My mother did not like the heat. I never saw her in a swimsuit or in sudden surrender closing her eyes at the sun. The arrival of spring in Cairo would set her off planning our summer getaways. Once we spent the holidays high up in the Swiss Alps, where my body stiffened at the sight of deep hollow chasms emptied out of the rocky earth. Another time she took us to Nordland, in northern Norway, where the splintered peaks of austere black mountains were reflected sharply in the unmoving waters. We stayed in a wooden cabin that stood alone by the shore and was painted the brown of withered leaves. Around its roof hung a gutter as wide as a human thigh. Here whatever fell from the sky fell in abundance. There was no other man-made structure in sight. Some afternoons, Mother disappeared and I would not let on to Father that my heart was thumping at the base of my ears. I would keep to my room until I heard footsteps on the deck, the kitchen door sliding open. Once I found Mother there with hands stained black-red, a rough globe dyed into the front of her jumper. With eyes as clean as glass, wide, satisfied, she held out a handful of wild berries. They tasted of a ripe sweetness I found hard to attribute to that landscape.
One night, fog gathered thickly, abstracting the licks and sighs of the northern lights. You need adulthood to appreciate such horror. An anxious heat entered my eight-year-old mind and I curled up in bed, hoping Mother would pay me one of her night visits, kiss my forehead, lie beside me.
I woke up several times believing that Naima was there. She was our maid, and had been since before I was born, before my parents left our country and moved to Egypt. In winter, when the sky got dark early and Mother worried about her making the long commute home, Naima would sleep on my bedroom floor. I would watch her lying on her side, facing the skirting board, her leg bent with the tight determination of a tree branch. Her devotion had always seemed muscular, too intense, but now I yearned for it; I wished that she had come with us, or even that I had been left behind with her in Cairo.
In the morning the still world returned: the innocent waters, the ferocious mountains, the pale sky dotted with small, newborn clouds. I found Mother in the kitchen, warming milk, a glass of water on the white marble counter beside her. Not juice, tea, or coffee but water was her morning drink. She took a sip and with her usual insistence on quiet muffled the impact of the glass on the marble with the soft tip of her little finger. Any sudden sound unsettled her. She could conduct an entire day’s chores in near-silence.
It should not have been difficult for me to speak, to say the usual “Good morning, Mama,” but at times she seemed impenetrable, as if contained within an invisible structure. I sat at the table, where, when the three of us gathered at mealtimes, Mother would occasionally glance at the fourth, empty chair as if it signalled an absence, something lost. She poured the hot milk into a cup for me. A sliver of steam brushed the air then disappeared beside her neck.
“Nuri, habibi,” she said, speaking my name the way she often did, with careful affection, “why the long face?”
She took me out onto the deck that stretched above the lake. The air was so brisk it stung my throat. I remembered what she had said to Father in the car when the naked mountains of Nordland first came into view: “Here God decided to be a sculptor; everywhere else he holds back.”
“Holds back?” Father had echoed. “You talk about him as if he’s a friend of yours.”
In those days Father did not believe in God. He often greeted Mother’s references to the divine with irritated sarcasm. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when, after Mother died, he now and again voiced a prayer; sarcasm, more often than not, hides a secret fascination.
Was it the romance of wood fires, the discretion of heavy coats that attracted my mother to the northern and unpeopled places of Europe? Or was it the impeccable stillness of a fortnight spent mostly sheltered indoors with the only two people she could lay claim to? I have come to think of all those holidays, no matter where they were, as having taken place in a single country—her country—and of the silences that marked them as her melancholy. There were moments when her unhappiness seemed as elemental as clear water.
After she died, it soon became obvious that what Father had always wanted to do in the two weeks off that he allowed himself every summer was to lie in the sun all day. So the Magda Marina, a small hotel in Agamy Beach, near Alexandria, became the place where he and I spent that fortnight. He seemed to have lost his way with me; widowhood had dispossessed him of any ease that he had once had around his only child. When we sat down to eat he either read the paper or gazed into the distance. Whenever he noticed me looking at him he would fidget or check his watch. As soon as he finished eating, he would light a cigarette and snap his fingers for the bill, not bothering to check whether I had finished, too.
“See you back in the room.”
He never did that when Mother was alive.
Instead, when the three of us went to a restaurant, they would sit side by side facing me. If we were all engaged in a conversation, she would direct most of her contributions toward me, as if I were the front wall of a squash court. And when his unease led him to play the entertainer she would monitor, in that discreet way of hers, my reactions to his forced cheerfulness or, if he could bear it no longer, to his silences. With Mother’s eyes on me I would watch him observe the other patrons or stare out at the view, which was often of some unremarkable street or square, no doubt daydreaming or plotting his next move in the secret work I never once heard him talk about. At these moments it felt as if he were the boy obliged to share a meal with adults, as if he were the son and I the father.
After Mother passed away, he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors held together by circumstance or obligation. But then, at the most unexpected moments, a tenderhearted sympathy, raw and sudden, would rise in him, and he would plunge his face into my neck, sniff deeply and kiss, tickling me with his mustache. It would set us off laughing as though everything were all right.
At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.
“Baba, who are you looking for?” I once asked.
He shook his head and said, “No one.”
But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for. Kamal Pasha, those books said, had been a close adviser to the king and one of the few men who could walk into the royal office without an appointment. Whenever the young monarch was in one of his anxious moods—perhaps suspecting his end to be near—it was Kamal Pasha el-Alfi who was called to ease his fears. In these books my father was also described as an aristocrat who, having been forced into exile by the revolution, had moved “gradually but with radical effect” to the left. I read these things about my father before I could understand what they meant. And if I came to him with my questions he would smoothly deflect them: “It was all so long ago.”
I rarely persisted, because I knew that he was being true to Mother’s wishes.
“Don’t transfer the weight of the past onto your son,” she once told him.
“You can’t live outside history,” he argued. “We have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary.”
After a long pause she responded, “Who said anything about shame? It’s longing that I want to spare him. Longing and the burden of your hopes.”
I recall how sometimes, during the edgeless hours of the afternoon, I would use Mother’s hip for a pillow. I would listen to the steady rhythm of her breath, the pages of her book turning. If I fell asleep, the sound would become a lazy breeze rustling a tree, or a broom brushing the earth. I hold the memory of her collarbone. I used to reach for it the way a rock climber would a sturdy ledge. I recall also her hair, strands as thick as strings. I would stretch one across my forehead, or on my tongue, and feel it tighten like a blade. None of this would distract her from her reading. I would watch the wide blossom of her eyes scanning the lines, those same eyes which grew keen whenever I caught her standing behind a heavy curtain in a game of hide-and-seek or when I revealed to her a luminous butterfly I had captured. How quickly her cheeks would redden then. She would speak, a warm whisper, before laughter flexed her throat. She was as close as I ever came to having a sister.
And then there were those cruel, sudden gaps, the clearings where she stood alone, not knowing how to return. How her eyes would wilt, looking at me as if acknowledging someone she half knew. Sometimes at night I would wake up and find her there, studying my face. She would force a smile and depart, quietly closing the door behind her, as if I were not hers. Other times she would lie beside me, our two heads sharing one pillow. Her pale thin fingers, which never seemed to match her strength, were like frozen twigs. She would tuck them between my knees or, if I was lying on my back, slide them behind my lower back, the place that is still hers.
But if I was ill it was Naima who would not leave my bedside. Mother would occasionally come in and stand at the foot of the bed, clearly concerned but awkward, as if she were intruding on a private moment. Once I confronted her about this. I babbled and stuttered, and she held me and said, “I know, it breaks my heart, too. But we mustn’t see it this way. We are all lucky. We must count ourselves lucky.”
In her last year, her silences grew deeper and more frequent. Some days she did not leave her room. When she called, she called only for Naima, who also called her Mama.
“Of course, Mama”; “Straightaway, Mama.”
Naima would often be sent to the pharmacy for aspirin, sleeping pills, painkillers.
So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem that I had never stopped to ask its cause. Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.
I remember the last night.
It was late evening. Naima had already changed out of her house galabia and into the hard fabric of her black dress, a veil wrapped tightly around her head, revealing the delicate shape of her skull. The familiar carrier bag hung on her wrist, containing one or two but never more than three pieces of fruit, the round forms pressing against the plastic. At Mother’s instruction, every evening Naima had to go to the large fruit bowl that sat at the center of the long dining table and take home those guavas, apricots, or apples which had passed their prime. Naima resisted and would often argue that the fruit was still good. Her resistance baffled me because I knew that on her birthdays Naima’s parents were able to give her only an apple or a handful of mulberries.
Now she stood there, silent and hesitant, at Mother’s door. She brought her hand up but did not knock.
“When she wakes up,” she whispered, “tell her I went home. See you tomorrow.”
She must have detected that I did not want her to go, because she stopped and asked, “Did you brush your teeth?”
When I looked up from the sink I saw her in the mirror, standing outside the bathroom, her hands clasped against her waist, like a person in prayer. Her Nubian face looked even darker than usual. I followed her to the door and stood barefoot on the cold marble. She studied her foggy reflection in the long, narrow glass window in the lift door and with nervous hands tucked away stray hairs. She never stopped dreading the long journey home. On the occasions when she spent the night with us, she would carry out her tasks in the house with renewed enthusiasm, insisting on dusting the bookshelves again, cleaning the bathrooms one more time, all the while cracking jokes at which no one laughed. The silences that followed these jokes always turned her cheeks a deep shade of purple.
“Go on now, you will catch a cold.”
But I did not move until the lift arrived because, regardless of her words, I knew she welcomed my attachment. There was always some elusive way in which Naima showed that she needed confirmation not so much of my attention as of my loyalty, as if she feared I might, one day, betray her.
I waited for Father and only once dared walk into their room. Mother lay on her side and did not move when I touched her ear. I went to my room and stood on my desk chair facing a photograph that Mother had recently taken of herself. She was the one who had had it framed and had hung it there. Her eyes stared out unflinchingly, but her jawbones were slightly out of focus, as if she was emerging from a cloud. I liked it because her face was nearly life-size. I did not know then why Mother looked better in photographs taken before I was born. I do not mean simply younger but altogether brighter, as if she had just stepped off a carrousel: her hair settling, her eyes anticipating more joy. And in those photographs you could almost hear a kind of joyful music in the background. Then, after I arrived, it all changed. For a long time, before I knew the truth, I thought it was the physical assault of pregnancy that had claimed her cheery disposition.
Occasionally it would reëmerge, this happy outlook, awakened by a memory from the past, as when she told the story of Father slipping and landing on his bottom on one of the steep alleyways in Geneva’s Old Town.
“His back white with snow,” she said, barely able to speak because of her laughing. “Calling my name as he nearly tripped up the Christmas shoppers.”
Father’s face changed, a solemn expression suggesting that he might be taking offense, which of course made the whole thing funnier. “I nearly broke my neck,” he finally said.
“Yes, but your father has always been an excellent navigator,” she said, and they both exploded into laughter.
I do not recall ever being so happy.
I woke up to Father repeating, “Saviour, Saviour,” and the sound of his reaching, anxious steps.
I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, my eyes weak against the blazing chandelier in the hall. Other people were there, two men in white. They held the front door open as Father rushed toward them, Mother slack in his arms. Her long, dishevelled hair trembled with every step he took. One of her dangling feet seemed to swing more rapidly than the other. I ran after him, down the stairs. I remembered him once daring me to a race down those stairs, saying that he could descend the three flights faster than it would take me to go down in the lift. When the lift landed on the ground floor, he had pulled the door open, trying not to let his breathlessness show, his eyes sparkling with satisfaction. But now, when he saw me following, he stopped.
“Nuri.”
His eyes were red. Mother lay silent in his arms, her eyelids hard as shells. I paused for a moment, and the two men in white overtook me.
“Nuri,” he shouted, and the two men looked at me. The expressions on their faces are still a source of horror.
I climbed back up, stopping at every landing, looking down the stairwell. Then I stood on our balcony, my hands gripping the cold metal balustrade above my head. I watched him carry her to the ambulance. One of her breasts was almost out of the gray satin nightdress. When the men in white tried to take her, Father shook his head and shouted something. He laid her on the stretcher, straightened and covered her body, caught the fall of her hair, wrapped it like a belt around his fist, and then tucked the bundle beneath her neck. A siren started up. Father walked back into the building, past the still figures of Amm Samir, the building’s porter, and his sons. Early light was just breaking, and they, too, must have been startled out of sleep. Somehow they did not seem surprised, as if they expected such a calamity to befall “the Arab family on the third floor.” The Nile flowed by strong and indifferent. There was hardly a wind to flutter the bamboo grasses that covered its banks. The leaves of the banana trees hung low, and the heads of the palms seemed as heavy as velvet.
I heard the door of the apartment slam shut.
“Where are they taking her?”
He kneeled before me so his face was level with mine. “She needs to rest. For a while . . . in hospital,” he said, and stopped as if to stifle a cough.
“Why? We can take care of her here. Naima and I can take care of her. Why did you let them take her?”
“She will be back soon.”
He smelled of cigarettes, of other people. He looked as if he had not slept at all. I followed him into their room. Her form was still stamped into the mattress. Father’s side was undisturbed. The room had the air of a place that had witnessed a terrible confrontation, a battle lost.
Father spent most of the subsequent days at the hospital. Never having had to look after me, he was now continuously asking Naima whether his son had eaten or if it was bedtime yet.
“Has he bathed? Make sure he brushes his teeth.”
I was suddenly spoken of in the third person. I had become a series of tasks. I could tell that Father was irritated by having to bear such domestic responsibility. And every time I cried for the mother from whom I had never before been separated, he looked at once fearful and impatient.
“Naima,” he would call, louder than necessary.
I asked to be taken to the hospital.
“The doctors are doing everything they can. There is nothing more any of us can do.”
“Then why do you spend the whole day there?”
I watched his anxious eyes.
Two days later, he took us to visit Mother. At a set of traffic lights, a boy, possibly my age, although his thinness made him look younger, tapped on my window. Around his arm hung necklaces of jasmine. He was wearing a red patterned T-shirt that reminded me of one I used to wear.
Rigid with shyness, Naima asked, “Could we buy some? Madam loves jasmine.”
Although Naima did not address Father directly, the question was clearly intended for him. She was often wary around him. She would usually send me to ask whether it was coffee or tea that he wanted, if he was expecting anyone for lunch, or if there was anything else he needed before she left. Father rolled down his window, and the thick heat of the day spilled in. The boy ran to him. Father bought the whole bunch, his eyes lingering on the boy’s T-shirt. He handed the jasmines to Naima and rolled up his window. His eyes now were on the rearview mirror, trying to catch a last glimpse of the boy.
Naima fingered the necklaces in her lap.
“You will get them knotted doing that,” I said, and immediately regretted it as she looked nervously at the rearview mirror.
“Aren’t those the clothes we gave Ibn Ali?” Father asked.
Relieved, Naima looked back. We watched the boy run between the cars and vanish.
“Yes, Pasha,” she said. “It looks like the same T-shirt.”
Ibn Ali was one of the orphanages Father visited, often taking Naima and me with him, to deliver food or clothes or make a donation. There was also Abd al-Muttalib and Al Sayeda Aisha and Al Ridha.
“Don’t let it upset you,” Naima told him. “No matter what you do, you can’t stop them working.”
“But so young,” he said.
“Not much younger than I was,” she said softly, and after too long a delay.
Naima gripped my hand tightly as we went deeper into the maze of neon-lit corridors. The jasmines were slung neatly around her other arm. The odor of the hospital was so unforgiving that every so often she would bring the cloud of white flowers to her nose. I tugged, and she let me do the same. Father was already a few metres ahead. With every step he took, the leather heels of his shoes were striped by the neon light.
We found Mother lying under a cold blue lamp. The bedcovers were folded beneath her arms, one wrist was encircled by a yellow plastic bracelet, and a constant bleeping hammered the silence.
Naima placed the jasmines at the foot of the bed and covered her face.
“Did I not tell you . . .” Father said, pulling her out of the room.
I was alone with Mother. I wanted to lift the flattened pillows, puff them up. Her skin had turned ashen. Her eyes were shut with an outrageous finality, a moistness lingering where the eyelids met. I thought of touching her, and the impossibility of it frightened me. My mind returned to a distant memory. I was four or maybe five. She was getting ready for a party. I was crouched beneath the chiffonier, beside her feet: black high heels, stockings a color that made her skin look powdered. A thin fluorescent line hovered above where the black suède of the shoe met the stockings. An optical illusion. I traced it, erasing and redrawing the light with my finger. Then she moved. I looked up, smiling, thinking I had tickled her, but she was only leaning closer to the mirror in order to scrutinize the exactness of her lipstick line.
Father was right: there was nothing any of us could do here.
A few days later Father came home from the hospital earlier than usual. He went straight to his room. I stood outside his door for a minute or two, then knocked.
“Not now, Nuri,” he said, his voice uneven.
After a few minutes, I heard the sound of running water in his bathroom. I remembered what Mother used to tell him whenever she found him in a bad mood: “Take a cold shower. It’s what the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, used to do whenever he received bad news.” And I remembered Father shaking his head. But that was when he was in no need of God. When he got out of the shower he called for Naima.
“Shut the door behind you. Where is Nuri?”
“Ustaz Nuri is in his room,” she said, even though she saw me standing outside the door and forced a smile before walking in.
He began whispering. A few seconds later I heard her give a short scream. Had he placed a hand on her mouth?
For the rest of that day Naima’s fingers trembled.
Her eyes filled with tears when I asked, “Are you all right? Are you ill? Shall I pour you a glass of cola?”
Every hour or so she would come to ask, “Has your father spoken to you yet?”
Father stayed in his room, talking on the telephone.
At sunset he called me in.
“Sit down. Let me see your hand.” After a few seconds he said my name, then the words “Mama will not be coming home.”
After another pause he spoke again.
“She will never be coming back.”
I pulled my hand away. I did not believe him. I insisted that he take me to the hospital.
“She is no longer there.”
He restrained me, carried me to my room, and locked the door behind us. Outside, Naima cried, begging to be let in. Father opened the door and with astonishing tenderness pulled her to his chest and kissed her head. He held me, too, and began muttering that from here on life was never going to be the same, that God had felled his only tree and shelter. I searched but could not find a tear in either of his eyes. This should not have surprised me, for I had never seen Father cry.
The following day, seventy-five wooden chairs, the sort most commonly found in Egyptian cafés, with a profile of Nefertiti printed on the seat, arrived. The porter, Amm Samir, and his silent children carried two huge speakers up the stairs. They slid off their slippers at the door, and, their stiff bodies swaying momentarily beneath the weight, placed the speakers, each taller than Father, in the middle of the hall. The angle at which they were left facing each other suggested a quarrel. Then the porter and his children carried every piece of furniture that was in the reception hall into the dining room. Armchairs were capsized over the dining table, and their cushions stuffed beneath. I watched Amm Samir’s dark, hard feet sink into the rug. Each toenail curved forward into the thick wool. Each joint was crowned with a little gray stone of skin, and each heel was like the battered end of a club. At what point, I wondered, will his sons’ feet look like this? Noticing me, Amm Samir placed a heavy hand on my head and, after a second’s hesitation, kneeled down and kissed my forehead. He looked at Father. And Father, choosing to give Amm Samir the approval he requested, said, “Thank you.” With lowered heads, the sons followed Amm Samir out.
Urgency and grief had rendered Father, Naima, and me nearly equal. Together we arranged the chairs. And at one point Father asked Naima her opinion.
“Where shall we put the speakers?”
“By the entrance,” she said, embarrassed, and when he hesitated she pressed on. “But that is where they are always placed, Pasha.”
“Perhaps in your district,” he said.
The possibility of a smile brushed both of their faces.
“But it’s people’s duty to attend, Pasha. It wasn’t I who set the custom.”
“Enough. Lift,” he said, and together they carried the speakers to where she had suggested, placing one at either side of the entrance.
We pushed the chairs against the walls in conspiratorial silence. When we were done, we stood in the middle of the room, and I hoped that there would be something else for us to do, but then Father disappeared into his room, and Naima returned to the kitchen.
The front door was left open. The reception hall began to resemble a waiting room. Not knowing where to go, I sat and counted the chairs, which now stood in a rectangle. The first time I came up with seventy-four. On the second attempt I had seventy-seven. Only the fourth or fifth time around did I get seventy-five. Then I saw our next-door neighbor walk out of the lift. He did a double take. The Koran was not playing yet, so he may have thought we were preparing for a party. But something about me must have suggested bad news. I went to Naima in the kitchen, and the man followed behind me.
“Greetings, Ustaz Midhaat.”
“What happened?”
“Madam passed away,” Naima told him, and, just as she did, tears appeared in her eyes.
Ustaz Midhaat looked at me now with eyes as wide as coffee cups. I moved behind Naima.
A few minutes later he returned with his whole family. Father came out dressed in a white galabia. He wore a galabia only to bed, and so he looked as if he had wandered out from a dream. He sat beside our neighbor, saying almost nothing, his cheeks covered in stubble. Naima served them unsweetened black coffee and asked me to pass around a plate of almonds. Then Father waved to me to come.
“The Koran, turn on the Koran,” he whispered.
By the afternoon more neighbors had arrived, people we hardly knew, and by nightfall the place was packed with silent mourners. I had never seen our house so full yet so quiet. Naima was joined by an army of servants, lent by neighbors, whom she managed with a new authority.
I took the lift up to the roof to escape. The city stretched in all directions. It hummed and clanked like an engine in the night. The streets coiled into knots here and there. Not even the Nile tempered it. If I could I would have erased it, wiped it clean. I have never before or since experienced such a careless desire for violence. Then I felt a presence behind me. Naima, even with her endless duties, had noticed my absence.
In the morning my mother’s three siblings, Aunt Souad, Aunt Salwa, and Uncle Fadhil, arrived from our country. I had never met them before, but recognized them from photographs. My aunts kept remarking how brave I was and how unusually long my eyelashes were, and teased me about my Cairene accent, my skin. They said that because I was darker than Father and Mother I was really the son of my great-grandfather, who was, by all accounts, nearly as dark as I am. They tickled my toes, hugged me when I laughed, dug their faces into my neck and inhaled deeply before kissing. At night, they took turns lying beside me, telling stories that usually included a mention of the waterfalls or pomegranates or palm trees of our country. If in the night I went to get a drink of water, one of them would appear behind me, asking whether I was all right.
They sweetened my name to Abu el-Noor, calling it out whenever they saw me daydreaming. The slightest hint of contemplation worried them. If I was in the bathroom for a little longer than usual, I would hear one of my aunts whisper, “Abu el-Noor, habibi, are you all right?”
Father let his beard grow. It surprised me how heavily streaked with gray it was; he was only thirty-nine and the hair on his head was completely black.
Once, Uncle Fadhil embraced him, speaking solemnly and with a hint of urgency. Father eventually began nodding in a resigned sort of way, his eyes still on the ground.
Another time the door of his bedroom was ajar, and I saw him cornered by my two aunts.
“He is unusually aloof for a boy his age,” Aunt Salwa was saying.
“Let us take him back. He will grow up among his cousins,” Aunt Souad added.
“We will bring him up as our own,” Aunt Salwa said. “This way, when the country comes back to us, he can play a role.”
After a long pause Father spoke. “I could not do that to Naima. She would never forgive me.”
Long ago, when Naima was ill with bilharzia, Father, at Mother’s insistence, brought me to visit her. It took about an hour to reach the maze of her neighborhood by car. But, as our driver, Abdu, was keen to tell Father, the journey on public transport took at least an hour and a half.
“Three hours’ round trip, Pasha.”
Father did not react.
Every time Abdu rolled down his window to ask someone for directions, the pedestrian would lean down and study our faces. Eventually we found Naima’s street. It was so narrow that the car could barely fit through.
“Careful,” Father said in a near-whisper, while holding on to the handle above his window.
“Don’t worry, Pasha,” Abdu replied, also in a whisper.
Raw sewage meandered down the middle of the road, passing between the wheels. Father asked Abdu to roll up his window, but by then the stench had already entered the car. Above us clotheslines sagged under the weight of laundry and veiled most of the sky. Every so often Abdu had to press the horn, which sounded like an explosion in the narrow street. People had to find doorways to stand in, and even then we had to pass ever so slowly, almost brushing against their bodies. I watched a buckle, a detail of fabric, the occasional child’s face. These people who lined the road stood still and kept their arms by their sides. I was sure that from that angle they could see my bare knees on the beige leather upholstery.
Naima, her seven siblings, and her parents lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a four-story building that was covered in flaking red paint with the words “Coca-Cola” repeated across it. Abdu waited with the car. Children preceded Father and me up the stairs, announcing our arrival and occasionally stopping to look back, giggle, and elbow one another before running up again. On each landing small paper bags sat bulging with rubbish, many of them punctured or torn. Flies the size of bees weaved lazily around them.
“Don’t touch,” Father said, and I immediately pulled my hand off the railing and placed it in his open palm. He did not let go until we were at the door of the apartment.
Naima’s father, who was a security guard at one of the museums, met us on the landing in his uniform. He looked worried. The mother cried when she saw Father, then was ordered by her husband to go and make tea. There was hardly any furniture in the living room. One carpet, the size of a prayer rug, lay in the center of the tiled floor as if concealing an imperfection or some secret passage. Naima lay on a mattress in a corner. I sat beside her. She took hold of my hand. My skin burned in her grip. She neither smiled nor cried, but stared at me with a peculiar gentleness, as if I were a kind of nourishment.
“Nothing, really,” the father said. “Her mother spoils her. She’s just after attention.” Turning toward Naima, he asked loudly, “Aren’t you?”
She did not respond.
“She will be up in no time,” he told Father, anxiety making him blink his eyes.
“She should take as long as she needs,” Father told him. “We only came to wish her well.”
The mother returned with a plate and placed it on the rug: crumbled feta and sliced tomato submerged in the pee yellow of cotton oil. She stopped for a moment and looked at Naima and me.
“Isn’t that right, Umm Naima?” the father said. “You spoil your daughter.”
She waited a few seconds before speaking.
“She loves him like a son,” she said to Father.
“Yes,” he told her.
Although Naima would not let her eyes leave my face, she had taken note of this exchange. I squeezed her hand. I thought of saying something. Instead, I placed my palm on her cheek. She held it there. I thought perhaps the relative coolness of my skin was a comfort to her. But then tears welled in her eyes.
“Come, girl, don’t be afraid,” her father said, fear detectable in his voice.
And just as suddenly Naima’s tears vanished.
The parents insisted that we eat. Father shook his head. I wished he were better able to conceal the frown on his face. Naima’s father handed us loaves of bread. Mine was hard and speckled with flour stones. The mother poured a thick black liquid, and when I asked what it was the father said, “Tea, of course,” and I was convinced I had offended him. About two centimetres of the powdered leaf sat in the base of the glass. Father kneeled down, broke a small piece off his loaf, and dipped it in the solitary dish on the floor.
“There, thanks very much.”
I bowed all the way down, feeling the blood gather in my head, and kissed Naima’s hot forehead.
Uncle Fadhil seemed to have come to Cairo mainly to accompany the women. As a man, he faced the greatest risk of retaliation for visiting his “backward, traitor” relatives. He mostly sat smoking. Whenever I sat next to him he would squeeze my skinny upper arms and say, “Flex.”
Three days after they arrived, he told my aunts it was time to go. “Just in case the authorities think we are enjoying ourselves,” he said, weariness curling his eyebrows.
Naima and I stood watching Amm Samir and his eldest son, Gamaal, fasten the luggage on the roof rack. We waved when the car pulled away, then went back upstairs. When I was in my room, surrounded by the smell of my aunts, I wept.
Our apartment struggled to resume its original character. Naima moved soundlessly, cleaning the indifferent surfaces, preparing our joyless meals. I felt a tremor whenever I heard the clang of pots in Mother’s kitchen. Father seemed awkward and nervous around me. The beard was gone, and now he spent most of his time out or in his room. Naima no longer slept at her home but on the floor in my bedroom. There was an abstract urgency in the air.
The arrival of Hydar and Taleb, old friends of Father’s who, after the revolution, had settled in Paris, rescued us. Hydar brought his wife, Nafisa, who raised her voice every time she addressed me.
Father gave up his room to Hydar and Nafisa. When they resisted, he said, “Listen, ask Nuri, I hardly sleep there. I prefer the couch. Honestly.”
Then he insisted that Taleb take my bed.
“This man knew you before you were born.”
Taleb blushed, nodding.
I slept on the floor, in Naima’s place, and she slept in the kitchen.
Mother had not liked having guests, particularly these guests, and this had been a recurring source of disagreement between my parents. But now Father and his friends could stay up drinking whiskey until the early hours. I would hear Taleb getting into bed. I think if he had not tried so hard to be quiet he might have made less noise. His breath would quickly fill the room with the chemical smell of alcohol.
I could not help but feel that Mother’s coldness toward Father’s old Parisian friends was somehow part of a general unease that marked my parents’ relationship to Paris. They almost never talked about their time in that city. And on the rare occasion that Mother did speak about how I came to be born there she would always begin by telling me how Naima came to work for the family. I did not then understand how this detail mattered at all to the story.
She told me how she and Father had gone to Cairo expressly to employ a maid. And how, on the two-day drive back to our country, thirteen-year-old Naima had hardly stopped crying. But every time they had tried to turn back she objected.
“At one point, she began begging us to go on, so we continued.”
Perhaps mistaking my silence for disapproval at the maid’s young age, Mother said, “I wanted someone young, to get used to our ways, to be like a daughter.” Then she stopped and looked at her fingers, and only when she glanced up again did I realize that tears had been gathering in her eyes.
Eighteen months after my parents employed Naima, our king was dragged to the courtyard of the palace and shot in the head. Father was a government minister by this stage and, instead of risking ill treatment, detention, or even death, he decided to flee to France. Naima was the last to step onto the boat, right behind my parents, pulled on board by Abdu the driver. They all stood watching the coast drift away, the smoke rise.
When the boat arrived in Marseilles, Taleb was standing at the dock waiting for them. Was he smiling, was he sucking at the end of a cigarette, did he wave? Mother did not like to talk about Taleb.
“Why? Is he a bad person?”
“No, not at all.”
It never seemed like anger that she felt toward him. More like shame. And I think she thought of Paris and the time in Paris in the same way. So I was eager to ask Taleb, to find out what had happened after they arrived.
“Poor Naima could hardly stand,” he said. “She had been throwing up the whole way. But your mother was determined. She didn’t want to stay in Marseilles. I never understood that. She didn’t even want to rest the night. She insisted we go directly to the train station and get on the first train for Paris.”
I pictured her marching ahead and imagined Father behind her, glad for her stubbornness, glad that someone at least knew what to do next.
“And how was she on the train?”
“Who? Your mother? Like the Sphinx. I told jokes, but they were obviously bad ones.”
“And Naima and Abdu? Did they go back to Egypt?”
Here Taleb looked at me as if I were suddenly standing a long way away. He seemed to consider the distance and whether it was wise to cross it.
“Abdu went back from time to time, but Naima didn’t, of course.”
“Where did they stay?”
“In Paris.”
He seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. I thought of how to bring him back.
“Uncle Taleb?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you lived in Paris?”
“Since university. Too long.”
“Do you like it?”
“What does it matter? It seems to like me.”
“Did Mama and Baba stay with you?”
“No, I found them an apartment in the Marais. Not ideal, but close to the hospital. A nice place, but a big step down from what they were used to.”
“Not a hotel?”
“Six months is too long for a hotel. And in the end they stayed a year.”
“Really?” I said. “I always thought they were there only a couple of months.”
“You breathed Parisian air for the first eight months of your life. You will be ruined forever.”
I liked Taleb. Unlike Nafisa’s, his sympathy was not patronizing. He took me to places I had never been. One afternoon, as I followed him through the arches of Ibn Tulun Mosque, I asked him, “Uncle Taleb?”
“Yes.”
“What did my mother die of?”
He stopped and looked at me in that way again but said nothing.
Late one night, he on the bed, I on the floor, the room as black as a well and filling up with the smell of whiskey, Taleb suddenly spoke.
“Some things are hard to swallow,” he said.
I recalled a dog in our street that had choked on a chicken bone. It wheezed and coughed and then eventually lay on its side and surrendered, blinking at me.
“You must know, regardless of anything, about her great humanity,” he said, the word utterly new to me. I repeated it in my mind—humanity, humanity—so that I could look it up later. “She never ceased to be tender with Naima, who was innocent, of course. Ultimately, everyone is innocent, including your father.”
After a long silence, just when I suspected he had fallen asleep, Taleb spoke again.
“You have no idea what he was back home. It’s difficult, looking at him now, to believe that he is the same person and that the world is the same world. And he wanted someone to inherit it all.”
The following day Taleb, Hydar, and Nafisa flew back to Paris. And although Naima changed the bedsheets, I could still smell Taleb’s head on my pillow. I asked Naima to replace it.
“Why?” she said, and pressed the pillow against her face. “It’s perfectly clean.” ♦
