The Mistress of Nothing (21 page)

I screamed the night Abdullah was born; I made more noise that one night than I had during the whole of the rest of my life put together. But after that, I fell into silence. And that silence deepened and darkened and grew heavier and thicker, until my days were as dark and silent as my nights.

Omar whispered to me and his Arabic pierced the night—each word like a star, flaring out, then falling. I spoke no English now, heard no English spoken in fact, and it was as though my mother tongue was shriveling, growing faint. I’d mouth words to myself, I sang Abdullah English nursery rhymes and lullabies, but conversation—what was conversation? Something my Lady prized, and practiced avidly, something now denied to me.

Those lullabies—they surprised me. It was as if they’d lived inside me all these years and now they were emerging. I found I had a small store of them, and they were not the same as those I had heard my Lady sing to her children, they were not the same as those I had heard other women sing to their babies; they were songs my own mother had sung to me, my mother, long dead, faded in my memory, but fresh to me once again through these songs, through the way I found myself loving and caring for my child, my own mother, reembodied.

AND WHAT COULD OMAR DO? HE WAS EVERYTHING TO ME AND YET
we discovered that meant nothing. There was nothing he could do to save me. He took on the work of two people and was cook, housekeeper, valet, and nursemaid to my Lady. The endless stream of guests added to his workload but he didn’t mind; he was as interested as the next man in the parade of
Frangi,
and besides, they helped take my Lady’s mind off the domestic situation, provided I wasn’t the chosen topic of conversation. While my Lady was diverted, I imagined Abdullah and I were safe.

OMAR LIVED SO MANY DIFFERENT LIVES SIMULTANEOUSLY THAT HE
said he sometimes worried he would become confused and say the wrong thing to the wrong person in the wrong place. But he did not. I watched him as he slipped between worlds like a spirit, as and when required. Like any domestic servant worth his salt, he’d long since grown accustomed to being one man for one set of people and quite another man for the next.

His first life, before he met me, was that of family man—son, husband, father. Though he and his wife, Mabrouka, were apart most of the time, she was at the center of this world, in Cairo where she lived with his parents and his little daughter, Yasmina. This was not difficult for me to accept; it had been this way since the first day we met. Omar had always had this other life, but given our distance from it, it was both easy to accept and easy to forget.

He had other lives as well, other roles, including dragoman to Lady Duff Gordon. Attaining this position was a great achievement, one Omar had spent his life working towards. His father’s business struggled to survive under its heavy weight of rent and taxes, and his family relied upon him to secure a decent income. Omar knew that his place in my Lady’s household, if he carried out his duties with enough love and talent, would continue to bring him many opportunities. He had worked for
Frangi
before, in Cairo and Alexandria, so he was familiar with that world, but he told me he never imagined that he’d find himself in a household like ours. Lady Duff Gordon was not like any woman he’d ever met before,
Frangi
or Egyptian; he told me she was more serious, and more scholarly, than most of the men he knew. She liked to argue and discuss; she sought the company of men who could inform and teach her; she grappled with Islam in a way that made him look again at his own pale faith. And she kept her illness at one remove with teases and threats and bargains and a strength of will that surpassed his reckoning.

And in yet another one of Omar’s many lives: me. He tumbled into that headlong, without thinking: I doubt he had ever done anything so without thought before or since. Everything about our relationship was as new to him as it was to me. I was full of passion, he said; I had always been full of passion, he said, I’d just never had a chance to display it before. We displayed ourselves to each other, Omar and me, in secret, in private. He could not understand why I was not already married, did not have my own family, so when the chance came to show me his heart, he said, he seized it.

He blamed himself for what happened, of course he did, no matter how I objected. And it was true, it would never have happened had it not come from him. But once it started he let it continue, we both allowed it to continue, without pause, without thinking. “That’s my defense,” he said to me one night as we lay together, “though I’ve never been given a chance to produce it, certainly not by my Lady. We did it without thinking. And because I wasn’t thinking,” he said, “I wasn’t afraid.”

The same was not true of me, not once I realized I was carrying a child. I didn’t show my fear to him during that time, but I held it, clenched inside my gut, along with the baby.

“Twins,” I said, “the baby and its future.”

“If there is one thing I understand now,” he said, “it is this: you are very brave.”

The baby was a secret life, hidden within the life that we led together without my Lady’s knowing, and that life in turn was hidden from Omar’s wife and parents in Cairo, who looked on him as the good son, the able provider.
Insha allah.
God willing.

And there was a whole other life for Omar, another layer of living that no one in either of his households knew much about, not even me. I had seen hints of it but the pregnancy and the birth of our child made me keep my eyes averted at the very time there was the most to see.

The mistake that both the ruling Ottomans—the
Osmani—
and the
Frangi
make when they think about this country is that they believe it never changes. They are deceived by this perception because it is partially true: since the time of the Pharaohs Egypt has been invaded and occupied and ruled from a distance, and even now, the
Osmani
Khedive, Ismail Pasha, who claims his independence from Constantinople, oversees the people as if they are his personal possessions, not a land, a people, in their own right. And yet they continue, the Egyptians endure, like the Nile itself, through the eternal calendar of abundance followed by famine, famine followed by abundance. But while all of this is true, it is a mistake to think that the people are so preoccupied with the Nile and its inundation of the land—an inundation that destroys while at the same time rebirthing—that they will continue to labor under the sun, oblivious to the passing of the centuries. Instead, they lie in wait, like a scorpion on a rock, like a crocodile among the reeds, and from time to time they rise up and they bite.

Omar is a man from the green delta of Lower Egypt and he has no particular allegiance to the people of Saeed who live wedged between the Nile and the desert, between the wet black mud and the bone-white sand. But in Luxor he witnessed the corvée, the brutality meted out to the
fellahin,
his fellow Egyptians, by the
Osmani
Pasha in his palace in Cairo. He watched as the villages around us lost their men, drafted to Suez to dig the enormous wide trench that will one day become the canal; he watched as the crops they grew and the animals they tended were stolen from the women and children who were left behind. He watched as the camels and horses were abducted for the troops who’d been dragooned into fighting the Pasha’s battles in Nubia and Sudan, in the Gulf, and even farther afield. When he returned to Cairo with my Lady, he saw the fevered pitch of the building program; they said that Ismail Pasha would make Cairo into a city to rival Paris with his boulevards and his palaces and his gardens. But in Luxor Omar witnessed the real price of the Pasha’s ambition.

And so in Cairo in the autumn, before our baby’s birth, Omar found his old friends in the city who felt as he did and he began to do what he could to help. It was not a lot. He passed on messages. He talked to people. There were rumors, in the army, of rebellion among the troops, discontent at the very top, among the generals—only rumors, yet Omar and his friends knew that, when whispered loudly enough, it was possible for rumors to become truths. Like most things in Egypt, it would take a long time to happen, perhaps another twenty years, thirty years, one hundred years even would pass before they would see real change, but—here’s another partial truth, Omar says, about himself and his country—“We Egyptians are patient; we Egyptians know how to wait.”

Omar whispered fragments to me late at night while we waited for my fate; he kept these thoughts hidden from my Lady, of course. But my Lady spent many hours on her balcony watching over the people of Luxor, and she had many friends among both the
fellahin
and the men of importance in the village; Mustafa Agha the consular agent, Saleem Effendi the magistrate, and Sheikh Yusuf were frequent visitors to her salon, and they talked politics all the time. I heard them but, at the time, I wasn’t interested; my Lady talked politics wherever she was—Egypt, England, Germany. She saw what was happening in Luxor and the villages nearby, she saw the fields empty of men, the animals rounded up and driven away, and she took note. She did what she did best—she raised her voice in protest. She argued with her friends in Luxor and, when she saw how little they were able to do, as subject to the Pasha’s whims as any lowly
fellah,
she wrote letters home; she sat at her desk in the French House in the mornings when the light was strong but not too bright. One day Omar brought a partial draft of one to me to read:

The whole place is in desolation, the men are being beaten, one because his camel is not good enough, another because its saddle is old and shabby, and the rest because they have not money enough to pay two months of food and the wages of one man, to every four camels, to be paid for the use of the Government beforehand. The
courbash
has been going on my neighbours’ backs and feet all the morning. It is a new sensation too when a friend turns up his sleeve and shows the marks of the wooden handcuffs and the gall of the chain on his throat. The system of wholesale extortion and spoliation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go … I grieve for Abdallah-el-Habbashee and men of high position like him, sent to die by disease (or murder) in the prison at Fazoghou, but I grieve still more over the daily anguish of the poor
fellahin,
who are forced to take the bread from the mouths of their starving families and to eat it while toiling for the private profit of one man. Egypt is one vast plantation where the master works his slaves without even feeding them. From my window now I see the men limping about among the poor camels that are waiting for the Pasha’s boats to take them, and the great heaps of maize which they are forced to bring for their food. I can tell you the tears such a sight brings to one’s eyes are hot and bitter. These are no sentimental grievances; hunger, and pain, and labour without hope and without reward and the constant bitterness of impotent resentment. To you all this must sound remote and almost fabulous. But try to imagine Farmer Smith’s team driven off by the police and himself beaten till he delivered his hay, his oats and his farm servant for the use of the Lord Lieutenant, and his two sons dragged in chains to work at railway embankments—and you will have some idea of my state of mind today. I fancy from the number of troops going up to Assouan that there is another rising among the blacks. Some of the black regiments revolted up in the Sudan last summer, and now I hear Shaheen Pasha is to be here in a day or two on his way up, and the camels are being sent off by hundreds from all the villages every day. But I am weary of telling, and you will sicken of hearing my constant lamentations.

I READ IT AND SAT BACK AND LOOKED AT OMAR, WHO WAS LOOKING
at me expectantly. The letter was typical of my Lady’s correspondence, full of passion and detail. “Why have you brought this to me?” I asked.

“I’m sure that this letter, written with such conviction and out of true concern for the Egyptian people, will create a furor in England,” Omar replied, his voice low, “when the
Frangi
are told what is really taking place in my country.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But why have you brought it to me?”

“I wanted you to see,” he replied.
“Sitti
Duff Gordon cares about Egypt. She has earned my loyalty.”

I looked at Omar. What did he mean? Was he saying that his loyalty to my Lady was greater than his loyalty to me?

“You will see,” he said, speaking quickly now, “this letter will show the
Frangi
the truth about my country. She sees through the layers of myth and conjecture that make up their version of my country’s history. She does not look at Egypt and find the modern Egyptian people lacking. She does not look at Egypt and see only the colossal achievements of our ancestors, the ruins we live among. She looks at us and sees all manner of true things, and what she sees pleases her.”

“She loves Egypt,” I said. But the truth was that my Lady wrote many letters like this to her family and her friends, and the only furor they created was here in Egypt, when her opinions were brought to the attention of the Khedive himself, who was not, after all, pleased to hear the sound of Lady Duff Gordon raising her voice. Omar knew this as well as I did.