The Map of Love (59 page)
Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
‘I told Hasna to go to bed. You have no need of her tonight.’ He fumbles as he unclasps, unhooks, unties. He loses patience before it is all done and, crushing the silk, the lace, the yielding body beneath him, he groans into her neck, ‘Oh, Anna, Anna! You have no idea how much I love you.’
1 January 1902
‘Hubb’ is love, ‘;ishq’ is love that entwines two people together, ‘shaghaf’ is love that nests in the chambers of the heart, ‘hayam’ is love that wanders the earth, ‘teeh’ is love in which you lose yourself, ‘walah’ is love that carnes sorrow within it, ‘sababah’ is
love that exudes from your pores, ‘hawa’ is love that shares its name with ‘air’ and with ‘falling’, ‘gharam’ is love that is willing to pay the price
.
I have learned so much this past year, I could not list all the things I have learned
.
That moment when we dreamed we could change the face of our world was a luxury which later generations were denied. But for that short, dazzling moment we paid a heavy price.
Arwa Salih, 1997
15 September 1997
Three Palestinian suicide bombers killed seven people in West Jerusalem. An Israeli army unit tried to land in Ansariyyeh in southern Lebanon and was fought off by the people and an Amal unit killing eleven Israeli troops. ‘Arafat and Hussein arrived in Cairo for a summit meeting with Mubarak. An Israeli soldier shot randomly at thirty Palestinians in a bus in Hebron. One hundred and seventy Palestinians were arrested on the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority also arrested thirty-five members of Hamas and Israel arrested sixty-seven other Palestinians. In Algeria forty-nine were killed and sixty wounded in the Beni Sous district in the capital, sixty-four were killed in Beni Musa and one hundred and thirty-seven alleged terrorists were killed in Jibal al-Shari’ah. One hundred and thirty Algerians who had fled their country were killed when their ship collided with another off the coast of Nigeria. The United Nations had to borrow from its peacekeeping budget to pay its staff and Princess Diana died and five million joined her funeral. Mother Teresa died. Mobutu died. Austria agreed to compensate victims of the Nazis for their stolen gold. These were some of the things that happened during the two weeks that my brother stayed with me. I know because he could not last for two hours without reading a paper or switching on some radio or TV news channel.
He got restless with the beach and we went back to Cairo, where each morning he took seven Arabic papers and last thing
at night we went down to Midan Tal
at Harb so he could get the English and French ones. He bought me a PC and had me connected up to the Net. I told him that I had made contact with TareqAtiyya and that he was going to help with the school on Tawasi. I did not tell him about Tareq’s plans for his land and I did not arrange for the two men to meet.
Isabel called and said she was staying in New York for a while as she had to sort out all the legal matters relating to her parents. I’m clogging up a room for you,’ she says.
‘It’s your room,’ I say.
‘You can move my things if you like,’ she says.
‘It’s your room,’ I say again. ‘Everything will stay as you left it.’
I know she was waiting for him to go back. When he speaks to her I can hear his voice shift into a deeper and more resonant pitch: the pitch of sexual tenderness. But he is unwilling to commit himself. He goes on about being fifty-five.
‘You look wonderful,’ I say, ‘you act thirty.’
‘But I’m not,’ he says. ‘And I am tired of explaining. If I am to be with a woman she has to be someone who knows it all. Someone who doesn’t need to be told.’
‘Knows all what?’ I ask, although I know what he means.
‘Everything.’
‘What? Egypt, Palestine, America, your kids, your music, the past, the future? Come on —’
‘She doesn’t have to know the future.’ He grins.
He planned concerts in Ghazzah and Jericho and Qana. They were to be free so he had his manager working to find sponsors. I said he should have one in the Said — and come to Tawasi. In the odd times when he went out alone, I worked on my Anna story. I would not show him my manuscript, but I showed him Anna’s journals, her letters, her candle-glass, her white shawl. I showed him the great green flag with the Cross and the Crescent and we unrolled, once again, the length of tapestry that I had found so carefully wrapped in a corner of the trunk; the tapestry that matched h
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, ‘I’ll bring it next time.’
We clipped the panel to a couple of hangers and hooked it on a high bookshelf: Osiris, seated. You would know him anywhere by his dark face, his shrouded body, the hands crossed over his chest carrying the sceptre and the flail. Above his tall crown, painstakingly woven in curling Diwani script, every diacritic meticulously in place, the single Arabic word ‘al-mayyit’.
10 May 1905
My husband lies sleeping and I am so restless with the baby that I cannot sleep. For weeks now I have been unable to lie down but must needs sleep propped up on cushions like an invalid. It is a small enough price to pay for the happiness this unborn child has already brought us but that I am tired and listless for lack of sleep and everyone is constantly telling me that I must build up my strength for the birth
.
I am afraid of the birth. I cannot pretend otherwise. My husband has tried repeatedly to persuade me to engage the services of a British physician and he has even — once only, and that in the early days — suggested that I might like to go ‘home’ to be confined among ‘my people’. I have refused both offers and said I could not feel safer or better cared for than I am here in this house. I am determined that I will not countenance any anangement that might hinder his joy in the occasion. He has much need of joy now for the Entente has cast its shadow widely over Egypt and, though he continues to strive and work for her good, there is that heaviness in the air which betokens the ebbing away of hope
.
TOWARDS THE END OF
1904 Anna fell pregnant. My mother surrounded her with tenderness and as for my brother, if Anna had asked for bird’s milk he would have brought it to her. We had particular reason to be grateful to her for bringing this new happiness into our lives at this time. For in April of that year, and after Madame Juliette Adams had toured Egypt, hosted and feted by all the Nationalist Notables and even banqueted by Efendeena,
France and Britain declared the Entente Cordiale, giving France a free hand against Morocco in exchange for letting Britain do what she would in Egypt. For seven months we campaigned and made representations. They came to nothing and the Entente was declared ratified. Then ‘Abbas Hilmi broke our hearts by standing with Cromer under the British flag in the court ofAbdin Palace and surveying the Army of Occupation on the occasion of King Edward’s Birthday.
Cairo
12 May 1905
Dear James
,
I have received yours of 10 March with the picture of your new house in Chelsea. It looks delightful and if we ever come to England you may he certain of a visit. I am sure your mama is most happy to have you near her
.
We are expecting our baby in early June and there is a great fuss being made of me. I am not permitted to make or buy anything for the baby, however, until it is born, as that would bring bad luck. The rules and edicts concerning Fate and the Stars and what acts bring Good Fortune and what bring Bad are laid down by Mabrouka, an old Ethiopian serving-woman who is my belle-mère’s childhood companion. Even Sharif Basha more or less heeds her, for she was his nanny when he was a child
.
Ahmad is now five years old and is a very handsome little boy. I believe he has a musical gift for he happily spends much time with me at the piano and can already play tolerably well. We have told him I am growing a little cousin for him and he daily enquires how the baby is doing and whether some bit of it has not appeared that he might see it
.
Our household is a happy one, although the waves created by the Entente Cordiale are felt everywhere and no one knows where they will end. The Khedive, for one, has abandoned all hope of being a true Ruler and now gives free rein to his cupidity. He tried to engineer a land deal of advantage to
himself in Mushtuhur, but Sheikh Muhammad Abdu — as being responsible for Awqaf — put a stop to it. Since then the Palace and its newspapers have mounted a virulent attack on the sheikh and — since Lord Cromer supported Muhammad Abdu in this matter — the attack takes the form of publishing scandalous (and counterfeit) pictures of Muhammad Abdu drinking and consorting with foreign women. It has had the effect of provoking his resignation from the Board of al-Azhar and indeed has made him so ill that it is a cause of grave concern to us all
I have heard that there is talk in London that Cromer is negotiating with Eldon Gorst that he hand over Egypt to him, on condition that Gorst hands it to Cromer’s son Errington in later years. You would think he was the Monarch here. And indeed it seems that he imagines himself so now — although I suppose we have to thank him for putting an end to the al-Arish project in Sinai. But he has lately been touring the Provinces in a kind of Triumphal Progress which sits most ill with people of patriotic feeling
.
I had not heard of the al-Arish project. Once again I enlisted the help of my son in London, and his research yielded the following story. In 1902, Herzl, in his search for a homeland, hit upon Cyprus and al-Arish as possibilities. He won the support of Lord Rothschild by describing how the new community of settlers would guard the Suez Canal, sabotage the German-Turkish autobahn project and generally keep an eye on Turkey to the advantage of Britain. With Rothschild’s support he approached Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary. Chamberlain said he could not give him Cyprus but set up an appointment with the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, to discuss al-Arish. Lansdowne duly sent a Mr Greenberg, his friend and confidential agent, to speak to Cromer. Cromer commissioned a feasibility study, but eventually decided that the amount of water needed for the agricultural settlements Herzl wanted could not be spared from the Nile — and the laying-down of pipes would interfere
with the Canal for several weeks. And so it was that one evil diverted another.