The Cairo House

‘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.’

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.