The Cairo House Read online

  There was a burst of ear-splitting zaghrutas from the maids at the back of the second floor gallery, drawing everyone’s attention to the top of the stairs. Belly dancers clicking castanets and musicians clashing cymbals and banging drums wound their way slowly down the steps. Then came the flower girls, tossing wafer-thin, gilded coins. The bride and groom finally made their appearance at the top of the landing, the bride in a bare-shouldered gown of creamy satin entirely embroidered with tiny seed pearls, long satin gloves and a diamond pendant at her throat; the tall, beaming groom in a black frock coat. They stood there for a few moments while the guests broke out in applause and the photographers popped their flashbulbs. Then the groom gave the bride his arm and they started slowly down the stairs, one step at a time, stopping every so often to let the maids of honor adjust the long, heavy satin train and the frothy tulle of the veil sweeping behind them. As Gina followed the procession around the curve of the landing, she saw Ali Tobia at the far end of the hall, in a group of young men. She looked away almost as soon as their eyes met.

  The zaffa procession made its leisurely way down the stairs and through the hall to the kosha set up at the far corner of the inner salon, and there was a pause while the bridesmaids negotiated the task of drawing the train out of the bride’s way and arranging it in a pool of shimmering satin at her feet. The bridesmaids took turns sitting on little stools at the feet of the bride and groom. Gina discreetly slipped away when it was Ali’s turn to approach the kosha dais and greet the wedding couple. The photographers snapped endless photos and the belly dancers entertained the crowd, as the Pasha beamed and greeted, and Zohra supervised and ordered the wait staff and the photographers about.

  Eventually the bride and groom got up from their gilded chairs in the bower of flowers to go upstairs and change for the second part of the evening. Gina followed the bride to one of the suites while the groom’s attendants followed him to another. Half an hour later, the bride made her reappearance in a pale lemon, sleeveless satin gown trimmed with wide black bands of pearl and jet embroidery; she wore long black satin gloves to match and her diamond pendant mounted on a black velvet ribbon around her neck. The groom had changed into a white smoking jacket and black tie. They made their way down the stairs again and headed to the dining room where they cut a ceremonial ribbon to open the grand buffet, and the guests took their places at the tables set out around the dining room and the hall.

  The long evening stretched into the early hours of the morning, and the bride and groom got up again to cut the wedding cake. Finally the center of the hall was cleared and a full orchestra of traditional musicians set up their chairs and stands as the guests gathered around. The legendary singer Om Kalthoum, clutching her trademark chiffon handkerchief, belted out song after song in her deep, powerful voice, urged on by cries of ‘Allah’ and ‘Encore.’

  When the first light of day broke, the bride and groom went upstairs for the last time, to one last tribute of zaghrutas and applause. The first guest got up to leave, picking up the wedding favor at his place at table, a silver ashtray embossed with the couple’s intertwined initials and filled with pink and white dragées. As the long hours of the wedding wore to a close, as the drawn-out litany of leave-taking took place, the ‘mabruk’ and ‘may your turn be next’ echoing over and over, Gina and Ali breathed a sigh of relief; throughout it all, they had somehow avoided coming face to face.

  Two months later Makhlouf Pasha sank into an armchair in his salon, his thick fingers splayed on his beefy thighs, his muddy shoes planted squarely on the rose border of the Aubusson carpet. He had just arrived in Cairo an hour ago, and the servants had scurried because they had not expected the Pasha to be back from the country till evening. Zohra Hanem was out shopping with the three youngest ladies, and Sitt Gihan had gone out on her own a while ago.

  The doorbell rang and he heard the voice of his oldest daughter as she greeted the maid. Then she walked through the French doors of the salon, dropping her handbag on the console on the way.

  ‘Hello, Papa.’

  ‘Where were you?’ he barked.

  She stopped in the middle of the salon. One look at her face brought the blood rushing to Makhlouf’s head. Gihan could never hide anything.

  ‘Answer me. Where were you? Did you see that Ali Tobia?’

  She stood there, not saying a word, head up, eyes down, twisting her gloves. Even as a child, Makhlouf thought, she did not lie or whine when she was accused; she should have been a boy. He felt the blood surge behind his eyes so he could hardly see. How dare she stand there, facing him down! He grasped the arms of his chair and tried to heave his bulk out of it.

  ‘Papa, be careful!’ Gina instinctively took a step forward, to help him up.

  He swung his arm back and lunged at her, swiping blindly at her face as he lost his balance. She screamed and turned, running for the door.

  ‘Get out!’ He was frothing at the mouth. ‘Don’t ever come back! You’re no longer my daughter!’

  She ran out, not stopping to pick up her handbag.

  A few hours later, Zohra let Shamel into her husband’s bedroom. ‘No one has been able to go near him,’ she whispered, her eyes red. Shamel patted her hand and closed the door behind him. In the semi-darkness of the room he made out the figure of his brother-in-law lying on the bed, still wearing his muddy shoes.

  ‘Who is it?’ Makhlouf Pasha growled, lifting the ice pack off his forehead. ‘Oh, it’s you! I should throw you out of my house! It’s all your fault. I trust you with my daughter and you play the Pander between her and that—’

  ‘I wanted to tell you that Gina –’

  ‘Don’t ever pronounce that name in my house! I have no daughter by that name.’

  ‘She only disobeyed you that one time, I swear. And nothing happened. Even after you threw her out and she ran to Ali, he brought her straight to me, he didn’t even let her through his door. The last thing he wants to do is compromise her. Don’t you see that you’re wrong about him? He would marry her this minute, in the dress she’s wearing, but he must have your blessing. He won’t make her choose between him and her family. And he has too much pride to marry her without her father’s permission. The Tobias have their pride too.’

  ‘By Allah she’ll have nothing from me! Not one feddan after I die and not one piastre while I’m living. She’ll be sorry. No wedding trousseau, no shopping trip to Europe, no furniture, no decorator, no antiques, nothing. Let’s see how long this true love will last.’

  ‘It won’t make a difference to Gina. If it were any of her sisters, I’d agree with you. But she’s different, things like that don’t matter to her. And I can speak for Ali. All he wants is Gina – but not without your blessing.’

  ‘Then let him have her! In nothing but the dress she is wearing!’

  ‘And your blessing –’

  ‘My blessing, my curses! Now get out before you kill me!’

  It was a happy ending, for a while. Gina and Ali set up house in an apartment with simple modern furniture. My parents were newlyweds themselves, and the two couples were inseparable. When I was born, my father named me Gihan.

  That year the coup d’état of 1952 changed everything, although no one at the time realized the magnitude of what was happening.

  The day came when the bulk of the large estates was confiscated from the landowning families. Mostly the fellahin accepted this momentous change with their usual mixture of resignation and indifference, but there were isolated incidents of violence. When the rumor spread that government agents were on the way to confiscate Makhlouf Pasha’s country house, a mob of peasants besieged the place. Their intention seemed to have been to loot the house before the agents arrived. Makhlouf came out on the terrace and roared at them, and they took a few steps back. But he was suddenly struck by a massive stroke and collapsed, speechless. The fellahin surged forward; some of them were carrying torches and they set fire to the house. Makhlouf and his family were smuggled out in a car,
the two youngest girls lying on the floor. Makhlouf never recovered from the effects of the stroke; he remained a paralyzed husk of a man.

  Ten years later the selective sequestration decrees targeted certain families, notably the Seif-el-Islams and the Makhloufs. Gina’s sisters, married to their cousins, sold off their jewelry and their furniture, piece by piece, to live from day to day.

  Meanwhile Ali’s reputation as a brilliant cardiologist had risen steadily. The waiting rooms at his clinic overflowed and he was increasingly called in for consultations by the most prominent members of the new regime. His success cost him long hours away from home, but he encouraged Gina to go out without him. She was often seen at parties and restaurants, always with a group of close friends from the new elite of doctors and their wives.

  One day the rumors started about Gina and the scion of a Lebanese banking family. She did not lie to Ali.

  ‘You’re my only friend,’ she pleaded, ‘help me.’

  He acted like a perfect gentleman: he divorced her on the spot, pronouncing the ritual words ‘I release you,’ three times in quick succession. He told her she could take anything she wanted, as long as she left quickly. She took nothing but photographs of the two children she was leaving behind, Leila and Tamer. There was no question of taking the children with her; they were both of an age when custody would have gone automatically to the father, even if the mother were not the one to ask for divorce, even if she were not leaving the country, even if she were not remarrying.

  I remember the day Gina left for Lebanon; she came to our house to say goodbye. I was fourteen at the time. I watched from the balcony as she arrived in the Lebanese playboy’s sports car. He stayed in the car, but I got a glimpse of dark sunglasses and a gold bracelet on his wrist glinting as he tapped his fingers on the side-view mirror.

  Gina ran up the stairs and into the living-room where my father was waiting. She came towards him, arms outstretched. ‘You’re the one person I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye!’

  ‘Goodbye, Gihan,’ he said very quietly.

  She stopped dead in her tracks. Then she turned on her heel and ran out of the room and down to her lover waiting in the car.

  At the time I misjudged my father’s harshness. I even attributed it to the fact that the man was a Maronite, and that Gina would marry out of her religion. But I realize now that it had nothing to do with it. My father was a romantic. He had believed in their love, his Gina and his best friend. He could not forgive her for disillusioning him.

  Many years later, Tante Zohra was to tell me that for Gina it always had to be the grand passion. She was one of those women who need to feel in love, the way an addict craves an elusive state of euphoria. She could not bear to see her romance with Ali succumb to routine and neglect; she could not bear to be taken for granted. She looked for the immediacy, the missing thrill, the passion, in the eyes and the arms of another.

  Today I can try to understand the fugue for which Gina was condemned without appeal by everyone she knew. But what I remember thinking at the time was that I could never bear to disillusion my father that way. Did Gina give a thought that day to the adolescent girl watching from the corner? Do we ever realize, when we take a plunge, that the ripples we create can spread as far as the distant shore? But there was no way anyone could have imagined then that Gina’s story would lie like a palimpsest under mine, long after it had faded from memory.

  As for Gina, Papa never saw her again. A few years later the civil war broke out in Lebanon; it must have been particularly hard for her, a Muslim married to a Maronite.

  But he did see Ali again. A year after Gina left him Ali remarried, a younger woman with ties to the new regime. He became President Nasser’s personal physician. So it was hard to believe when Dr Ali Tobia came to visit my father one night. It had been years, even before his divorce from Gina, that he had not come to our house. Few people who had anything to lose risked association with the families that Nasser had designated as ‘enemies of the people’. It was no secret that the intelligence agent at the door took note of every visitor, that the telephone was tapped and the servants were spies. Even in the privacy of our own bedrooms, between parent and child, we still whispered. That Nasser’s personal physician would risk calling on my father was unthinkable.

  Yet one summer night, there was Ali Tobia. He looked tired, the creases in the craggy face were deeper, but his smile was unchanged. He chucked me under the chin as if I were still seven rather than seventeen. Then he and my father went out to the verandah to talk in private. I remember seeing the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark for over an hour.

  Only after Ali’s death did I learn from my father why he had come that night. He needed to confide in someone he could trust. He was convinced that Nasser was paranoid, clinically paranoid, and increasingly irrational and dangerous. A few months later Ali Tobia died overnight of an unexplained illness. It was generally believed that Nasser had his physician poisoned for spreading rumors about him.

  4

  The Proposal

  The girl watching from the corner, the girl I once was. Where do I start looking for her? In retrospect, she seems to have drifted along like a leaf borne downstream. When could she have changed course?

  I flip through an album of my own wedding pictures. These photographs are in color, and that difference in itself seems to mark a distinct shift in time and mood, the inherent glamor and nostalgia of the black and white images replaced by the stark, bright immediacy of the color prints. I am looking at a photo of a young bride with a round, sweet face and long, dark brown hair. She is looking straight at the camera, unsmiling, and the only expression behind the blankness of her wide eyes is a flicker of apprehension. But I am only guessing. I can close my eyes and get under the skin of the child of nine, but when I look at the photo of the bride of nineteen it is like looking at a stranger. Somewhere in the intervening years I have lost the key to her thoughts and emotions.

  Perhaps it is the evolution girls go through in the process of molding themselves in the image of a feminine ‘other’. The wild, willful ‘I’ is mercilessly renounced like the outgrown, embarrassing, favorite things of childhood. They become strangers to themselves. Years later, a change in their lives can trigger a return full circle, and they rediscover their lost voice.

  The Gigi I remember at eighteen was a little set apart by her circumstances and consequently unusually sheltered and naive. She lived largely in her books and her imagination; the outside world filtered through as feebly as light through the thick wooden shutters of Mediterranean windows.

  In the way that the particular, rather than the general, colors our fundamental experience of growing up, hers was a cherished, normal girlhood. All children have nightmares about a bogeyman. For Gigi the bogeyman was real, he had a name and a face. The black-browed face was inescapable on a million posters throughout the country: the intense, sooty eyes, the prominent nose, the moustache, the lantern jaw. The name was whispered: Nasser, El-Raiis; his thousand eyes and ears lurked behind every corner. She did not have nightmares, only she was a very light sleeper, and she always woke at dawn, straining her ears; when they came for her father, it was at dawn.

  She never heard her father talk about his experiences in the internment camps. At home he spent hours smoking in an armchair, lost in his thoughts. He had no land or business left to run. According to the sequestration decrees that applied to most of the men in the families affected, he was barred from practicing law or belonging to a professional syndicate or even a social club. Like a prisoner on parole, he could not leave the city without clearance from the authorities, nor leave the country under any circumstances. His revolver and passport were confiscated. Nasser’s sequestration decree went far beyond the confiscation of wealth or the stripping of civil liberties. It was the sharply-honed instrument of his malice: it emasculated, it isolated, it muzzled, it humiliated, it stigmatized; it forced retirement on men in their prime; it immured them i
n their own homes.

  If the diffuse gloom that hung in the air at home had an effect on Gigi, it was to teach her a sort of precocious tact. She learned to be unquestioning and accepting, in order to spare the adults who imagined they were shielding her. She cultivated a bubbly surface. Mama in particular regarded any sign of moodiness as alarming.

  She waited patiently for life to begin, without giving a single conscious thought to what she was supposed to be waiting for, until her aunt Zohra’s visit set the wheels of this unspoken destiny in motion.

  ‘Gigi! There you are.’ Madame Hélène stood at the door, a little out of breath. ‘Reading again? You’ll ruin your eyes, ma petite! Monsieur is looking for you. He’s in the study.’

  Gigi put down Le Rouge et le Noir with a sigh. She went downstairs to the study. Papa was sitting at his desk. The window behind him let in the afternoon sunshine and a whiff of jasmine from the bushes outside. Gigi perched on the arm of his chair, watching him fill his pipe, his movements careful and precise, the back of his hands shadowed with dark hair. He had given up cigarettes years ago, since his first heart attack. Gigi loved the smell of the aromatic pipe tobacco.

  ‘Well, Gigi, your Arabic tutor tells me you need to do some reading if you’re going to pass your Arabic exam for the baccalaureate this year.’

  Gigi made a face.

  Her father laughed. ‘Considering that Madame Hélène was just complaining you stayed up all night reading a novel by Zola—’

  ‘Not Zola. Stendhal.’

  ‘Stendhal, then. Surely you can make yourself read a dozen pages a day of Naguib Mahfouz.’

  ‘His books are so – depressing.’ She flipped through a book titled Midaq Alley.

  On her way elsewhere Gigi had been driven through some of these back alleys, her nose firmly buried in a French novel, avoiding the sight of the beggars; of the carcasses of meat hanging on hooks in front of the butcher shops; of the flies on children’s faces; of the peasant woman sitting cross-legged on the railroad station platform, suckling a baby on one swollen, bare breast. The woman had been totally unselfconscious, and no one had stared at her. Whether it was motherhood or misery that removed the provocation from her nudity, Gigi had not been able to tell.