‘He died of a broken heart.’ Qadriyyah twisted her handkerchief. ‘The new regime killed him. They took away his position and his peace of mind. And this upheaval played havoc with his health.’
As was customary with funerals, Nabilah met relatives and friends she had not come across for years.
‘Alhamdullilah you are here in Cairo,’ they said. ‘How fortunate it is that you can stand by your mother in her time of grief.’
For the first time in many years, mother and daughter witnessed and shared a searing experience, not an event they would narrate to each other by letters or abridge in telephone calls. The scratch and shock of death overwhelmed them at the same time. And they went over the details again and again.
‘I heard you in the bathroom.’
‘He made a sound like a cough, a deep cough.’
‘He knocked the glass of water by his bedside when he fell.’
‘That’s when I came rushing in.’
‘He looked like he was asleep.’
‘No, I knew. I knew straight away he was gone.’
They huddled together, cowed by the proximity of death, their minds on the arrangements and adjustments, who else they needed to call, and would Nabilah quickly sew that button on her mother’s black silk blouse. They were jolted against each other and became close, sharing thoughts and impressions. Life stood still; it was just the two of them, all the rancour and exasperation purged away, all the coolness of distance replaced by a sisterhood. Now they would move in step with each other, now the words yesterday, the day he died, a week since the funeral, it’s forty days tomorrow – all had a meaning they both understood.
As a new widow, Qadriyyah was subdued and helpless. Nabilah stepped into the role of mistress of the house. When she enrolled the children at a nearby school, a decisive step, which solidified her presence in Cairo, Qadriyyah did not object. Only Mahmoud’s visit in the summer stirred her to ask Nabilah to give him a chance and reconsider. To honour her mother’s wishes, Nabilah sat stifly in front of him in the salon and said, ‘I can’t live with Waheeba in the same house, not even in
different quarters. I will only return if we leave Umdurman altogether for a villa in Khartoum. This is a fair and reasonable request.’
Her voice didn’t waver; she was beginning to grow up. And, deep inside, she knew that he would not agree to leave Umdurman, not easily at any rate, but she was prepared to put up a fight.
Widowed mother and divorced daughter. There was something compelling and right about the combination. Even though Nabilah was not yet divorced, she revelled in the new situation, a life without the duties and restrictions imposed by men. At last, after so many years, she was finally fulfilling her dream, the dream of having her mother’s full attention. The two of them talked and cried. They pored over old photographs, went over old conversations, memories told from Nabilah’s perspective, from Qadriyyah’s perspective, and then stitched the two stories together. Now Mohsin’s widow, Qadriyyah spoke freely about Nabilah’s father. He became big again, real again, no longer a secret love, a buried hurt.
‘I remember the day your father died,’ Qadriyyah would start, and Nabilah would hang on to every word. ‘I’ve been widowed twice,’ a rueful smile, taking a drag from her cigarette, ‘such bad luck.’
The children were set proper mealtimes, but the widowed mother and divorced daughter ate whenever they liked. Turkish coffee with biscuits and cigarettes would substitute for breakfast. Watermelon and feta cheese would substitute for supper, or else Nabilah, glimpsing the season’s first courgettes and eggplants, would make stuffed vegetables for lunch. They would eat them hot and later eat them cold. One day she made koshari, one day she made moulokhia with rabbits. Qadriyyah started to bake again: pies, sponge cakes and jam pastries. Tea and the cakes hot from the oven, irresistible. So more tea and pastries, and peanuts and roasted watermelon seeds as they sat on the balcony. More
Turkish coffee as they listened to plays on the radio and began to laugh again.
On the first day of every month, a clerk from the Cairo Abuzeid office knocked on the door and handed Nabilah a wad of cash. Her monthly allowance continued as if this was an ordinary summer spent in Cairo. Autumn came and went, and it was Nabilah’s first winter in Cairo for years. Jumpers and blankets were pulled away from naphthalene balls and carpets spread on every floor; Qadriyyah knitting by the fire; the children’s feet in socks and warm slippers. Oh, the joy of sliding her arms into her fur coat, the stove glowing and the smell of roasted chestnuts. The special vegetables and fruits of winter: cabbage, pomegranates, navel oranges, pumpkins and piping hot aniseed, sips of cocoa and sahlab.
Nabilah became plump and matronly while the sky was heavy with rain, Cairo dreamy under clouds, the days short and cold. All her clothes needed adjusting. She needed to let out the waist on this skirt and that dress. So she took to her sewing machine and found herself absorbed and able, her feet on the gridded pedal, which said Singer, her elbows on the smooth mahogany wood. Soon, she was making new dresses for herself and clothes for the children. More ambitious, she made her mother a silk dress in the latest fashion. A dress which the next-door neighbour admired and said, ‘Please, Nabilah, make me one exactly the same, but red.’
The neighbour brought her own material and there were pleasurable visits for the fittings, changes here and there to the dress and, at the end, when the neighbour was thoroughly satisfied, she gave Nabilah a gift because it would not be polite or tactful to give money. Grand, bustling Cairo; Nabilah could so easily forget all about Sudan.
The only thing that marred her life was the children. Farouk and Ferial were like lumps of food stuck in her throat. They were refusing to adjust to the move or to embrace their new life.
‘Give them time,’ everyone advised her, ‘they will come round in the end.’
But Ferial started to wet her bed and Farouk was doing badly at school. He didn’t reply when the teacher spoke to him, just stared back, sullen and dumb. She discovered, to her disgust, that he was cutting the tips of his fingers on purpose, with razors he found discarded on the stairwell or on the road to school. They were small cuts, but the fact that they were deliberate made no sense. It was as if he enjoyed the attention he got when he lifted his thumb up, covered in blood. For then she would wash the blood away, apply mercurochrome and wrap it snug with a bandage. It made her feel pity and contempt for him. He looked wrong, too, walking next to her, his skin too dark and his hair kinky. The man at the haberdashery shop she frequented to buy buttons and tracing paper made comments when he saw them together.
‘I don’t understand how the mother can be so pretty and the son something else!’ he would say, or, with an exaggerated expression of astonishment, ‘Can all this beauty have such a dark son?’ He was getting bolder with time. ‘Why did they marry you off to a foreigner, Madame? What’s wrong with your fellow countrymen?’
Nabilah delighted in these comments and considered them part of the amusement and banter of Cairo street life. She would answer back, too, saying, ‘It’s my fate and my portion’ or ‘My daughter is pretty, you can’t fault
her
. Thank God, she has smooth hair.’
But deep down, she was troubled about her children. They were like centaurs, neither fully Egyptian nor fully Sudanese, awkward, clumsy, serious and destined to never fit in.
‘I want to go home to Father,’ said Ferial one day, and packed a little bag.
She succeeded in making her way, undetected, down outside the building and as far as the bottom of the road. Nabilah spanked her and warned her that if she went back to Umdurman,
Hajjah Waheeba would grab her and cut her again with a knife. Ferial became hysterical and throughout the next week had nightmares.
‘I want to play in a garden,’ she whispered to her mother, ‘like the garden of the saraya back home.’
‘I will take you to the zoo,’ Nabilah said. ‘The zoo here is much better and bigger than the one in Khartoum.’
Everything in Cairo was much better and bigger than its counterpart in Khartoum. They must learn to look, these two children. They must understand all the backwardness they were rescued from and appreciate their better life; they must fit in and become normal like other Egyptian children. Their names were not helpful, Nabilah had to admit. The King her son was named after was now deposed and Princess Ferial was out of the country. This was a new Cairo, a new era. Nabilah thrived and wanted her children to thrive, too. Change was in the air, the old order of Pashas and Beys was waning and this suited Nabilah fine. She, too, was an ordinary middle-class woman who no longer wanted her husband Bey.
‘This situation cannot continue, my dear,’ her mother warned her. ‘It is one of three things; either you will make peace with your husband and go back to him, or Mahmoud Bey will stop sending you the allowance or, God forbid, he will divorce you and take the children.’
Sometimes, when Farouk and Ferial exasperated Nabilah, the thought of sending them to live with their father did seem appealing. But she would immediately chide herself. It would be morally wrong to give them up to such chaos. Who would supervise their upbringing in Umdurman? The servants? Hajjah Waheeba? And what calibre of adults would that produce (look at Nassir)? Certainly, Mahmoud had no time or inclination to look after children. And he was a reasonable man. He would want the best for his children, and the best for Farouk and Ferial was to be with their mother.
‘There was a time – actually many times – when your
relationship with Mahmoud Bey was warm and strong,’ her mother would remind her from time to time. ‘Your early years in Cairo, the months you spent in London. Don’t let Waheeba sour what was good between you. Don’t let her win. Don’t leave everything to her and walk away.’
But Qadriyyah’s voice was losing its edge. Widowed mother, divorced daughter. They were on an equal footing, now, and Nabilah noticed the changes in her mother; the softer voice, the heavier tread, and a sense of retirement, a drawing back. Qadriyyah resumed dyeing her hair and manicuring her nails; she still made sure that her shoes were polished and would not go out in a crumpled skirt, but she did not shrug her daughter off as she used to. She enjoyed having Nabilah and the children around her. Indeed, she needed Nabilah, and all these speeches urging her to return to Sudan were increasingly becoming earnest but conventional politeness, words she did not really mean.
‘Do you want to live your life without a man? Will you be happy alone?’
‘I am happy with you, Mama,’ Nabilah would reply. ‘I am content like this.’
She was making up for the years of separation and even before that. For her hurt when her father died and Qadriyyah remarried, for her feelings of being shunted aside for the sake of her stepfather. She revelled in her mother’s undivided attention;
needed
this healing time.
Sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, she would sit at her sewing machine, absorbed and content, her feet pushing the pedal until her mother, at dawn, brought her a cup of tea or it was time to rouse the children for school. Sometimes she dreamt of Mahmoud, or a man who looked like Mahmoud, but might not be him after all. She remembered his passion for the girl he saw in the window of the photographer’s studio; how he had searched and found her. She remembered their time in London and how their every activity and encounter pulsed with
harmony. She had loved the father desperate for a cure for his son, had loved his gallantry and determination. She recalled walking arm in arm with him to the hospital, conscious of the new hat on her head – a London affectation. Recalled meals they had shared, the entrance to the Ritz, the afternoon they were introduced to the Duke of Bedford. Perfect days, unclouded by Waheeba or Umdurman. Even seeing Nur in that English hospital was not as distressing as seeing him lying propped up in the hoash. He belonged in that English hospital, and he should have stayed there for the full rehabilitation programme, for as long as it took to get him to be as independent as he could. That would have been the modern thing to do; the right decision. But Mahmoud, so enlightened, so forward-thinking, had surprised her by saying no.
‘I cannot leave him here by himself,’ he had said, ‘and I cannot be away from Sudan for so long. So he must return to Umdurman with me. The whole family must surround him and stand by him.’
She remembered how secretly relieved she had been – and still was – that Fate had struck Waheeba’s son and not Farouk, how utterly grateful. Time and time again, she thanked Allah Almighty. It was the first and only religious sentiment in her life; that deep gratitude saying alhamdullilah and meaning it. No, she did not want to go back to Umdurman and see that miserable sight again. In Nabilah’s mind, religious observance was associated with the rural lower classes; only the poor and uneducated prayed. Her gratitude, though, had an element of worship to it, a step that extended beyond temporary relief and fleeting elation.
The tall, dusky lady standing at the door was difficult to place. Nabilah was distracted by the elegant, obviously expensive, clothes and, instead of searching the stranger’s face, her eyes lingered on the silk of the dress, the collar that folded wide almost over the breasts; such exquisite jewelry, such stylish shoes.
‘Nabilah, how are you?’
That accent, and the words drawled out, her name bald without Aunty or Abla or Hanim.
‘Why Soraya, it’s you!’ French perfume as Soraya leaned slightly to kiss her. ‘I had no idea you were in Cairo. Come in, come in!’
‘I am on my honeymoon,’ Soraya explained matter-of-factly, as if a honeymoon was neither breathless nor transforming.
She followed Nabilah into the sitting room, looking around with curiosity. Manners were never her strongest point, nor posture. She slumped on a chair, on her lap the boxes she’d been carrying, large parcels wrapped in gift paper.
‘I couldn’t be in Cairo without seeing my cousins Farouk and Ferial. It’s been so long.’
Nabilah still couldn’t get over the clothes. They had to be part of the trousseau. Such exquisite taste, and a perfect fit. She could not help but voice her admiration and ask.