Samia Serageldin – The Cairo House (страница 5)

The cook stood in the doorway to the kitchen, dramatically baring his scarred chest and declaiming that he had been with my parents since they first set up house and that he owed them the flesh on his shoulders. I assumed he was referring to the terrible accident in which he had incurred the burn scars on his chest. He had been trying to light the gas stove before the Feast the year before when the stove caught fire and he was wrapped in flames. Papa had ventured into the blaze to turn off the gas, taking the risk that the entire cylinder would blow up in his face. The cook was rushed to the hospital, where, despite the severity of his condition, his eventual recovery was assured. Mama had been very sorry for him at the time and only much later made the remark that the fire probably started because the cook was so lazy about keeping the stove clean from grease.

‘What I need for you to do,’ Mama was saying that morning as she sat on a stool in the pantry, ‘is to find a suffragi-cook for me, someone who doesn’t need a kitchen boy, a marmiton, to help him. Of course I don’t expect him to cook very well. It doesn’t matter as long as he will settle for the salary I mentioned and won’t mind doing some housework on the side. Help with the heavy cleaning, that sort of thing.’

The next morning, when the cook arrived, Mama went into the kitchen.

‘Did you find someone?’ she asked.

‘I found you a cook who will be happy with the salary, doesn’t need a marmiton, will peel the vegetables himself and will even mop the kitchen floor!’ the cook concluded triumphantly.

‘Well, where is he?’

‘You’re looking at him!’ The cook beamed, slapping his chest.

But Mama was just as stubborn as the cook, and adamantly refused the sacrifice. Eventually a ‘passe-partout’ was found. Dinners were no longer served the usual way, with the head-suffragi bringing around each dish in turn to your left and serving you himself. Meals were served ‘family style’ instead: the dishes were all placed on the table at once, and we passed them around and helped ourselves. I, for one, was pleased: it always looked so much cosier in American movies and on television when I watched families sit down to dinner.

Madame Hélène stayed. She would not consider looking for another position, at her age.

Later that week four men in dark suits came to the house, clutching pens and clipboards. They were solemn and almost apologetic as they dispersed through every room of the house, making careful notes on every piece of furniture, every object, every bibelot. They even went into my room and counted my dolls. At the end of their tour they handed Mama a copy of the inventory they had made. When they left, one of them drove off with one of the two family cars. They also took the revolver that Papa kept to take on his trips to the estate, in case of highwaymen on the road.

Mama looked at the list and then at Papa. She started to laugh. ‘Just look what they’ve written down. They have no idea what anything is, or what value to put on anything. We could sell any of the carpets or any of the vases, and replace them with fakes, and they’d never know the difference.’ Then she looked at me and changed the subject.

At the end of the month, when the servants had to be paid, Mama’s younger brother Hani came to pick her up. She wore sunglasses and she was biting her lip as she slipped a bank passbook into her handbag.

‘I wish you didn’t have to go through this.’ Papa put his hand on her shoulder as he saw them off at the door.

‘It’s all right, really. There’s just a chance – it’s such a small account, they might have overlooked it.’

I went up to my bedroom and cornered Madame Hélène, who was writing a letter to ‘le petit Luc.’

‘Why is Uncle Hani taking Mama to the bank? Why not Papa?’

‘Because he would be recognized. All the family’s bank accounts are frozen, and your mother’s as well, because she’s married to your Papa. All the family keep their accounts at the Banque du Caire. But Maman has one small savings account that she’s had since she was a minor, in a little bank, I don’t know its name. And of course the account’s in her maiden name. So perhaps the sequestration authorities don’t know about it. Madame is going with your uncle to try to cash it. Let’s hope the bank would not have instructions to freeze the account, and that they would not realize who she was married to.’ Madame Hélène shook her head and sighed. ‘Who would have believed all this? It’s like what happened to us during the war, my husband and I. I never thought I would hear that word “sequestration” again.’ She sighed. ‘Now please don’t tell Madame I told you all this, she said you were not to be allowed to worry about these things.’

Mama and her brother came back an hour later. She looked at Papa and shook her head. Before Uncle Hani left, Mama handed him a small, velvet jewelry box.

‘It’s platinum and pearl, I don’t know what it’s worth, but see what you can do. All my valuable things were in the bank vault. I had taken out all my best pieces for the Bindari’s wedding last month, if only I hadn’t been in such a hurry to put them back in the vault…’

‘What’s that you’re giving Uncle Hani?’ I asked.

‘One of my bracelets, the clasp is broken, it needs to be taken to the jeweler’s to be fixed. Kiss your uncle and run upstairs now, darling, I think Madame Hélène is calling you.’

Later that night I looked for my parents to kiss them goodnight. Mama’s bedroom was dark but the French doors were open and I heard their voices coming from the verandah. Before I reached them the word ‘divorce’ made me stop in my tracks and hold my breath.

‘I mean it,’ my father was saying. ‘You heard Nasser’s speech. If I were to divorce you right away you could keep your property. But if you stay married to me, you lose everything. It’s not fair to you. Most of my brothers are married to their cousins, their wives would be subject to the sequestration decrees anyway in their own right. But you wouldn’t be. Nabil and Zakariah’s wives wouldn’t either, but they have no money of their own. But you do. No one would blame you if you asked for a divorce, it would be understood that you were doing it for the child’s sake. I would be the first to defend you if anyone said a word against you.’

‘Don’t let’s discuss this. There’s no point.’

‘I want you to think seriously about this before it’s too late. You didn’t marry me for love. You married me because I was one of the most eligible bachelors in Egypt. Things have changed.’

‘You know my answer, once and for all. Promise me you won’t bring this up again?’

I crept back to my room.

When school started in the fall, there was a lot of whispering among the other girls, cut short when I approached. The nuns patted me on the head for no special reason and murmured ‘la pauvre petite.’

My birthday fell on a weekend early in December, and nothing seemed different about the preparations that year. It was only as an adult that I realized what a sacrifice this appearance of normality must have represented. As usual I handed out an invitation to every one of the twenty-two girls in my class, no R.S.V.P. requested. Every girl in class had always come to my birthday teas. Mama and Madame Hélène put together twenty-two bags of party favors. After lunch I wasn’t allowed into the dining-room while they festooned it with balloons and streamers and set the table with an organdy tablecloth. At three the deliveries arrived: Mama had ordered the decorated birthday cake, the gâteaux and the petits fours from Simmond’s in Zamalek. At three-thirty I put on a velvet dress with a lace collar hand-made by Madame Hélène, and a little gold locket that was Mama’s present. It was one of hers that I’d always liked.

At four o’clock I waited for the doorbell to start ringing. By four-thirty only one girl had arrived, Aleya Bindari, who was a distant cousin. At five o’clock, looking stricken, Mama suggested we go ahead with the birthday party. She said she had heard that there was a case of measles going around the school and the other girls must either have come down with it or have stayed away for fear of getting exposed to it. I pretended to believe her, then and forever.

At school the following week only one of my classmates apologized. ‘I wanted to come, but my parents said I couldn’t, because it wasn’t safe to associate – you know, because of the sequestration.’ I nodded, although I didn’t really know what sequestration meant, nor, I suspected, did she.

One day the Arabic teacher, the only male instructor, came into class and announced that a new subject had been added to the curriculum by the Ministry of Education. It was called Arab Socialism and was mandatory. It would be one of only three subjects taught in Arabic, the other two being the language itself and Religion for the Muslim pupils.

The Arabic teacher taught all three. During the break between Arabic class and Religion class, while the half dozen Coptic girls filed out for Bible study with one of the nuns, he could be heard noisily performing his prayer ablutions in the washroom next door to my classroom. He gargled and spat, and cleared his nose and throat copiously. When he walked back into class, the girls would giggle and make faces.