The Cairo House Read online

  Mama and her brother came back an hour later. She looked at Papa and shook her head. Before Uncle Hani left, Mama handed him a small, velvet jewelry box.

  ‘It’s platinum and pearl, I don’t know what it’s worth, but see what you can do. All my valuable things were in the bank vault. I had taken out all my best pieces for the Bindari’s wedding last month, if only I hadn’t been in such a hurry to put them back in the vault…’

  ‘What’s that you’re giving Uncle Hani?’ I asked.

  ‘One of my bracelets, the clasp is broken, it needs to be taken to the jeweler’s to be fixed. Kiss your uncle and run upstairs now, darling, I think Madame Hélène is calling you.’

  Later that night I looked for my parents to kiss them goodnight. Mama’s bedroom was dark but the French doors were open and I heard their voices coming from the verandah. Before I reached them the word ‘divorce’ made me stop in my tracks and hold my breath.

  ‘I mean it,’ my father was saying. ‘You heard Nasser’s speech. If I were to divorce you right away you could keep your property. But if you stay married to me, you lose everything. It’s not fair to you. Most of my brothers are married to their cousins, their wives would be subject to the sequestration decrees anyway in their own right. But you wouldn’t be. Nabil and Zakariah’s wives wouldn’t either, but they have no money of their own. But you do. No one would blame you if you asked for a divorce, it would be understood that you were doing it for the child’s sake. I would be the first to defend you if anyone said a word against you.’

  ‘Don’t let’s discuss this. There’s no point.’

  ‘I want you to think seriously about this before it’s too late. You didn’t marry me for love. You married me because I was one of the most eligible bachelors in Egypt. Things have changed.’

  ‘You know my answer, once and for all. Promise me you won’t bring this up again?’

  I crept back to my room.

  When school started in the fall, there was a lot of whispering among the other girls, cut short when I approached. The nuns patted me on the head for no special reason and murmured ‘la pauvre petite.’

  My birthday fell on a weekend early in December, and nothing seemed different about the preparations that year. It was only as an adult that I realized what a sacrifice this appearance of normality must have represented. As usual I handed out an invitation to every one of the twenty-two girls in my class, no R.S.V.P. requested. Every girl in class had always come to my birthday teas. Mama and Madame Hélène put together twenty-two bags of party favors. After lunch I wasn’t allowed into the dining-room while they festooned it with balloons and streamers and set the table with an organdy tablecloth. At three the deliveries arrived: Mama had ordered the decorated birthday cake, the gâteaux and the petits fours from Simmond’s in Zamalek. At three-thirty I put on a velvet dress with a lace collar hand-made by Madame Hélène, and a little gold locket that was Mama’s present. It was one of hers that I’d always liked.

  At four o’clock I waited for the doorbell to start ringing. By four-thirty only one girl had arrived, Aleya Bindari, who was a distant cousin. At five o’clock, looking stricken, Mama suggested we go ahead with the birthday party. She said she had heard that there was a case of measles going around the school and the other girls must either have come down with it or have stayed away for fear of getting exposed to it. I pretended to believe her, then and forever.

  At school the following week only one of my classmates apologized. ‘I wanted to come, but my parents said I couldn’t, because it wasn’t safe to associate – you know, because of the sequestration.’ I nodded, although I didn’t really know what sequestration meant, nor, I suspected, did she.

  One day the Arabic teacher, the only male instructor, came into class and announced that a new subject had been added to the curriculum by the Ministry of Education. It was called Arab Socialism and was mandatory. It would be one of only three subjects taught in Arabic, the other two being the language itself and Religion for the Muslim pupils.

  The Arabic teacher taught all three. During the break between Arabic class and Religion class, while the half dozen Coptic girls filed out for Bible study with one of the nuns, he could be heard noisily performing his prayer ablutions in the washroom next door to my classroom. He gargled and spat, and cleared his nose and throat copiously. When he walked back into class, the girls would giggle and make faces.

  The new course, Arab Socialism, seemed to focus on identifying ‘the enemies of the people’, and the Arabic teacher took evident satisfaction in teaching it. He drilled us in the triumvirate of evil: ‘Imperialism, Feudalism and Capitalism.’ Whenever he reiterated the words: ‘landowners,’ or ‘capitalists’, he looked at me and at Aleya Bindari, who sat one row behind me.

  I showed the textbook to my parents, with its illustrations of peasants being whipped by cruel landowners. ‘Now they’re poisoning the minds of children!’ Papa erupted.

  Mama quickly put a warning hand on his arm.

  ‘You’ll only confuse Gigi that way. And if she starts to repeat things at school…She’s too young to carry that kind of burden.’ She put an arm around me. ‘One day you’ll understand all this. Things aren’t going to stay like this forever. You’ll see. Just don’t worry about it now.’

  One morning in November when I woke up, I looked at the alarm clock and realized that I had been allowed to oversleep, I was late for school. Madame Hélène was sighing in her armchair, her boiled-egg eyes reddened. I ran to find my mother. Mama was on the phone in her bedroom, whispering urgently, a hand over her eyes. I opened the door that led, through my mother’s boudoir, into Papa’s bedroom. It was empty and the suitcase under the bed was gone.

  In an otherwise forgettable essay on glamor, I read the phrase ‘our parents are our earliest celebrities’, and I suppose that’s true. In my own case, the recollection of my early years is colored by more than the rose-tinted glasses of childhood. I realize now that it is the easy life, the freedom from petty problems and concerns, that imparts the glamor of optimism and generosity.

  I think what I regret most from ‘the good old days’ is the loss of lifestyle of the open house, of the easy welcome to guests at any time of day, on any day of the week. Merely to ask a drop-in guest if he would be staying for dinner rather than to assume, indeed to importune, him to do so, would have been considered irredeemably tactless. The cuisine and the etiquette may have been more or less cosmopolitan, but the spirit of hospitality was as uncompromisingly Egyptian as that of the country people with whom we shared our roots.

  It’s true that the easy welcome of the open house was made casual and effortless by the swarm of domestics hovering in the background. But it’s just as true that the back door was always as wide open as the front. No beggar off the streets was turned away without a meal or a handout. Anyone with the most tenuous claim, whether of kinship or former service, could be sure of a regular stipend or a place to spend the night.

  The nether regions of the house: the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the kitchen balcony, the maid’s room and the all-purpose ‘holding-room’, were a domain into which I trespassed cautiously. At any time of day, but especially at mealtimes, I never knew whom I might stumble upon: the doorkeeper’s third cousin come up from the country, my aunt’s wet nurse, the seamstress who did alterations and ran up the servants’ clothes, the laundryman who did the ironing, the shoeshine man.

  It’s also true that, long after the front door was closed, the back door stayed open. And that the last luxuries we clung to were pride, and the good name of the family.

  3

  Past As Prologue

  The good name of the family. Growing up, I was constantly aware of bearing the burden of belonging. You couldn’t help it, when the mention of your last name invariably provoked a reaction not always easy for a child to read: dread or pity, envy or commiseration. You grow up unable to reconcile family loyalty with the virulent rhetoric from public podiums. You grow up with the my
th of the ‘good old days’, before the revolution, antebellum, before you were born. All you have are photographs, but they cannot tell the whole story, because even the most candid snapshot always presupposes angles and editing.

  You can pick one faded black and white photograph after another, and look at the people in it, so young, so carefree, and wonder how they never saw the storm clouds gathering. There is one particular snapshot I find in a worn leather album of my parents’ wedding pictures, an incongruous photo tucked in the flap. This photograph, in black and white, was taken a couple of years before the Revolution, around 1950. A woman sits between two men at a table in a restaurant, the men in light summer sharkskin suits, holding cigarettes, the woman in a scoop-necked cocktail gown. All three are smiling at the camera.

  The broad-shouldered young man with the neat black moustache is my father, Shamel. The slender girl with the dark hair in a French twist is his niece. Her name was Gihan but he always called her Gina. The only time I ever heard him call her by her real name, she ran out of the room and he never saw her again. But this photo was taken before I was born, before my father was married.

  The other man in the photo is shorter than my father, wiry, radiating energy. His lanky black hair falls over his forehead and his teeth flash in a smile that etches deep creases in his face. His name was Ali, and he was my father’s best friend, but they had been estranged for years before his death.

  Shamel splashed some water over his face and neck and came out of the bathroom. The room was quiet except for the sound of the fan, whirring clockwise in one direction, then counterclockwise back again. Ali Tobia was sprawled in an armchair, propping an open book on his bare, smooth chest. Maurice Baruch was slumped in front of the chess board, his head down on his arm, apparently snoozing. Shamel sat back down opposite him and moved a rook to the right. ‘Your move,’ he touched Maurice’s arm. The other ignored him. He turned to Ali.

  ‘Want to take over from Maurice? He seems to have fallen asleep.’

  ‘Leave me alone, will you, I have to study. Some of us need to earn a living, you know.’ Ali was an intern at the Kasr-El-Eini Hospital, not far from Garden City.

  Shamel lit another cigarette. May was hotter than usual in Cairo that year. The three young men in the room had taken their shirts off. In the salamlek or ‘bachelors annex’ of the Cairo House, Shamel was free to entertain his friends as he pleased. The older, married brothers of the Seif-el-Islam family lived in the main house, while the unmarried, younger brothers slept in the salamlek, a separate small building a few feet away on the grounds.

  Shamel poked Maurice again. ‘Are you going to finish this game or not?’

  There was no response. Shamel reached over and shook his friend’s shoulder. Maurice rolled over onto the floor, the chair crashing down with him. Shamel dropped to his knees beside him and Ali leaped out of his armchair.

  A few minutes later, Ali sat back on his heels and shook his head. The two men were pouring sweat from their efforts to resuscitate their friend. ‘It’s no use. We’ve tried everything. He must have been already dead when he fell.’

  It was about a month later that Shamel stood, hesitating, one foot on the bottom step of the wide, curving marble staircase flanked by a pair of stone griffons. His grandfather had brought the griffons back from Italy, along with the Italian architect he commissioned to build the house. Seif-el-Islam Pasha’s portrait hung in the hall, with his formidable handlebar moustaches, his tarbouche, and the sash and sword of a pasha of the Ottoman Empire.

  The grandfather had been the one to make the momentous decision to uproot the clan from their family home on the cotton estates in the Delta and establish them in Cairo. The Egyptian Cotton Exchange in Alexandria was booming. Seif-el-Islam Pasha and his brother-in-law left for Europe with a suitcase full of Egyptian pounds, to which they each had a key; they helped themselves at will as they toured the continent. It was in Italy that the Pasha finally saw the palazzo he would set his heart on. Within three years the family moved into the brand-new mansion in Garden City that came to be known as the Cairo House.

  Twenty years later, he sent for his Jesuit-educated son from Paris, married him to an heiress and found him a seat in Parliament. It was time for men like him to lead the nationalist movement against the British and against the Albanian dynasty that ruled Egypt. His son died at fifty, but the old Pasha had the satisfaction of seeing his grandson chairman of the most powerful party in the country.

  The wealthy heiress that Seif-el-Islam Pasha had chosen for his son’s bride was an only child; this unusual circumstance was a result of her mother’s gullibility. Her mother had been a beautiful redhead Circassian from one of the Muslim regions of the Russian steppes. The women in her Egyptian husband’s household could barely contain their spite against this lovely and somewhat dim-witted foreigner. When her first child, a girl, was born, they convinced her that, according to local superstition, her daughter would die if the mother subsequently had a male child. The poor woman believed them, and resorted to midwives’ tricks to prevent another pregnancy. Her husband, however, did not immediately take another wife, as the spiteful women had hoped. When he died unexpectedly, his daughter was the only heir to his considerable fortune.

  At fifteen she was married off to Seif-el-Islam Pasha’s handsome son, and bore him thirteen children, of whom nine survived. Two babies had died in succession before the youngest, Shamel, was born. She insisted on having him sleep in a small bed in her boudoir until he was eight. That was the year his father died of a heart attack, and his older brothers decided that it was time for him to move into the bachelors annex with them.

  Shamel strode up the stairs and stopped briefly in his mother’s bedroom to kiss her hand, as he did every morning. Then he crossed the gallery to his oldest brother’s suite. He knocked, just in case his sister-in-law was still in bed, and went in. There was no one in the bedroom. His sister-in-law must be up already, seeing to the needs of the household, and he could hear the Pasha washing in the bathroom. Shamel referred to his oldest brother, who was eighteen years his senior, by his title, as did most of the family.

  The Pasha came out of the bathroom in his satin dressing gown. ‘Good morning,’ he smiled. ‘Well, well, it’s been a while since you joined us for breakfast. Shall I ring for some more tea?’

  Shamel glanced at the breakfast tray with the flat, buttery pastry, the white slab of thick clotted cream and the clover-scented honey. It was his favorite breakfast, but he could not muster an appetite. He had lost considerable weight lately. He shook his head.

  The Pasha reached for the first cigar of the day and sank into a comfortable club chair. ‘Your sister Zohra was complaining just last night that you haven’t been to visit her in a fortnight. What have you been doing with yourself?’

  Shamel suspected that his brother already had a fairly good idea of the answer to that question. Not that the Pasha was in the habit of keeping tabs on his family. But the chief of the Cairo police reported directly to him; as a courtesy he routinely included briefings on the movements of any and all of the cars belonging to the Pasha’s address. Their special single-digit Garden City license plates identified them immediately to the police all over Cairo. Shamel had found this to be a mixed blessing. If he was in a hurry he could park his car almost anywhere without getting a ticket. On the other hand, the police report was not for the Pasha’s eyes only; it was turned over to the ‘Abeddin Palace.

  Shamel supposed that the Pasha was aware that, of late, his youngest brother had neglected his familiar haunts and regular nightclub companions; had taken solitary trips to the country; and had spent several hours with an illustrious doctor of theology at the Azhar University.

  ‘There’s something on your mind.’ The Pasha puffed on his cigar. ‘I’m listening. You’ve not been yourself lately. I know it must have been a shock for you, your friend Maurice dropping dead like that. And so young too, in his twenties.’

  ‘That’s just it. You
never think it could happen to someone your own age. I mean, you live your life, you sow your wild oats, you think you have all the time in the world, to settle down later, to make everything right with Allah and your fellow-man. And then, just like that…You realize that you can run out of time at any moment.’ He shook his head. He was quiet for a minute, then he turned to face his brother. ‘I’ve come to ask for your permission. To get married.’

  The Pasha listened, nodding from time to time. If he had an inkling of the nature of Shamel’s revelation, he did not show it. Shamel had learned very early on that his oldest brother could listen to the same piece of information five times from five different people and leave each one of his interlocutors with the impression that he was imparting news.

  ‘Well, well, so you’ve decided it’s time to settle down. Of course, what a shock, that poor Baruch boy – You know, someone else would have dealt with that very differently. But you were always mature for your age. I think you’re making the right decision. Congratulations.’ The Pasha puffed on his cigar, deep in thought. ‘When I get back from the ministry this evening we must get together with all your brothers and decide about dividing up the inheritance. We always said we’d do it when you came of age. We should have done it five years ago, but there never seemed to be a good time. Now that you’re thinking of getting married, it’s high time.’