The Mistress of Nothing (11 page)

My Lady and I knew all about stoppages of the digestive tract; laudanum also caused this problem and I had had to administer this expensive but effective sedative—kept in a special bottle in its own lined wooden box, for desperate emergencies only—to my Lady on several occasions. And laudanum invariably led to castor oil, and if that failed to work, to the gruesome lavement machine.

Omar and I spent the rest of the day, when we were not tending Ahmed, cleaning and emptying the ground floor room of the French House; this would be where we would treat the villagers. It had been a while since animals were last kept there, but the floor of the windowless room was still covered in straw and ancient dried dung; we swept and cleared and threw water on the rough surface to keep the dust down. As I swept the stairs, I saw that the stones were ancient temple building blocks, shifted and rearranged, something I hadn’t noticed before, despite cursing the uneven steps whenever I tripped on my way up. On the third step from the bottom I found a single row of hieroglyphs. When I showed Omar he shrugged and kept working, as though to say, they are everywhere, these markings, they are ordinary, and indeed, in Luxor it was commonplace to live one’s life surrounded by indecipherable messages from the past. The work was hot and dirty and we were both forced outside into the sun from time to time, coughing and spluttering, gasping for breath like my Lady on one of her bad days.

THAT EVENING BEFORE SUPPER I DRAGGED THE TIN BATH TO MY ROOM
and filled it with hot water; my body ached and I was avid for a hot bath even though the evening was warm. I added a few drops of the perfumed oil I had bought in Cairo to soften my skin; my hands were so dry, the skin between my fingers had begun to crack and bleed. I opened the shutters wide, and as I sat in the steaming water, I looked out over the Nile. My body felt different from before, as if not wearing stays had effected a long-term physical change; my limbs felt longer and straighter, my back stronger, my neck more flexible; even my hands felt more capable. I ran the soap over my skin and closed my eyes. When I got out I covered myself in a good layer of the oil. I was slippery, and clean.

At dinner the three of us sat on our cushions and talked, planning our makeshift clinic. My Lady was vivid with the challenge of our undertaking and had already written a letter to her daughter, Miss Janet, requesting more medical supplies from Alexandria and Cairo, anticipating what we would use, what would need to be replenished. It was late when we finally extinguished the candles and went to bed. The dawn call to prayer arrived in what seemed only moments after I’d gone to sleep. I got up, splashed clean water on my face, drew my shawl around my shoulders, and went next door to wake Omar, who had slept through the call once again.

Instead of standing outside his door and mimicking the muezzin myself, I entered his room. The shutters were open and the room was full of cool night air though the sky outside was pink and fading to blue-white already. He was asleep on his back, breathing evenly. I knelt down beside him and began the call to prayer.

Omar opened his eyes. He did not look at all surprised to see me there so close beside him. He sat up slowly, stretched his arms above his head, then took my hand. He brushed my hair away from my face; I had not put it up yet that morning. He ran his fingers across my lips, very lightly. Then he brought his face close to mine, and kissed me.

I had never been kissed, never, not once; I had never dared allow that to happen to me. I had spent my entire life avoiding kissing. He was whispering in Arabic and stroking my hair and the truth of the matter is that I did not hesitate. It was as though I had waited so long to lie down beside Omar that I had forgotten why I was waiting. All I can remember thinking was, Yes, this is it, this is right, this is what I want, this is what I’ve spent the past months wanting. He kissed me again and this time it was a long kiss and I moved towards him as he moved towards me. Then he drew my nightdress over my head and I gasped out loud to be so revealed and he kissed me in order to help me be quiet, and his warm hands on my body reassured me. He took his own nightshirt off. And we sat there, on the carpet in the middle of his room, next to his sleeping mat, the cool air pouring over and over our skin, and we looked at each other for a long time. He was wonderful to look at; I had never thought that a man—a man’s body—could be a thing of such dream-filled beauty. Then he drew me down beside him on his sleeping mat and we began. We began and we began and we began and it was perfect. I had not known it could be so perfect.

My Lady had come to Egypt to evade death, but in Egypt I found life.

WE SET TO WORK, THE THREE OF US, AND ALMOST IMMEDIATELY
the work was overwhelming. My Lady and I opened our clinic at the French House that morning, seeing villagers early before it grew too warm. Over the next few days the epidemic increased in viciousness; as many as four villagers were dying every day. If patients were brought to us before they were too poisoned by the sickness, the castor oil, combined with the lavement machine and the internal wash it afforded, proved to be a very successful treatment. My Lady took the role of doctor, with me as her assistant; we fell into a working rhythm quite naturally. Instead of tiring with the increasing pressure of the task at hand, my Lady thrived, though I was careful to bear the brunt of any physical labor—heating kettles in the kitchen and carrying the water down the stairs, lifting patients, cleaning and sterilizing the lavement machine. Omar and I worked out how to extract oil from the leaves of the enormous castor plant growing in the garden and he spent a large part of every evening pounding the leaves with his pestle and mortar. Rather than curse her with the evil eye, villagers proclaimed my Lady their new
hakima,
or healer.

News came from farther up the Nile at El-Moutaneh that the sickness had spread through both the people and the cattle and that they were losing eight to ten people every day and double that number of animals. In Luxor, only a few calves had died. One afternoon I walked down to the Nile on my own, to get away from the house for a time, and thought the surface of the water had somehow been altered before I realized the river was crowded with dead cows, so many head of cattle floating downriver that, should I choose, I could walk across to the other side without wetting the hems of my Egyptian trousers.

The next day I walked out onto the balcony to find that the sand in front of the French House was thronged by people and camels. I called my Lady to come out and look; we stood together and marveled at this inexplicable gathering of men and beasts. My Lady spotted Sheikh Yusuf in the crowd and called to him to come up. “The camels are being sent off to transport the Pasha’s troops in Sudan,” he explained as he stood with us surveying the scene. “They’ll head south in convoy. The poor owners will not see their animals again.” As well as the camels, the owners had been ordered to supply two months’ worth of feed per animal, so the village was crowded with camels, their beleaguered owners, and great heaps of maize and hay. Bitterness and resentment rose off the men like a great black cloud of fleas.

“How are they meant to live and work without their camels?” my Lady asked.

Sheikh Yusuf gave one of his expressive shrugs. “
Alhamdulillah.”

Later, after the sheikh had gone back down to the crowd, my Lady and I went into the kitchen to beg Omar for more information. He explained that all the land in Egypt is owned by the Khedive, Ismail Pasha. “There are no Egyptian owners,” he said, “only tenants, each paying a tariff according to the value of the land; when they die they can pass their tenancy on to their children.”

“Thus the passion for babies,” my Lady said to me, nodding.

“If you are childless, you lose your land,” Omar continued. “The Pasha can take it from you, with payment or without.”

“Without payment?” I said.

“Yes, in fact, the Pasha can take the land any time he wants—to give to someone else more favored perhaps, or for one of his grand building projects, or some other, more obscure purpose. And I have seen it happen, I have seen families stripped of their land, their animals, their …” Omar stopped himself. We urged him to continue, but he declined. “We must leave you to rest, my Lady,” he said. Then he bowed and left the room.

My Lady looked at me. “I suspect Omar has politics,” she said, “but he doesn’t want to share his views with you and me.”

I nodded. Talking about Omar made my throat tighten.

“Or does he talk to you, when I’m not around to hear?” she asked.

“There’s a lot to learn,” I said. I could feel myself beginning to blush and I hoped my Lady would not notice. “There’s a great deal about this country that I can’t begin to comprehend.”

Omar and I did talk about the situation in Luxor; we talked about it endlessly; it was not difficult to get him to talk about Egypt, especially when it came to the Pasha’s ill-treatment of the
fellahin,
and he was amused by my curiosity. We talked as we worked in the house, we talked as we walked through the village, we talked all day every day. But I was unwilling to confide this to my Lady. She knew that Omar and I spent our days together: we were with her as well, for much of the time. But now, for the first time in my life, I had a secret. A real secret, not just another tiny piece of information I kept to myself out of longing to own something, anything. And for the first time in my long years of service, I did not tell the whole truth to my Lady.

“Well,” my Lady said benignly, as she returned to her seat on the balcony, where she could observe the scene, “we are lucky to have Omar here with us.”

And I scuttled back to the kitchen, where I could continue my conversation with Omar, in private.

AND IT WAS OUR SECRET, OUR WONDERFUL SECRET, SOMETHING THAT
Omar and I shared with no one else. We were my Lady’s devoted servants. But in the nighttime everything changed. Everything was altered.

After that first dawn, I wasn’t sure what to do; I spent much of the day—the first day of our clinic (and I was grateful for all the activity)—in a kind of self-induced fever. I wondered if I had in fact fallen ill myself and the whole thing was a hallucination. Omar looked at me, spoke to me, behaved towards me exactly as he had the day before; his deference and charm had no additional note of sweetness. In the evening we took our meal together with my Lady and made yet more excited plans for our clinic; I helped my Lady to bed, then went to my own room. I kept a single candle alight and opened my shutters to the Nile and got ready to go to sleep. I sat on my bed and rubbed a few drops of oil into the dry skin of my hands. Then I heard a tiny knock on my door. And he came into my room and into my arms and I felt a happiness so great that had someone else described the sensation to me, I would never have believed them.

I BEGAN TO RECEIVE MARRIAGE PROPOSALS FROM THE FATHERS OF THE
young men of Luxor and the surrounding villages. I can see now there was a horrible irony to this, although at the time I found it bewildering, as though the whole of Upper Egypt had suddenly decided to take notice of me. I was not used to being noticed. It was my Lady who gathered onlookers and admirers; the fact was that she herself, let alone anyone else, scarcely noticed me: that was the whole point of being a good, faithful, and hardworking lady’s maid.