The Cairo House Read online

  Papa took the book from her and put it back on the shelf. ‘One day you’ll appreciate Mahfouz’s writing. But never mind for now.’ He pointed to the bookcase behind him. ‘Pick a book by Yussef El-Siba’yi. They’re harmless romantic novels about cavalry officers and pretty young girls.’

  ‘They sound like books by Delly. I don’t like the roman à l’eau de rose type either! But all right, if you insist.’

  Gigi leaned against his shoulder.

  ‘Papa, were you ever sorry that I wasn’t a boy?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘Please be serious!’

  ‘Then why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s that I just found out that the sacrifice of the Feast is to ransom the male members in a family. Only the sons.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, that’s correct.’

  ‘But we always sacrificed a sheep and a lamb, and you always said the lamb was for me.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned we ransom our blessings. And you were a blessing – most of the time!’

  Domino suddenly started barking and the doorbell rang. In a minute the maid announced that Tante Zohra was at the door. Gigi ran upstairs to tidy up.

  She looked out of her bedroom window. Tante Zohra’s ancient black Mercedes was parked in front of the house, and the driver was helping her out. Her tall, lean figure unfolded slowly out of the car. Gigi recognized the driver, Omar, although he was not her aunt’s regular chauffeur. He was an agent of the government intelligence service, the dread Mukhabarat, who had been assigned to follow Tante Zohra around several years ago. Like the rest of the family, she was the object of constant surveillance since the sequestration decrees.

  Gigi had heard the curious story of how it came about that the government informant ended up driving her aunt around. One evening during the month of Ramadan Tante Zohra had been looking out of the window and had seen the man standing alone in the deserted street. It was sunset, and the calls from the minarets echoed all over the still city. The birds were twittering in the Indian jasmine trees and an eerie moratorium had fallen over the normally bustling traffic. Everyone was indoors waiting for the cannon to go off, announcing the breaking of the fast. Apparently no one had thought to relieve the poor Mukhabarat agent. Zohra felt sorry for him and sent someone to call him around to the back door for the Ramadan meal.

  From that day on, the man bowed politely whenever he saw her waiting outside the door to her villa, while the doorkeeper tried to hail a taxi. Her husband, Makhlouf Pasha, was wheelchair-bound since his massive stroke. She herself had never learned to drive and now could no longer afford a chauffeur.

  One day when she was late and having trouble stopping a taxi, she had a brainstorm. She beckoned the man over and suggested that he could drive her where she was going in her own car, which was sitting idle in the garage; that way he would know her exact whereabouts at all times without having to chase after her. The man fell in with her plan immediately and that was the beginning of a long, mutually profitable association. It was one more instance in which the Kafkaesque shadow of the police state was undermined by the irrepressible common sense of the people.

  Gigi dragged her hairbrush through her hair hard enough to make Madame Hélène wince, then slipped on a headband. She washed her face but decided against changing out of the dreary uniform of the Sacré Coeur school.

  She skipped down the stairs and stopped short just behind the Aubusson screen that separated the two salons. She had remembered to unroll the waistband of her skirt, which she had rolled over twice while dressing in the morning in an attempt to shorten it. Papa was very old-fashioned about things like that and called any hemline above the knee a ‘miniskirt’.

  ‘Gigi’s too young,’ she heard her father say.

  ‘She’s eighteen.’ Her aunt’s voice. ‘Her cousins were engaged or spoken for at her age.’

  ‘Fine. I have only one daughter. I’m in no hurry.’

  ‘That’s evident. Look, I’m not talking about marriage yet. I’m just asking you to consider an engagement. At least you would have some peace of mind – you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m not worried about anything like that with Gigi.’

  ‘I know she’s very sheltered, but if you think just because of that –’

  ‘Not at all. Girls who get into that kind of trouble lack attention and affection at home, they look for them in the arms of the first boy who turns their head. I know Gigi; underneath her bubbly ways she’s a cool, self-sufficient girl.’ Gigi could hear Papa puffing on his pipe, the way he did when he was thinking. ‘Besides, she really is too young. She should wait until she finishes college. She’s a bright girl and should do very well in her studies.’

  ‘All the more reason why she won’t have any trouble studying for her college degree while married. The boy is suitable from every point of view, and these days, what with the situation in the country what it is –’ She sighed. ‘You should be glad to see her get away, to have her study in Europe. You should think of her future, of her own good. Things are going from bad to worse over here. If things were different, if we weren’t under sequestration, a girl like Gigi would have her choice of suitors, but these days…’ She sighed. ‘Really, Shamel, we’re only talking about an engagement. But it’s not as if we could take our time about this. Yussef is only here for a couple of weeks, then he’ll be going back to England. His father is putting a lot of pressure on us to arrange a meeting right away.’

  Yussef? Gigi tried to guess whom they were discussing.

  ‘His father is a hard man,’ Papa was saying. ‘A hard man in business, a hard man with women. Twice divorced, and his wives complained bitterly during their marriages. No, Kamal Zeitouni is a hard man. I don’t know if I want to hand over my only child to a son of his.’

  Yussef Zeitouni. Gigi remembered being introduced to him at a wedding, and running into him again on feast days at her aunt’s. His mother Zeina, Kamal Zeitouni’s first wife, was a friend of Tante Zohra’s.

  ‘It’s not always like father, like son,’ Tante Zohra was remonstrating. ‘Besides, do you want her to marry one of those pious young men who’ve never been with a woman before?’

  ‘And have him experiment on my daughter? Allah forbid!’

  ‘At least let me arrange a meeting between Gigi and Yussef –’

  Gigi had been standing awkwardly behind the screen, too embarrassed to interrupt once she realized she was the subject of the discussion. But now she heard her mother coming down the stairs and decided it was time she made an appearance in the salon.

  Yussef, Kamal Zeitouni’s son by his first marriage, was now in his late twenties and lived in London, where he was studying for a doctoral degree. Since Tante Zohra’s visit, Gigi had met him again several times at formal teas and dinners that common acquaintances had arranged. She found him as she remembered: good-looking, tall, with his mother’s sweep of raven hair. He had come to the house for lunch, twice. After lunch they had made strained conversation in the salon while Madame Hélène sat discreetly in a corner, ostensibly engrossed in her embroidery.

  Normally the next step would have been a formal engagement, followed by a few months of courtship during which the engaged couple, still more or less chaperoned, came to know each other better. Either one could break it off at some point before the wedding, and some of Gigi’s friends were already on their second engagement. But the circumstances were different in this case. Gigi knew that she had run out of time to make up her mind: she needed to give an answer before Yussef left for England. If it was favorable, he would be back in a few months for the wedding, after which they would leave immediately for Europe.

  Papa assured her repeatedly that the decision was entirely hers; it was his prerogative to veto any of her suitors, but he would never influence her in anyone’s favor. Mama seemed to be favorable. Gigi’s girlfriends thought Yussef was handsome and that she was lucky to be going abroad not just for a honeymoon, but to live and study.

 
Gigi kept stalling; she felt she didn’t know Yussef at all, a reasoning which made Mama impatient. What she could not tell her mother was that she had only the vaguest notion of what marriage was about and did not feel ready for it, regardless of the suitor. Indeed the idea that her parents actually expected her to marry so soon came as a surprise, tinged with a slight sense of betrayal.

  Tante Zohra took the matter in hand with her usual decisiveness. ‘Gigi dear, I have an idea. I know it’s hard for you to exchange more than a few words with Yussef with people around all the time. Why don’t you go spend a couple of days at my beach house in Agami? Yussef could come to visit, without all the pressure, in peace and quiet. With your governess, of course, to chaperone; and take Tamer along too, so it won’t seem too obvious. Leila has to study for an exam, but Tamer can go, he never studies anyway.’

  Ever since their father’s sudden death nearly a year ago, Tante Zohra had raised Gina’s children, Leila and Tamer. Gigi got along very well with Leila, a level-headed girl only a year younger. Tamer, on the other hand, alternated between uncommunicative sulks and obnoxious high spirits. Gigi was a little disappointed that it was Tamer and not Leila who would go along on this trip.

  ‘See Alexandria and die,’ the ancient Greeks used to say. Gigi tried to remember the book in which she had read that. She loved Alexandria in the off-season, before the summer crowds arrived. She sat in the back of the car between Madame Hélène and her fifteen-year-old cousin Tamer as they drove up the desert road from Cairo. Omar, Tante Zohra’s occasional driver, was at the wheel, with Om Khalil, all in black, in the passenger seat next to him. Tamer gripped the dog between his knees, his long, lanky legs bent nearly in half.

  Tante Zohra’s chalet, as small beach houses were called, was in Agami, on the far side of Alexandria, but they detoured through the city. Once past the salt marshes and long before they could see the Mediterranean, they caught whiffs of the sea breeze. Then they were driving along the Corniche, relatively quiet because it was only April. They stopped at Glimonopoli to buy granita: lemon and mango ices.

  They parked on the Corniche. Gigi and Tamer leaned against the railing at the top of the sea wall and let the breeze blow in their faces as they licked their ices. The sun glinted on the crests of the steel blue waves that broke briskly against the sea wall. Gigi closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, her senses overwhelmed by the light and the warmth, the smell of salt and seaweed, the tang of lemon on her tongue.

  At the chalet they were greeted by the familiar musty smell, soon dissipated when the creaky wooden shutters were flung open. Gigi found a battered straw hat in the hallway closet overflowing with sand-encrusted sandals, fins, goggles and inflatable rafts. She rolled up her pant legs and ran down the beach across the fine, sifting white powder. At the water’s edge she dug her toes into the cool, wet sand and the gritty, crushed cockleshells. She ran in and out of the surf, keeping a lookout for the loathsome jellyfish washed up by the tide.

  ‘Gigi! Will you come back in now? It’s getting dark.’ Madame Hélène’s plaintive voice called from the top of the path down to the beach. ‘Gigi! Come in now, you’ll be bitten by crabs.’

  After dinner Tamer found the dog-eared deck of cards and the Scrabble game with the three missing letters; they played for hours in the dim light. The electrical voltage in Alexandria was 110 rather than the 220 prevalent in the rest of Egypt and the light always seemed weak there.

  Gigi tried on the new dress she was planning to wear when Yussef came tomorrow. Mama’s ‘little dressmaker’ had just finished running it up for her. It was an apricot sundress with crisscrossing shoulder straps and a short, swinging skirt. Gigi twirled round and round in front of the mirror, making the dress flare up and out, and her long hair fly about her face. A Beatles record played on the small portable record-player. Tamer sipped a coke through a straw; it was flat and syrupy, the only kind available in Egypt for years now. When Gigi stopped twirling, she saw him gazing at her, and she pinched his cheek.

  That night she dreamed that Yussef was coming down the beach towards her, but all she could see of him were his bare feet. He had black hairs on the toes. She turned and started running away. But suddenly something surfaced in front of her, terrifying eyes in pools of black ink.

  Gigi fought off the clutches of the nightmare to find herself staring into the fierce, kohl-ringed eyes of Om Khalil. Om Khalil applied a lot of kohl before going to bed and washed it off in the morning. This morning she had apparently not yet done so, and the kohl was smeared all around her eyes.

  ‘Sitt Gigi, are you going to sleep all day? What time do you want lunch? What time is your company coming?’

  Gigi looked at her watch on the bedside table. ‘Nine o’clock! I’d better hurry. Yussef said he’d come early. We’ll have lunch at two, Om Khalil, does that give you enough time? Just a simple lunch. I’ll come down and see about the menu. Where’s Tamer?’

  ‘Sleeping on the slope of the roof; if he slips down and breaks his neck it’ll teach him a lesson.’

  Gigi yanked on her dressing gown and went out on the roof terrace. Her cousin was still half-asleep in the morning sun, his curly dark hair rumpled, a blanket over his shoulders. He didn’t turn in her direction. Gigi leaned against the sun-warmed wall. She wanted to ask him if he missed his father, if he wished his mother would come back from Lebanon. But the eyebrows drawn down like shades over the eyes warned her off. She touched his shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Tamer, we’d better get dressed. Yussef will be here any minute. Will you find Domino and chain him up?’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Yussef doesn’t like dogs.’ She sighed.

  Tamer looked at her as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind. He went off to find the dog.

  Gigi went downstairs to check on the preparations for lunch. She stopped short in her tracks when she saw Yussef standing in the middle of the foyer. ‘Oh! When did you get here?’

  He smiled. ‘Just now. Your governess went to look for you.’

  Involuntarily, Gigi’s eyes dropped to his feet. He was wearing canvas espadrilles. She couldn’t tell if his feet looked anything like those in her dream.

  ‘Excuse me a minute, I just have to dress.’

  She ran back upstairs. Before the mirror she surveyed her messy hair and childish dressing gown in despair. This day was not getting off to a good start.

  A few minutes later she came down, wearing the new apricot dress. They went for a walk on the beach. She carried her thin-strapped sandals and waded ankle deep in the water. He kept his espadrilles on and walked on the sand, a foot or two up from the water’s edge.

  ‘Father says I’d better be flying back to London as soon as I get back to Cairo.’

  ‘Oh, so soon?’

  ‘My thesis supervisor threw out all the data I’d collected over the past two months, he insists that I redo the experiments. Just because I took a shortcut! He just likes to give me a hard time, the old stick-in-the-mud.’

  They walked along, Gigi swinging her sandals by the straps. She tried to imagine what life would be like for her in London. ‘Do you have to study all the time?’

  ‘Oh, no, London’s lots of fun! Parties, discos on the King’s Road.’

  ‘You have a lot of friends?’

  ‘Quite a few. Many of them are foreign graduate students like me. The one thing we all miss is home cooking. My mother is having a dozen stuffed pigeons, a leg of lamb and I don’t know what else prepared for me to take back to London. Then as soon as I get there I’ll call everybody to come over and we’ll have a big dinner.’

  He sounded eager to go back, Gigi thought. She couldn’t see herself in the picture he was painting. Maybe she could put off making the decision till later, maybe they would have another chance to get to know each other better. ‘When do you think you might be coming back to Egypt?’

  ‘I don’t know, it depends on what my father decides. I doubt I can come back before summer next yea
r. But I think he said a day or two before the wedding would be plenty of time. That is, of course, assuming…’ He trailed off a little awkwardly. Gigi too was embarrassed. It seemed bizarre to be discussing wedding plans with a man with whom she had not exchanged an intimate word. It occurred to her that he had not asked her a single personal question, about her likes or dislikes, her hopes or her dreams. Disappointment formed a lump in her chest. She knew she was hopelessly romantic, waiting for some intrepid explorer to discover her like some uncharted island; like the woman languishing dreamily on a deserted tropical isle in the advertisement for Fidgi perfume: ‘Toute femme est une île’ – every woman is an island.

  Just then Domino appeared at the top of the dune, barking frantically as he ran towards them. Yussef stiffened and Gigi rushed to head off the dog.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t imagine how he got loose.’ It could only be Tamer, she thought grimly, as she caught Domino’s collar and dragged him back towards the chalet.

  Om Khalil cleared the lunch table and set down a tray of baklava and a basket of the earliest mangoes of the summer: green, comma-shaped Hindi; sweet, round, orange Alphonse; huge ‘calf’s egg’. Gigi regretfully decided to skip the mangoes – no matter how careful she was, there was no way to eat a whole mango without risking a stain on her new dress or at least getting her fingers all sticky. At home Mama would have made sure the mango was served peeled and diced in a bowl. Gigi started to serve the baklava to Yussef and Madame Hélène.

  Tamer chose a round, fleshy Alphonse. He held it upright in his fist, stuck a knife into the middle and cut about an inch deep all the way round. ‘Aren’t you going to have a mango, Gigi? You like them so.’ He twisted the top half off, ending up with one half like a cup and the other with the large pit still attached, protruding. The sticky, indelible, bright-orange juice ran down his hands. Gigi watched with horror out of the corner of her eye while trying to make conversation with Yussef.