As she returned her attention to the garden, she heard a little girl singing nearby, and paused to listen, recognizing Camelia's voice. That child was born with music in her brain, she thought, and she tried to make out the Arabic lyrics the child was singing. After seven years, Alice was proud of the progress she had made in Arabic, and although she had a little trouble with Camelia's song, she was able to get the gist of it. It was, as most Egyptian songs were, about love: "Lay your head on my breast, warm my breast, pierce me with your love arrow."
When she heard Yasmina's voice join in, Alice wasn't surprised. Although a year apart in age, the two half sisters were as close as twins, always together, and even, Alice had discovered on nights when she had gone into the girls' room to check on her daughter, sometimes slept in the same bed.
To her surprise, the sound of her daughter's voice made her feel homesick for England. She was longing more and more to see the ancestral Tudor home of the Westfalls, and the misty green countryside; she missed riding to hounds with her friends, and shopping at Harrod's; she yearned for bacon and ale, shepherd's pie and bangers, weeks of rain, and a ride on top of a red double-decker bus. And she missed her friends, who had declared that they would come to Egypt and visit her, but whose promises over the years had begun to fade until their letters no longer contained any plans for a visit. Only one of her friends, Madeline, had come right out and written, "It's too dangerous to travel in Egypt now. Especially for a British subject."
But I am happy here, Alice reminded herself. I have a good life with Ibrahim, and a beautiful little girl.
But a nagging thought, triggered by the sound of Yasmina's voice, was now undermining that certainty. Alice searched the garden, as if she could discover this new doubt among the flowers and shrubs. She examined her life and concluded that she truly didn't mind that she and Ibrahim slept on opposite sides of the house; her own parents had had separate bedrooms for nearly all their married life. Nor did she really mind that Ibrahim often attended social events without her, such as today's soccer match. But, on this warm August morning, she realized for the first time that something was missing. She couldn't figure out what.
Leaving her garden tools, Alice peered through a cluster of hydrangeas and saw Camelia and Yasmina playing in a patch of sunlight. Her smile turned to shock when she saw what they were doing. Each draped in a single length of long black silk, the girls were practicing wrapping the melaya around their bodies, over their heads and across the lower halves of their faces, imitating women seen all over Cairo. To Alice's further surprise, the two girls, aged six and seven, were doing a remarkable job of mimicking the way those women walked, sashaying their hips and constantly readjusting the slippery fabric.
"Hello, children," she said, emerging into their private patch of sunlight.
"Hello, Auntie Alice!" said Camelia, twirling around in her melaya dramatically. "Aren't these lovely? Auntie Nefissa gave them to us!"
Nefissa's discarded veils, Alice thought, recalling the change that had come over her sister-in-law in recent years. Nefissa had said, "I no longer want to live the way my mother does. I want to be a free woman." And Nefissa had boldly announced to Amira that she wasn't going to wear a veil outside anymore, and Amira, to Alice's surprise, had not argued with her.
So now the little girls were playing "dress-up" in the melayas, just as Alice had once done with her mother's old gowns. But there was a difference: Lady Frances's outmoded evening dresses had not been a symbol of repression and slavery.
Alice was suddenly gripped with a strange new fear. Ever since the over-throw of Farouk and the establishment of the revolutionary government, there had been talk of making the English leave Egypt, so the country could return to the old ways. She had thought nothing of it until this moment. Return to the old ways! She pictured the many rooms in the Rasheed mansion, filled with portraits of long-dead ancestors: powerful-looking men in turbans and fezzes, accompanied by faceless women hidden beneath veils. Women with no identities, Alice thought, except through the men they stood with.
Women, she thought darkly, who had to sit by while their husbands took other wives.
It had been so difficult, when she had wakened the morning after Yasmina was born, to learn that Ibrahim had had another wife! A wife she hadn't known about. And to be told that the son of that union was going to be raised in this house! When Ibrahim had explained to her that the other wife had meant nothing to him, that they had divorced by mutual consent, that it was she, Alice, he loved, and no one else, Alice had tried to tell herself that it was not Ibrahim's fault, that it was just part of his culture. But she had said to him, No more wives, I must be the only wife. And he had agreed.
Even so, there were times when she would look at little Zachariah, or hear his laugh, and she would feel the old pain: Ibrahim already had a wife when he married me!
Other images began to flood Alice's mind: the English tea parties she had attended with other English wives, the dances and balls she went to with Ibrahim, where men and women mingled, the Punch-and-Judy shows to which she took Yasmina, and the playgrounds where she met English nannies watching over children who resembled her own daughter. And she thought now: What if the British did leave Egypt? Would all the Englishness be gone as well?
She imagined a frightening future, with women again veiled, restricted to their homes, their husbands taking other wives. Alice had learned to accept the curtailed freedoms—not being able to go anywhere she wanted unless she was escorted, not being able to leave the country without her husband's permission, finding herself left alone with the women when she and Ibrahim visited Egyptian friends. She had even, after a while, come to accept the fact that Ibrahim had already had a wife when they had married in Monte Carlo. But reverting to the old ways was unthinkable.
And now, looking at her six-year-old daughter innocently wrapped in the archaic black veil, hiding her body, her identity, beneath it, Alice experienced a fear she had never felt before. What would this little girl's future be like, how would she be treated, what chances would she have in this culture in whose language the word for chaos, fitna, also meant "beautiful woman"?
The little girls had been speaking Arabic, and Alice had responded in the same language, but now, as she sat down on a stone bench and drew Yasmina to her, she reverted to English. "I was working in my garden just now, and I remembered a funny story from when I was a girl. Would you like to hear it?"
"Oh yes," they both said, coming to sit on the grass beside her.
I will tell Yasmina about England, Alice thought as she searched her memory for a story. I will fill her with my memories, so that if that other future should come to pass, then my daughter will be armed. "When I was a little girl," Alice said, "we lived in a big house in England. It was a beautiful house, given to our family by King James, centuries ago, and because it was so old it was inhabited by a lot of mice. Now, one day your grandma noticed that a mouse had been in the kitchen during the night and—"
Yasmina said, "Do you mean Umma?" "Umma" was the children's name for Amira.
"No, darling. Your other grandmother, my mother, Grandma Westfall."
"Where is she now?"
"She died, darling. She went to live with Lord Jesus in heaven. Now then, Grandma Westfall was terrified of mice, and so she had Grandpa and Uncle Eddie search everywhere for that mouse. Where was he hiding? They searched and searched but they couldn't find that little mouse. And then one morning while Grandma was having her tea, she saw a long pink tail sticking out from under the tea cozy. Grandma let out a cry and fell in a dead faint to the floor!"
Yasmina and Camelia screamed and clapped their hands. "The mouse was living in the tea cozy!"
"And Grandma had picked up that tea cozy every morning for weeks without knowing that the mouse was inside it!"
As the girls laughed and Camelia started pretending she was a mouse, Alice heard a voice call, "Hello there! Good morning!" They saw Maryam Misrahi's red hair before they saw the woma
n herself.
"Auntie Maryam!" the two little girls called out, and Camelia immediately jumped up, hastily wrapping the melaya about herself.
"Always the little show-off," Maryam said with a laugh, first patting Camelia on the cheek, and then Yasmina.
She turned to Alice. "How are you this morning, my dear? You are looking so well."
As Alice replied, it struck her for the first time how different Maryam and Amira were. Alice knew that they had been friends for years, that they saw each other nearly every day, but it had not occurred to her until this moment that where Maryam was outgoing and perhaps a little flamboyant, Ibrahim's mother was quiet and more conservative. And Maryam had an active social life beyond her home, whereas Amira, to Alice's continued amazement, had yet to set foot in the street beyond her gate.
And now that she thought about it, Alice decided it was beyond her understanding how Amira could be happy in such a cloistered life. And yet, astonishingly, Amira had once confessed that she stayed inside of her own volition. The confession had come the day Amira had received a letter from Athens, from an old friend, Andreas Skouras, informing her of his marriage to a Greek woman. Amira had been uncharacteristically open that day, confessing to Alice that she sometimes regretted not marrying Mr. Skouras when she had had the opportunity, and Alice, hearing about the former minister of culture for the first time, had seen her mother-in-law in a new light. Amira, she had realized, was still a young woman! Which made her choice of such a sequestered life all the more baffling.
As Camelia and Yasmina went off to play, Maryam said, "I heard from my son Itzak today."
"The son who lives in California?"
"He sent me some photographs. Here is one of his daughter, Rachel. Isn't she a pretty little girl?"
Alice looked at the group of people standing happily on a beach with palm trees behind them.
"She's a year younger than your Yasmina. My," Maryam said with a sigh, "how time flies. I have never seen her, you know. One of these days, Suleiman and I must go there. Here is another picture I thought you would like to see. I asked Itzak to send it to me because it's the only one we have. It was taken years ago, at Itzak's Bar Mitzvah. There, do you see anyone you recognize?"
It was another group photo, taken beneath an ancient olive tree. Alice recognized Maryam and Suleiman Misrahi, looking much younger; the son Itzak; and Ali Rasheed, Amira's barrel-chested husband, whose portrait dominated nearly every room of the house. Now, strangely, he seemed to dominate this picture, too. Finally there was Ibrahim, a young man of about eighteen.
Alice was struck by how strongly Yasmina resembled her father, and the fact that Ibrahim was not looking at the camera, but at his father, Ali.
"Who is this young girl?" Alice asked.
"That's Fatima, Ibrahim's sister."
"Fatima! I have never seen a picture of her. Do you know what became of her? Ibrahim won't talk about it."
"Perhaps someday he will tell you," Maryam said. "I'm going to see if I can get copies made of this photo. Itzak wants to have it, but I want it too, and I'm sure Amira will want it, to put into her albums." Maryam laughed. "Those albums of hers. I should have the patience she does. I still keep pictures in boxes."
"Maryam," Alice said, as she and Maryam walked back to where the cyclamen were blooming, "there aren't any pictures of Amira's family in her albums—her own parents, brothers and sisters. Why is that?"
"Why don't you ask her?"
"I have, and each time she says that when she married Ali, his family became hers. But still, she should have some pictures of them, shouldn't she? In fact, she never speaks of her parents."
"Ah well, you know how it can be between parents and their children sometimes. Things don't always go smoothly."
Thinking of her own father, the Earl of Pemberton who, to this day, still refused to talk to his daughter, Alice nodded and said, "Yes, you're right." She had hoped that he would come around when Yasmina was born, but, except for a yearly Christmas present to the girl—a generous check deposited in a trust fund—the earl had never acknowledged that he had any children other than Edward.
Alice wondered: is that what happened between Amira and her parents?
And then something else occurred to her, something which she had never brought up with any of the family but which, feeling surprisingly at ease with Maryam, she did. "There are also no pictures of Zachariah's mother in any of the albums. Did you know her?"
"No, I didn't. None of us knew about her. But that is not unusual with Muslim men."
"Do you know her name, or where she is now?"
Maryam shook her head.
"Maryam," Alice said quietly, sensing that this might be her only moment with the one person outside the family who knew them so well, and in whom she could confide. "Do you think I fit in well here?"
"Whatever do you mean, my dear? Aren't you happy?"
"Oh, I'm happy, it's not that. It's just that...it's hard to explain. Sometimes I feel like a clock running at a different speed from everyone else, or like a piano slightly out of tune, as if I weren't synchronized with those around me. Sometimes, in the evening after dinner, when we're all in the salon, I look around at my husband's family and they all seem slightly out of focus, the scene is somehow askew. It isn't them, of course, because they are where they belong. It's me. I'm like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I am happy here, Maryam, and I do so want to be. But there are times ..."
Maryam smiled and said, "What is it you want, Alice? You say you're happy, and you do seem happy, but perhaps you want something more? This isn't England, I know, and I know you had quite an adjustment to make when you came here. But something must be troubling you, even if you can't say what it is."
Alice looked up at the house, which was blushing a deep pink as the sun rose, and she imagined that she could see through the thick stone walls, right into the many rooms. "At this moment," she said, so quietly that it was as if she were talking to herself, "Amira is going through the house and taking inventory of everything—the sheets, the china."
Maryam laughed. "Amira is the most fastidious woman I know when it comes to knowing exactly where everything is! I've told her she can come to my house any time and count my sheets. God knows I don't even know what's in some of my closets!"
"Yes, but Maryam, that's what I want to do," Alice said, as she envisioned her mother-in-law going from room to room with a servant and a clipboard, counting the linens, setting aside pillowcases that needed mending, making neat stacks of starched, monogrammed sheets. "I envy her," Alice added, and suddenly realized what it was that was missing from her life: she longed for a home of her own. She suddenly understood something else about herself, something about her new fears for Yasmina and Ibrahim. It would be easier for her, should the British leave Egypt, and the old ways return, if she was in her own house. She would be better able to fight the old traditions—and save her daughter and herself from becoming slaves to them. As she and Maryam walked, Alice thought excitedly: I shall bring it up with Ibrahim tonight. We must have a place of our own!
All Cairo was buzzing over the latest news about the deposed king. Ibrahim's family, gathering in the salon after dinner, was no exception.
"Who would have thought their majesties were so extravagant?" declared a spinster cousin over her knitting.
Because Farouk and his family had sailed away on short notice, taking with them only what they could carry from the Alexandria residence, the five hundred rooms at Abdin Palace, and the four hundred at Qubbah, had revealed the true extent of Farouk's outlandish lifestyle. Sunken malachite bathtubs, huge wardrobes containing thousands of tailored suits, collections of precious stones and gold coins, vaults filled with reels of erotica, American movies, and comic books. There was also a hidden collection of keys to fifty apartments in Cairo, each key labeled with a woman's name and a rating of her sexual skills.
A lot of the queen's belongings had also been left behind: Narriman's wedding gown
, studded with twenty thousand diamonds, a hundred hand-made lace nightgowns, five mink coats, high-heeled shoes fitted with solid gold heels.
Experts from Sotheby's in London were being brought in by the Revolutionary Council to evaluate everything, after which they would hold an auction, the proceeds going to the poor. It was estimated that the value of the royal family's confiscated property was going to exceed seventy million Egyptian pounds.
"I don't like all this talk," Nefissa murmured to Ibrahim, who was sitting next to her on the divan as, with the rest of the family, they drank their after-dinner coffee. "The princess was my friend."
Ibrahim didn't reply; he had too much on his mind.
"To be thrown out of one's own home," Nefissa said quietly, as she absently ran her fingers through her son's hair. Omar was now a chunky eleven-year-old. "And then to have one's private things publicly displayed. I wonder if Faiza is still in Egypt. I haven't been able to find out." Thoughts of the princess brought back memories, the "Night of the Nightingale and the Rose," as Nefissa had come to call it. And from that memory her thoughts strayed to Alice's brother, Edward, whose blond hair and blue eyes nearly matched those of her lieutenant.
Was he as disappointed as she, she wondered, that they hadn't gone to Alexandria two weeks ago? Was he anxious to try to get away again? Nefissa wasn't to be deterred. If they couldn't take a motoring trip north, they could always go south. She knew Edward was interested in the ancient monuments, and that he had yet to visit the pyramids at Saqqara, nineteen miles from Cairo. Tonight, when the opportunity arose, she was going to suggest a day trip with a picnic lunch, just the two of them.
Virgins of Paradise Page 14
