The Cairo House. Samia Serageldin

in front of me. ‘Purpose of visit: Business or pleasure?’ Simplistic questions in a complicated world. What is the purpose of my visit? How do you answer, I have come back to claim what’s mine? To find out if it is still mine. To find two children I left behind when I ran away a decade ago: one child is my son and the other the girl I once was. The future and the past. Between them they hold the key to the question I have come to try to resolve: where do I belong? Where is this chameleon’s natural habitat?

      I fasten my seat belt and smile at the white-haired Minnesotan couple next to me as they grasp each other’s knuckled hands. We have made small talk about cross-country skiing and hockey. At some point they asked me where I was from, and I answered, truthfully, that I live in New Hampshire. It is not evasiveness, nor even the instinct to resist being pigeon-holed. It is only that any answer I give will be just as incomplete and misleading, so this is as good – or bad – as any other.

      The wheels skim the ground and the engines are thrust into reverse with a violent roar as the plane hurtles down the runway, then skids to a stop. There is a round of clapping from the Egyptian passengers; it never fails, no matter how bumpy or smooth the landing. As much as a courtesy to the pilot, the applause is the self-congratulation of a fatalistic people on arriving safely. Hamdillah ‘alsalama. Home safely.

      Cairo Airport, finally. I sling my shoulder bag and coat over my arm and head for the passport check booths. The Minnesotan couple follow me in line. I hand my blue American passport to the man at the first booth.

      ‘Do you have a visa?’ he asks in English.

      ‘No, but I’m Egyptian-born.’

      He looks mildly surprised; perhaps I do not look typically Egyptian. He flips through my passport.

      ‘Seif-el-Islam?’ He raises his eyebrows at my maiden name and asks in Arabic, ‘Any relation to the Pasha?’

      ‘I’m his niece.’

      The man enters the data from my passport on a computer screen, then hands the document back to me with a smile. ‘Hamdillah ‘alsalama. Welcome home.’

      As I pass through the gate I nod to the couple from Minneapolis, a little awkwardly, because I can see in their eyes that I no longer belong to their world. At customs I push my cart right through the Nothing To Declare aisle. I scan the mass of dark, eager faces beyond the barrier at the exit. One does not distinguish black or white, only infinite gradations of gray in this most ethnically-mixed and color-blind of peoples. Within a few hours I will no longer notice such things, just as I will no longer see the inevitable film of desert dust in the stark sunshine, like a layer of ash over the gray buildings and the sooty cars, the leaves of the trees and the dark winter clothing of the people.

      

      The muezzin’s call from the minaret wakes me at dawn my first morning in Cairo. I listen to the drawn-out echoes rising and falling in the stillness. I try to go back to sleep but the layers of noise start to build up outside the wooden shutters: first the birds twittering, then dogs barking, voices raised in greeting; finally the first car will set off the incessant honking that punctuates every minute of the day on the streets of Cairo.

      I can hear Ibrahim the doorkeeper carrying out his morning ablutions at the tap in the courtyard under my window. His wooden clogs clap on the cobblestones, then the creaky faucet is turned off. I can imagine him winding his turban around his shriveled old head. Someone passing by in the street calls out a greeting: ‘Morning of jasmines!’ Ibrahim responds: ‘Morning of cream to you!’ The flowery greetings make me smile. Such small automatic courtesies are some of the few luxuries which even the poorest of the poor can afford.

      As a child I used to sleep right through all this. I even used to sleep through the Bayram Feast sacrifice. Except for that one year, that year that was to be the last of the ‘good old days’.

      There is a photo of me and my parents taken in the salon of the villa just before the Feast of the Sacrifice that year, 1961. Papa is holding a cigarette in one hand, his other hand on my shoulder. He chain-smoked Craven A’s; I remember the red and white box with the black cat. In the photo he has the broad-shouldered, dark looks of the Latin film stars of the fifties. His moustache is very neat, and his hair is slicked back. That style of suit, double-breasted, with boxy shoulders, was in style then, but I remember him wearing it a decade later and still looking impeccably tailored in it. He was that rare sort of man who carries himself well, without a hint of vanity.

      Papa and I are standing behind Mama’s Aubusson bergère. Papa never changed that much – because he died young, I suppose – but Mama is almost unrecognizable in the photo. Her black hair is short, she has the thick straight brows, the red lipstick and string of pearls that were the ‘look’ of the period. Her features are too irregular to be photogenic, but her smile is confident. She is wearing a salmon, lace-encrusted tulle dress she kept for years after she stopped wearing it. She is at her slimmest in that photo, and although her shoulders and arms look creamy and plump, the boned bustier of that dress is tiny. I know because I tried it on when I was eighteen. I could only hook up the waist if I sucked in my breath, while the fabric of the hips and the bust hung loose on me.

      In the photo I am standing with an arm around the back of Mama’s chair, head tilted to one side, one foot rubbing against the patent leather heel of the other foot. My shoulder-length hair is brushed back in a velvet Alice band. It was chestnut brown in those days and Mama rinsed it with camomile tea to bring out the highlights. I am wearing a sweater set over a short pleated skirt, and my legs are coltish and long. I am nine, on the verge of l’âge ingrat, as my governess called it, the awkward age.

      Just before the photograph was taken, Mama had hurriedly tried to smooth my eyebrows.

      ‘Stand still, Gigi!’

      She had wet the tip of her finger with her tongue and run her finger over my brows. I remember making a face. It’s the same face my son makes today when I take a sip from his drink, or in some other way betray the fact that I still don’t see him as his own person, physically separate from me.

      Old photographs are like a deck of worn cards; you can try to read them like a fortune-teller at a fair, except in reverse: to read the past, rather than the future. With hindsight you recognize the people in them for what they were: the king, the joker, the knave, the hangman. The Pasha, of course, would be the King, the Sha’ib or Graybeard, as he is called in Arabic; Fangali the jester; Om Khalil’s black figure the hangman, turning up like an ill omen at unexpected junctures. But only with hindsight. While the cards are face down, you cannot tell what hand you’ve been dealt.

      That photo of me with my parents was taken just before the Feast of the Sacrifice the year I turned nine. It was the last time we ever posed together for a family portrait.

      

      The Feast of the Sacrifice must have been in winter that year. The sheep had arrived two days before amid much commotion, an incongruous sight in a residential neighborhood in Cairo. Sheep or cattle were sacrificed on the family estate, but it was also customary to carry out the ritual in Cairo. This imperative was never questioned: it was one of the many instances in our hybrid culture when Western norms were unhesitatingly sacrificed on the altar of tradition.

      The Bayram Feast was meant to ransom one’s blessings, as Abraham did by his sacrifice. Health, wealth, and the greatest of blessings, children, could be withdrawn on a whim of the Giver. The Revolution of 1952 was nearly a decade old, and the Land Reform Act had stripped the bulk of our landholdings, but the worst was still around the corner for families like ours, and as yet unimaginable.

      The distribution of the meat from the sacrificial beast was a symbolically intimate form of charity, sharing with dependents and mendicants the meat from one’s own table. For the sacrifice to be accepted, every detail of the ritual had to be carefully observed, such as the exact window of time during which it should be performed. That year that was to be the last of the good days, there was a hitch, the lapse of a fatal few minutes. In retrospect, it was an ill omen, and I was the one responsible for it.

      I remember watching from the balcony when the van arrived with the two sheep in