The Cairo House Read online

  Mama, who normally rose at about ten o’clock, would have been up at dawn, supervising the distribution of meat to the old retainers and the poor who regularly came to the house. A small crowd would have gathered by daybreak. The wetnurses were given the lion’s share, followed by the household help. The sheepskins invariably fell to the lot of the Nubian doorkeeper, who took them back with him to his village in the Nubia on his biannual visits home.

  I would stay up in my room until it was time for me to dress and go with Papa on another round of visits. By the time I came home, calm would have been restored, and the people who had come for charity would have dispersed. Dinner would be served, with several dishes of lamb as required by tradition. I never touched it; the odor of freshly-butchered meat still lingered about the kitchen, wafting into the dining-room every time the door to the butler’s pantry swung open. The household staff would be in a hurry to clear the table and be gone for the holidays, except for the governess, who did not celebrate Muslim feasts, and for the doorkeeper, who had no family in Cairo.

  It had never before occurred to me to be curious about what went on in that shed, between dawn and daybreak. But now I could not get the idea out of my head, not even when Papa took me with him on the first round of visits to relatives. The routine never varied; the aunts and uncles were visited in order of their seniority. Since Papa was the youngest of his eight brothers and sisters, his turn to receive visitors came on the last of the three days of the Feast. On the Eve of the Feast he took me to visit the Pasha, Papa’s oldest brother and the head of the clan. He lived in the family home in Garden City, which everyone called the Cairo House.

  On the way we passed a truck full of smiling, excited people from the country. They were standing up in the back of the truck, swaying with its movement, singing and clapping. The girls wore neon pink, nylon gauze dresses, the boys new striped pajamas. We also passed pick-up trucks carrying bleating sheep marked for slaughter with a rose-red stain on their fat tails. By dawn the next day they would all be butchered. I stared at them with equal fascination and revulsion, trying to imagine the actual proceedings.

  We drove down the Nile Corniche past the grand hotels and the long white wall of the British Embassy, then turned off into the narrow, villa-lined streets of Garden City. When we reached the family house Papa stopped the car and honked for the gatekeeper to open the gate. He parked in the back of the villa, alongside several other cars.

  I followed him round to the front, past the fountain with its statue of a reclining Poseidon. One of the two heavy double doors was open; normally the front doors were only used on feast days, and at weddings and funerals. Inside the long hall the marble floor radiated cold. I looked up through the atrium at the blazing crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling of the second floor, fifty feet above my head.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs to see your grandmother first.’ Papa headed for the wide marble staircase with the two curved balustrades. I followed him up, then along the gallery.

  At the top of the stairs we were met by Fangali, the majordomo of the house. He adjusted the out-moded fez he wore on his head and tugged at his caftan as he came forward to greet us. There was something about him that eluded my understanding. The high-pitched voice, the ingratiating manner, contrasted with the thin moustache, the bold eyes. I wondered why he, of all the menservants, was the only one allowed to come and go freely upstairs, in the family quarters. I had vaguely overheard that, as a result of an accident at birth, he was not quite a man. I wondered if he was an agha. I had heard of the eunuches of my grandmother’s day, without understanding what the word signified. I didn’t dare ask. Years later I thought I understood, but later still, Fangali would spring a surprise on us all.

  Fangali knocked perfunctorily on the door to Grandmother’s room and opened it, announcing in his peculiar whine: ‘Look who’s here, Hanem. Shamel Bey and Sitt Gigi.’

  Grandmother was sitting on a chaise longue, her legs covered with a knit shawl. Fangali tucked the shawl around the child-like feet in satin mules, and left the room. It never failed to amaze me that this tiny woman could have born my tall, strapping father and his eight brothers and sisters. But it seemed as though the effort had drained Grandmother completely; as far back as I could remember, she had always had that vague air of detachment about her.

  Papa kissed his mother’s hand and pulled up a chair beside her and I followed suit. She was saying to Papa, with an approving nod in my direction, ‘That little one can name her own mahr.’ I understood vaguely what the word meant: the dowry the bridegroom brings to the bride.

  Papa laughed and rumpled my hair. ‘I’m going down to see your uncle in his study, Gigi. I’ll send for you when I’m ready to go, and you can come to wish him a happy Feast before we leave.’

  I nodded and sat down beside Grandmother. Fangali brought us glasses of qammar-eddin, apricot nectar, and a tray with sweets. I nibbled absently on a glacé chestnut, my mind on the act of the Sacrifice. Mama would never allow it if I asked to observe it, but she had never expressly forbade it, so technically I would not be disobeying. I knew Mama’s rules well enough though: whatever was not explicitly allowed was forbidden. As for Madame Hélène, she slept in the room adjoining mine, with the door ajar, but she slept heavily, with a smoker’s nasal snore. I made up my mind: I would do it.

  At that moment Fangali ushered in a shriveled old woman wrapped in black from head to toe. The sooty black eyes, ringed with kohl, darted sharply around the room. No one seemed to know how old Om Khalil really was, but it was rumored that the secret of her spryness was drinking nothing but vinegar and water for one day a week. She went from house to house, making jam, pickles, rosewater, kohl from pounded roast almonds, or special concoctions for recovering new mothers. The servants in each household treated her with the awe commensurate with her reputation for an undeflectable evil eye.

  I tried to resist an involuntary frisson when I set eyes on the black-shrouded figure. I knew this reaction to an old family retainer was highly reprehensible, but children, like animals, have not yet learned to override their instincts. Seeing Om Khalil at the moment I had made my decision was a bad omen, and I hesitated again.

  ‘How are you, Om Khalil?’ Grandmother reached for some money from a tasseled purse she kept beside her for the steady stream of family domestics who came to visit on feast days. She had phobias about certain things; for instance, she insisted on having the maid wash any money that she handled, whether it was coins or bills. ‘It’s because she had such a bad experience during the cholera epidemic,’ Mama had explained. ‘She lost two children to cholera, they were just babies.’

  Fangali came to fetch me. I kissed Grandmother and hurried downstairs. The door to my uncle’s study was open, and there were a dozen men sitting around the room. My eldest uncle sat behind his desk at the far end. He seemed even larger than the last time I had seen him, on the Lesser Feast a few months before. A big man, his bulk suggested power rather than obesity. His gray double-breasted suit fitted him perfectly, and the silk square in the breast pocket matched his tie. I went up to kiss him; he smelled of Cuban cigars and Old Spice, just like I remembered.

  ‘Happy Feast, little one, what a big girl you’ve become.’ He patted my cheek and reached into his pocket for a handful of shiny coins. It was the custom to give children shiny new coins for luck on feast days, and my uncle always prepared great quantities of them for all the children of the clan, and the children of friends and retainers, who came to visit.

  I had heard that in the old days, before the revolution, before I was born, when my uncle had been prime minister, he had once paid the Feast Day bonuses to some of the Cairo police force, out of his own pocket – out of the family’s pocket, really, since it was all one and the same. During the revolutionary tribunals of 1952, this had been brought up as proof of undue influence. The Pasha had countered that, there being a temporary shortfall in the budget, he had only advanced the money out of his own pocket, in or
der to make sure that the poor policemen and their families would have the wherewithal to celebrate the Feast. I did not understand what all the fuss had been about; I thought it was about the new coins that children were given.

  That night it took me a long time to fall asleep. I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not to risk trying to watch the sacrifice. Finally I dozed off. The call to dawn prayers from the minaret of the mosque nearby woke me. Every morning I slept right through the call to prayers, but that day it had woken me. It seemed like an omen. I sat up in bed in the dark, blinking at the dial of the alarm clock. Had the cook and his helpers started yet? The ram would be first. The larger, more dangerous animal is always killed first, before it has time to panic and resist. I strained my ears but I could hear nothing but Madame Hélène’s regular snoring through the door to the adjoining room.

  I slumped back against my pillow. I tried to go back to sleep, but my whole body was tense, straining for the slightest sound. I thought I heard a faint bleating, but I couldn’t be sure. I sat up again, my heart pounding. It was now or never. I would just go down to the back garden, but I wouldn’t actually look into the shed. I jumped out of bed, and pulled on my yellow wool dressing gown. I slipped on my ballet slippers and tiptoed out.

  Within minutes I had slipped out of the kitchen door and headed for the lighted shed at the bottom of the garden. I could hear a sort of scuffling, then staccato bleating and the low, urgent voices of the men inside. I recognized the voice of the cook, suddenly raised in warning:

  ‘Watch out!’

  Then the encouraging mutters of the doorkeeper and the other men.

  ‘In the name of Allah!’

  ‘Easy now!’

  ‘I’ve got him.’

  ‘Allah Akbar.’

  I tiptoed to the door of the shed, my heartbeat throbbing so loudly in my ears I could hear nothing else. I clamped my hand over my nose and mouth against rising nausea, and peered in. To this day, I am unable to tell for sure what I actually saw from what my overheated imagination filled in: the harsh light of a naked light bulb on the straining backs of the men bent over in a circle; blood spattering the walls; bound hooves flailing. I screamed and turned to run, slipped in the pool of blood seeping under the door, and fell unconscious.

  As Madame Hélène was to tell me later, she was roused from her sleep by the shouting of the cook under her window. She looked out and saw me, lifeless and blood-spattered in the arms of the bloody cook, and started screaming. The cook was apparently shouting for her to come down so he could unload me onto her and get back to his work, but she understood little Arabic at the best of times and at that moment was completely hysterical.

  The combined screaming and shouting roused the household and the cook was able to leave me in Mama’s care and get back to slaughtering his sheep. But by then the first light had broken, and the men shook their heads. It was a bad omen.

  When I woke up, I found myself in my own clean bed, in a fresh nightgown. Madame Hélène was embroidering in her armchair, looking as if she had been severely reprimanded by Mama, which boded ill for me. I buried my head in the pillow, ashamed and miserable, knowing I had taken the risk of breaking an absolute taboo, and yet was none the wiser for it.

  Later that year, when the blow fell, when the stormclouds broke, I could not help believing, in the unreasoning, solipsistic way of guilty children, that there had been a connection. That some sacred rituals – even good magic – should not be exposed to the eyes of the uninitiated, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the gods. Looking back, I realize that this experience left a deeper mark on me than anyone could have foreseen at the time: a fear of curiosity, a squeamishness, an avoidance of the messy, unsettling underside of life which left me singularly unprepared to deal with it as an adult.

  2

  Sequestration

  Later that year, when the blow fell, when the stormclouds broke, it started with a speech broadcast over the radio. That was the first time I became aware that my life was susceptible to being caught in the slipstream of history, that a speech broadcast over the radio could change my life forever. The year I first became aware of the burden of belonging: to a name, a past.

  One day that summer I came home to find my parents sitting in front of the television set in the living room. President Nasser’s oversized features dominated the screen, the intense eyes smoky under the thick eyebrows. I remembered that it was Revolution Day, July 23, 1961. Nasser was giving a speech, one of his three-hour harangues that were regularly broadcast on radio and television. The familiar hypnotic voice rose and fell, echoed through the open windows by the radios blaring from the street. Everyone seemed to have the radio on: the man in the cigarette and candy kiosk on the corner, the doorkeepers, the motorists in their cars.

  I started to say something and Mama put her finger to her lips. It was then that I became aware of the tension in the air. I turned to the television set. I couldn’t understand every word that was being said, but the virulence in the tone was unmistakable. There were repeated references to ‘the enemies of the people.’

  Over the next few days many inexplicable things happened. When I asked questions I was told not to worry and sent to Madame Hélène. I overheard snatches of anguished conversations, whispered phone calls. I gathered enough to understand that, the day after the speech, at dawn, all my uncles, including the Pasha, had been taken away to an internment camp. That night Papa brought out a little overnight case. He packed some underwear, toiletries and medicine, and put the case under the mahogany sleigh bed in his bedroom.

  One morning all the servants were gone, except for the cook and Ibrahim the doorkeeper. I found Mama sitting on a stool in the butler’s pantry, talking to the cook.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she was saying, ‘but you know we can’t afford you any longer. You won’t have any trouble finding a job as a chef with one of the hotels. You’re a first class cook and you’ll have the best references.’

  The cook stood in the doorway to the kitchen, dramatically baring his scarred chest and declaiming that he had been with my parents since they first set up house and that he owed them the flesh on his shoulders. I assumed he was referring to the terrible accident in which he had incurred the burn scars on his chest. He had been trying to light the gas stove before the Feast the year before when the stove caught fire and he was wrapped in flames. Papa had ventured into the blaze to turn off the gas, taking the risk that the entire cylinder would blow up in his face. The cook was rushed to the hospital, where, despite the severity of his condition, his eventual recovery was assured. Mama had been very sorry for him at the time and only much later made the remark that the fire probably started because the cook was so lazy about keeping the stove clean from grease.

  ‘What I need for you to do,’ Mama was saying that morning as she sat on a stool in the pantry, ‘is to find a suffragi-cook for me, someone who doesn’t need a kitchen boy, a marmiton, to help him. Of course I don’t expect him to cook very well. It doesn’t matter as long as he will settle for the salary I mentioned and won’t mind doing some housework on the side. Help with the heavy cleaning, that sort of thing.’

  The next morning, when the cook arrived, Mama went into the kitchen.

  ‘Did you find someone?’ she asked.

  ‘I found you a cook who will be happy with the salary, doesn’t need a marmiton, will peel the vegetables himself and will even mop the kitchen floor!’ the cook concluded triumphantly.

  ‘Well, where is he?’

  ‘You’re looking at him!’ The cook beamed, slapping his chest.

  But Mama was just as stubborn as the cook, and adamantly refused the sacrifice. Eventually a ‘passe-partout’ was found. Dinners were no longer served the usual way, with the head-suffragi bringing around each dish in turn to your left and serving you himself. Meals were served ‘family style’ instead: the dishes were all placed on the table at once, and we passed them around and helped ourselves. I, for one, was pleased: it alwa
ys looked so much cosier in American movies and on television when I watched families sit down to dinner.

  Madame Hélène stayed. She would not consider looking for another position, at her age.

  Later that week four men in dark suits came to the house, clutching pens and clipboards. They were solemn and almost apologetic as they dispersed through every room of the house, making careful notes on every piece of furniture, every object, every bibelot. They even went into my room and counted my dolls. At the end of their tour they handed Mama a copy of the inventory they had made. When they left, one of them drove off with one of the two family cars. They also took the revolver that Papa kept to take on his trips to the estate, in case of highwaymen on the road.

  Mama looked at the list and then at Papa. She started to laugh. ‘Just look what they’ve written down. They have no idea what anything is, or what value to put on anything. We could sell any of the carpets or any of the vases, and replace them with fakes, and they’d never know the difference.’ Then she looked at me and changed the subject.

  At the end of the month, when the servants had to be paid, Mama’s younger brother Hani came to pick her up. She wore sunglasses and she was biting her lip as she slipped a bank passbook into her handbag.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to go through this.’ Papa put his hand on her shoulder as he saw them off at the door.

  ‘It’s all right, really. There’s just a chance – it’s such a small account, they might have overlooked it.’

  I went up to my bedroom and cornered Madame Hélène, who was writing a letter to ‘le petit Luc.’

  ‘Why is Uncle Hani taking Mama to the bank? Why not Papa?’

  ‘Because he would be recognized. All the family’s bank accounts are frozen, and your mother’s as well, because she’s married to your Papa. All the family keep their accounts at the Banque du Caire. But Maman has one small savings account that she’s had since she was a minor, in a little bank, I don’t know its name. And of course the account’s in her maiden name. So perhaps the sequestration authorities don’t know about it. Madame is going with your uncle to try to cash it. Let’s hope the bank would not have instructions to freeze the account, and that they would not realize who she was married to.’ Madame Hélène shook her head and sighed. ‘Who would have believed all this? It’s like what happened to us during the war, my husband and I. I never thought I would hear that word “sequestration” again.’ She sighed. ‘Now please don’t tell Madame I told you all this, she said you were not to be allowed to worry about these things.’