The Map of Love (78 page)
Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
Cairo, 10 August 1998
The ironing-boy comes up loaded with our pressed washing, Tahiyya and two of her children keeping an eye on him. When I bring out my purse and pay him, the older child, a little girl, says shyly: ‘You’ve got pictures of the pharaohs.’ She points at Anna’s two panels hanging from my bookcase.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Do you know who they are?’
‘Isis and Osiris,’ the child says while her mother covers her mouth with her hand and laughs.
‘Bravo,’ I say. ‘Did you learn that at school?’
The child nods and retreats behind her mother’s skirt.
‘She’s very intelligent,’ Tahiyya says. ‘But she’s naughty like the jinn.’
‘She doesn’t look naughty,’ I say.
‘That’s just because she’s shy in front of you.’
Isabel comes out of her room carrying the baby. ‘Who is a jinn?’ she asks.
‘This one,’ Tahiyya says, nodding at the child. ‘Give him to
me, ya Sett Isa —’ holding out her arms — ‘let me carry him for a bit.’
‘And are you lacking children?’ I ask as Isabel hands over the baby. Tahiyya starts to dandle him and the baby crows and chuckles.
‘I’ve got another root for you,’ Isabel says to me. ‘I had it all prepared and then I forgot: “j/n”.’
‘Tell me,’ I say.
‘Well, “jinn” is a spirit, and “janeen” is a foetus and “jinan” is madness. So what’s the common theme?’
‘Let’s look it up.’ I reach for
al-Mu’jam al-Wasit
from the bookcase between Isis and Osiris. Tahiyya’s little girl says:
‘Why have you put them so far apart? Weren’t they married?’
‘There’s a bit missing,’ I say. ‘The bit in the middle.’
‘That would be their child,’ Tahiyya says.
‘Yes, and it would complete the aya. See —’ Above Isis’s head is inscribed: “It is He who brings forth —” Osiris stands facing her, above his head “- the dead”. ‘ “It is He who brings forth the living from the dead,” ‘ I recite. This must have been the verse that Sharif Basha chose for Anna to weave.
‘But they were infidels,’ Tahiyya says. ‘Did they know God?’
‘Ya Tahiyya, is there anyone who does not know God?’
‘True,’ she says. ‘True, true,’ she says, making it into a song, dandling the baby. I turn back to the dictionary but the phone rings and Isabel takes the book from me. It is Tareq
Atiyya.
‘Have you recovered from your journey?’ he asks.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I say.
‘And how does it feel to have a baby in the house?’
‘Wonderful!’ I laugh. ‘Especially as there’s two of us.’
‘There would always be two with a baby,’ he says.
‘No, no. Two mothers. We take it in turns to wake up nights.’
‘You sound good. It’s great to hear you sound so happy.’
‘And Omar is coming next week. He is in Sarajevo. Then he goes to the West Bank and ‘Amman. Then he comes here.’
‘We must all have dinner,’ he says.
‘That would be great,’ I say.
‘Amal?’ he says.
‘Yes?’
‘When the world has settled and you are a bit more free, I want to sit and talk with you.’
‘What shall we talk about?’
‘You don’t know?’
…
‘Amal?’
‘Tareq, I’m not the one who’s not free.’ ‘I need to talk to you. Later. I’m just — putting down a marker now.’
‘All right,’ I say, ‘we can talk.’ We can talk, I find myself thinking, but it will come to nothing.
When I go back to Isabel, she says:
‘The common theme is concealment. “Jinn” are those which are hidden, and “janeen” is a diminutive hidden one.’
‘And “jinan”?’
‘From “junna” — his intellect became concealed. And “al-Jannah” — Paradise, the place that is hidden —’
‘Of course,’ I cry. ‘Oh, and Isabel, listen, “juiiaynah”, garden, is little paradise —’
‘That’s just too neat,’ Isabel says.
‘But what about “jund”, soldiers, and “janub”, south?’ I wonder.
The buzzer goes and Tahiyya says, ‘Madani wants me downstairs.’ She collects her children and hands me the baby. ‘Don’t you want anything?’
‘Your safety,’ Isabel and I both say.
It is more difficult to get down to Anna’s remaining pages with Isabel and the baby in the house. Is this true, or do I make it so because I do not want to arrive at the end?
Cairo, 12 August 1998
Isabel has taken Sharif to show him off to Ramzi Yusuf and his wife, and I leaf again through Clara Boyle’s memoir, looking
at the pictures, reading a paragraph here and a sentence there. Suddenly I am arrested by a phrase I have come across before: ‘How can one arrive at the planet Souad?’
An hour later I am still sitting with the book on my knee and, on the table in front of me, the letter Anna had in such agitation given to her husband as he planted the young cypress tree for Nur back in 1906. Oh, how angry I am, and how I wish I could tell him! ‘If people can write to each other across space,’ Isabel had asked, ‘why can they not write across time too?’ But how do you write to the past? Once more I read Clara Boyle’s words, written in 1965:
About 1906 there had been some disagreement between Lord Cromer and the Foreign Office in connection with a point of policy to be followed in Egypt. Lord Cromer had sent a dispatch to London, which had had no effect.
As a last resort Harry then submitted a paper which was to give a true picture of the workings of the oriental mind; it was supposed to be the translation of a letter which had reached him secretly, and as such it was transmitted to the Foreign Office. Only Lord Cromer himself knew the truth — that the original letter was written by Harry Boyle himself. Such a letter might indeed have come into his hands at that time, but as he needed it at that exact psychological moment to make his point, he did not hesitate to use his knowledge of the oriental, for what he meant to say was to the benefit of the Egyptians and towards better understanding.
The original paper, typed by Harry laboriously with two fingers, is still in my possession. As will be seen, there is all the picturesque, flowery language of the East, transposed into equally picturesque English …
This letter was to serve as a warning to the Foreign Office of general dissatisfaction among Egyptian people and notables. It was supposed to convey the plot of a big Nationalist rising, giving all particulars about the time, the strength, the manner of conducting the revolt against
British rule. Every single sentence, almost every word, has a double meaning. Harry must have had great pleasure in writing this letter. Although he invented the ‘translation’, he did not invent the spirit of it which served as a graphic illustration of the situation. Lord Cromer was delighted to have this letter at hand to drive home his point, and he sent it to the Foreign Office informing the authorities that it had come to him through one of Harry’s secret contacts.
Again I check the letter quoted in the book against the letter on my table. They match word for word. Tomorrow I guess I shall be triumphant in my find. But now, all I want is to be able to rush back and tell him, show him the book, say, ‘Look! You were right.’
Cairo, 15 August 1998
Sharif is restless and I hold him against me and walk him up and down. Up and down, past the screen, and the bookcase, and the tapestry, and the sideboard, and up to the mirror on the far wall, then back again. I am still thinking about Harry Boyle’s letter. About his wife’s confidence — not in some long-ago forgotten time, but in the Sixties, in the Sixties when
I
was alive — her confidence that he had put his finger on and had actually expressed ‘the workings of the oriental mind’ -my mind. Up and down I walk the baby, up and down. His weight against my chest soothes me, his breath on my neck comforts me. I wonder if Denshwai would have happened had Enoch not written his letter and his Lord not sent it. I wonder if that is why Cromer left Egypt just before the trial -having tested the gallows before he went. All the British officials in Cairo must have believed an uprising was imminent. Only Boyle and Cromer knew the truth. So Cromer leaves Matchell, de Mansfeld Findlay, Hayter, Bond and Ludlow to deal with what he, knows they will see as the •beginnings of a people’s revolt. He hopes that when his leave is over and he returns to Cairo, the unrest that had shown itself
there since the Entente, since Taba, will have been cowed and he can come back once more as the ‘friend of the fellah’. But it had not worked — and he had lost Egypt. Is that why in a two-volume book published in 1908 in which he lists practically every detail of his Egyptian rule, Denshwai is never mentioned?
And as for the Egyptians, Fathi Zaghlul was promoted to undersecretary for Justice after the trial but was booed wherever he went; Ibrahim al-Helbawi spent the rest of his days trying to atone — the portraits of him in later life are portraits of a haunted man. And Boutros Ghali paid with his life.
Sharif is fast asleep against me, but I don’t want to put him down. Does all this matter now? After ninety years of Boyle’s letter and thirty of his widow’s commentary? Anna would have been incandescent.
Isabel comes into the room. She is in a pink towelling robe and is rubbing her hair dry. She hangs the towel round her neck, flings her hair back from her face and sees us.
‘Oh,’ she cries. ‘I want to take a photo of you. Do you know, I have not taken a single photograph of Baby. I left my camera here. But you look so great together, you with your cheek resting against his head like that. Just walk, walk — while I get the camera.’ She runs to her room and comes back with her bag, looking puzzled.
‘Amal,’ she says, ‘what’s this? Look! It was in my bag.’
Hanging half out of the big holdall is a fat, oblong bundle wrapped in muslin. I’ve seen one like it before. I know what it is before we open it.
I untie the ends awkwardly, working with one hand, while I hold the sleeping baby against me with the other. We roll out the fabric and a hint of orange blossom comes into the room, and there is the infant Horus, small and naked and still with his human head — on which rests the hand of Isis, his mother. Above him, two words: ‘al-hayy min —’. The Living from —
5 November 1911
Sharif Basha’s prayer beads hang from his right hand. With his left he leafs through a pile of sheets on a low bookcase in Ismail Sabri’s study. On each sheet a photograph is pasted.
‘I see you are interested, ya Basha?’ Ismail Basha Sabri is seated in a deep easy chair, a chequered blanket in pale cream and blue spread over his knees.
‘We know so little about them,’ Sharif Basha says. ‘Long ago, in the days of Mariette Basha, I wanted to go on a dig.’ He turns to smile at his friend.
‘Maybe you will yet.’ Ismail Sabri smiles back. ‘I hear you are planning a sort of retreat from public life?’