Читать книгу The Cairo House - Samia Serageldin - Страница 8

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 the most candid snapshot always presupposes angles and editing.

You can pick one faded black and white photograph after another, and look at the people in it, so young, so carefree, and wonder how they never saw the storm clouds gathering. There is one particular snapshot I find in a worn leather album of my parents’ wedding pictures, an incongruous photo tucked in the flap. This photograph, in black and white, was taken a couple of years before the Revolution, around 1950. A woman sits between two men at a table in a restaurant, the men in light summer sharkskin suits, holding cigarettes, the woman in a scoop-necked cocktail gown. All three are smiling at the camera.

The broad-shouldered young man with the neat black moustache is my father, Shamel. The slender girl with the dark hair in a French twist is his niece. Her name was Gihan but he always called her Gina. The only time I ever heard him call her by her real name, she ran out of the room and he never saw her again. But this photo was taken before I was born, before my father was married.

The other man in the photo is shorter than my father, wiry, radiating energy. His lanky black hair falls over his forehead and his teeth flash in a smile that etches deep creases in his face. His name was Ali, and he was my father’s best friend, but they had been estranged for years before his death.

Shamel splashed some water over his face and neck and came out of the bathroom. The room was quiet except for the sound of the fan, whirring clockwise in one direction, then counterclockwise back again. Ali Tobia was sprawled in an armchair, propping an open book on his bare, smooth chest. Maurice Baruch was slumped in front of the chess board, his head down on his arm, apparently snoozing. Shamel sat back down opposite him and moved a rook to the right. ‘Your move,’ he touched Maurice’s arm. The other ignored him. He turned to Ali.

‘Want to take over from Maurice? He seems to have fallen asleep.’

‘Leave me alone, will you, I have to study. Some of us need to earn a living, you know.’ Ali was an intern at the Kasr-El-Eini Hospital, not far from Garden City.

Shamel lit another cigarette. May was hotter than usual in Cairo that year. The three young men in the room had taken their shirts off. In the salamlek or ‘bachelors annex’ of the Cairo House, Shamel was free to entertain his friends as he pleased. The older, married brothers of the Seif-el-Islam family lived in the main house, while the unmarried, younger brothers slept in the salamlek, a separate small building a few feet away on the grounds.

Shamel poked Maurice again. ‘Are you going to finish this game or not?’

There was no response. Shamel reached over and shook his friend’s shoulder. Maurice rolled over onto the floor, the chair crashing down with him. Shamel dropped to his knees beside him and Ali leaped out of his armchair.

A few minutes later, Ali sat back on his heels and shook his head. The two men were pouring sweat from their efforts to resuscitate their friend. ‘It’s no use. We’ve tried everything. He must have been already dead when he fell.’

It was about a month later that Shamel stood, hesitating, one foot on the bottom step of the wide, curving marble staircase flanked by a pair of stone griffons. His grandfather had brought the griffons back from Italy, along with the Italian architect he commissioned to build the house. Seif-el-Islam Pasha’s portrait hung in the hall, with his formidable handlebar moustaches, his tarbouche, and the sash and sword of a pasha of the Ottoman Empire.

The grandfather had been the one to make the momentous decision to uproot the clan from their family home on the cotton estates in the Delta and establish them in Cairo. The Egyptian Cotton Exchange in Alexandria was booming. Seif-el-Islam Pasha and his brother-in-law left for Europe with a suitcase full of Egyptian pounds, to which they each had a key; they helped themselves at will as they toured the continent. It was in Italy that the Pasha finally saw the palazzo he would set his heart on. Within three years the family moved into the brand-new mansion in Garden City that came to be known as the Cairo House.

Twenty years later, he sent for his Jesuit-educated son from Paris, married him to an heiress and found him a seat in Parliament. It was time for men like him to lead the nationalist movement against the British and against the Albanian dynasty that ruled Egypt. His son died at fifty, but the old Pasha had the satisfaction of seeing his grandson chairman of the most powerful party in the country.

The wealthy heiress that Seif-el-Islam Pasha had chosen for his son’s bride was an only child; this unusual circumstance was a result of her mother’s gullibility. Her mother had been a beautiful redhead Circassian from one of the Muslim regions of the Russian steppes. The women in her Egyptian husband’s household could barely contain their spite against this lovely and somewhat dim-witted foreigner. When her first child, a girl, was born, they convinced her that, according to local superstition, her daughter would die if the mother subsequently had a male child. The poor woman believed them, and resorted to midwives’ tricks to prevent another pregnancy. Her husband, however, did not immediately take another wife, as the spiteful women had hoped. When he died unexpectedly, his daughter was the only heir to his considerable fortune.

At fifteen she was married off to Seif-el-Islam Pasha’s handsome son, and bore him thirteen children, of whom nine survived. Two babies had died in succession before the youngest, Shamel, was born. She insisted on having him sleep in a small bed in her boudoir until he was eight. That was the year his father died of a heart attack, and his older brothers decided that it was time for him to move into the bachelors annex with them.

Shamel strode up the stairs and stopped briefly in his mother’s bedroom to kiss her hand, as he did every morning. Then he crossed the gallery to his oldest brother’s suite. He knocked, just in case his sister-in-law was still in bed, and went in. There was no one in the bedroom. His sister-in-law must be up already, seeing to the needs of the household, and he could hear the Pasha washing in the bathroom. Shamel referred to his oldest brother, who was eighteen years his senior, by his title, as did most of the family.

The Pasha came out of the bathroom in his satin dressing gown. ‘Good morning,’ he smiled. ‘Well, well, it’s been a while since you joined us for breakfast. Shall I ring for some more tea?’

Shamel glanced at the breakfast tray with the flat, buttery pastry, the white slab of thick clotted cream and the clover-scented honey. It was his favorite breakfast, but he could not muster an appetite. He had lost considerable weight lately. He shook his head.

The Pasha reached for the first cigar of the day and sank into a comfortable club chair. ‘Your sister Zohra was complaining just last night that you haven’t been to visit her in a fortnight. What have you been doing with yourself?’

Shamel suspected that his brother already had a fairly good idea of the answer to that question. Not that the Pasha was in the habit of keeping tabs on his family. But the chief of the Cairo police reported directly to him; as a courtesy he routinely included briefings on the movements of any and all of the cars belonging to the Pasha’s address. Their special single-digit Garden City license plates identified them immediately to the police all over Cairo. Shamel had found this to be a mixed blessing. If he was in a hurry he could park his car almost anywhere without getting a ticket. On the other hand, the police report was not for the Pasha’s eyes only; it was turned over to the ‘Abeddin Palace.

Shamel supposed that the Pasha was aware that, of late, his youngest brother had neglected his familiar haunts and regular nightclub companions; had taken solitary trips to the country; and had spent several hours with an illustrious doctor of theology at the Azhar University.

‘There’s something on your mind.’ The Pasha puffed on his cigar. ‘I’m listening. You’ve not been yourself lately. I know it must have been a shock for you, your friend Maurice dropping dead like that. And so young too, in his twenties.’

‘That’s just it. You never think it could happen to someone your own age. I mean, you live your life, you sow your wild oats, you think you have all the time in the world, to settle down later, to make everything right with Allah and your fellow-man. And then, just like that…You realize that you can run out of time at any moment.’ He shook his head. He was quiet for a minute, then he turned to face his brother. ‘I’ve come to ask for your permission. To get married.’

The Pasha listened, nodding from time to time. If he had an inkling of the nature of Shamel’s revelation, he did not show it. Shamel had learned very early on that his oldest brother could listen to the same piece of information five times from five different people and leave each one of his interlocutors with the impression that he was imparting news.

‘Well, well, so you’ve decided it’s time to settle down. Of course, what a shock, that poor Baruch boy – You know, someone else would have dealt with that very differently. But you were always mature for your age. I think you’re making the right decision. Congratulations.’ The Pasha puffed on his cigar, deep in thought. ‘When I get back from the ministry this evening we must get together with all your brothers and decide about dividing up the inheritance. We always said we’d do it when you came of age. We should have done it five years ago, but there never seemed to be a good time. Now that you’re thinking of getting married, it’s high time.’

The Pasha got up and started to put on the suit that was set out for him on the clotheshorse. He picked out a bow tie and matching silk pocket square. ‘What do you think of the land around the Kafr-el-Kom villages? It’s good cotton land, and there are mango orchards. It’s right next to the land your brother Zakariah has his eye on; the two of you can take turns running both estates.’

He picked up two soft, silver-backed brushes, one in each hand, and brushed his thinning dark hair with both brushes at once. ‘Do you have a particular bride in mind? No? Then I assume you’re leaving that to the women?’

‘As soon as I had settled it with you, I was going to speak to Zohra – and to Dorria too, of course,’ Shamel added, remembering his sister-in-law.

‘Good, good. You couldn’t make them happier if you offered them Solomon’s treasures. It will keep them occupied for months.’ The Pasha clearly relished the thought. ‘I swear there is nothing women enjoy as much as matchmaking.’ He buttoned up his waistcoat and pressed his tarbouche down on his head. ‘There, I’m ready. Let’s go.’

As the Pasha and Shamel opened the door, Om Khalil straightened up from her position at the keyhole. The Cairo House teemed with intrigues, what with its three sets of married brothers, the bachelor brothers, distant relatives and assorted hangers-on. The Pasha sometimes found it more of a challenge to manage the politics of his household than those of his cabinet. The thirty-odd domestics played an indispensable role in the scheme as spies and couriers. So Om Khalil did not bother to disguise or excuse her eavesdropping behind the door. She threw her head back, put her hand to her mouth and released the blood-curdling whoop of rejoicing called a zaghruta. The men groaned. They knew that in a few hours every household of their acquaintance would have been informed that the youngest of the Seif-el-Islam brothers had thrown his hat in the ring.

Shamel drove across the Kasr-el-Aini Bridge, flanked by its British stone lions, and down the Nile Corniche to his older sister Zohra’s villa on the island of Zamalek in the middle of the river at its widest point in Cairo.

‘Is Zohra Hanem home?’ Shamel asked the maid who opened the door. ‘Good, I’ll go up then. And go tell Sitt Gina that if she’s ready in twenty minutes I’ll take her out to dinner.’

There were twenty years between Shamel and his oldest sister Zohra, so that his nieces were only a few years younger than he was. Zohra had four daughters, and each of her three youngest brothers had a favorite niece whom he chaperoned and squired around to restaurants and shows. Shamel’s favorite was the oldest, Gina, not because she was the prettiest – the youngest was considered the beauty – but because she was the most intelligent and spirited.

Shamel found his sister sitting in front of her secretary desk, tallying up the household accounts. When Shamel told her the news she jumped up and hugged him. ‘Have you told anyone yet but the Pasha? Do you have anyone in mind? No? Will you leave it to me and Dorria then, to find you a bride?’

‘All right. But no cousins. There’s too much intermarriage in our family already. You know how I feel about that.’ Zohra herself was married to a cousin on her mother’s side; it had been a difficult marriage. ‘And none of these “modern” girls,’ he added. ‘I’ve known too many of them.’

‘Of course, of course. Leave it to me. These things take time, they have to be handled very delicately.’ Zohra’s eyes gleamed at the prospect. She was already weighing and dismissing various possibilities. ‘Why don’t you go see the girls? You’ve been such a stranger lately, they’ve missed their favorite uncle.’ It was obvious that Zohra could barely contain her impatience to get on the phone.

Shamel headed down the corridor towards his nieces’ rooms. It occurred to him as he caught whiffs of lemon juice and talcum powder, nail polish and hot curling irons, that four daughters in the house was something like a cottage industry. His arrival was greeted with squeals of alarm, cries of welcome and doors being pulled hastily shut. His youngest niece, Mimi, skipped down the corridor towards him. She tossed her chestnut brown plait over her shoulder and offered a plump cheek for a kiss.

‘The bath woman is here today,’ she confided. ‘They’re all getting their legs waxed with sugar wax, then smoothed with pumice stone. I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet. It hurts! Come in here.’ She pulled him by the hand into a small sitting room where a dressmaker was running up a nightgown. ‘Gina’s almost ready.’ She sat him down and perched on the arm of the chair. ‘Why is it always Gina? When are you going to take me out?’ She pouted.

‘When you’re older. And when you stop eating so much Turkish Delight. You’re turning into a piece of Turkish Delight yourself.’ He pinched her chubby pale arm.

‘Gina’s taking so long because her hair takes forever to hold a set,’ Mimi announced spitefully. ‘It’s so floppy she has to set it with beer. But Nazli’s hair is so coarse and curly, she has to straighten it with the curling tongs. She even waxes her forearms. Why –’

‘Mimi! Wait till Mama hears how you’ve been talking!’ Gina came in, smoothing the puffed skirt of her flowered-print silk dress. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Uncle Shamel,’ she gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘Where are we going?’

‘The Romance. I haven’t taken you there yet. They have a new band, all the latest sambas and rhumbas. And Samya Gammal is the featured belly dancer for tonight. She’s back from Europe, she just finished filming a movie with Fernandel.’

Gina looked around the dance floor. The band was playing an animated ‘Mambo Americano, Hey Mambo’. She sighed. One thing her favorite uncle could not do was dance, and of course it was out of the question for her to dance with anyone else. She put down her fork. Her portion of the Chateaubriand steak for two they had ordered was daunting. She put her hand on Shamel’s arm and motioned with her head. ‘That man that just came in – I think he’s trying to catch your eye.’

Shamel looked over across the dance floor.

‘Oh, that’s Ali Tobia. He’s a good friend of mine.’ He waved to Ali, who crossed over to their table. Shamel offered him a seat and introduced him to Gina. They shook hands. It seemed to Shamel that it took Ali a heartbeat too long to muster his easy smile and that Gina turned her attention back to the dance floor a little too self-consciously. It was hard to read young girls, Shamel thought, but his friend was a different story; he knew Ali well enough to sense his momentary loss of composure. At the first opportunity he would mention that Gina was spoken for. It would avoid complications, and in any case it was true enough.

A sudden scurrying and whispering on the part of the staff was followed by an expectant hush. All eyes turned to the door as King Faruk and his retinue made their way to a table by the dance floor. The diners at the other tables stood up and applauded. The three at Shamel’s table clapped perfunctorily. The king lowered his great bulk into his chair, people took their seats and the band resumed playing. Faruk’s head turned slowly toward Shamel’s table; he stared in their direction for a moment, then turned away. Pouli, his Italian valet, whispered something to the maître d’hotel. Faruk would be informed in a minute who was responsible for this public display of disrespect.

‘I think we might as well go somewhere else,’ Shamel suggested, motioning to the waiter for the bill. He handed Ali his car keys. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and take Gina to the car? I’ll follow as soon as I’ve settled the bill.’

Several other tables with young women in their party were following suit. The king had a reputation for forcing unwelcome attentions on any woman who happened to catch his eye. As a preliminary, he would send a bottle of champagne, with his compliments, to the woman’s table. If his overtures were repulsed, disagreeable incidents ensued. Faruk could be dangerous; it was widely believed that he had arranged for the ‘accidental’ death of a young officer, the fiancé of a woman Faruk was currently besotted with.

By the time Shamel joined Gina and Ali in the car, the incident with the king had had the effect of completely dismissing from his mind his earlier misgivings about having introduced them.

That summer, as every summer, there was a mass migration of households to escape the heat of Cairo during the mosquito-infested months of the Nile flood. Those families that were not vacationing in Europe sent the staff ahead to air and clean their summer homes in Alexandria. A few days later the entire household would follow. Shamel shuttled between the seaside and his new duties on the estate in the Delta. Ali Tobia came up from Cairo every weekend that he could get away from hospital assignments.

The days were spent at cabanas on the private beaches. At around ten in the morning the beach boys unlocked the cabanas and set up the parasols and chairs on the sand. By noon the beach would be busy.

‘Fresca! Ritza! Granita! “Life”!’

All day long the vendors walked up and down, hawking tiny honey and nut pastries, raw sea urchins, water ices and magazines in four languages. The waiters from the cafeteria on the pier hurried back and forth in their embroidered caftans, carrying pitchers of frothy yellow-green lemonade the color of the foamy waves that lapped at their feet.

At two o’clock in the afternoon the Corniche was clogged with chauffeur-driven cars bearing full-course hot lunches which would be served on folding tables in the cabanas. Reluctant, brown children were called out of the water by nurses with large towels at the ready. In swimsuits and burnouses, families sat down to lemon sole and sweet sticky mangoes. Lunch invitations were passed along from cabana to cabana.

By sundown the beach boys folded the parasols and pulled the light wooden paddle boards up the sand and stacked them. The beaches were deserted for the night spots.

All through that long, lazy summer the photographers trudged up and down the shore with their pant legs rolled up, their equipment slung over their shoulders, looking for likely prospects. They snapped the photos and came back with a print the next day. Shamel had a photograph with Gina and Ali sitting on either side of him, at a table in the garden of the Beau Rivage hotel at night; wrapped around Gina’s wrist was a string of jasmine blossoms that Ali had bought from a street vendor. Looking at the photograph, later, Shamel wondered how he could have been so blind.

It was late August when the three of them were having dinner on the terrace of the Beau Rivage. There was an end-of-summer air about the folded parasols and the black flags fluttering on the beaches. The strings of lights suspended from the trees swayed in the breeze and Gina drew her wrap around her bare shoulders. Shamel got up to use the washroom.

When he came back to the nearly deserted restaurant, Gina and Ali had their heads together, whispering urgently. She shook her head and turned away. He reached for her hand. She laid her forearm flat on the table between them and turned her palm up. He covered her hand with his and pressed her fingers apart. She closed her eyes.

When they heard Shamel coming they jumped apart. He sat down between them.

‘How long has this been going on?’ He put up a hand. ‘Never mind. I tell you one thing. It stops right here, or else you speak to Gina’s father tonight.’

‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ Ali burst out. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve wanted to ask for her hand from her father, for weeks now. But Gina won’t let me. We were arguing about that again just now.’

‘He doesn’t know Papa,’ she pleaded. ‘You know what he’s like, Uncle Shamel. We don’t stand a chance. Give us some time. Maybe if I can talk Mama around to our side first –’

‘No.’ Shamel had seen enough. He was not going to be responsible for what might happen between them. ‘You talk to your father tonight, Gina. I’ll come with you, I’ll do my best to convince him. But if the answer is no, then that’s that. Ali?’

‘Of course,’ Ali nodded miserably. ‘You have my word. You should know me better than to ask.’

Gina’s father, Makhlouf Pasha, never felt as out of place as he did in his wife Zohra’s boudoir. He was not sure what grated most on his sensibilities: the uncomfortable preciousness of her Louis XVI-style bergères or the feminine froufrou of the chiffon skirt of her dressing table. It reminded him that he lived in a household of women.

A few minutes in his wife’s boudoir were enough to make Makhlouf Pasha long to be on horseback in the country, touring some corner of his land. In the freshness of the dawn he would ride out to the white pigeon towers of the Bani Khidr village, wheel his mare around and whip her into a flat gallop all the way home. They said of Makhlouf Pasha that he rode his peasants as hard as he rode his horses, but he only really felt at home among them. He was proud of not being an absentee landlord, like most of his wife’s citified, Europeanized brothers.

His cousin Zohra had been barely sixteen when he married her, but even then Makhlouf realized that he could never completely cow her. Had she born him a son, she would have been intolerable. But every time she had been pregnant with a boy, she had miscarried in her last term. Allah knew Makhlouf had indulged her every whim during her pregnancies. She could not suffer his presence in the first months: she claimed the sight of his thick, red lips made her ill, it reminded her of raw meat. Baffled and humiliated, he would take off for the country and return after the months of morning sickness were over. But his sons had been still-born. Only the four girls survived.

Allah had not seen fit to give Makhlouf the sons who should bear his name and inherit his land. But his brothers had sons, many of them, and his daughters would marry their cousins. His grandchildren would bear his name, and the land of their great-grandfathers would not be parceled out to the sons of strangers.

Makhlouf Pasha had always made clear his expectations in that respect. So he was astonished and annoyed as he sat in his wife’s boudoir and listened to his young kinsman and brother-in-law, Shamel, intercede on behalf of some fortune-hunting suitor for Gihan.

‘Ali is no fortune-hunter,’ Shamel objected, ‘and you know as well as I do that the Tobia family goes back a long way.’

‘Much good that does them!’ Makhlouf was stung by the hint at his own parvenu status. ‘All I know is that they’ve run through their fortune. Oh, they live well, vacations in Europe every summer and all that. But there won’t be one fedan left for that boy to inherit by the time his father is done selling off their property. And even if he owned half the Sharkia province, I wouldn’t marry a daughter of mine into a family with such “modern” notions. It’s a scandal how his sisters drive their own cars and smoke in public. I ask you!’ He threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘No, Gihan will marry one of her cousins, that was decided a long time ago. Now I’m not an unreasonable man. I’m not imposing my choice on her. My brother Hussein has three boys and Zulfikar has four. She can pick and choose.’

Makhlouf Pasha leaned back and closed his eyes. He stopped listening to Shamel’s arguments and Gihan’s pleading, he ignored Zohra’s interjections. He took a deep breath and tried to control his rising temper. His blood pressure was dangerously high, the doctor had warned him repeatedly not to get worked up. He opened his eyes.

‘Listen. I’ve been very patient, but enough is enough.’ For once even Zohra was silenced. She knew him well enough to know when he could not be budged.

‘Gihan will get engaged to one of her cousins within the month. I don’t want to hear any more about Ali Tobia. If you ever see him again, Gihan, I will disown you.’

A week later Gina was engaged to her uncle Zulfikar’s second eldest son. She did not see Ali Tobia again till Shamel’s wedding.

By the end of summer Shamel had settled on his choice for a bride. The fact that the new fiancee was no kin helped to minimize the inevitable slight to the matchmakers whose candidates were passed over. It was grudgingly admitted that Shamel’s choice was perfectly appropriate in every way, and that she had the best kind of reputation, in other words, none. After lengthy, delicate negotiations and a short engagement period, the wedding was set for an evening in late October.

The double front doors of the Cairo house were flung open, as they had been so many times before, for weddings and funerals. The chandeliers in the hall blazed down on the scores of huge, free-standing flower arrangements sent from all over Cairo and the provinces. At the far corner of the salon, a kosha had been set up, a bower of white flowers where the bride and groom would be enthroned in state for the first part of the evening. The bride had arrived an hour earlier in a limousine followed by a procession of cars, and had emerged, in a pale pink chiffon gown, on her uncle’s arm, to a volley of zaghrutas and clapping. She had been hurried up the stairs to change into her Paris wedding gown with the help of hairdressers and maids of honor. Armand, Cairo’s premier photographer, followed in due course with his assistants, and the bride was photographed standing alone against a sweeping drapery of red satin and ten-foot-tall, bird-of-paradise arrangements in baskets.

Meanwhile downstairs, suffragis in brilliant caftans circulated with trays of jewel-toned nectars and mounds of almond dragées. The guests who had been milling around the two salons now crowded the bottom of the staircase in the hall; the rumor had spread that the bride and groom were about to make an appearance. Everyone prepared for the zaffa, the slow procession down the staircase that was the highlight of an Egyptian wedding. The belly dancers adjusted their sequined sashes, the torchbearers lit their torches, the flower girls picked up their baskets. Under Zohra’s direction, the unmarried girls and boys of the clan lined the steps of the staircase on both sides, holding tall, flickering tapers. Gina took her place with her sisters and cousins at the top of the stairs, one hand shielding the flame of her candle from a sudden breeze.

There was a burst of ear-splitting zaghrutas from the maids at the back of the second floor gallery, drawing everyone’s attention to the top of the stairs. Belly dancers clicking castanets and musicians clashing cymbals and banging drums wound their way slowly down the steps. Then came the flower girls, tossing wafer-thin, gilded coins. The bride and groom finally made their appearance at the top of the landing, the bride in a bare-shouldered gown of creamy satin entirely embroidered with tiny seed pearls, long satin gloves and a diamond pendant at her throat; the tall, beaming groom in a black frock coat. They stood there for a few moments while the guests broke out in applause and the photographers popped their flashbulbs. Then the groom gave the bride his arm and they started slowly down the stairs, one step at a time, stopping every so often to let the maids of honor adjust the long, heavy satin train and the frothy tulle of the veil sweeping behind them. As Gina followed the procession around the curve of the landing, she saw Ali Tobia at the far end of the hall, in a group of young men. She looked away almost as soon as their eyes met.

The zaffa procession made its leisurely way down the stairs and through the hall to the kosha set up at the far corner of the inner salon, and there was a pause while the bridesmaids negotiated the task of drawing the train out of the bride’s way and arranging it in a pool of shimmering satin at her feet. The bridesmaids took turns sitting on little stools at the feet of the bride and groom. Gina discreetly slipped away when it was Ali’s turn to approach the kosha dais and greet the wedding couple. The photographers snapped endless photos and the belly dancers entertained the crowd, as the Pasha beamed and greeted, and Zohra supervised and ordered the wait staff and the photographers about.

Eventually the bride and groom got up from their gilded chairs in the bower of flowers to go upstairs and change for the second part of the evening. Gina followed the bride to one of the suites while the groom’s attendants followed him to another. Half an hour later, the bride made her reappearance in a pale lemon, sleeveless satin gown trimmed with wide black bands of pearl and jet embroidery; she wore long black satin gloves to match and her diamond pendant mounted on a black velvet ribbon around her neck. The groom had changed into a white smoking jacket and black tie. They made their way down the stairs again and headed to the dining room where they cut a ceremonial ribbon to open the grand buffet, and the guests took their places at the tables set out around the dining room and the hall.

The long evening stretched into the early hours of the morning, and the bride and groom got up again to cut the wedding cake. Finally the center of the hall was cleared and a full orchestra of traditional musicians set up their chairs and stands as the guests gathered around. The legendary singer Om Kalthoum, clutching her trademark chiffon handkerchief, belted out song after song in her deep, powerful voice, urged on by cries of ‘Allah’ and ‘Encore.’

When the first light of day broke, the bride and groom went upstairs for the last time, to one last tribute of zaghrutas and applause. The first guest got up to leave, picking up the wedding favor at his place at table, a silver ashtray embossed with the couple’s intertwined initials and filled with pink and white dragées. As the long hours of the wedding wore to a close, as the drawn-out litany of leave-taking took place, the ‘mabruk’ and ‘may your turn be next’ echoing over and over, Gina and Ali breathed a sigh of relief; throughout it all, they had somehow avoided coming face to face.

Two months later Makhlouf Pasha sank into an armchair in his salon, his thick fingers splayed on his beefy thighs, his muddy shoes planted squarely on the rose border of the Aubusson carpet. He had just arrived in Cairo an hour ago, and the servants had scurried because they had not expected the Pasha to be back from the country till evening. Zohra Hanem was out shopping with the three youngest ladies, and Sitt Gihan had gone out on her own a while ago.

The doorbell rang and he heard the voice of his oldest daughter as she greeted the maid. Then she walked through the French doors of the salon, dropping her handbag on the console on the way.

‘Hello, Papa.’

‘Where were you?’ he barked.

She stopped in the middle of the salon. One look at her face brought the blood rushing to Makhlouf’s head. Gihan could never hide anything.

‘Answer me. Where were you? Did you see that Ali Tobia?’

She stood there, not saying a word, head up, eyes down, twisting her gloves. Even as a child, Makhlouf thought, she did not lie or whine when she was accused; she should have been a boy. He felt the blood surge behind his eyes so he could hardly see. How dare she stand there, facing him down! He grasped the arms of his chair and tried to heave his bulk out of it.

‘Papa, be careful!’ Gina instinctively took a step forward, to help him up.

He swung his arm back and lunged at her, swiping blindly at her face as he lost his balance. She screamed and turned, running for the door.

‘Get out!’ He was frothing at the mouth. ‘Don’t ever come back! You’re no longer my daughter!’

She ran out, not stopping to pick up her handbag.

A few hours later, Zohra let Shamel into her husband’s bedroom. ‘No one has been able to go near him,’ she whispered, her eyes red. Shamel patted her hand and closed the door behind him. In the semi-darkness of the room he made out the figure of his brother-in-law lying on the bed, still wearing his muddy shoes.

‘Who is it?’ Makhlouf Pasha growled, lifting the ice pack off his forehead. ‘Oh, it’s you! I should throw you out of my house! It’s all your fault. I trust you with my daughter and you play the Pander between her and that—’

‘I wanted to tell you that Gina –’

‘Don’t ever pronounce that name in my house! I have no daughter by that name.’

‘She only disobeyed you that one time, I swear. And nothing happened. Even after you threw her out and she ran to Ali, he brought her straight to me, he didn’t even let her through his door. The last thing he wants to do is compromise her. Don’t you see that you’re wrong about him? He would marry her this minute, in the dress she’s wearing, but he must have your blessing. He won’t make her choose between him and her family. And he has too much pride to marry her without her father’s permission. The Tobias have their pride too.’

‘By Allah she’ll have nothing from me! Not one feddan after I die and not one piastre while I’m living. She’ll be sorry. No wedding trousseau, no shopping trip to Europe, no furniture, no decorator, no antiques, nothing. Let’s see how long this true love will last.’

‘It won’t make a difference to Gina. If it were any of her sisters, I’d agree with you. But she’s different, things like that don’t matter to her. And I can speak for Ali. All he wants is Gina – but not without your blessing.’

‘Then let him have her! In nothing but the dress she is wearing!’

‘And your blessing –’

‘My blessing, my curses! Now get out before you kill me!’

It was a happy ending, for a while. Gina and Ali set up house in an apartment with simple modern furniture. My parents were newlyweds themselves, and the two couples were inseparable. When I was born, my father named me Gihan.

That year the coup d’état of 1952 changed everything, although no one at the time realized the magnitude of what was happening.

The day came when the bulk of the large estates was confiscated from the landowning families. Mostly the fellahin accepted this momentous change with their usual mixture of resignation and indifference, but there were isolated incidents of violence. When the rumor spread that government agents were on the way to confiscate Makhlouf Pasha’s country house, a mob of peasants besieged the place. Their intention seemed to have been to loot the house before the agents arrived. Makhlouf came out on the terrace and roared at them, and they took a few steps back. But he was suddenly struck by a massive stroke and collapsed, speechless. The fellahin surged forward; some of them were carrying torches and they set fire to the house. Makhlouf and his family were smuggled out in a car, the two youngest girls lying on the floor. Makhlouf never recovered from the effects of the stroke; he remained a paralyzed husk of a man.

Ten years later the selective sequestration decrees targeted certain families, notably the Seif-el-Islams and the Makhloufs. Gina’s sisters, married to their cousins, sold off their jewelry and their furniture, piece by piece, to live from day to day.

Meanwhile Ali’s reputation as a brilliant cardiologist had risen steadily. The waiting rooms at his clinic overflowed and he was increasingly called in for consultations by the most prominent members of the new regime. His success cost him long hours away from home, but he encouraged Gina to go out without him. She was often seen at parties and restaurants, always with a group of close friends from the new elite of doctors and their wives.

One day the rumors started about Gina and the scion of a Lebanese banking family. She did not lie to Ali.

‘You’re my only friend,’ she pleaded, ‘help me.’

He acted like a perfect gentleman: he divorced her on the spot, pronouncing the ritual words ‘I release you,’ three times in quick succession. He told her she could take anything she wanted, as long as she left quickly. She took nothing but photographs of the two children she was leaving behind, Leila and Tamer. There was no question of taking the children with her; they were both of an age when custody would have gone automatically to the father, even if the mother were not the one to ask for divorce, even if she were not leaving the country, even if she were not remarrying.

I remember the day Gina left for Lebanon; she came to our house to say goodbye. I was fourteen at the time. I watched from the balcony as she arrived in the Lebanese playboy’s sports car. He stayed in the car, but I got a glimpse of dark sunglasses and a gold bracelet on his wrist glinting as he tapped his fingers on the side-view mirror.

Gina ran up the stairs and into the living-room where my father was waiting. She came towards him, arms outstretched. ‘You’re the one person I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye!’

‘Goodbye, Gihan,’ he said very quietly.

She stopped dead in her tracks. Then she turned on her heel and ran out of the room and down to her lover waiting in the car.

At the time I misjudged my father’s harshness. I even attributed it to the fact that the man was a Maronite, and that Gina would marry out of her religion. But I realize now that it had nothing to do with it. My father was a romantic. He had believed in their love, his Gina and his best friend. He could not forgive her for disillusioning him.

Many years later, Tante Zohra was to tell me that for Gina it always had to be the grand passion. She was one of those women who need to feel in love, the way an addict craves an elusive state of euphoria. She could not bear to see her romance with Ali succumb to routine and neglect; she could not bear to be taken for granted. She looked for the immediacy, the missing thrill, the passion, in the eyes and the arms of another.

Today I can try to understand the fugue for which Gina was condemned without appeal by everyone she knew. But what I remember thinking at the time was that I could never bear to disillusion my father that way. Did Gina give a thought that day to the adolescent girl watching from the corner? Do we ever realize, when we take a plunge, that the ripples we create can spread as far as the distant shore? But there was no way anyone could have imagined then that Gina’s story would lie like a palimpsest under mine, long after it had faded from memory.

As for Gina, Papa never saw her again. A few years later the civil war broke out in Lebanon; it must have been particularly hard for her, a Muslim married to a Maronite.

But he did see Ali again. A year after Gina left him Ali remarried, a younger woman with ties to the new regime. He became President Nasser’s personal physician. So it was hard to believe when Dr Ali Tobia came to visit my father one night. It had been years, even before his divorce from Gina, that he had not come to our house. Few people who had anything to lose risked association with the families that Nasser had designated as ‘enemies of the people’. It was no secret that the intelligence agent at the door took note of every visitor, that the telephone was tapped and the servants were spies. Even in the privacy of our own bedrooms, between parent and child, we still whispered. That Nasser’s personal physician would risk calling on my father was unthinkable.

Yet one summer night, there was Ali Tobia. He looked tired, the creases in the craggy face were deeper, but his smile was unchanged. He chucked me under the chin as if I were still seven rather than seventeen. Then he and my father went out to the verandah to talk in private. I remember seeing the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark for over an hour.

Only after Ali’s death did I learn from my father why he had come that night. He needed to confide in someone he could trust. He was convinced that Nasser was paranoid, clinically paranoid, and increasingly irrational and dangerous. A few months later Ali Tobia died overnight of an unexplained illness. It was generally believed that Nasser had his physician poisoned for spreading rumors about him.