Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall. For Amal al-Ghamrawi, this story started with a trunk. An old-fashioned trunk made of brown leather, cracked now and dry, with a vaulted top over which run two straps fastened with brass buckles black with age and neglect.
The American had come to Amal’s house. Her name was Isabel Parkman and the trunk was locked in the boot of the car she had hired. Amal could not pretend she was not wary. Wary and weary in advance: an American woman — a journalist, she had said on the phone. But she said Amal’s brother had told her to call and so Amal agreed to see her. And braced herself: the fundamentalists, the veil, the cold peace, polygamy, women’s status in Islam, female genital mutilation — which would it be?
But Isabel Parkman was not brash or strident; in fact she was rather diffident, almost shy. She had met Amal’s brother in New York. She had told him she was coming to Egypt to do a project on the millennium, and he had given her Amal’s
number. Amal said she doubted whether Isabel would come across anyone with grand millennial views or theories. She said that she thought Isabel would find that on the whole everyone was simply worried — worried sick about what would become of Egypt, the Arab countries, ‘le tiers monde’, in the twenty-first century. But she gave her coffee and some names and Isabel went away.
On her second visit Isabel had broached the subject of the trunk. She had found it when her mother had gone into hospital — for good. She had looked inside it, and there were some old papers in English, written, she believed, by her great-grandmother. But there were many papers and documents in Arabic. And there were other things: objects. And the English papers were mostly undated, and some were bound together but seemed to start in midsentence. She knew some of her own history must be there, but she also thought there might be a story. She didn’t want to impose but Amal’s brother had thought she might be interested …
Amal was touched by her hesitancy. She said she would have a look at the thing and sent the doorman to bring it upstairs. As he carried it in and put it in the middle of her living room, she said, ‘Pandora’s box?’
‘Oh, I hope not,’ Isabel cried, sounding genuinely alarmed.
My name is Anna Winterbourne. I do not hold (much) with those who talk of the Stars governing our Fate.
A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love.
Quoted in
Middlemarch
Cairo, April 1997
Some people can make themselves cry. I can make myself sick with terror. When I was a child — before I had children of my own — I did it by thinking about death. Now, I think about the stars. I look at the stars and imagine the universe. Then I draw back to our galaxy, then to our planet — spinning away in all that immensity. Spinning for dear life. And for a moment the utter precariousness, the sheer improbability of it all overwhelms me. What do we have to hold on to?
Last night I dreamed I walked once more in the house of my father’s childhood: under my feet the cool marble of the entrance hall, above my head its high ceiling of wooden rafters: a thousand painted flowers gleaming dark with distance. And there was the latticed terrace of the haramlek, and behind the ornate woodwork I saw the shadow of a woman. Then the heavy door behind me swung open and I turned: outlined against a glaring rectangle of sunshine I saw (as I had never in life seen) the tall broad-shouldered figure of my great-uncle, Sharif Basha al-Baroudi, and as I opened my eyes and pulled the starched white sheet up close against my chin, I watched him pause and take off his tarbush and hand it, together with his ebony walking stick, to the Nubian sufragi who leaned towards him with words of greeting. He glanced up at the lattice of the terrace and strode towards me, past me, and into the shadows of the small vestibule that I knew led to the stairs up to the women’s quarters. I have not been near this
house since my youngest son was nine; ten years ago. He loved the house, and watching him play, and explore while the museum guards looking on benignly, I had found myself wondering: what if we had kept it?
But this is not my story. This is a story conjured out of a box; a leather trunk that travelled from London to Cairo and back. That lived in the boxroom of a Manhattan apartment for many years, then found its way back again and came to rest on my living-room floor here in Cairo one day in the spring of 1997. It is the story of two women: Isabel Parkman, the American who brought it to me, and Anna Winterbourne, her great-grandmother, the Englishwoman to whom it had originally belonged. And if I come into it at all, it is only as my own grandmother did a hundred years ago, when she told the story of her brother’s love.
Day after day I unpacked, unwrapped, unravelled. I sat on the floor with Isabel and we exclaimed over the daintiness of the smocking on the child’s frock we found, the smoothness of the sandalwood prayer beads released from their velvet bag, the lustre of the candle-glass. I translated for her passages from the Arabic newspaper cuttings. We spoke of time and love and family and loss. I took the journals and papers into my bedroom and read and reread Anna’s words. I almost know them by heart. I hear her voice and see her in the miniature in the locket: the portrait of the mother she so much resembled.
At the table under my window, I fit the key from the green felt purse into the delicate lock of the brown journal and turn, and I am in an English autumn in 1897 and Anna’s troubled heart lies open before me:
— and yet, I do love him, in the sense that I wish him well, and were it in my power to make his lot happier and his heart more content, I would willingly and with a joyful spirit undertake anything — But, in fairness, I must say that I have tried. My understanding — in particular of men — has of necessity been limited. But within that I did strive — do strive — to be a faithful and loving wife and companion —
It is not as I thought it would be, in those girlish days — just two short years ago — when I sat by the pavilion and watched, my heart swelling with joy when he glanced smiling in my direction after a good run, or when we rode together and his leg brushed against mine.
Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena, or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years — or a continent — make?
How sadly, more than ever now, I feel the lack of my mother. And yet I could not say that Edward has changed. He has not. It is that same polite courtesy that I thought the mark of greater things to come, that I thought the harbinger of a close affection and an intimacy of mind and spirit.
We are roughly in the middle of the journal, which has already moved some way from its girlish beginnings as Anna prepared to chronicle a happy married life — beginnings touching in their assumption of order, of a predicted, unfolding pattern.
My mother is constantly in my mind. More so than my dear father — though I think of him a great deal too. I wonder how they were together. I cannot remember them together. Until she died, my memories are of her alone. And in my memory she is surrounded always by light. I see her riding — fast; always at a canter or a gallop. And laughing: at the table, while she danced, when she came into the nursery, when she held me in front of her on the saddle and taught me how to hold the reins. And it is as if my father only came into being for me when I was nine years old — and she had died. I remember him grieving. Walking in the grounds or sitting in the library. Gentle and loving with me always, but sad. There were no more dances, no more dinner parties where I would come down in my night-clothes to be kissed good night. Sir Charles came to see him, often. And they would
talk of India and of Ireland, of the Queen and the Canal, of Egypt. They spoke of the Rebellion, the Bombardment and the Trial. They never spoke of my mother.
I asked Sir Charles, a few months ago, after my father’s funeral, about my mother. I asked him how she and my father had been together. Had they been happy? And he, looking somewhat surprised, said, ‘I expect so, my dear. She was a fine woman. And he was a true gentleman.’
Sir Charles does not speak much of private matters. He is more happy on the high road of public life. Although ‘happy’ is a careless word, for he is most unhappy with public life and was in an ill temper throughout the Jubilee festivities in June. Two weeks ago we were down in Saighton to visit George Wyndham and dined there with Dick Grosvenor, Edward Clifford, Henry Milner, John Evelyn and Lady Clifden. The question of whether savage nations had a right to exist came up, George arguing — from Darwin and the survival of the fittest — that they had none, and the rest of the company being of much the same mind. Sir Charles was much incensed and ended the conversation by saying (somewhat strongly) that the British Empire had done so much harm to so many people that it deserved to perish and then it would be too late to say or do anything. Edward was, for the most part, silent, I fancy because he really agreed with the younger set but was careful of offending his father. Sir Charles’s only ally was John Evelyn, who declared his intention of sending his son up the Nile to ‘learn Arabic, keep a diary and acquire habits of observation and self-reliance and not to imbibe Jingo principles’. I wish — if that is not too wicked a wish — I wish I were that son.
Edward visits my apartment from time to time, and he is tender and affectionate of me as he leaves. And I have long thought it was a mark of the waywardness of my character that on such occasions I was beset by stirrings and impulses of so contrary a nature that I was like a creature devoid of reason: I wept into my pillows, I paced the length of my chamber, I opened the casements to the cold night air and leaned out and wished — God forgive me — that I had not been so resilient in physical health
that I might not catch a fatal chill and make an end of my unhappiness. Often, in the mornings, I had resort to cold compresses on my eyes so that no trace of unseemly anguish might be detected on my countenance when I came down to breakfast.
I have wondered whether any shadow of such turmoil came to him, for I would have been glad to soothe and comfort him as best I could, but as he always left so promptly and with such apparent equanimity, I have come to conclude that these disturbances were mine and mine only and were born of some weakness of my feminine nature, and I strove — strive — to master and overcome them. To that end I have devised various small stratagems, the most successful of which is to leave some small task uncompleted and close to hand. So when my husband rises from my bed I rise with him and walk with him to the door to bid him good night and, having closed the door, return immediately to my drawing or my book until such time as I am certain the wicked feelings have passed and it is safe for me to lift my head.
My journal is of no use on such occasions for it would merely encourage the expression of these emotions that threaten me and that I must put aside.
I cannot believe that he is happy.
Oh what a dear, ravishing thing is the beginning of an Amour!
Aphra Behn, c. 1680
Cairo, May 1997
Isabel gives me bits of her story. She tells me how she met my brother. A dry, edited version, which, as I get to know her, as I get to be able to imagine her, I fill out for myself. Isabel thinks in pictures: as she speaks I see the pool of light rippling on the old oak table —
New York City, February 1997
A pool of light ripples on the old oak table, picking out the darker grains of wood, then shadowing them. At its centre shines a glass bowl in which three candles float like flat, golden lilies.
‘I thought maybe it’s like birthdays,’ Isabel says. Her voice has that slight, deep-down tremor she has noticed in it lately. She doesn’t know whether anyone else can hear it. She doesn’t know why it comes. She lays her fork down carefully on her plate.
‘I mean,’ she says, looking down, considering her fingers still resting on the fork, ‘you know how when you’re a kid every birthday has this huge significance?’ She glances up. Yes, she still has his attention. ‘You even think,’ she continues, encouraged, ‘that after a birthday everything is somehow going to be different,
you
’re going to be different; you’ll be
new —’
‘And then?’
‘And then, later —’ she shrugs — ‘you realise it isn’t like that.’
‘My dear girl — I’m sorry: my dear young woman — you can’t possibly know that already.’
Is he flirting with her? He leans back in his seat, one wrist on the table, an arm slung over the back of his chair. Beyond the bowl of light, the woman he arrived with turns laughing towards Rajiv Seth. A sheet of auburn hair falls forward, obscuring her face. My brother fingers the stem of his wineglass; the back of his hand is covered with fine, black hair. She looks full at him: his face so familiar from television and newspapers. They hate him, but they cannot get enough of him. When he conducts, the line snakes around the block as though for the first showing of a Spielberg film. The ‘Molotov Maestro’ they call him, the ‘Kalashnikov Conductor’. But the box office loves him. Now the dark, deep-set eyes are lit and fixed on her. He is laughing at her.
From the head of the table, Deborah calls out, ‘Anybody want more salad?’
There is a general clinking of cutlery and shifting of plates and after a moment Deborah says, ‘I’ll go get the ice cream.’
Louis, her partner, groans and she flashes him a smile.
Isabel gets up and even though Deborah says, ‘Sit down, sit down, I’ll do it,’ she picks up her plate and his and carries them into the kitchen. ‘Isn’t he just a doll?’ Deborah whispers amid the gleaming brass pots, pans and colanders.
‘He’s pretty gorgeous,’ Isabel agrees, not pretending not to know whom Deborah means. ‘And he’s approachable. Who’s the lady?’