat friend may not make the month.” He looked through a window into the crowds outside. “Maybe not the day. The students are agitating. All sides are foaming at the bit. The Commies. The Fascists. The Moslem Brotherhood.”

  “What do they want?” she asked. She was ignorant of political matters.

  “Want?” he said, smiling broadly now. “They want”—he waved his hand, sweeping it around the lobby—“what these people have. They want what they have not got.

  “The haves against the have-nots. It’s an old story. What they have here now is someone on whom to focus their hate. Our fat friend. And, of course, the British.” The waiter brought the coffee. “What they need now is someone else to love, someone to galvanize events. There is talk that the army is getting ready to uproot him.” He looked at her. “I expect there will be lots of bloodshed. Maybe even yours.” He said it bluntly, as if she were an inanimate object.

  “Mine?” The idea frightened her. She shivered and thought of her baby.

  “You, my dear, are a symbol of his decadence.”

  She didn’t know what that meant.

  “I’m not afraid,” she lied. “He deserves whatever happens.”

  “Good girl. Good girl,” he said in English, patting her arm. She assumed it was a form of flattery. Yet she was concerned that he had not broached the matter of the story. Had he forgotten? “The fact is,” he said, as if interrupting his own thoughts. “Everything will be the same. The Brits will go. Farouk will fall. Only the faces will change. Most of the haves will still have. Most of the have-nots will still have not.” He sighed wearily.

  “I have his baby,” she said, suddenly, the words impelled on their own. Gulping his coffee, his Adam’s apple seemed to have stuck in his throat. When he recovered, his smile was boyish. He did not hide his delight.

  “And is this little bonus a boy or a girl?”

  “A girl. Six months old.”

  Counting blatantly on his fingers, he shook his head in mock disbelief.

  “Farouk’s?”

  She nodded.

  “That big bastard. He was exercising the old royal… prerogative, while he was engaged. And he sent Narriman to Rome to teach her a little finesse.” He chuckled. “That’s
rich.”

  The crowd outside seemed to grow noisier, more unruly, and many of the guests crowded the portico to get a better view. Suddenly, the outside world was intruding, although some of the guests, older British-looking men, continued to read their newspapers, lost in the calm of their privileged world. What had events outside to do with them?

  “Okay, Farrah,” he began again, after a brief deflection of interest in the rising noise. “We’ll want pictures of you and the baby and, of course, your story of your meetings with Farouk… the whole affair.” He rubbed his hands again. “They’ll eat it up. Not that anything he does or did will surprise anybody. It will simply underline the moral decay of the man.” He shook his head. “You can’t imagine what it was like sixteen years ago, when he assumed the crown. Cairo was ablaze with optimism. He was like a god. The happy smiling crowds.”

  “Yes. He told me,” Farrah said. The noise outside was continuing to increase, and even the calm newspaper readers took notice. The manager and a troupe of liveried servants began to shutter the windows.

  Suddenly the panicked doorman ran into the lobby.

  “They’re burning everything. Fires are everywhere.”

  At the mention of fire, some of the women screamed and the people began rushing for the street. The manager, his face flushed and sweating, ordered the desk clerk to ring the alarm and more people began pouring downstairs and out of elevators.

  “Where are the soldiers?” Thompson asked, grabbing the manager by his arm as he passed.

  “They’ve joined the crowds.”

  “And the king?” He looked at Farrah.

  “The king,” the manager said with hissing contempt, “is having a little soiree at the palace in honor of the birth of the crown prince. Cairo burns and he celebrates.”

  “Like Nero,” Thompson said, wearily, rising.

  “The hotel is burning,” someone shouted, running through the lobby.

  “Armageddon,” Thompson said, displaying his weary cynicism. He guided Farrah through the panicked crowds into the street, where angry men were setting fire to everything in sight. Bodies lay in the street. Caught in the chaos, holding tightly onto Thompson’s arm, she could think only of Isis.

  “My baby,” she screamed as the crowd surged and ebbed in their “danse macabre” of destruction. It seemed like the end of the world.

  “Why can’t they stop this?” someone asked.

  “Because Farouk is a fool,” Thompson said, vaguely answering the person who had spoken. “Because all the politicians are fools. Because the Brits are fools. I can see them all licking their chops, hoping that they will each benefit when the smoke clears.”

  “We must get my baby,” Farrah screamed, leading him now through the crowds in the direction of the old city.

  It took them hours to finally reach Farrah’s family’s street. Looking back, they could see the fires burning in the distance. But in this neighborhood all was as before. The orange glow in the distance seemed like the setting sun.

  Thompson followed her into the crumbling building and up the stairs where the children crowded around them. He threw a handful of coins on the steps, scattering them. In her family’s room, Isis slept peacefully on a dirty pallet in the corner. Farrah’s mother lay sleeping in the darkness. Slumped on the floor, Farrah spied her father, his body like a discarded sack, lying inert, face turned as if in shame to the wall. Sets of children’s eyes opened sleepily.

  “Here,” she said, gently lifting the baby. “Farouk’s bastard.”

  “Give me money, please,” Farrah said. Without hesitation, Thompson dipped his hand in his pocket and brought out a twenty-pound note.

  “On account,” he said.

  She put the note in her mother’s hand. The woman stirred, clutched the money, then fell off again.

  Farrah took one last look around the place, knowing she would never see it again.

  “Nothing will change here in this pig sty,” she whispered with disgust.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thompson brought her to his cluttered apartment in a seedy building overlooking the Nile and cleared a space in his gloomy study filled with moldy books for her and the baby.

  “You will stay here. We have work to do together. We will decide what to do once we have done the job. I will take care of both of you.” He shook his head. “You needn’t worry. I will not harm you in any way.”

  She did not question his judgment. It was the best alternative for the moment. Besides, Isis was with her. Nothing else mattered. Besides, he had promised that she would get five hundred pounds as soon as the story appeared, a fortune for her, enough for her and Isis to live for a long time. That was all that mattered.

  Not all of Cairo burned, as she discovered the next morning. She found Thompson in the parlor, the sun streaming in on the heavy nondescript furniture, his face buried in a newspaper. He did not look up when she came in carrying Isis.

  “Only fifty Egyptians killed,” he murmured, “seventeen foreigners. They burned Shepheard’s, three other hotels, a British club, of course, an office of the Moslem Brotherhood, several department stores, seventeen cafés and restaurants, eighteen cinemas, a Jewish school, and seventy other commercial establishments. Not bad for a single day’s work.”

  “And Farouk?”

  He put down the newspaper, and let the baby grip his thumb.

  “Daddy lives. All’s well in paradise.”

  The telephone rang and he answered it, spoke in whispers, then came back to the table.

  “Now for work,” he said, clearing the table of everything but a pad and pencil.

  She worked with him for hours telling of her relationship with Farouk without emotion, as if it had happened to someone else. She told him about Zakki. He questioned her on everything: Farouk’s collections, his eating habits, his clothes, his body, his sexual proclivities. Unsmiling and attentive, she told him everything she could remember. Thompson seemed to cluck with joy every time she offered what he seemed to think was a new revelation. It was all rather boring to her.

  “Will it hurt him?” she asked at one point.

  “It obviously won’t be the coup de grâce. Just another little annoyance to further the process along.”

  “Where will it appear?”

  He named an Egyptian newspaper and others in other countries. It did not occur to her to ask him why he was doing this, although he took the time to explain that he was a freelance journalist who had lived in Egypt for more than ten years and that he was an American.

  As if to prove his sincerity, he gave her fifty pounds, and she immediately went down to the Khan el-Khalili bazaar and bought herself and Isis decent clothing. Once she was finished with Thompson, she vowed, she would go out and find a good job and a decent place to live. For the first time in her life, she was thinking ahead.

  Occasionally, he went out, returning early in the small hours of the morning. Sometimes, he had people in, but always sent her off to the converted study with Isis.

  Because she was bored and Isis was asleep, she would put her ear to the door. Frequently, she recognized one of the voices, the man she had first met with Thompson at the Auberge des Pyramides, the intense man with the dark eyes. A Professor Ezzat, she remembered; a pale ascetic face. Their conversation seemed repetitive.

  “…sometime in the next six months. They are not sure. There is only agreement, Farouk must go,” the professor said as she listened one night. He spoke swiftly, expelling chunks of language like staccato hammer blows.

  “It has been going on for years, Ezzat,” Thompson interjected. “His pressure for help by our government is increasing. Acheson won’t budge. They keep asking: When will it be? When will it be?”

  “His position is untenable. The joke is, he is easy to discredit. He made an ass of himself in Europe. The story of this girl and her baby will be another nail
in his coffin.”

  “He is so easy to discredit. His honeymoon was a public farce. Every night at the nightclubs, then the gambling tables. Somehow, things appear more dissolute in a luxury hotel setting. The silly ass doesn’t understand how his antics are fodder for propaganda. Image is the word they are using now. He has an absurd image. A lecher. A voluptuary. Ridicule is a powerful tool.”

  “But the pot must continue to boil. People forget.” Ezzat’s voice rose. “And, imagine, the crown prince and the other were born only six weeks apart. More grist for the mill.”

  “It’s a dirty business, Ezzat.”

  “Your government should be quite pleased with you.”

  She heard a long pause. Thompson must have told him to be quieter, and she had trouble listening for a while. Then the professor’s voice barked again.

  “The British are finished here, as everywhere,” he said. “But if you think these soldiers will give you a glorious democracy, you had better think again. It is merely a first stage. Topple the king. Nothing will change under the army. They are naive. Inexperienced. Corruption will continue. As always the men at the top will corrupt eventually although there might be a grace period. They claim idealism and democratic intent. Perhaps for a while at least they won’t have their hand in the till. Not like the fat one with his grubby fingers in every filthy enterprise. Arms. Smuggling. Whorehouses. Hashish. Not to mention kickbacks everywhere.”

  “There will always be that. All sides have that. It is part of their filthy culture.”

  “It is a pity that we must rely on these silly soldiers with their romantic macho dreams,” Ezzat said. “But they have the weapons and they seem to have convince people that they are honest, if that is the right word. Power greed is a worse affliction than material acquisitiveness, don’t you agree, Thompson?”

  Thompson mumbled what Farrah took for assent.

  “They are the sons of clerks and fellaheen. Nasser, Sadat, the others. It is not that they are so efficient at secrecy. It is simply that no one, the king included, wants to acknowledge their existence. It is an old Egyptian habit. Deliberate blindness. It is more comforting never to tell ourselves the truth.” Ezzat groaned as if the revelation gave him pain before continuing, “Maybe the fellaheen will gain in the long run.”