The Map of Love (70 page)
Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
‘What’s so funny about cognac?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ I splutter and rush into the bathroom, where, washing my face, I start to cry again. I hear myself make small sobbing sounds like a child. I stand up straight and breathe deeply, in, out, in, out. I stare out of the window. I make myself think of his wife answering me on the telephone.
When I emerge from the bathroom, he says, ‘You look terribly pale. Did you not sleep last night?’
‘Not much,’ I say.
I make tea and take it into the hall. With the glass in his hand, he looks around. ‘How many years is it since I’ve been here?’
‘Don’t even try to count,’ I say.
‘You have nothing to fear,’ he says. ‘You shall never grow old.’ In the face of my silence he continues: ‘It’s true. I’ve told you before. You grow more beautiful each time I see you.’ He smiles, puts down his glass and leans back in his chair comfortably, his legs stretched out. ‘I wish I could have seen you last night at the markaz, telling them off.’
‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘I must have been comic.’
‘You must have been magnificent —’
As I stand, he reaches up and catches my arm above the elbow. He pulls me down, his eyes look questioningly into mine for a moment, then his mouth is on my mouth and his hand is tight in my hair. When I can breathe, I whisper ‘My back’, and he pulls me down to kneel on the floor while he bends over me, his kisses on my face, his hands cupping my head. ‘Amal,’ he breathes, ‘Amal —’
I hear the knock on the door and scramble to my feet. Khadra and Rayissa are there, beaming, carrying two large
trays covered with white napkins: ‘That you both might have lunch.’ They smile.
‘May your bounty be increased,’ I say. ‘We’ll have it on the veranda in the sun.’
They lay the food on the table, stealing glances at him.
‘Are the men all right?’ he asks.
‘EI-hamdu-l-Illah,’ Khadra says. ‘And the village rejoices and kisses your hands.’
The women cover their smiling mouths with the edges of their tarhas and ask, ‘Will you be needing us now?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘stay awhile.’ And they vanish into the kitchen.
‘You coward,’ Tareq says, and I shrug.
‘Perhaps it’s best,’ he says. ‘This is the Sa
id, after all. My, this is a festive lunch.’
At the door he says, ‘I’ll stay at my place tonight and leave for Cairo in the morning. You have my mobile number?’
‘Yes.’ I nod.
‘And the first thing you do — right now — is get some sleep. Before you try to do any work or anything.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And Amal, you can’t hide in Tawasi for ever.’
As he drives off, the women join me at the door.
‘The Basha has his eye on you, ya Sett Amal,’ Khadra says.
Abd el-Nasser abolished titles,’ I say. She tosses her head.
‘A Basha is a Basha with a title or without. And this one has his eye on you.’
‘What are you saying? I’m an old woman,’ I say.
‘Lies! You are like the moon and any man would lose his mind over you.’
‘I’ve known him for a hundred years,’ I say.
‘ “The near one is more deserving than the stranger”,’ she says.
‘And he’s married,’ I say.
‘So what?’ Ray essa says. ‘A man has a right to four.’
We watch his car disappearing into the distance.
‘So I would marry a married man?’ I ask.
‘And why not? Since he has the means and will make you live and keep you happy? This is a Basha, ya Sett Amal, and he wants you. Look at him — the live image of Rushdi Abaza
‘So I steal a man from his hareem? I destroy her life?’
‘And why should her life be destroyed? She’s in her house and you are in yours. And if she doesn’t like it she can say so and she has her children and her apartment and her alimony. And he doesn’t look like a miser.’
‘And when
your
husband comes and tells you he’s taken another wife, you won’t change your words?’
‘I’d slit his throat and drink his blood,’ Rayissa laughs.
‘The clever woman looks after her husband,’ Khadra says, ‘fences him in.’
‘Thank you very much for the lunch,’ I say. ‘May your hands be saved. I’m going to rest now, and later I will come to the village, to greetAm Abu el-Maati and the others.’
‘Why don’t you wait till tomorrow, ya Sett Amal?’ Khadra says. ‘Today the village will be upside down —’
‘You think so?’
‘It’s better,’ Rayissa agrees.
‘Fine,’ I say, ‘I’ll come tomorrow. And now I’ll go and sleep for a while.’
‘Happy dreams,’ they call out after me, giggling.
I dream I am holding on to Sharif Basha al-Baroudi. I kiss his face, his eyes, his shoulders. I lie by him on the great bed in my grandmother’s room and I sob with relief at having found him. He holds me and lets me kiss him, slightly amused at my passion. ‘Thank God you are not my father,’ I say over and over. Against his chest I feel I have come home.
I wake up embarrassed. Sad to be alone. I walk through the rooms of the empty house. In the village, the men are in their homes. TareqAtiyya is in his house, a few kilometres away. But it is not him I want. I stand in front of Anna’s painting, I look in on her garden and watch Sharif Basha as, with his back to me, he plots out a sheltering garden for his child. I school myself to work and open Anna’s papers. Anna, my friend,
who wrote all this down for me and now writes of Abu el-’Ela, my favourite bridge, the bridge they are tearing down even as I read:
Cairo
15 October 1909
Dear Sir Charles
,
Today is the first day of the Eid and there are festivities all round. We have just come back from seeing the wonderful new bridge at Bulaq. It is a most amazing construction, designed by Monsieur Eiffel and built in Chicago and then transported here to lie across the Nile at the other end of the island from Ismail Bridge and form a link between the new quarter of Ghezirah and the old Port area of Bulaq. They say it is 200 tons of iron, but it is so intricate and airy that it seems as light as a bridge in a fairy tale. All of Cairo is turning out to see it and — as is usual now whenever there is agathering of people — cries of ‘Vive l’Egypte’ and ‘Vive l’independence’ are to be heard and it is all most exhilarating
.
We have been following the news of Dingra’s trial for the assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie; the papers printed his statements in court and before his execution and there is no one here who speaks a word against him
. Al-Liwa
came out on the morning of his execution with an eulogy which has already earned it an official warning, and a whole spate of fair to middling poems about him have started to appear. From this you may judge the strength of feeling there is against Britain. The Government has seen fit to reissue the 1881 decrees to muzzle the Press so that publications, theatre performances, reviews and public meetings have become subject to criminal law without appeal. Any student taking part in demonstrations, writing articles or giving news to the Press is to be expelled. Our Friday ladies’ classes at the University have been suspended and we have news that Gorst is preparing a White paper that will permit him to deport people without trial. All this is causing great commotion and public protests. My husband has written an article about these measures which I have sent — in English — to James
Barrington and I pray that you take the matter up with your friends in Parliament
.
Our friend Muhammad Farid Bey (Mustafa Kamel’s successor at the Hizb al-Watani) is much pleased with the events of the Egyptian National Congress and his meeting with Keir Hardie. We have hopes that Labour may prove more sympathetic to Egypt’s aspirations than the Liberals have so far proved. Farid Bey has caused great uproar by revealing, in
al-Liwa,
the plans to extend the Suez Canal lease by sixty years. It lends strength to suspicions that the Government has misspent a substantial portion of the Reserve Fund and seeks to recoup its losses by selling the lease of the Canal for four million pounds payable over four years. A meeting of several Notables of the Assembly was convened at our house two nights ago and they are determined to fight this measure
.
We entertained an American gentleman by the name of Benjamin Gordon at Hilmiyya last week. He is visiting here with a view to writing a book about the Jews in Egypt and Palestine and had a letter of introduction from Sharif Basha’s old friend Maître Démange in Paris. My husband introduced him separately to Cattaoui Basha, the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, and to Benzion Bey and other prominent Jewish notables. Then we had him and his wife to dinner at Hilmiyya
.
I found when I spoke to him of our fears regarding Palestine that Cattaoui Basha and the others had all expressed similar sentiments, fearing that the settlers’ activities are bound to cause a rift between the Jews on the one hand and the Christians and Moslems on the other. We furnished him with details concerning the activities of Mr Rupin in the Palestine Office in Jaffa (which is really a colonial office organising the purchase of land which from the day of its purchase is never to be allowed to pass into non-Jewish hands), of Dr Jacobson, who is now the permanent Zionist Representative in Istanbul, and of the transfer to Beirut of Ali Ekrem Bey, the Mutasarrif of Jerusalem, and many other matters. I am not sure, however, whether he has a clear difference in his mind between Jewish families emigrating to live in Palestine as subjects of the Ottoman State, and colonising
settlers retaining allegiance to their countries of origin. We are sending him to Shukri Bey in Nazareth and hope that what he sees there, on the land itself, may bring matters home to him
.
My husband has decided that I should be able to meet foreign visitors, especially English-speaking ones, as they all come wanting to find out about political conditions and what the Egyptians think; he feels that together we can give them a true and sympathetic account of these things and so help to inform public opinion in their countries, as they are mostly people with some influence. This breaks the social custom of segregation and so we only do it in secret and in Hilmiyya so that our household is not affected. We have a few trusted servants in attendance, chief of whom is Sabir, who used to work for James Barrington, and who has become my husband’s eyes and ears in various places as he has kept up his old connections at the Agency and other households
.
I understand that Cromer is still pulling the strings at the Foreign Office with regard to Egypt. Can you tell me if this is true, and what the extent of his influence is? I was most amused at your tale of Lady Cromer turning suffragette in opposition to the Lord. He surely deserves an insurrection in his own castle. It seems hard, though, that women should be jailed in England for their political opinions. They are bound to get the vote one day, so why does the Government not make a gift of it to them now with grace and spare everybody a deal of trouble?