The Map of Love (76 page)

Khadra comes in pale with morning sickness. She tells me
Am Abu el-Ma
ati is not well. In the evening I go to see him. It is the first time I enter beyond the mandarah and into his bedroom, where I find him propped up in a big brass bed.

‘It’s a small thing and will pass,’ he tells me, but he has to pause for breath.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’ I ask.

‘Yes, the doctor came and wrote him a medicine and we got it,’ his wife says. She shows me the medicine: a painkiller and an antibiotic.

‘What can I do?’ I ask.

‘Nothing, ya Sett Amal, may He keep you safe. He is not in pain and his breathing is easier now.’

I sit with him for a while in silence. When I leave I press the gnarled hand lying on the green cotton counterpane. His son insists on walking me home.

Cairo, 2 August 1998

In Tawasi we sat on the veranda as we had done a year ago — old friends now, and sisters. The doors were open into Isabel’s room, where her baby lay on my grandmother’s bed, barricaded with pillows, protected by the mosquito netting and watched over by Sharif Basha. He touches me to the heart. I had forgotten how downy their heads are, how delicate their ears, how soft their skins. I had forgotten their scent.

I had not been able to go to Cairo, for
Am Abu el-Ma
ati died on the day of Isabel’s arrival. He died quietly and easily, with his forefinger outstretched, with his children and grandchildren around him, with his wife moistening his lips with wet cotton wool and his son’s name inscribed on the flyleaf of his Qur
an. God was generous to him, for he died in the morning and so he was washed and prayed over and buried before the sun set. And in the evening the people of all the villages surrounding us came to Tawasi to shake his sons’ hands and sit with his wife and daughters and speak of his life and invoke God’s mercy on him while the chant of the Qur
an washed over the houses and the planted fields and the still canals.

And Isabel had not been able to wait, for it was a Friday, and I said I would have to stay in Tawasi till the first Thursday; so I turned, once again, to Tareq
Atiyya, for I could not see her on the train or braving the barricades in the back of a Peugeot taxi with her baby. And Tareq had sent a car and a driver and she and I had hugged on my doorstep and even though the village could not rejoice, with
Am Abu el-Ma
ati dead just the day before, the women still came round in the afternoon before they went to his house for the Second Day to congratulate her and to see the baby and bring him gifts,
and every one of them said, ‘And where’s the Basha? He lets you travel like this alone with the child on your arm?’ And I wondered how many times, over the coming years, she would hear this phrase.

‘They’ll really let him have it when he comes, won’t they?’ Isabel said. She is happy and appears settled. She is still in love but no longer in pain. She has him now — in part, anyway.

We sat on the veranda and she told me, once again, of Jasmine’s death and we wept a little, together, for both our mothers, and then for our fathers too. And I told her Anna’s story so far and we wondered over the distance that had been placed between the two branches of our family when Anna and Layla had been like sisters and Nur and Ahmad had loved each other so much. And she told me of Omar and how he had never yet said he loved her but everything showed that he did.
And
he had come with her to the hospital but could not bear the delivery so paced outside the room like an expectant father in an old movie. And when he had come in he had held her tight and whispered, ‘I was so afraid for you.’ But when the nurse gave him the baby and he held it and looked into its eyes, she had seen a completely new look come over his face and she knew he belonged to little Sharif for ever.