The Map of Love (15 page)

I loved my mother, and I lived with her for twenty-two years, but it seems to me now that I only ever saw her dimly or in part. I wish I had listened more carefully. I wish she had left me something; a letter, perhaps, written on a quiet evening, when I was out and she was alone. A letter that I would read when I was older, and more able to understand.

It was later, much later, when the need to return was upon me and I yearned for the great, cool hall of our house in Tawasi, for the smell of the fields and the black, starry night of the countryside before the High Dam brought electricity to the villages — when I yearned for Cairo, for Abu el-
Eia bridge, for the feel of the dust gritty under my fingers as I trailed my hand along the iron railing, for the smell of salted fish that met you as you drew near to Fasakhani Abu el-
Ela, for the sight of fruit piled high in symmetrical pyramids outside a greengrocer’s shop and the twist of the brown paper bag in which you carry the fruit home, when I yearned even for the khamaseen winds that make you cover your face against the dust and with bowed head hurry quickly home — it was only then that I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return?

My mother died. Just as I finished university, she died. And I went abroad.

And then came back to piece together what I could of the Cairo where I had grown up. A flyover squats over Abu el-’Ela bridge and renders it obsolete. They’re even thinking of selling it for scrap. The greengrocers still pile the fruit high but mostly they give it to you in a thin blue plastic bag and they don’t throw in an extra piece On top of the sale’. But the salt-fish shop is still there, and the old banyan tree in Zamalek still stands, although it is so beleaguered by concrete that I cannot see where its coming tendrils can take root. I had sold the
house in Hilmiyya many years before and a great concrete car park had risen in its place.

I said to Isabel, ‘Come on then, let’s see if we can find bits of my Cairo for you.’

In the afternoon we went to the Mu
allaqah. We listened to a guide tell a group of schoolchildren about Noah’s Ark and Noah’s family. The pillars supporting the pulpit, he said, are for the Disciples. They are in pairs because Christ sent them out to preach the Word in pairs. And the black pillar in the middle is because the Word came to save black and white alike. Judas Iscariot has made way for political correctness. We sat in the quiet pews and walked round the chapels and tried, once again, to get the Virgin’s eyes to follow us. At the baptismal font Isabel stopped. ‘Look,’ she said. I looked where she pointed: a series of wavy lines.

‘Water,’ I said.

‘The hieroglyph for water,’ she said. We looked at each other in delight: another layer.

In the early evening we walked the length of Shari’ al-Mu
izz; we ate sandwiches of clotted cream and honey off the stall by the Mosque of Sultan Qalawun. We sat in the small goldsmith’s shop and watched him mend and polish a pair of earrings that had sat in their box on my dressing table for two years. We crossed Shari
al-Azhar and plunged into the Ghuriyya and beyond to the Khiyamiyya and bought a small green and blue tapestry and were treated to tea. We walked down Shari
Muhammad
Ali and looked in the shop windows at the lutes and tambourines inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and we followed the sounds of drums and zagharid till we came upon a wedding and we joined in the clapping and the singing and the eating and had our photograph taken and the earrings made a good present for the bride, who even now must be in bed with her new husband.

They say this is the hottest month of the year, but the heat has never bothered me. I lie in my bed with the ceiling fan whirring lazily above my head and when the sheet underneath
me gets hot I have the pleasure of stretching out my leg and feeling a new, cool patch under my skin. When the children come — I mean when the boys come, or one of them — we could go to the Red Sea. The days will be hot but the nights will be wonderful. We could even go down to Tawasi for a few days, then drive across from there. I did that once, with their father a long, long time ago. A time so happy that later, in my Spartan years, I came to view it almost with distaste as though its sweetness were excessive.

I did not sleep well and this morning I woke at eleven and wandered out into the living room into a day that felt heavy with indolence. I drew the shutters and sat on the arm of the sofa watching the minuscule flecks of dust suspended in each bar of sunshine that drifted through the wooden slats.

It was early afternoon when I went back to my table and opened my grandmother’s and Anna’s journals once again, and it was as I settled my son’s bronze cat on the corner of the page that the intercom went and Tahiyya’s voice warned me that
Am Abu el-Ma
ati was here and could she bring him up?

And there is the familiar figure in his ‘best’ galabiyya of dark blue wool and his grey scarf despite the July heat. The white
imma is wound tightly around the close-fitting brown felt cap and the eyes — a legacy from a Turkish seigneur somewhere down the years — are as shocking blue and bright as ever. He stands leaning on his old, thick stick, a little stooped, but still tall and solid. You expect him to open his mouth and utter prophecies. When I shake his hand it is like holding the bark of a tree. Behind him, Tahiyya is bringing the covered baskets out of the lift one by one.