The Map of Love (27 page)

12 July 1997
I cannot wait to get back into the Sinai, back into Anna’s world and away from my own. Cairo is full of talk of the ‘Cult of Satan’ — which will eventually boil down to a group of young men and women in black T-shirts listening to heavy metal in the spooky halls of the Baron Empain’s derelict palace in Heliopolis. The fallaheen riot and the police put them down. The readers’ letters in
al-Ahram
are noisy with arguments for and against the new land laws. I have made some telephone calls, reactivated old friendships, found Tareq
Atiyya, the son of my father’s friend, and gone to see him at his office in a tall marble and black glass building in Muhandeseen. A pretty secretary shows me in and for a moment I think the man behind the desk is
Atiyya Bey, my father’s friend. Then he stands to greet me and takes my hands.

‘Amal! You haven’t changed at all.’

We sit in soft leather armchairs and exchange news: our families, our children, what we have been doing over the past twenty years. We speak as we always have: Arabic, inlaid with French and English phrases. He tells me he imports linings for the huge concrete pipes that carry oil across the desert and owns one hotel in Marsa Matruh and another in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Sinai. He plans to be the first to bring mobile phones into Egypt.

‘You have to come to our house,’ he says. ‘My wife and the
girls are in
Agami over the summer but in September we’ll throw a dinner party for you.’

‘And you spend the summer here?’ I ask. ‘In Cairo?’

‘I go to them Thursday evening and come back Sunday morning. The road is nothing: two and a half hours.’

‘The problem is getting out of Cairo,’ I say.

‘Next year,’ he says, ‘the road connecting Muhandeseen to the Desert Road will be finished and it’ll be much quicker.’

He has changed. I do not remember him as a particularly good-looking youth, but this is definitely a handsome man. He is tall and broad-shouldered in the beige linen jacket. His dark hair is cut short. His brown eyes are quick. And he is so confident, so easy.

‘I need to ask your advice,’ I say. I tell him about the school and the health unit.

‘It’s not a problem,’ he says. ‘I’ll speak to the governor of Minya.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. Now, if you like.’ He walks to the desk and picks up the phone. He asks his secretary to check whether Muhyi Bey is in Cairo. When she rings back it is to say that he is in Cairo but will not be contactable until after three. Tareq looks at his watch.

‘It’s one o’clock. Let me take you out to lunch.’

At a corner table of Rive Gauche we order Mediterranean prawns and salads and start to reminisce over those school holidays so long ago when we played together in Tawasi, the university days when we spent time together at the club.

‘Then you went abroad and vanished,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I fell in love and got married.’

‘Is your husband with you here? Let me take you both out to dinner.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘no, he’s not. He’s in England.’ That is all I say. Then I say, ‘Have you been down to Minya recently?’

And he tells me how he had bought out the fallaheen he didn’t want long ago, how he had modernised the farm and kept on only the people who could keep pace with what he
wanted to do. ‘It makes a reasonable profit,’ he says. ‘Not like business, of course, but it’s history and roots. And it can probably be made to give more. I’m going to bring in a good Israeli team to redesign the infrastructure. We’ll see what they’ll do.’

‘A what team?’ I say.

‘An Israeli team,’ he says. ‘To revamp the whole place —’

I stop eating. ‘But how can you do that? How can you bring Israelis into your land?’

‘They’ve got the technology,’ he says, ‘and the experience. You look shocked.’

‘I
am
shocked. I’m amazed. After all these years, all these wars — and what about the Palestinian cause?’

‘The Palestinians are doing business with the Israelis.’

‘But Tareq, how can you do it? Don’t you know that’s what they want? To get into Egypt. To get into the whole area —’

‘You know, I think you’ve been away too long. You sound like you’re still in the Seventies. Things have moved on.’

‘But they
can’t
move on. They
shouldn’t
move on. Not while they want power over the whole region.’

‘It’s up to us not to give them power. If I hire a few Israelis on my land, transfer their technology — how does that give them power? I’m transferring their power to me. You think it would be better to hold on to our old methods and pretend they don’t exist? That’s hiding our head in the sand. These old ideologies are no good any more. Everything is determined by economics.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything.’

‘I thought you were a patriot,’ I say bitterly. ‘We went out on demonstrations —’

‘I am a patriot. I do more for my country by strengthening its economy than I would by sitting in a rut and hoping things will take the course I want somehow.’

We fall silent and then I say, ‘What you are saying offends me. Hurts me, even …’

He smiles at me, with all the warmth of our old friendship. ‘You’re being emotional. But this isn’t an emotional issue. It’s a practical one.’

‘It’s done,’ he says, back in the office, putting the phone down. ‘The unit will be reopened next week. The school can open if the teachers are approved. You’ll need a list of their names, and once they’re vetted, the school will open.’

Isabel, of course, can’t see why the fallaheen should mind giving a list of names to the authorities. ‘They won’t be doing anything wrong,’ she says. ‘They’re volunteering to man the school.’

I try to explain: centuries of lists being used to tax people, to take their sons away to dig canals or till the Khedive’s land or be killed in wars; centuries of distrust, broken only briefly by what the fallaheen now call ‘the good time’: the time of
Abd el-Nasser. She looks quizzical and I try to steer our conversation to where it’s safer, where I feel more comfortable: to the past. It’s not difficult.

‘I want to see Sharif Basha’s house,’ she says. ‘The one in the story — I mean the one in the journals. Is it still there?’

‘Yes. It’s a museum now,’ I say. ‘You can go whenever you like.’

‘I’d like to visit it with you,’ she says.

And so we go. Along the river, then eastwards into lanes broad enough for a carriage to roll through, but strangled now by the cars parked on either side. A lane opens on to a clearing and the house stands before us: three storeys of mellow cream stone broken here and there by the dark brown of the mashrabiyyas. To the western side is the extension with the small green dome. A group of women in black galabiyyas sit outside it with their children.

We pass through the massive doorway of the old house. Out of the bustle and noise and heat of the city, we enter into the cool, hushed, ordered space and once again the feel and smell of the past wraps itself round me — even though the
house is stripped to a shell and the guide who insists on taking us round tells us proudly that it has been used as a film set for an Agatha Christie movie. But we see the storeroom where Anna spent her first hours, the haramlek drawing room with the two divans where she and Layla slept and woke to a new friendship, the courtyard where she played with the one-year-old child who was to be my father. We see too the room hidden under the floorboards of the main bedroom where Sharif Basha’s father must have taken refuge after the failure of the revolution. When things calmed down he found he could not live under the Occupation, but he could not fight against it, and he would not go abroad. He moved into the shrine of Sheikh Haroun attached to the house and there he spent the last thirty years of his life. We found the door to the shrine chained and padlocked. When I asked if we could go through, the guide laughed.

‘No, no, ya Sett Hanim, it’s become a proper mosque now and you can’t get to it from the house. The door is outside, on the street.’ He said that when the house was turned into a museum, a waqf had come into place for the upkeep of the mosque and the support of one sheikh to live there.

As we leave, Isabel asks if she can go back with a camera.

‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ he says. ‘But there’s a charge of five pounds.’

The house has cast its spell on us and we walk around the district, reluctant to leave. The women have gone and the door to the small mosque is closed. Behind it rises the great old mosque in whose shadow the house was built back in the seventeenth century. To the left, where the gardens would have been, small houses, shops and lanes have grown over the last thirty years. But in a clearing with a small kiosk we find a group of trees, dusty now and uncared-for. We stand under them. We touch and name them. There is a jacaranda with a few loose blue pyramids of flower, a sarw and a handsome poinciana, a magnolia with no flowers, a zanzalacht and a sifsafa. We sit on two upturned crates by the kiosk, sipping
Pepsi-Cola, and Isabel tells me she’s going back to the States in August.

‘I need to see him. And I want to see my mother. You know, there’s so much I want to ask her and now it’s probably too late. Even the biggest things in our lives we never really talked about —’

‘Did she ever talk about her grandmother, about Anna?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’ Isabel plays with a twig, tracing triangles in the dust. ‘She used to say Anna had set a pattern for the women of our family: they would all marry foreign men and live far from home.’ She glances up at me. ‘My mother married an American. Her mother, Nur, married a Frenchman. I married someone from my country, from the States — but then I left him. And do you know, my mother was not even surprised.’

When Isabel decided to leave Irving for no reason other than that the days had grown grey and the nights greyer, she arranged to meet Jasmine to break the news to her. They met in the Metropolitan, for her mother liked the museum and Isabel wanted the setting, at least, to be on her side. Over steaming corn chowder, in response to the unsuspecting ‘And how is Irving?’, Isabel said ‘We’re getting divorced’, and was taken aback when her mother merely nodded. Jasmine patted her mouth with her napkin and said, ‘You’ll both get over it, I guess.’