Cairo Stories Page 6

  Her mother was visiting his and had brought her along. He was in his room playing with his collection of small cars. At the sight of the little girl being ushered into his room, he grudgingly abandoned his cars, making no bones about showing his annoyance at having to stop his imaginary races. Then – and of this he must have a memory, since their mothers were no longer in the room (unless his imagination filled in the blank) – to provoke the little girl he was expected to play with, he suggested that they throw his cars – one by one – out of the window. And she, without hesitating, grabbed a car, rushed to the window and threw it. He had no choice but to do the same. One car after the next went cascading down the building from his parents’ seventh-floor apartment, landing on Hag Ibrahim’s newspaper stand. Not a single one of his much-cherished cars was spared. All of a sudden, his mother barged into the room, shrieking, ‘Pierre, what on earth is happening? Hag Ibrahim is at the door with your cars in a paper bag. He’s furious. He says that you’ve been throwing them out of the window. Apparently, you’ve been at it for the last ten minutes! What’s the matter? Are you out of your mind? You come with me at once and apologise to the poor man!’ And Nadia’s mother, now also in the room, told her daughter, ‘There will be no more playing this afternoon. You come into the living-room.’

  They became best friends after that episode. Until four years later, when Nadia’s parents decided to leave the country, not a week went by without his spending some time with Nadia, even though he went to a boys’ school (an English school; his father’s choice) and she to an all-girls’ school run by nuns. They exchanged books (mostly Tintins and children’s detective stories), played marbles, cards, snakes and ladders, draughts and monopoly. They went rollerskating together and swimming too, at the club. They even enrolled in a tap-dancing class together. And they talked. They both liked to talk. That they each had other friends (he strictly boys, and she strictly girls) did not seem to pose a problem. Every single birthday party of his, he put her name first on his guest list. When the time came for him to blow out the candles, she would sit by his side. At her birthday parties, he was the first to arrive and the last to leave.

  ‘Turn off the lights, turn off the lights!’ people screamed in the streets as he and Nadia ran inside the apartment and ducked into one corner of her parents’ living-room, playing at pretending to be afraid (they later confessed to one another that they were actually afraid). They had been standing on the balcony when the sirens started blowing and the people screaming. It was 1956, the days of the ‘vile and cowardly’ triple aggression when sand was piled up high in front of buildings and people painted their windows dark blue.

  ‘I wish my mother wasn’t English,’ Nadia whispered in his ear.

  He whispered back, ‘I wish mine wasn’t French.’

  They burst out laughing. Then, he whispered in her ear, ‘I wish I were Hag Ibrahim’s son,’ which made her look at him with what he felt was boundless admiration. Two seven-year-old children huddled in a little dark corner, half-excited, half-afraid. When the air-raid warning was over they were almost disappointed.

  Curiously, he could not remember his feelings when he heard that she would be leaving to live in England, though he remembered, very clearly, the goodbye party his parents had organised for her parents. Except for him and Nadia, there were only adults at the party, much of which he and she spent in his room, looking at his stamp collection. She too collected stamps but, of the two of them, he was the more serious collector.

  They talked little that night. That was unprecedented. When it was time for them to say goodbye, and they were standing by the door, next to their parents, he did not know quite what to do – whether to hug her or shake her hand. His mother prodded him, saying to him, ‘Come on, Pierre, give Nadia a kiss. You won’t get to see each other for some time.’

  The mothers hugged and kissed many times. The fathers slapped each other on the back. He gave Nadia a quick kiss and immediately proceeded to clown around, bowing and chanting ‘Goodbye Madam, Goodbye Sir,’ both in French and in English.

  ‘You’ll become pen pals,’ her mother said.

  They were ten years old; they did not become pen pals. At Christmas time, when their parents sent each other greetings cards, they usually wrote one another some insignificant line, at the bottom of the card, such as, ‘I hope you’re happy at school’; ‘I’m learning to play squash. I’ll teach you how to play when you return for a visit’; ‘I’ll show you London, if you come here.’ But that was all.

  She looked very young for her age – at least in his eyes – when he saw her again in Agami, a beach ten miles away from Alexandria with a few villas scattered here and there and which, twenty-five years later, would become a jungle of buildings. He was used to more mature-looking thirteen-year-old girls. She had come to Egypt to see her grandparents who had taken her to Agami, where he and his parents happened to be spending the summer. They became good friends – not best friends but good friends, with him being a little protective of her. He introduced her to his group – boys and girls buzzing with innocent flirtation. He told her, under the seal of utmost secrecy, that he had his heart set on Nevine – the belle of the group who was, very definitely, a very mature thirteen-year-old girl and wore a black bikini his parents found inappropriate. Upon hearing of his infatuation, Nadia said, ‘She is very pretty,’ without appearing to be envious or jealous.

  One of the group’s favourite games was called ‘tell the truth’. They would all sit in a circle around a bottle which someone would spin. When the bottle stopped spinning, the person towards whom the top was pointing had to answer absolutely truthfully whatever question the rest of the group, by broad consensus, wished to ask. Whatever question! The questions were about love, though the word was hardly ever used. ‘Do you like Nevine?’ ‘How much do you like Aziz?’ ‘Do you prefer Sami to Jimmie?’ Those sorts of questions. Once, the top of the bottle had pointed in Nadia’s direction, and the group decided to ask her: ‘Do you like Egyptian boys or English boys better?’ She blushed and protested, ‘It’s not a fair question,’ which made Pierre feel sheepish for having gone along with the rest of the group.

  Nadia went to Agami a couple of summers in a row, then she stopped going. Then it was 1967 and no one (or hardly anyone) went to Agami that summer, even though the terrible war was over in June. Pierre left secondary school that year and heard from his mother that Nadia had left too and was planning on taking a degree in art history. He would be studying economics, not so much because he wanted to but because his thanawiya marks met the prestigious faculty’s tough entry requirements.

  ‘Guess who is in Egypt?’ his mother announced to him one morning in the summer of 1968. ‘Nadia and her mother. They’re here for the whole summer.’

  This was to be the summer of his falling in love with her. The first time he would fall in love with her. He remembered the moment, that first time around, as if it had just happened. He was at the Ghezireh Sporting Club with a couple of friends, lounging around the swimming pool. Nadia, whom he had seen at his parents’ place a couple of days earlier, was walking towards them when one of his friends remarked, ‘Your English friend looks fabulous in miniskirts. They really suit her.’ She did look wonderful with her jet-black hair contrasting starkly with her fair skin, her blue eyes and willowy build.

  ‘I’m very fond of her,’ he said gruffly to the friend. The message was clear: ‘Don’t touch her.’ His friend understood.

  It was probably the happiest summer of his life as she fell in love with him too. In fact, she told him that she had always been in love with him. When she returned to England, they wrote to each other constantly. She began spending every holiday in Egypt.

  His parents were disconcerted by the turn of events. They approved of the relationship, but its intensity took them by surprise. They didn’t quite know how to handle it. His mother told him that they were both awfully young to be getting so serious. While neither he nor Nadia talked of marriage, he
thought of her as his forever.

  They were both in their third year at university when her letters became less frequent. There was a casualness about her tone and an evasiveness that made him fear the worst: she was falling in love with someone else. He was right. In an awkwardly worded letter, she eventually admitted, in so many words, to having been briefly attracted to a student in one of her classes, but assured him that nothing had happened, that it had been an aberration and that it would never happen again. Never, never, never! She didn’t know what had possessed her to even look at this young man. Pierre forgave her as best as he could.

  When they saw each other, after the school year ended, loving her was no longer as easy as it had been. They quarrelled often. He began eyeing other girls. Just eyeing though. Was he doing it to spite her? Probably, as well as to protect himself, for what if she was to really stop loving him?

  ‘From the most beautiful city in the world to the most beautiful girl in the world,’ he wrote to her unimaginatively on an unimaginative card that showed lovers ambling along the Seine, the day he set foot in Paris to do a PhD in economics at Paris Dauphine. They were grown up now. Both were twenty-three years old. She had just accepted a job at the Tate.

  At the beginning his move to Paris invigorated their relationship. They were free to spend weekends together and treat her studio apartment in London and his room in Paris as theirs jointly. ‘Let’s get married,’ he said on a day he felt particularly in love with her, which made her laugh. ‘But we already are in a way! Aren’t we?’

  Then what happened? He didn’t remember the precise sequence of events. Paris was a heady thing for a young man who had lived all his life in Cairo. The cafés, the talk, the girls – in sum, all that Paris is known for. He didn’t exactly cheat on her, but he was certainly taken by the whole ambience. She gradually lost the feeling of being central to his life. In those days, when she visited him in Paris, she wanted time alone with him, and yet he dragged her from party to party, from one students’ meeting to the next.

  News of her infidelity passed on by a not-so-well-meaning friend of theirs hit him in the stomach. Years and years after it had happened the mere thought of it still upset him. Confronted, she admitted the affair and fired back that, in any case, there was hardly any room for her in his life now. She said that he had in effect pushed her into the arms of that other man: she could talk with him, while they hardly talked any more. And when they did talk, they only talked about his life and his Paris.

  ‘I never want to see you again,’ he declared after they had exhausted themselves arguing. And, as if that was not enough, he added something he hadn’t thought of saying – the words just came out – ‘You’ll never know happiness with another man.’ She ignored his remark and pleaded with him not to disappear from her life altogether. She said, ‘I need you. I need to know that you’ll always be there for me, that I’ll always be there for you. You can love whoever you want to love, whoever – I’m sure that part of you has been wanting to be free – but let’s not sever all our ties. Let’s keep something.’

  He severed all their ties. Later, much later, though he understood what had made him say the awful things he had said – he had felt enormously betrayed – he was ashamed of himself for having said them.

  Of course he fell in love again, after Nadia. He was young. It was the mid-seventies and Paris was full of attractive women. But never quite in the same way. After her, he would always keep a part of himself in reserve, however taken he was by a woman. Even with Eva.

  Nadia he totally cut out of his life. As he had told her he would.

  Three years after they had broken up, his mother told him that Nadia was about to get married to an Englishman. He sent her a card, saying, ‘So you do prefer English boys to Egyptian boys, after all! I wish you much happiness. I do!’ Did he though? To think of her still hurt him.

  He got married a year or so after she did. To Eva, who was vibrant, smart, outgoing and pretty. Like him, she was an economist, and took her work very seriously. He liked that aspect of Eva’s character. He also liked her calm and composed demeanour, her rational approach to life. But it was not a marriage of reason, nor a retaliatory marriage. He did fall in love with Eva. And he was very happy in his marriage at the beginning, then a bit less happy, but happy enough.

  ‘Nadia’s father died. It was very sudden,’ his mother informed him over the phone. That would have been around ten years after Nadia had got married. They were both in their late thirties. They both had children. His mother suggested, ‘We’re going to London to attend the funeral. I think it would be a nice gesture for you to come along. You were very close after all, and you know how much she loved her father.’

  He agreed to go to the funeral with his parents, who were by now also living in Paris. Why had he agreed to go? Out of curiosity? Because he and Eva were having a bit of a rough patch? In any event, that was how Nadia re-entered his life. And they were back, more or less, at square one. They fell in love again. His first extramarital affair. Her first too, so she told him. He chose to believe her. The affair lasted a little over two years. It caused them, caused Eva, caused Nadia’s husband a lot of pain. On a quick trip to Cairo – a trip down memory lane, which neither Eva nor Nadia’s husband knew anything about (he was supposed to be on a business trip in Syria and Nadia in Italy), they made up their minds that the affair must end, for neither one of them was prepared to break up their marriage. Despite all the love they said they felt for each other, they were not prepared to take a big gamble and dismantle the lives they had. Of course, the children – his and hers – were a big part of the decision, but it seemed to him, at the time, that they both feared botching it up again, as they had when they were younger.

  Back in Paris, he turned over a new leaf, and threw himself more and more into his work. His marriage survived. He did his best to make it up to Eva, who had the heart and the sagacity not make him pay for the affair.

  Years passed. He received the occasional Christmas or birthday card from Nadia but sent her none. Sometimes his mother would mention her. Once, he saw her with her husband at a big party in Paris attended by many ex-Cairenes, including some common friends of theirs. His heart sank slightly at the sight of her by her husband’s side. Though she still looked charming, she had aged more than he would have expected, in the few years since their affair. She had lost weight and had become almost too thin. Her face was a bit drawn. Her cheekbones – one of her most attractive features – had become too pronounced. He introduced her to Eva: she introduced him to her husband, Peter. Everybody behaved with the utmost courtesy. The four of them were now solidly middle-aged, in their mid- to late forties.

  Three to four years after that party his mother died. Accompanied by her mother, Nadia attended the funeral. It was a low point in his life. He was very attached to his mother. Her death left him feeling very alone. To have discovered, shortly before she died, that, for years and years, she had had an affair with a family friend – something he had never suspected – made him realise that he did not know her as well as he had thought he did, and that hurt. Nadia’s presence at the funeral was timely. He was feeling the need to talk to her about the past, Egypt, and a whole range of things that suddenly seemed to matter, and which he felt incapable of explaining to Eva.

  So he talked to Nadia. And talked and talked. And the talk led to the resumption of their affair. This time they managed to be discreet about it. Their feelings had lost their earlier turbulence.

  Why they stopped being lovers he couldn’t tell, but they did after a while, and yet they continued to talk and see each other in London or Paris, whenever they could. They became each other’s best friends, as they had been when they were children and, as Nadia had pleaded for when he had said he no longer wanted to see her.

  It was only after they stopped being lovers that Eva found out that he was seeing Nadia. Naturally Eva concluded that they were having an affair. He tried to reassure her, but how could he? He
was not prepared to stop seeing Nadia. Besides, affair or not, theirs was a closeness no spouse would happily tolerate. In the end, Eva seemed to resign herself to Nadia’s presence in his life. She continued to believe that they were having an affair, but she thought that he would eventually tire of it. More so even than when they had been lovers, he, though, could not conceive of a future in which Nadia would play no part.

  * * *

  After an extraordinarily long drive, the cab driver finally stopped in front of the Tavistock Hotel. Pierre had pins and needles in his legs and felt numb inside.

  As he paid him the fare the driver said, ‘I hope your friend’ll be alright.’

  Twenty minutes after he checked in, he went to the hospital. Instead of a cab, he took the tube. It would be faster, he thought. And also thought that he should have gone straight to the hospital. Why didn’t he think of it?

  He arrived at the hospital too late.

  * * *

  ‘But you must go to the funeral,’ Eva told him over the phone when he called her to say he was coming back home. ‘I don’t understand how you can consider not going. I just don’t understand!’

  How could he begin to explain to her that he could not face the funeral without being able to express the extent of his grief? That he couldn’t face shaking Peter’s hand, and saying he was sorry, when he felt that people ought to be telling him – him – they were sorry?

  ‘No, you don’t understand; you can’t,’ he told Eva childishly.

  At first she was silent, then she said, ‘I’m sorry, Pierre; I am.’

  He sobbed his heart out after he had hung up. For all the losses he had experienced, all the sorrows, all the disappointments, all the defeats. The loss of Nadia had come to represent all his losses.

  He forced himself to go to the funeral.

  The next day, instead of returning to Paris, he flew to Cairo. It seemed to him the natural thing to do.