The Cairo House

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 order 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 always 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.’

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 myth 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.