Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
The Map of Love (80 page)
‘We are heading for war,’ Isma
il Basha Sabri says, ‘a big war.’
‘They
are heading for war,’ Sharif Basha says from his position by the bookcase. ‘It is not our war.’
‘But we will suffer,’ Ismail Sabri says.
‘We suffer anyway.’
‘True, mon ami,’ Yaqub Basha says. ‘But since when are you so fataliste?’
Sharif Basha shrugs. ‘I am going to go up to Tawasi for a while,’ he says, ‘for the winter. These pictures you have here — I want to see the temples for myself. I want to take my family to Luxor, to the Valley of the Kings.’
‘I wish I could come with you,’ Ismail Sabri sighs.
‘Come,’ Sharif Basha says simply. ‘We will look after you.’
Why should they not travel? Take things slowly. Enjoy their time together. Ahmad can come with them. And Mahrous too if he wishes. It will be a good education for the children. His parents will be looked after, Layla and Husni are in Cairo. And his mother can come to Tawasi when she pleases. He will move Sabir and his family into the house. Sabir tells him
Kitchener likes him even less than Cromer did, although he has never met the man. Time was when he would have found some satisfaction in that. Now he does not care. MuhammadAbdu is dead and Qasim Amin is dead.Urabi is dead. Even young Mustafa Kamel is dead. Died in agony with cancer eating at his stomach. And what is it all for? A millimetre by millimetre struggle while the world sweeps by like a hurricane.
Sharif Basha paces the garden of the quiet house in Hilmiyya. They have carved out a life, a good and happy life even if overshadowed by larger matters. Perhaps it is time to set that life free. In the summer he can take Anna to Europe. And if he feels distaste at the thought of Italy, of France, he shall school himself not to think of their politics. He and Anna can take pleasure in the music, in the paintings, in the food. They can go to Palestine and visit once again the olive groves of his childhood in ‘in el-Mansi and pray in al-Aqsa: once for himself and once for MuhammadAbdu. They might even go to England. Why should she not have the pleasure of going home just because of his sensitivities? People would stare? Let them stare. He would wear his tarbush in the park and outstare them. Let her have the pleasure of showing him her countryside, her Lake District, her museum with the paintings that had brought her to him. They could call on Blunt, visit Barrington. He might get on well with Sir Charles. She should have the joy of watching Nur play in the places where she played as a child. There is no need to have the whole world poisoned. He pauses under the sycamore that spreads its branches up to his bedroom balcony. Twenty years he lived in this house alone. And now it has become their hiding place. Where they have foreign guests to dinner and entertain together. And when the guests have gone and they are alone, she stands close by him on the balcony and he hears the rustle of the sycamore and remembers the nights he paced here, longing for her — and afraid.
He enters the house and strides through the halls to the street door, where Sabir is waiting for him.
‘I am going home,’ he says.
‘I shall accompany you, ya Basha.’
They step outside and a hire carriage draws up. Sabir tries to pull up the hood but it is stuck. He climbs up on the box by the driver.
Sharif Basha leans back in his seat. He will be in time for Nur’s bath. And then a quiet dinner with Anna. She does not believe that he will be happy with a quiet life. But he will; after almost thirty years of fighting, he is ready. And she? Will she be happy? She had adopted Egypt and adopted his cause. The one woman in all the world who was meant for him -and God had sent her to him. Had her kidnapped and thrown into his house. Sharif Basha smiles to himself as, once again, he sees Anna, in a man’s shirt and trousers, sitting — obstinate and determined — in his mother’s haramlek. What if he took her back to Sinai? Showed her the coral, this time? A whole world beneath the surface — and all you had to do was put your head in the water and open your eyes. She would enjoy that. Would she have been happier in a different life? Useless to wonder. She seems happy with him. But he could have given her more. Not more care or tenderness, but more of the ordinary things of life. She loved so many things: people and trees and painting and music and cooking. A woman who was always busy but carried a great and restful stillness always around her. Sometimes he just entered her and lay with her, not moving, just resting. And he had taken her in joy and in passion and tenderness, in sorrow and in despair. She was his sea to swim in, his desert to gallop in, his fields to plough —
‘Move a bit faster, will you?’ he says to the driver.
15 August 1998
It is evening and I am watching the news on television when Isabel comes into the living room.
‘He is asleep,’ Isabel says.
I smile at her. Another crisis burgeoning between Iraq and the United States. Not between Iraq and the United Nations —
‘Amal,’ Isabel says.
‘Yes?’ I half turn towards her.
‘I know how it came to be in my bag.’
‘How?’ I say.
‘She put it there.’
My heart sinks. ‘Who put it there?’ I ask quietly.
‘The woman in the mosque. Umm Aya. She put it there.’
I look at her and I feel a growing anger. I have no better explanation, but I am angry all the same.
‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘So what do you think happened?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Isabel. But I cannot —’
‘Listen,’ she says, leaning forward, her eyes huge, ‘I’ve been going over it. As I was leaving, I was going to forget this bag. I had put it down somewhere inside. On the bench or on the floor. And it was open, I’m sure of that, because I had been using the camera and I hadn’t closed it. And as I was leaving, she came towards me and handed it to me. She said, ‘Don’t forget your things.’ And she smiled and hugged me. And when she handed it to me the zipper was closed.’
‘And you didn’t feel that the bag was heavier?’
‘No.’ She pauses. ‘But I always find this bag heavy.’
‘And you never opened it again?’
‘No, I didn’t. I was getting ready to go. I didn’t take any more pictures. And I left it here with you.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, where else would I have got the thing?’ she asks. ‘And why would I lie? I might as well think
you
put it there. The bag has been here for months.’
‘I didn’t put it there,’ I say.
We sit in silence.
I WILL NEVER KNOW
How she knew. I heard her cry before I heard the wheels, the shouts, the loud battering at the door. I was in the courtyard. We had been in Nur’s room, she and I. Anna still bathed her last thing at night -as the English do. Nur was out of the tub, warm and rosy.
She would not put on her pyjamas but kept wrapping herself in the big, white bath towel. We unwrapped her and she wrapped herself up again. It turned into a game. We would pull at the edges of the towel and ask, ‘What’s this? What’s this that we have found? Is it a monkey? Is it a gazelle?’ And she would fling off the towel, laughing with delight: ‘It’s a girl, it’s a little girl!’ and wrap herself up again. And again. And again. Then she said, ‘I want my doll.’ We looked for the doll and I remembered she had been playing with it in the courtyard in the afternoon. I called Hasna but she must have been in the kitchen. So I went to look for the doll. And that is why I was in the courtyard. The doll was there, lying by the fountain, and as I picked it up I heard Anna’s cry. A great, long cry that rang through the house and sent a shiver through my body and brought Ahmad running from the garden. ‘No,’ she cried — and it was an English ‘no’. I looked up and she had burst out of the house — she was running along the courtyard, stumbling. ‘No … No …’ And then I heard the sounds outside. The wheels, the shouts, the stamping and then the banging at the door. I ran, and she was there — pulling at the heavy door as Fudeil and Mirghani came running out to help — to pull the door open. And then the men’s voices saying one thing: ‘El-Basha, el-Basha …’
They carried him in. My brother. Three men carried him in. And there was a small, bent old man limping after them, holding my brother’s stick and his tarbush, while the horses stamped and neighed and reared outside with no one to hold them.
They carried him into the salamlek while Anna hung on to him. She had stopped screaming but she was still saying ‘no’ — holding on to his arm, saying ‘no, no’ and shaking her head. She was refusing it, turning it away, sending it back, this thing that had come to us.
‘Hush,’ he said. I heard him and my legs went weak with relief. A turn, a heart attack, a slight stroke, anything, but he was alive. He was alive and saying ‘hush’,
and when they laid him down on the diwan and she fell to her knees beside him, he raised his hand and put it on her neck.
I did not understand it at first. What had happened. Till the men stood back and I saw the stains on their clothes and I went rushing to him — and Nur came faltering into the room following her mother’s scream -still naked, trailing her towel behind her — and saw her father lying on the diwan, his eyes closed, and ran to him. I saw the blood spreading on the diwan under him and caught hold of the child. And Mirghani came to me and said, ‘I shall go fetch Husni Bey’ and Anna said, ‘Get the doctor. Get Milton Bey and Sa’d Bey el-Khadim. Quickly.’ And she was on her feet and unbuttoning his shirt: ‘Can you turn over, my love? Can we turn you over?’ Nur wriggled out of my arms — ‘Papa is hurt,’ I said, ‘he’s hurt’ — and she was kissing his face and trying to get to the wound: ‘Shall I kiss your hurt away?’ He opened his eyes. ‘Kiss my cheek, ya habibti, and go put your sleeping clothes on.’ Fudeil had brought the medicine box and Anna was pulling out bandages and bottles and cotton wool and as they were turning him on his side he saw her holding the lengths of bandages and he said ‘Are you going to tie up your hair again?’ and closed his eyes. She cut his shirt, and she was speaking to him all the time as she bathed his wound and staunched it with cotton wool and held her hand tight over it. I came close and said ‘Abeih?’ and he opened his eyes and said ‘Layla? They’ve done it -the dogs —’ and I said ‘Who ya Abeih? Who?’ and he said, ‘There are plenty of dogs. Don’t be afraid. Send for mother. And put Nur to bed. And see to Sabir.’ Sabir’s wound was in the shoulder. He had thrown himself over my brother when the shots rang out.
My mother was at the wedding of Mustafa Pasha Fahmi’s youngest daughter. I sent for her. I put Nur to bed and made Hasna stay with her. She was no use downstairs and kept calling, ‘Sidi! Sidi el-Basha!’ I told
Nur her father was fine and her mother was looking after him and he just needed to sleep. Coming down the stairs I leaned on Ahmad, but my heart had been wrenched loose and was stumbling and banging itself against the walls of my chest. I could only draw my breath in short, shallow pulls. I was whispering ‘ya Rabb, ya Rabb’ continuously. I put water to boil and I said to Ahmad, ‘It is a wound, just a wound, Khalu is strong and the doctors are on the way’, but fear was a tight band round my chest and my heart kept banging into it.
As I went downstairs I heard the galloping outside. All night the horses were galloping to and from our house, and as I went into the salamlek Milton Bey hurried in, already opening his bag.
Three bullets. Two in his stomach and one in his back. Milton Bey and Sa’d Bey said they would have to take them out and Mirghani went upstairs to bring the boiling water and Husni came and they lit a spirit lamp and they said Fudeil and Mirghani and Sabir should stay and we should leave. Ahmad would not leave his uncle’s side. Anna and I went outside into the courtyard and stood close by the wall. And we prayed and prayed and his first clenched cry of pain threw Anna into my arms and we held on to each other crouched by that wall until Husni came and said, ‘They’ve done everything they can. They will wait outside if you want to go in.’
Milton Bey and Sa’d Bey stayed all night with us. At first he was not conscious, then he came to and spoke with Husni. Then he spoke with me and he told me — he told me what a good and gallant brother tells the sister he knows would give her life for him.
Then he spoke to Anna, who was kneeling on the floor at his side.