Desiring Cairo. Louisa Young

… oh God. Is he young enough for me to tell him not to smoke? It’s hard to tell an Egyptian anyway: so inhospitable, so northern health-obsessive. Maybe later. Anyway the window was open. The distant hum of the A40 filtered vertiginously up, up and past to diffuse in the clouds.

      ‘You look well,’ he said.

      ‘Alhamdulillah,’ I replied. Praise to God.

      He started to speak in Arabic again, and I stopped him.

      ‘My Arabic is not good,’ I said.

      ‘It was,’ he said.

      ‘It’s been many years. I’m out of practice.’ I learnt my Arabic initially from love songs. While I danced I soaked up all sorts of useful vocabulary: Habibi, kefaya, enta ’omri – my darling, enough, you are my life. Elli shuftu abl ma teshoufak enaya, what I saw before my eyes saw you … It did get broader after that, but … it was a long time ago.

      ‘It’s OK. My English is better. You have a husband?’

      ‘No.’

      He looked at the dolls. Their names are Tulip, Liner, Rose, Rosie and Rosabel.

      ‘Just a child,’ I said.

      I wasn’t actually prepared to go through a delicate dance around his sensibilities about this. I don’t explain the whole story to people. It’s too long, too private, too complicated, and, dare I say it, too boring for me to witness their stock reactions of amazement, shock, sympathy, incomprehension, in reaction to the weirdnesses that underpin my life. That are my life. And Lily’s. It’s not their business. If and when it becomes their business, I tell them. But very few new people need to know the whole story. Anyway I’m fifteen years older than him.

      He raised an eyebrow.

      ‘Child, no husband,’ I said. ‘That’s right.’

      ‘Divorced?’

      If we had been in Egypt, I would have said yes, or said that the husband was dead, just to make life easier; here, I may not tell the whole truth, but I don’t need to lie for comfort or protection.

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never married.’ Well, it was true. Janie never was married to Lily’s father, whoever he was. And I have never been married.

      Pity crept over his face, and incomprehension, and concern, and distaste, all at once, like the rainbow colours of oil skimming over water.

      ‘It’s different here, Hakim,’ I said. ‘It’s no shame. No dishonour. If anything, the dishonour is to a man who leaves a woman and child. There is no dishonour to the woman.’ If only that were quite true, I thought. But if I was going to educate him in Western ways, I was bloody well going to educate him in the ways of rational London post-feminism, not in those of hypocritical Tory backbenchers. He looked utterly unconvinced.

      ‘How is your father?’ I asked, realising that I hadn’t asked before just at the moment that it suited me to change the subject. ‘Is he well?’

      Hakim narrowed his pale eyes and murmured something I didn’t catch. This was wrong. The reply should have been a firm and grateful Alhamdulillah. I looked questioningly at him. He flashed me another little smile and said: ‘I have a present for you’, then with a laugh he went to the hall and began to unpack his suitcase, laying small piles of very tidy clothing all over the floor, as carefully as a stream of ants. I peered round the door at him. ‘Give me one moment!’ he cried.

      I went back to my coffee. A minute or two later he came in with a small package. It was wrapped in white tissue and looked fluffy and light, but when I took it from him it was heavy. I laid it on the table to unwrap it. When the crisp, clean paper fell aside, there lay a small blue globe; a smooth, hard, polished ball of lapis lazuli, the shape and texture of a tiny cannonball. Its shades of colour shifted a little: murkier islands, paler seas. Flecks of gold streamed across it like clouds. It looked like the world.

      I picked it up, felt its weight and gazed at it until its surface began to move and drift of its own accord, whereupon I uttered some absolutely genuine expressions of delight, and sat down with it balanced on my palm. It nestled. A world of my own. I liked it very much.

      *

      After three hours, during which time Hakim drank five cups of coffee, smoked eight cigarettes, read two Arabic newspapers and asked me a great many shyly phrased questions about my personal life, and I made five pots of coffee, put on a wash, cleared breakfast, washed up, changed Lily’s sheets and accepted three phone calls from my friend Brigid about exactly how many of her children were coming to spend the night on Friday, I decided that lunch, out, would be a good idea. The suitcase stayed. I live in the last flat at the very end of the balcony on the seventh floor. Even with the lift (and I use the stairs. Good for my not-so-good leg) it would have been a drag to move it. And he still hadn’t told me his plans.

      Finances being tight, and hospitable urges being still quite strong, we went to the Serbian café and had toasted cheese sandwiches. I wondered if he was rich. He looked it … sort of. Balls of lapis are rarely cheap. But he’s so young. And a little gold proves nothing. That golden Qur’anic verse might be all he has in the world.

      ‘So why are you here, Hakim?’ I said, open, brazen, and verging on impatient. Arab languor will take its time, and there’s no rushing it, but this was my time too, London time, Western time, modern time. I had things to do, important things. Thinking about Lily, for example, or watering my flowerpots, or hanging the washing over the radiators, or seriously considering getting a job now she was at school. Seriously considering which was my duty; working the absurd hours required by any interesting job or being available to my small child when she needed me. Seriously considering having a word with our lovely new government about it. I couldn’t sit about all day making him coffee, anyway. If only on principle.

      Then an image flew across my memory: his father’s grave face as he passed me a dish of water into the darkness of the room, the courtyard dazzling white behind him as he pushed the heavy-weighted mosquito nets aside. Abu Sa’id, bringing the water himself, cool water, every hour or so, for the four days that Nadia was sick. West Bank Luxor, 1987. Abu Sa’id, sitting on the doorstep of his own room at night, staring out into his white courtyard, keeping watch for us, the English girls, who lay in his bed. Sometimes he sat till dawn, sometimes he disappeared silently during the night, and emerged at midday from his son’s room, where he had been lying on a mat.

      To begin with I had thought there were no women in the house, only Abu Sa’id and Sa’id and Hakim. One reason why I liked Abu Sa’id so much was that he seemed alone, like me, and unlike everybody else in Egypt, who came arrayed and entangled with uncles and wives and cousins and brothers. Then after a day or two I noticed a tall silent figure, who slipped out of sight when she saw me, like a fish in dark waters. I asked young Sa’id who she was, and he shrugged, as if to say she’s nothing. A servant, I assumed, and counted his manners against him.

      Abu Sa’id never told me what happened to his family, if he ever had one. Never spoke to me of the boys’ mother. We just sat on the step, drinking karkadeh, the tart crimson tea made from hibiscus flowers, smoking, listening to music on his old Roberts radio, listening for Nadia to wake. He would play his ney for me, and sometimes I would dance a bit, imagining myself a snake in the Nile to the serpentine warp of the flute, and he would break off and tell me to sit down, with an old person’s laugh at a young person’s foolish pleasures, though he wasn’t so old. Fifty, perhaps. Once he played me a tape of Yaseen el Touhami, the Sufi poet, and rapidly translated his improvisations for me. El Touhamy never goes anywhere to be recorded. If you want to record him, you have to go where he is. And they do – to the mosques and the moulids, to the streets. We can have recordings if we want, in our poor necrophiliac way, but he and life and creation are doing their living business. I loved that. I wanted to be elevated enough to refuse to listen to him on tape. Wanted to share the purity of his creative transcendence. But alas I am not a Sufi, I am a mere London girl. And I was enchanted by the sound of him reproduced and preserved on the slightly stretched tape, crackling slightly on the banks of the Nile, with the palms black against the rose and gold of the beautiful