The Cairo House. Samia Serageldin

wedding last month, if only I hadn’t been in such a hurry to put them back in the vault…’

      ‘What’s that you’re giving Uncle Hani?’ I asked.

      ‘One of my bracelets, the clasp is broken, it needs to be taken to the jeweler’s to be fixed. Kiss your uncle and run upstairs now, darling, I think Madame Hélène is calling you.’

      Later that night I looked for my parents to kiss them goodnight. Mama’s bedroom was dark but the French doors were open and I heard their voices coming from the verandah. Before I reached them the word ‘divorce’ made me stop in my tracks and hold my breath.

      ‘I mean it,’ my father was saying. ‘You heard Nasser’s speech. If I were to divorce you right away you could keep your property. But if you stay married to me, you lose everything. It’s not fair to you. Most of my brothers are married to their cousins, their wives would be subject to the sequestration decrees anyway in their own right. But you wouldn’t be. Nabil and Zakariah’s wives wouldn’t either, but they have no money of their own. But you do. No one would blame you if you asked for a divorce, it would be understood that you were doing it for the child’s sake. I would be the first to defend you if anyone said a word against you.’

      ‘Don’t let’s discuss this. There’s no point.’

      ‘I want you to think seriously about this before it’s too late. You didn’t marry me for love. You married me because I was one of the most eligible bachelors in Egypt. Things have changed.’

      ‘You know my answer, once and for all. Promise me you won’t bring this up again?’

      I crept back to my room.

      

      When school started in the fall, there was a lot of whispering among the other girls, cut short when I approached. The nuns patted me on the head for no special reason and murmured ‘la pauvre petite.’

      My birthday fell on a weekend early in December, and nothing seemed different about the preparations that year. It was only as an adult that I realized what a sacrifice this appearance of normality must have represented. As usual I handed out an invitation to every one of the twenty-two girls in my class, no R.S.V.P. requested. Every girl in class had always come to my birthday teas. Mama and Madame Hélène put together twenty-two bags of party favors. After lunch I wasn’t allowed into the dining-room while they festooned it with balloons and streamers and set the table with an organdy tablecloth. At three the deliveries arrived: Mama had ordered the decorated birthday cake, the gâteaux and the petits fours from Simmond’s in Zamalek. At three-thirty I put on a velvet dress with a lace collar hand-made by Madame Hélène, and a little gold locket that was Mama’s present. It was one of hers that I’d always liked.

      At four o’clock I waited for the doorbell to start ringing. By four-thirty only one girl had arrived, Aleya Bindari, who was a distant cousin. At five o’clock, looking stricken, Mama suggested we go ahead with the birthday party. She said she had heard that there was a case of measles going around the school and the other girls must either have come down with it or have stayed away for fear of getting exposed to it. I pretended to believe her, then and forever.

      At school the following week only one of my classmates apologized. ‘I wanted to come, but my parents said I couldn’t, because it wasn’t safe to associate – you know, because of the sequestration.’ I nodded, although I didn’t really know what sequestration meant, nor, I suspected, did she.

      One day the Arabic teacher, the only male instructor, came into class and announced that a new subject had been added to the curriculum by the Ministry of Education. It was called Arab Socialism and was mandatory. It would be one of only three subjects taught in Arabic, the other two being the language itself and Religion for the Muslim pupils.

      The Arabic teacher taught all three. During the break between Arabic class and Religion class, while the half dozen Coptic girls filed out for Bible study with one of the nuns, he could be heard noisily performing his prayer ablutions in the washroom next door to my classroom. He gargled and spat, and cleared his nose and throat copiously. When he walked back into class, the girls would giggle and make faces.

      The new course, Arab Socialism, seemed to focus on identifying ‘the enemies of the people’, and the Arabic teacher took evident satisfaction in teaching it. He drilled us in the triumvirate of evil: ‘Imperialism, Feudalism and Capitalism.’ Whenever he reiterated the words: ‘landowners,’ or ‘capitalists’, he looked at me and at Aleya Bindari, who sat one row behind me.

      I showed the textbook to my parents, with its illustrations of peasants being whipped by cruel landowners. ‘Now they’re poisoning the minds of children!’ Papa erupted.

      Mama quickly put a warning hand on his arm.

      ‘You’ll only confuse Gigi that way. And if she starts to repeat things at school…She’s too young to carry that kind of burden.’ She put an arm around me. ‘One day you’ll understand all this. Things aren’t going to stay like this forever. You’ll see. Just don’t worry about it now.’

      One morning in November when I woke up, I looked at the alarm clock and realized that I had been allowed to oversleep, I was late for school. Madame Hélène was sighing in her armchair, her boiled-egg eyes reddened. I ran to find my mother. Mama was on the phone in her bedroom, whispering urgently, a hand over her eyes. I opened the door that led, through my mother’s boudoir, into Papa’s bedroom. It was empty and the suitcase under the bed was gone.

      

      In an otherwise forgettable essay on glamor, I read the phrase ‘our parents are our earliest celebrities’, and I suppose that’s true. In my own case, the recollection of my early years is colored by more than the rose-tinted glasses of childhood. I realize now that it is the easy life, the freedom from petty problems and concerns, that imparts the glamor of optimism and generosity.

      I think what I regret most from ‘the good old days’ is the loss of lifestyle of the open house, of the easy welcome to guests at any time of day, on any day of the week. Merely to ask a drop-in guest if he would be staying for dinner rather than to assume, indeed to importune, him to do so, would have been considered irredeemably tactless. The cuisine and the etiquette may have been more or less cosmopolitan, but the spirit of hospitality was as uncompromisingly Egyptian as that of the country people with whom we shared our roots.

      It’s true that the easy welcome of the open house was made casual and effortless by the swarm of domestics hovering in the background. But it’s just as true that the back door was always as wide open as the front. No beggar off the streets was turned away without a meal or a handout. Anyone with the most tenuous claim, whether of kinship or former service, could be sure of a regular stipend or a place to spend the night.

      The nether regions of the house: the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the kitchen balcony, the maid’s room and the all-purpose ‘holding-room’, were a domain into which I trespassed cautiously. At any time of day, but especially at mealtimes, I never knew whom I might stumble upon: the doorkeeper’s third cousin come up from the country, my aunt’s wet nurse, the seamstress who did alterations and ran up the servants’ clothes, the laundryman who did the ironing, the shoeshine man.

      It’s also true that, long after the front door was closed, the back door stayed open. And that the last luxuries we clung to were pride, and the good name of the family.

       3 Past As Prologue

      The good name of the family. Growing up, I was constantly aware of bearing the burden of belonging. You couldn’t help it, when the mention of your last name invariably provoked a reaction not always easy for a child to read: dread or pity, envy or commiseration. You grow up unable to reconcile family loyalty with the virulent rhetoric from public podiums. You grow up with the myth of the ‘good old days’, before the revolution, antebellum, before you were born. All you have are photographs, but they cannot tell the whole story, because even