Samia Serageldin – The Cairo House (страница 6)
The new course, Arab Socialism, seemed to focus on identifying ‘the enemies of the people’, and the Arabic teacher took evident satisfaction in teaching it. He drilled us in the triumvirate of evil: ‘Imperialism, Feudalism and Capitalism.’ Whenever he reiterated the words: ‘landowners,’ or ‘capitalists’, he looked at me and at Aleya Bindari, who sat one row behind me.
I showed the textbook to my parents, with its illustrations of peasants being whipped by cruel landowners. ‘Now they’re poisoning the minds of children!’ Papa erupted.
Mama quickly put a warning hand on his arm.
‘You’ll only confuse Gigi that way. And if she starts to repeat things at school…She’s too young to carry that kind of burden.’ She put an arm around me. ‘One day you’ll understand all this. Things aren’t going to stay like this forever. You’ll see. Just don’t worry about it now.’
One morning in November when I woke up, I looked at the alarm clock and realized that I had been allowed to oversleep, I was late for school. Madame Hélène was sighing in her armchair, her boiled-egg eyes reddened. I ran to find my mother. Mama was on the phone in her bedroom, whispering urgently, a hand over her eyes. I opened the door that led, through my mother’s boudoir, into Papa’s bedroom. It was empty and the suitcase under the bed was gone.
In an otherwise forgettable essay on glamor, I read the phrase ‘our parents are our earliest celebrities’, and I suppose that’s true. In my own case, the recollection of my early years is colored by more than the rose-tinted glasses of childhood. I realize now that it is the easy life, the freedom from petty problems and concerns, that imparts the glamor of optimism and generosity.
I think what I regret most from ‘the good old days’ is the loss of lifestyle of the open house, of the easy welcome to guests at any time of day, on any day of the week. Merely to ask a drop-in guest if he would be staying for dinner rather than to assume, indeed to importune, him to do so, would have been considered irredeemably tactless. The cuisine and the etiquette may have been more or less cosmopolitan, but the spirit of hospitality was as uncompromisingly Egyptian as that of the country people with whom we shared our roots.
It’s true that the easy welcome of the open house was made casual and effortless by the swarm of domestics hovering in the background. But it’s just as true that the back door was always as wide open as the front. No beggar off the streets was turned away without a meal or a handout. Anyone with the most tenuous claim, whether of kinship or former service, could be sure of a regular stipend or a place to spend the night.
The nether regions of the house: the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the kitchen balcony, the maid’s room and the all-purpose ‘holding-room’, were a domain into which I trespassed cautiously. At any time of day, but especially at mealtimes, I never knew whom I might stumble upon: the doorkeeper’s third cousin come up from the country, my aunt’s wet nurse, the seamstress who did alterations and ran up the servants’ clothes, the laundryman who did the ironing, the shoeshine man.
It’s also true that, long after the front door was closed, the back door stayed open. And that the last luxuries we clung to were pride, and the good name of the family.
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.