The Cairo House

For Kareem and Ramy

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

PART I PHOTOGRAPHS

1 The Feast of the Sacrifice

2 Sequestration

3 Past As Prologue

4 The Proposal

5 The Wedding

6 London

7 Cairo

8 Jedda

9 Papa

10 Madame Hélène

11 The Day of Remembrance

PART II EXILE

12 Paris

13 New Hampshire

PART III THE RETURN

14 Cairo Revisited

15 The Dervish

16 The Pasha

17 Tamer

18 Tarek

19 The Restaurant

20 Luxor

21 The Visit of Condolences

22 Insomnia

23 The House

24 The Accident

Glossary

P.S.

About the author

Seeing with Bifocal Vision

LIFE AT A GLANCE

A FEW FAVOURITE READS

A WRITING LIFE

About the book

The Alternative Universe of the Imagination

Read on

If You Loved This, You Might Like…

Find Out More

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 The Feast of the Sacrifice

For those who have more than one skin, there are places where the secret act of metamorphosis takes place, an imperceptible shading into a hint of a different gait, a softening or a crispening of an accent. For those whose past and present belong to different worlds, there are places and times that mark their passage from one to the other, a transitional limbo: like airports and airplanes.

Watch the travelers going through the arrival gates, being greeted by family and friends, or by strangers holding up a sign with their company name. Watch the subtle shift to accommodate a change in status or expectations, as we play our many roles in life: boss and child, parent and lover, hometown hot-shot and small fish in a big city pond. We emerge from the tunnel ramp and swing through the gates, a chrysalis bursting free of its cocoon, Superman erupting from the telephone booth; or we shuffle off to the luggage carousel, waiting to pick up the familiar battered luggage with which we left.

But the true chameleons are the ones who straddle two worlds, segueing smoothly from one to the other, adjusting language and body language, calibrating the range of emotions displayed, treading the tightrope of mannerisms and mores. If it is done well, it can look deceptively effortless, but it is never without cost. There is no hypocrisy involved, only the universal imperative underlying good manners: to do the appropriate thing, to make those around you comfortable. For the chameleon, it is a matter of survival.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing at Cairo Airport in twenty minutes. Local time is 4 p.m., and the ground temperature is 22 degrees Celsius. Please fasten your seat belts and return seats and trays to their full upright position. We remind you to have your passports ready and your landing cards and customs declarations filled out.’

I stare at the landing card in front of me. ‘Purpose of visit: Business or pleasure?’ Simplistic questions in a complicated world. What is the purpose of my visit? How do you answer, I have come back to claim what’s mine? To find out if it is still mine. To find two children I left behind when I ran away a decade ago: one child is my son and the other the girl I once was. The future and the past. Between them they hold the key to the question I have come to try to resolve: where do I belong? Where is this chameleon’s natural habitat?

I fasten my seat belt and smile at the white-haired Minnesotan couple next to me as they grasp each other’s knuckled hands. We have made small talk about cross-country skiing and hockey. At some point they asked me where I was from, and I answered, truthfully, that I live in New Hampshire. It is not evasiveness, nor even the instinct to resist being pigeon-holed. It is only that any answer I give will be just as incomplete and misleading, so this is as good – or bad – as any other.

The wheels skim the ground and the engines are thrust into reverse with a violent roar as the plane hurtles down the runway, then skids to a stop. There is a round of clapping from the Egyptian passengers; it never fails, no matter how bumpy or smooth the landing. As much as a courtesy to the pilot, the applause is the self-congratulation of a fatalistic people on arriving safely. Hamdillah ‘alsalama. Home safely.

Cairo Airport, finally. I sling my shoulder bag and coat over my arm and head for the passport check booths. The Minnesotan couple follow me in line. I hand my blue American passport to the man at the first booth.

‘Do you have a visa?’ he asks in English.

‘No, but I’m Egyptian-born.’

He looks mildly surprised; perhaps I do not look typically Egyptian. He flips through my passport.

‘Seif-el-Islam?’ He raises his eyebrows at my maiden name and asks in Arabic, ‘Any relation to the Pasha?’

‘I’m his niece.’

The man enters the data from my passport on a computer screen, then hands the document back to me with a smile. ‘Hamdillah ‘alsalama. Welcome home.’

As I pass through the gate I nod to the couple from Minneapolis, a little awkwardly, because I can see in their eyes that I no longer belong to their world. At customs I push my cart right through the Nothing To Declare aisle. I scan the mass of dark, eager faces beyond the barrier at the exit. One does not distinguish black or white, only infinite gradations of gray in this most ethnically-mixed and color-blind of peoples. Within a few hours I will no longer notice such things, just as I will no longer see the inevitable film of desert dust in the stark sunshine, like a layer of ash over the gray buildings and the sooty cars, the leaves of the trees and the dark winter clothing of the people.

The muezzin’s call from the minaret wakes me at dawn my first morning in Cairo. I listen to the drawn-out echoes rising and falling in the stillness. I try to go back to sleep but the layers of noise start to build up outside the wooden shutters: first the birds twittering, then dogs barking, voices raised in greeting; finally the first car will set off the incessant honking that punctuates every minute of the day on the streets of Cairo.

I can hear Ibrahim the doorkeeper carrying out his morning ablutions at the tap in the courtyard under my window. His wooden clogs clap on the cobblestones, then the creaky faucet is turned off. I can imagine him winding his turban around his shriveled old head. Someone passing by in the street calls out a greeting: ‘Morning of jasmines!’ Ibrahim responds: ‘Morning of cream to you!’ The flowery greetings make me smile. Such small automatic courtesies are some of the few luxuries which even the poorest of the poor can afford.

As a child I used to sleep right through all this. I even used to sleep through the Bayram Feast sacrifice. Except for that one year, that year that was to be the last of the ‘good old days’.

There is a photo of me and my parents taken in the salon of the villa just before the Feast of the Sacrifice that year, 1961. Papa is holding a cigarette in one hand, his other hand on my shoulder. He chain-smoked Craven A’s; I remember the red and white box with the black cat. In the photo he has the broad-shouldered, dark looks of the Latin film stars of the fifties. His moustache is very neat, and his hair is slicked back. That style of suit, double-breasted, with boxy shoulders, was in style then, but I remember him wearing it a decade later and still looking impeccably tailored in it. He was that rare sort of man who carries himself well, without a hint of vanity.

Papa and I are standing behind Mama’s Aubusson bergère. Papa never changed that much – because he died young, I suppose – but Mama is almost unrecognizable in the photo. Her black hair is short, she has the thick straight brows, the red lipstick and string of pearls that were the ‘look’ of the period. Her features are too irregular to be photogenic, but her smile is confident. She is wearing a salmon, lace-encrusted tulle dress she kept for years after she stopped wearing it. She is at her slimmest in that photo, and although her shoulders and arms look creamy and plump, the boned bustier of that dress is tiny. I know because I tried it on when I was eighteen. I could only hook up the waist if I sucked in my breath, while the fabric of the hips and the bust hung loose on me.

In the photo I am standing with an arm around the back of Mama’s chair, head tilted to one side, one foot rubbing against the patent leather heel of the other foot. My shoulder-length hair is brushed back in a velvet Alice band. It was chestnut brown in those days and Mama rinsed it with camomile tea to bring out the highlights. I am wearing a sweater set over a short pleated skirt, and my legs are coltish and long. I am nine, on the verge of l’âge ingrat, as my governess called it, the awkward age.

Just before the photograph was taken, Mama had hurriedly tried to smooth my eyebrows.

‘Stand still, Gigi!’

She had wet the tip of her finger with her tongue and run her finger over my brows. I remember making a face. It’s the same face my son makes today when I take a sip from his drink, or in some other way betray the fact that I still don’t see him as his own person, physically separate from me.

Old photographs are like a deck of worn cards; you can try to read them like a fortune-teller at a fair, except in reverse: to read the past, rather than the future. With hindsight you recognize the people in them for what they were: the king, the joker, the knave, the hangman. The Pasha, of course, would be the King, the Sha’ib or Graybeard, as he is called in Arabic; Fangali the jester; Om Khalil’s black figure the hangman, turning up like an ill omen at unexpected junctures. But only with hindsight. While the cards are face down, you cannot tell what hand you’ve been dealt.

That photo of me with my parents was taken just before the Feast of the Sacrifice the year I turned nine. It was the last time we ever posed together for a family portrait.

The Feast of the Sacrifice must have been in winter that year. The sheep had arrived two days before amid much commotion, an incongruous sight in a residential neighborhood in Cairo. Sheep or cattle were sacrificed on the family estate, but it was also customary to carry out the ritual in Cairo. This imperative was never questioned: it was one of the many instances in our hybrid culture when Western norms were unhesitatingly sacrificed on the altar of tradition.

The Bayram Feast was meant to ransom one’s blessings, as Abraham did by his sacrifice. Health, wealth, and the greatest of blessings, children, could be withdrawn on a whim of the Giver. The Revolution of 1952 was nearly a decade old, and the Land Reform Act had stripped the bulk of our landholdings, but the worst was still around the corner for families like ours, and as yet unimaginable.

The distribution of the meat from the sacrificial beast was a symbolically intimate form of charity, sharing with dependents and mendicants the meat from one’s own table. For the sacrifice to be accepted, every detail of the ritual had to be carefully observed, such as the exact window of time during which it should be performed. That year that was to be the last of the good days, there was a hitch, the lapse of a fatal few minutes. In retrospect, it was an ill omen, and I was the one responsible for it.

I remember watching from the balcony when the van arrived with the two sheep in the back. The cook, his helper, the chauffeur and Ibrahim the Nubian doorkeeper then proceeded to drag the bleating, resisting beasts to the dog run where they would be penned until the morning of the feast.

There was a sudden commotion and panic; someone had forgotten to chain up the dog, who had come flying at the throat of the ram. The howling German shepherd was dragged away. Finally the sheep were safely enclosed. Two days later, before dawn on the day of the Feast, they would be taken to a shed in the backyard that was ordinarily used once a week by two washer-women who came to do the laundry, then on the following day by a man who came to do the ironing. The dog was also bathed there. But on that one day of the year, between dawn and daybreak, as tradition required for the sacrifice to be valid, the sheep would be slaughtered and skinned in that room, and the stench of blood would replace the scent of soap and starch. Then the walls and floor were hosed down and everything returned to normal for another year.

On the morning of the day before the Feast the bustle around the house had reached a pitch of controlled frenzy. In the salon, the Sudanese head-suffragi stood on top of a tall ladder, painstakingly unhooking the crystal drops from the chandelier, one by one, to be wiped with vinegar and water. Mama supervised, hair in curlers under a chiffon cap, wearing one of her favorite déshabillés: a faded, blue satin, shawl-collared affair with a sweeping skirt. Mama only dressed to go out, and then she spent at least an hour in front of her tulle-skirted vanity and her modern built-in closets.

The under-suffragi was pushing a heavy contraption across the parquet floor to polish it; twice a year the hardwood floors were hand-stripped with steel wool, cleaned, waxed, then polished with a chamois cloth weighed down by a massive brick of lead at the end of a stick. He pushed the unwieldy contraption forward and dragged it back with a clicking, sucking sound. One of the maids was using a bamboo duster to beat the back of a rug slung over the railing of the balcony.

I stood on the balcony at a safe distance from the dust raised by the maid, watching the arrival of the sheep. I remember the scent of jasmine from the bushes under the balcony – jasmine and dust. The cook came up to the balcony with some carrots to coax me to feed the lamb. A large, garrulous man with terrible burn scars on his chest, he was sweating from his recent efforts and the general excitement. All the household help seemed to go around with unusually dilated pupils in the days leading up to the Feast. ‘Blood lust’, my mother called it. The cook proudly pointed out the two animals to me, a ram and a lamb.

‘See the pretty little one, I chose him just for you.’

He went on to make a remark about the ram’s horns and his virility. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the remark qualified as one of the ‘indelicate expressions’ to which the cook was unfortunately prone, and on account of which I was discouraged from engaging in conversation with him. The poor man was aware of this failing of his, without quite being able to determine how he offended. The comical result was that he prefaced his remarks with a precautionary ‘excuse the expression,’ as when he referred to a breast of chicken or a leg of lamb.

I went back inside, up to my room, and whiled away the afternoon styling my long-suffering governess’ hair. Madame Hélène was over sixty, but she still had long, lush hair which she wore in a dowdy forties bun. I loved to pin her silvery hair up in complicated twists and braids. She always undid my fantastic creations before venturing out.

A persistent bleating from the backyard was followed by the dog barking. ‘Oh, listen to that bleating,’ Madame Hélène grumbled. ‘At least tomorrow it will all be over and we’ll have some peace and quiet.’

I took the bobby pins out of my mouth and slowly secured a twisted braid in place. ‘I wonder what happens, when they sacrifice the sheep, I mean. It would be interesting to watch, just one time, what do you think?’

‘Quelle horreur,’ Madame Hélène shuddered. ‘Don’t even think about it. Your mother would never allow it.’

‘Oh, it was just a thought.’ I slipped one last pin in her hair. ‘There, your chignon is done, you look like the Belle Hélène of the Greeks.’

That was not strictly true. Madame Hélène had big, bulging blue eyes, rather like boiled eggs, which I attributed to much weeping. She had told me all about her sad life. A Frenchwoman married to an expatriate Italian count with considerable property in Egypt, they had been dispossessed by the British during the Second World War. Her husband’s death had left her penniless and childless. She had been reduced to working as a governess for a living, although among her coterie of expatriate widows she only admitted to giving private lessons. She kept a small apartment in downtown Cairo, where she spent her days off. She had no close relatives left in Europe, but was very attached to a godson who lived near Lyons. She often talked about ‘le petit Luc,’, and wrote him letters. She kept a photo of him on the table next to her armchair in my bedroom: a photo of a boy with a thick thatch of blonde-streaked hair over a square, smiling face.

‘That photo is at least ten years old,’ Madame Hélène would sigh as she looked at the photograph every day. ‘He must be eight or nine years older than you, ma petite, I can’t remember exactly.’

I sat down and flipped through a book, but I could not keep my mind on the pages. I had never been particularly curious about the ritual of the sacrifice. By the time I woke up on Feast Day mornings, it was all over. It was over by the time my father was roused, at about six o’clock, to attend the early prayers. Even Muslims who rarely set foot in a mosque during the year attend the feast prayers, and, on these occasions, the carpeting is extended out into the courtyard of the mosque in anticipation of the overflow. Papa tended to be late, so he usually ended up in the courtyard, along with the cook and his helpers, who would also arrive late and exhausted, having just finished with the butchering.

Mama, who normally rose at about ten o’clock, would have been up at dawn, supervising the distribution of meat to the old retainers and the poor who regularly came to the house. A small crowd would have gathered by daybreak. The wetnurses were given the lion’s share, followed by the household help. The sheepskins invariably fell to the lot of the Nubian doorkeeper, who took them back with him to his village in the Nubia on his biannual visits home.

I would stay up in my room until it was time for me to dress and go with Papa on another round of visits. By the time I came home, calm would have been restored, and the people who had come for charity would have dispersed. Dinner would be served, with several dishes of lamb as required by tradition. I never touched it; the odor of freshly-butchered meat still lingered about the kitchen, wafting into the dining-room every time the door to the butler’s pantry swung open. The household staff would be in a hurry to clear the table and be gone for the holidays, except for the governess, who did not celebrate Muslim feasts, and for the doorkeeper, who had no family in Cairo.

It had never before occurred to me to be curious about what went on in that shed, between dawn and daybreak. But now I could not get the idea out of my head, not even when Papa took me with him on the first round of visits to relatives. The routine never varied; the aunts and uncles were visited in order of their seniority. Since Papa was the youngest of his eight brothers and sisters, his turn to receive visitors came on the last of the three days of the Feast. On the Eve of the Feast he took me to visit the Pasha, Papa’s oldest brother and the head of the clan. He lived in the family home in Garden City, which everyone called the Cairo House.

On the way we passed a truck full of smiling, excited people from the country. They were standing up in the back of the truck, swaying with its movement, singing and clapping. The girls wore neon pink, nylon gauze dresses, the boys new striped pajamas. We also passed pick-up trucks carrying bleating sheep marked for slaughter with a rose-red stain on their fat tails. By dawn the next day they would all be butchered. I stared at them with equal fascination and revulsion, trying to imagine the actual proceedings.

We drove down the Nile Corniche past the grand hotels and the long white wall of the British Embassy, then turned off into the narrow, villa-lined streets of Garden City. When we reached the family house Papa stopped the car and honked for the gatekeeper to open the gate. He parked in the back of the villa, alongside several other cars.

I followed him round to the front, past the fountain with its statue of a reclining Poseidon. One of the two heavy double doors was open; normally the front doors were only used on feast days, and at weddings and funerals. Inside the long hall the marble floor radiated cold. I looked up through the atrium at the blazing crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling of the second floor, fifty feet above my head.

‘Let’s go upstairs to see your grandmother first.’ Papa headed for the wide marble staircase with the two curved balustrades. I followed him up, then along the gallery.

At the top of the stairs we were met by Fangali, the majordomo of the house. He adjusted the out-moded fez he wore on his head and tugged at his caftan as he came forward to greet us. There was something about him that eluded my understanding. The high-pitched voice, the ingratiating manner, contrasted with the thin moustache, the bold eyes. I wondered why he, of all the menservants, was the only one allowed to come and go freely upstairs, in the family quarters. I had vaguely overheard that, as a result of an accident at birth, he was not quite a man. I wondered if he was an agha. I had heard of the eunuches of my grandmother’s day, without understanding what the word signified. I didn’t dare ask. Years later I thought I understood, but later still, Fangali would spring a surprise on us all.

Fangali knocked perfunctorily on the door to Grandmother’s room and opened it, announcing in his peculiar whine: ‘Look who’s here, Hanem. Shamel Bey and Sitt Gigi.’

Grandmother was sitting on a chaise longue, her legs covered with a knit shawl. Fangali tucked the shawl around the child-like feet in satin mules, and left the room. It never failed to amaze me that this tiny woman could have born my tall, strapping father and his eight brothers and sisters. But it seemed as though the effort had drained Grandmother completely; as far back as I could remember, she had always had that vague air of detachment about her.

Papa kissed his mother’s hand and pulled up a chair beside her and I followed suit. She was saying to Papa, with an approving nod in my direction, ‘That little one can name her own mahr.’ I understood vaguely what the word meant: the dowry the bridegroom brings to the bride.

Papa laughed and rumpled my hair. ‘I’m going down to see your uncle in his study, Gigi. I’ll send for you when I’m ready to go, and you can come to wish him a happy Feast before we leave.’

I nodded and sat down beside Grandmother. Fangali brought us glasses of qammar-eddin, apricot nectar, and a tray with sweets. I nibbled absently on a glacé chestnut, my mind on the act of the Sacrifice. Mama would never allow it if I asked to observe it, but she had never expressly forbade it, so technically I would not be disobeying. I knew Mama’s rules well enough though: whatever was not explicitly allowed was forbidden. As for Madame Hélène, she slept in the room adjoining mine, with the door ajar, but she slept heavily, with a smoker’s nasal snore. I made up my mind: I would do it.