The Cairo House Read online

  The Pasha got up and started to put on the suit that was set out for him on the clotheshorse. He picked out a bow tie and matching silk pocket square. ‘What do you think of the land around the Kafr-el-Kom villages? It’s good cotton land, and there are mango orchards. It’s right next to the land your brother Zakariah has his eye on; the two of you can take turns running both estates.’

  He picked up two soft, silver-backed brushes, one in each hand, and brushed his thinning dark hair with both brushes at once. ‘Do you have a particular bride in mind? No? Then I assume you’re leaving that to the women?’

  ‘As soon as I had settled it with you, I was going to speak to Zohra – and to Dorria too, of course,’ Shamel added, remembering his sister-in-law.

  ‘Good, good. You couldn’t make them happier if you offered them Solomon’s treasures. It will keep them occupied for months.’ The Pasha clearly relished the thought. ‘I swear there is nothing women enjoy as much as matchmaking.’ He buttoned up his waistcoat and pressed his tarbouche down on his head. ‘There, I’m ready. Let’s go.’

  As the Pasha and Shamel opened the door, Om Khalil straightened up from her position at the keyhole. The Cairo House teemed with intrigues, what with its three sets of married brothers, the bachelor brothers, distant relatives and assorted hangers-on. The Pasha sometimes found it more of a challenge to manage the politics of his household than those of his cabinet. The thirty-odd domestics played an indispensable role in the scheme as spies and couriers. So Om Khalil did not bother to disguise or excuse her eavesdropping behind the door. She threw her head back, put her hand to her mouth and released the blood-curdling whoop of rejoicing called a zaghruta. The men groaned. They knew that in a few hours every household of their acquaintance would have been informed that the youngest of the Seif-el-Islam brothers had thrown his hat in the ring.

  Shamel drove across the Kasr-el-Aini Bridge, flanked by its British stone lions, and down the Nile Corniche to his older sister Zohra’s villa on the island of Zamalek in the middle of the river at its widest point in Cairo.

  ‘Is Zohra Hanem home?’ Shamel asked the maid who opened the door. ‘Good, I’ll go up then. And go tell Sitt Gina that if she’s ready in twenty minutes I’ll take her out to dinner.’

  There were twenty years between Shamel and his oldest sister Zohra, so that his nieces were only a few years younger than he was. Zohra had four daughters, and each of her three youngest brothers had a favorite niece whom he chaperoned and squired around to restaurants and shows. Shamel’s favorite was the oldest, Gina, not because she was the prettiest – the youngest was considered the beauty – but because she was the most intelligent and spirited.

  Shamel found his sister sitting in front of her secretary desk, tallying up the household accounts. When Shamel told her the news she jumped up and hugged him. ‘Have you told anyone yet but the Pasha? Do you have anyone in mind? No? Will you leave it to me and Dorria then, to find you a bride?’

  ‘All right. But no cousins. There’s too much intermarriage in our family already. You know how I feel about that.’ Zohra herself was married to a cousin on her mother’s side; it had been a difficult marriage. ‘And none of these “modern” girls,’ he added. ‘I’ve known too many of them.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Leave it to me. These things take time, they have to be handled very delicately.’ Zohra’s eyes gleamed at the prospect. She was already weighing and dismissing various possibilities. ‘Why don’t you go see the girls? You’ve been such a stranger lately, they’ve missed their favorite uncle.’ It was obvious that Zohra could barely contain her impatience to get on the phone.

  Shamel headed down the corridor towards his nieces’ rooms. It occurred to him as he caught whiffs of lemon juice and talcum powder, nail polish and hot curling irons, that four daughters in the house was something like a cottage industry. His arrival was greeted with squeals of alarm, cries of welcome and doors being pulled hastily shut. His youngest niece, Mimi, skipped down the corridor towards him. She tossed her chestnut brown plait over her shoulder and offered a plump cheek for a kiss.

  ‘The bath woman is here today,’ she confided. ‘They’re all getting their legs waxed with sugar wax, then smoothed with pumice stone. I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet. It hurts! Come in here.’ She pulled him by the hand into a small sitting room where a dressmaker was running up a nightgown. ‘Gina’s almost ready.’ She sat him down and perched on the arm of the chair. ‘Why is it always Gina? When are you going to take me out?’ She pouted.

  ‘When you’re older. And when you stop eating so much Turkish Delight. You’re turning into a piece of Turkish Delight yourself.’ He pinched her chubby pale arm.

  ‘Gina’s taking so long because her hair takes forever to hold a set,’ Mimi announced spitefully. ‘It’s so floppy she has to set it with beer. But Nazli’s hair is so coarse and curly, she has to straighten it with the curling tongs. She even waxes her forearms. Why –’

  ‘Mimi! Wait till Mama hears how you’ve been talking!’ Gina came in, smoothing the puffed skirt of her flowered-print silk dress. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Uncle Shamel,’ she gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The Romance. I haven’t taken you there yet. They have a new band, all the latest sambas and rhumbas. And Samya Gammal is the featured belly dancer for tonight. She’s back from Europe, she just finished filming a movie with Fernandel.’

  Gina looked around the dance floor. The band was playing an animated ‘Mambo Americano, Hey Mambo’. She sighed. One thing her favorite uncle could not do was dance, and of course it was out of the question for her to dance with anyone else. She put down her fork. Her portion of the Chateaubriand steak for two they had ordered was daunting. She put her hand on Shamel’s arm and motioned with her head. ‘That man that just came in – I think he’s trying to catch your eye.’

  Shamel looked over across the dance floor.

  ‘Oh, that’s Ali Tobia. He’s a good friend of mine.’ He waved to Ali, who crossed over to their table. Shamel offered him a seat and introduced him to Gina. They shook hands. It seemed to Shamel that it took Ali a heartbeat too long to muster his easy smile and that Gina turned her attention back to the dance floor a little too self-consciously. It was hard to read young girls, Shamel thought, but his friend was a different story; he knew Ali well enough to sense his momentary loss of composure. At the first opportunity he would mention that Gina was spoken for. It would avoid complications, and in any case it was true enough.

  A sudden scurrying and whispering on the part of the staff was followed by an expectant hush. All eyes turned to the door as King Faruk and his retinue made their way to a table by the dance floor. The diners at the other tables stood up and applauded. The three at Shamel’s table clapped perfunctorily. The king lowered his great bulk into his chair, people took their seats and the band resumed playing. Faruk’s head turned slowly toward Shamel’s table; he stared in their direction for a moment, then turned away. Pouli, his Italian valet, whispered something to the maître d’hotel. Faruk would be informed in a minute who was responsible for this public display of disrespect.

  ‘I think we might as well go somewhere else,’ Shamel suggested, motioning to the waiter for the bill. He handed Ali his car keys. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take Gina to the car? I’ll follow as soon as I’ve settled the bill.’

  Several other tables with young women in their party were following suit. The king had a reputation for forcing unwelcome attentions on any woman who happened to catch his eye. As a preliminary, he would send a bottle of champagne, with his compliments, to the woman’s table. If his overtures were repulsed, disagreeable incidents ensued. Faruk could be dangerous; it was widely believed that he had arranged for the ‘accidental’ death of a young officer, the fiancé of a woman Faruk was currently besotted with.

  By the time Shamel joined Gina and Ali in the car, the incident with the king had had the effect of completely dismissing from his mind
his earlier misgivings about having introduced them.

  That summer, as every summer, there was a mass migration of households to escape the heat of Cairo during the mosquito-infested months of the Nile flood. Those families that were not vacationing in Europe sent the staff ahead to air and clean their summer homes in Alexandria. A few days later the entire household would follow. Shamel shuttled between the seaside and his new duties on the estate in the Delta. Ali Tobia came up from Cairo every weekend that he could get away from hospital assignments.

  The days were spent at cabanas on the private beaches. At around ten in the morning the beach boys unlocked the cabanas and set up the parasols and chairs on the sand. By noon the beach would be busy.

  ‘Fresca! Ritza! Granita! “Life”!’

  All day long the vendors walked up and down, hawking tiny honey and nut pastries, raw sea urchins, water ices and magazines in four languages. The waiters from the cafeteria on the pier hurried back and forth in their embroidered caftans, carrying pitchers of frothy yellow-green lemonade the color of the foamy waves that lapped at their feet.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon the Corniche was clogged with chauffeur-driven cars bearing full-course hot lunches which would be served on folding tables in the cabanas. Reluctant, brown children were called out of the water by nurses with large towels at the ready. In swimsuits and burnouses, families sat down to lemon sole and sweet sticky mangoes. Lunch invitations were passed along from cabana to cabana.

  By sundown the beach boys folded the parasols and pulled the light wooden paddle boards up the sand and stacked them. The beaches were deserted for the night spots.

  All through that long, lazy summer the photographers trudged up and down the shore with their pant legs rolled up, their equipment slung over their shoulders, looking for likely prospects. They snapped the photos and came back with a print the next day. Shamel had a photograph with Gina and Ali sitting on either side of him, at a table in the garden of the Beau Rivage hotel at night; wrapped around Gina’s wrist was a string of jasmine blossoms that Ali had bought from a street vendor. Looking at the photograph, later, Shamel wondered how he could have been so blind.

  It was late August when the three of them were having dinner on the terrace of the Beau Rivage. There was an end-of-summer air about the folded parasols and the black flags fluttering on the beaches. The strings of lights suspended from the trees swayed in the breeze and Gina drew her wrap around her bare shoulders. Shamel got up to use the washroom.

  When he came back to the nearly deserted restaurant, Gina and Ali had their heads together, whispering urgently. She shook her head and turned away. He reached for her hand. She laid her forearm flat on the table between them and turned her palm up. He covered her hand with his and pressed her fingers apart. She closed her eyes.

  When they heard Shamel coming they jumped apart. He sat down between them.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ He put up a hand. ‘Never mind. I tell you one thing. It stops right here, or else you speak to Gina’s father tonight.’

  ‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ Ali burst out. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to ask for her hand from her father, for weeks now. But Gina won’t let me. We were arguing about that again just now.’

  ‘He doesn’t know Papa,’ she pleaded. ‘You know what he’s like, Uncle Shamel. We don’t stand a chance. Give us some time. Maybe if I can talk Mama around to our side first –’

  ‘No.’ Shamel had seen enough. He was not going to be responsible for what might happen between them. ‘You talk to your father tonight, Gina. I’ll come with you, I’ll do my best to convince him. But if the answer is no, then that’s that. Ali?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ali nodded miserably. ‘You have my word. You should know me better than to ask.’

  Gina’s father, Makhlouf Pasha, never felt as out of place as he did in his wife Zohra’s boudoir. He was not sure what grated most on his sensibilities: the uncomfortable preciousness of her Louis XVI-style bergères or the feminine froufrou of the chiffon skirt of her dressing table. It reminded him that he lived in a household of women.

  A few minutes in his wife’s boudoir were enough to make Makhlouf Pasha long to be on horseback in the country, touring some corner of his land. In the freshness of the dawn he would ride out to the white pigeon towers of the Bani Khidr village, wheel his mare around and whip her into a flat gallop all the way home. They said of Makhlouf Pasha that he rode his peasants as hard as he rode his horses, but he only really felt at home among them. He was proud of not being an absentee landlord, like most of his wife’s citified, Europeanized brothers.

  His cousin Zohra had been barely sixteen when he married her, but even then Makhlouf realized that he could never completely cow her. Had she born him a son, she would have been intolerable. But every time she had been pregnant with a boy, she had miscarried in her last term. Allah knew Makhlouf had indulged her every whim during her pregnancies. She could not suffer his presence in the first months: she claimed the sight of his thick, red lips made her ill, it reminded her of raw meat. Baffled and humiliated, he would take off for the country and return after the months of morning sickness were over. But his sons had been still-born. Only the four girls survived.

  Allah had not seen fit to give Makhlouf the sons who should bear his name and inherit his land. But his brothers had sons, many of them, and his daughters would marry their cousins. His grandchildren would bear his name, and the land of their great-grandfathers would not be parceled out to the sons of strangers.

  Makhlouf Pasha had always made clear his expectations in that respect. So he was astonished and annoyed as he sat in his wife’s boudoir and listened to his young kinsman and brother-in-law, Shamel, intercede on behalf of some fortune-hunting suitor for Gihan.

  ‘Ali is no fortune-hunter,’ Shamel objected, ‘and you know as well as I do that the Tobia family goes back a long way.’

  ‘Much good that does them!’ Makhlouf was stung by the hint at his own parvenu status. ‘All I know is that they’ve run through their fortune. Oh, they live well, vacations in Europe every summer and all that. But there won’t be one fedan left for that boy to inherit by the time his father is done selling off their property. And even if he owned half the Sharkia province, I wouldn’t marry a daughter of mine into a family with such “modern” notions. It’s a scandal how his sisters drive their own cars and smoke in public. I ask you!’ He threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘No, Gihan will marry one of her cousins, that was decided a long time ago. Now I’m not an unreasonable man. I’m not imposing my choice on her. My brother Hussein has three boys and Zulfikar has four. She can pick and choose.’

  Makhlouf Pasha leaned back and closed his eyes. He stopped listening to Shamel’s arguments and Gihan’s pleading, he ignored Zohra’s interjections. He took a deep breath and tried to control his rising temper. His blood pressure was dangerously high, the doctor had warned him repeatedly not to get worked up. He opened his eyes.

  ‘Listen. I’ve been very patient, but enough is enough.’ For once even Zohra was silenced. She knew him well enough to know when he could not be budged.

  ‘Gihan will get engaged to one of her cousins within the month. I don’t want to hear any more about Ali Tobia. If you ever see him again, Gihan, I will disown you.’

  A week later Gina was engaged to her uncle Zulfikar’s second eldest son. She did not see Ali Tobia again till Shamel’s wedding.

  By the end of summer Shamel had settled on his choice for a bride. The fact that the new fiancee was no kin helped to minimize the inevitable slight to the matchmakers whose candidates were passed over. It was grudgingly admitted that Shamel’s choice was perfectly appropriate in every way, and that she had the best kind of reputation, in other words, none. After lengthy, delicate negotiations and a short engagement period, the wedding was set for an evening in late October.

  The double front doors of the Cairo house were flung open, as they had been so many times b
efore, for weddings and funerals. The chandeliers in the hall blazed down on the scores of huge, free-standing flower arrangements sent from all over Cairo and the provinces. At the far corner of the salon, a kosha had been set up, a bower of white flowers where the bride and groom would be enthroned in state for the first part of the evening. The bride had arrived an hour earlier in a limousine followed by a procession of cars, and had emerged, in a pale pink chiffon gown, on her uncle’s arm, to a volley of zaghrutas and clapping. She had been hurried up the stairs to change into her Paris wedding gown with the help of hairdressers and maids of honor. Armand, Cairo’s premier photographer, followed in due course with his assistants, and the bride was photographed standing alone against a sweeping drapery of red satin and ten-foot-tall, bird-of-paradise arrangements in baskets.

  Meanwhile downstairs, suffragis in brilliant caftans circulated with trays of jewel-toned nectars and mounds of almond dragées. The guests who had been milling around the two salons now crowded the bottom of the staircase in the hall; the rumor had spread that the bride and groom were about to make an appearance. Everyone prepared for the zaffa, the slow procession down the staircase that was the highlight of an Egyptian wedding. The belly dancers adjusted their sequined sashes, the torchbearers lit their torches, the flower girls picked up their baskets. Under Zohra’s direction, the unmarried girls and boys of the clan lined the steps of the staircase on both sides, holding tall, flickering tapers. Gina took her place with her sisters and cousins at the top of the stairs, one hand shielding the flame of her candle from a sudden breeze.