Desiring Cairo

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abu Sa’id, his kindness. I wondered that he had sent Hakim alone, without getting in touch.

Hakim was looking into his thick dark coffee, twiddling his spoon and making an irritating little clinking sound. He looked about ten, like when I’d first met him. He lifted only his ambiguous eyes to answer my question.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘I will tell you, but now I cannot tell you. For now I need just your trust.’

Oh?

I looked.

‘I will stay just for one week,’ he said.

‘In London?’ I asked, but I knew what he meant.

‘In your house. Please? Then all will just become clear in the fullness of time.’

I was sad that he had sensed unwelcome from me, though I knew I was giving it off. I was ashamed. You cannot be unwelcoming to an Arab. There is something so wrong about it. What churls we are, we English, with our privacy and our territory and our cold cold hearts. In Egypt when men speak to you on the streets what they say is ‘Welcome’. There are signs in the streets of Hakim’s home town saying ‘Smile you are in Luxor’. Yes I know it’s for the tourists but even so. When I think of the kindness, the generosity, the hospitality of people I knew – and hardly knew – in Egypt, let alone of Hakim’s father … Shame.

‘You must stay as long as you need,’ I said, and I meant it.

THREE (#ulink_1f61c985-8dbe-566f-a7d3-dbaeeb0c6b73)

Talking about Gary Cooper (#ulink_1f61c985-8dbe-566f-a7d3-dbaeeb0c6b73)

The sitting room is also the kitchen, and I wasn’t putting him in there, so I had the choice: put him in Lily’s room, in which case she would be in with me, and probably in my bed; or put him in my study, in which case I would have to get a job because I certainly wouldn’t be doing any work at home. I don’t want a job. I don’t want Lily back in my bed, I’ve only just got her out of it.

I put him in Lily’s room. She was narked at the idea, initially. Wouldn’t you be? Finish your first day at big school, and what do you find but your normally very territory-protective mother has moved a man into your bedroom. I told her about him as we walked back from school. She was on ‘Mummy there’s a guinea pig can we have a guinea pig please please can we have a guinea pig’ and I took the opportunity to mention the new living creature that we already had.

‘I don’t want a man, I want a guinea pig!’

‘He’s more a boy than a man,’ I said, hoping to endear him to her. ‘And he’s quite like a guinea pig. He has lovely silky hair.’

‘A boy? You said a man.’

I still hadn’t decided quite which I thought him. A boy, of course, would be easier. I could mother him.

‘How old is he?’ she wanted to know.

‘I think he’s about nineteen.’

‘That’s a grown-up,’ she said, disappointedly.

‘Wait till you see him.’

‘Is he going to live with us?’

‘Just for a little while,’ I said.

‘Will he be my daddy?’

The way they come at you. Out of nowhere. She doesn’t mention daddies for months on end and then, matter-of-fact as you like, something like that.

‘No honey, he won’t.’

‘But daddies are the men that live with children.’

‘Not only, love. Some daddies live with children and some don’t, and some men that live with children are daddies and some aren’t, but Hakim isn’t in our family, no – he’s just coming to stay, like Brigid’s boys do, and Caitlin. Just for a bit.’

‘But we don’t know him.’

‘I know him, love.’ Sort of. ‘I knew him in Egypt before you were born.’

‘Mummy you’re very clever.’

‘Oh good. Why?’

‘You know so many things I don’t know.’

My heart filled with joy at her sweet absurdity. Such are the everyday pleasantries of my life.

*

She started coughing the moment she walked through the door.

‘Lily, hon, this is Hakim, Hakim, this is Lily.’

She took one look at him and then she started to curl. Curled her face into my stomach, her arms around my waist, her feet around her legs, her mouth into a simper, her eyelashes into a flutter. Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it. The last one was cousin Max, on my father’s side: six foot one of teenage Liverpudlian love-god, with long yellow hair and a playful disposition. He gave her a piggyback and she just went around saying ‘Max Max Max’ for a week.

‘Hello, Lily,’ said Hakim encouragingly.