5

“It’s a hard climb up the backstairs, but reaching the top has a flavor all its own.”—Zeinab Mahalawi

“Are you happy now, Zeinab?”

I clapped like a child even though I was almost twenty. I kissed his hand. I was so grateful I could have cried. He wasn’t going to send me back to Mahalla Marhoum after all. He’d forgiven me and allowed me to stay in Cairo, but on the condition I swore to obey him blindly, no questions asked. I lifted my eyes toward his, but I was too afraid to ask “Now what?” I didn’t want to risk another expulsion from paradise. As far as I knew, Abbas had no job or form of steady income that would keep us in this lap of luxury for much longer. What would happen when his savings—wherever they came from—ran out? He stared at me with a stony face, waiting for me to speak. Then his mouth cracked into a grin, as though he had read my worries on the surface of my eyes. “Come on, ask,” he said, adding a gentle nudge.

“What are we going to live on after the money runs out, Abbas?”

He gave me a confident smile and said, “It’s never going to run out. In fact, it’s going to grow and multiply . . . like rabbits!”

He roared with laughter, but I kept my face serious as I folded my leg beneath my bum, propped my elbow on my knee and my chin on the palm of my hand, and gave him a look that said, “Go on.” His eyes narrowed at the way I sat, like the women back in the village. He snatched up a cigarette and lit it, and said nothing. I felt my stomach knot. Now he really is going to send me back to the village, I thought. I snapped my foot down to the floor and sat primly, the way he’d taught me. It was Eve who got Adam expelled from Paradise, but with Abbas it was the opposite. He would boot me out if I committed the same offenses again. He had tried to call my attention to them gently at first, but there must have come a point where he felt he had to threaten to send me back to the village if I couldn’t adjust to the ways of the city. He’d only made that threat one time, but Abbas only threatens once. After that, he carries out his threat and worse.

My mind flashed back to an incident back in the village. I’ll never forget it. One day he learned that his partner at the carpentry shop had harassed our middle sister, Afaf, on her way to the fields. Abbas warned the guy that if he ever did that again he’d throw him into the irrigation canal. So the guy did it again just to defy my brother. Abbas had a dark scowl on his face when he came home that day. I watched from behind the oven as he coiled up a long cord and hid it beneath his shirt. Then I followed him out to the northern field and ducked down among the crops. He hid behind a large tree and waited. Before long, the guy came trotting along on his sturdy mule, cracking a short cane on its back whenever it tried to bolt, and reaching up to adjust his skullcap. Abbas let the guy pass. Then he pounced from behind, threw the guy to the ground, and tied him up with the cord. From between the plant stalks I could see my brother using a length of the cord to affix a large rock to the young man’s back. Then he dumped him into the canal next to the field and walked away as cool as a cucumber. I shot up and ran all the way home. My whole body trembled until the next morning. I couldn’t sleep for days. Not long afterward, my mother told us they found the young man’s bloated body floating in the canal: “Abbas was there with a bunch of other villagers when they pulled the body out and read the Fatiha over his soul. He took part in the funeral procession, too.” She fell silent for a moment, then said, “Poor Abbas. He’s had rotten luck his whole life. Whenever he partners up with somebody for some business or other, disaster strikes or the guy dies.”

I jumped despite myself when I felt Abbas’s hand on mine. He gave it a gentle tug to pull me to my feet. I stared nervously into his eyes as I wrestled with that old puzzle: what really made him so angry back then? Was it the arguments he had with that dead partner or was it the offense to our sister’s honor and mine? He gave me a pat on the head, as though to brush away my concerns, and pointed to
my bedroom.

“Go get changed. We’re going to Monsieur Edmond.”

Given the threat of expulsion hanging over my head, I followed M. Edmond’s instructions to the letter. His establishment was in Zamalek, in an elegant ground-floor apartment in a large new building that was five stories tall. The door was open when we arrived. We passed one room after another. All the doors had been removed so I could catch glimpses inside. In one I saw women dancing in front of other women, who watched them closely while a limp-wristed man swayed back and forth to the rhythm, calling out words in a foreign language. In another, I caught sight of some men bowing stiffly and strutting like roosters in front of other men who remained seated. Some of those imitated women so well I nearly gasped out loud. I was so amazed by everything I couldn’t even blink. Suddenly I found a very tall and elegant man in front of me. He made a deep and respectful bow and said, “Mademoiselle Zizi, come this way please.”

The name “Zizi” had a ring to it that brought a smile to my face. I followed the man, encouraged by a wink from Abbas, who lit a cigarette and stepped back into a corner, while keeping his eye on one of the dancers. He must have known M. Edmond for a long time. M. Edmond turned me over to a young man about my age who spoke Arabic in a way that made me want double over with laughter and who flapped his arms and swung his hips like Badia Masabni’s dancing girls. He taught me how to walk, how to sit, what to say and when to say it, and when to keep my mouth shut. He also taught me how to eat with a knife and fork, which I just couldn’t manage to hold in the right way.

“Mademoiselle Zizi! Please do not speak with your mouth full!”

That was M. Edmond, who wagged his long finger at me and shot a reproachful look at my teacher as he removed the knife from my right hand.

I still had no idea what mission Abbas had in mind for me. He always told me to be prepared, but he never told me for what. Still, I was happy to be learning a lot of words in French, which Abbas said was important. He always threw in soundalike words from Italian, as if that would help. When M. Edmond asked me to “répétez” after him, I would répétez with the greatest confidence. But Edmond had his own views on my progress. After ten lessons he told Abbas that there was no need for me to speak French in public. Then he leaned closer to Abbas’s ear and said, “Actually, it would be better if she spoke as little as possible, in general.”

I heard that, despite his lowered voice, and I hated him from then on. Actually, I hadn’t taken to him from the start. His voice made my skin crawl. It was as greasy as a lump of raw fat floating in cold soup. Of course, I kept such thoughts to myself.

The moment Abbas had been waiting for came on a warm winter day. I’d been lazing on the couch in our Imbaba apartment when he came prancing into the room in a full three-piece suit and a white broad-rimmed hat, and holding a fat cigar. I sprang to a sitting position. He looked so different. He’d sprouted a small pointed goatee and had darkened his hair with henna, but dyed the hair at his temples to make it look like he’d grayed prematurely. He gave me a wink, then put on a large pair of sunglasses that hid his eyes completely and went off to Cicurel’s department store downtown to discuss “a matter of extreme importance” with the director.

When he got back, I listened spellbound as he related what happened. After he was ushered into the director’s office and offered a seat, he explained his business. Looking the director straight in the face, he extracted several bills from his wallet and said, “Please take this. It’s a hundred pounds—the down payment M. Cicurel paid me. But first, sir, I would be grateful if you could give me the original work order.”

I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud—which Abbas disapproved of—as I pictured the reactions of the department store director. We were out on the balcony of our top-floor apartment overlooking the Nile in Imbaba. Abbas put his fat cigar in his breast pocket and took a Cortelli from his slender silver cigarette case and lit it. He took out another and handed it to me.

“You have to learn to smoke without your eyes watering.”

“But I can’t, Abbas.”

“All you got to do is hold it between your fingers. Take a puff or two at most and then toss it away.”

Abbas continued his story over a couple of cups of coffee, smoke wafting around us. The director was reluctant to accept the hundred pounds from Abbas because he’d been unable to find the original work order. He phoned Mme Paula Cicurel to explain that, shortly before his death, her husband had engaged a construction contractor called Abbas Mahalawi to renovate the villa in Zamalek, and had given him a sizeable down payment for the work. He told her, “Monsieur Mahalawi is with me here in the office at this moment. He wants to return the down payment after having learned of the tragic incident that befell your late husband. But he needs the document he’d signed in order to do that.”

Abbas placed one leg over the other and flicked his cigarette over the ledge while staring absently in the direction of Zamalek.

“Madame Paula, God bless her, must have rifled through her husband’s papers seven times over looking for that work order.”

“Did you get it?”

He laughed aloud and said, “Of course not!”

I clasped my hand over my heart and asked, “Are you going to give her the money back?”

“Of course not!”

My mouth dropped open, then shut again. I just couldn’t make head nor tails of this.

“But how the hell are you going to sort out this muck-up?” I said as I slapped my cheeks, lamenting whatever fix he was in over that huge sum of money.

He winced and shook his head sadly, and scolded me for speaking with my hands and in such a crude way.

“You’re hopeless. From now on, zip your lips. I don’t want to hear a peep out of you apart from ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘As you wish.’ Got it?”

I nodded, too afraid to speak.

“I said, ‘Got it?’”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, barely above a whisper. “But tell me, please. What do you plan to do?”

His face relaxed into a smile as he swung his arm proudly in the direction of the opposite bank and said, “Ta-dah!” He pointed toward a large villa that stood out from the others with its tall palm tree in the middle of its garden. Then he carefully took a folded piece of paper from his wallet and flourished it like a magician with the ace of spades.

“This paper here is our key into that villa over there!”

The next day he went to Zamalek to call on Mme Paula, Solomon Cicurel’s widow. I know no more than what he told me afterward, which wasn’t much. Basically, she asked him to carry out the contract between him and her late husband, which involved painting the interior from top to bottom, restoring some items of furniture, and renovating the facade. She also got him to throw in, free of charge, refurbishing the large main gallery of the downtown department store. At one point she suggested that the down payment her husband had paid Abbas seemed rather excessive for the work required. As Abbas related, he played the simple, kindhearted man ever willing to oblige.

“I would never ask for a piaster more, Madame Paula. Monsieur Cicurel—may God rest his soul—was always so generous with us.”

The widow seemed surprised at this. “Did you know my husband well?”

“He practically raised me since I was a kid. My dad and my granddad used to help him in the warehouses in Tanta. He did so much for us.”

And so Abbas managed to get his first foothold in the Cicurel villa. For many weeks, he oversaw a team of workers he hired from a part of Imbaba called Ezbet al-Saayada. It wasn’t too far from where we lived. Abbas told me it got its name because so many Upper Egyptians—“Saayada”—settled there after finding jobs as construction workers in Zamalek, which was booming at the time. Then, a couple of months later, he decided to take me to Zamalek with him. Not that he gave me any advance notice, as always.

He had a hansom cab waiting for us in front of our building. We headed north and crossed the Imbaba bridge, then drove south along the east bank of the Nile until we reached the Abulela bridge. After crossing into Zamalek, we turned right and kept going until Abbas suddenly signaled the driver to stop. The horse-and-buggy ride had been so soothing that my anxieties evaporated, which was probably what my brother had planned. We stopped in front of a large, stately building in the middle of a large garden. There was a sign next to the gateway that I couldn’t make out because it was written in a foreign language. I asked Abbas whether this was a museum like the Egyptian Museum we passed so often in Ismailiya Square. He smiled and pointed to the sign in Arabic written on the other post of the gateway: “Villa of Mahmoud Amr Pasha.” The gate was slightly ajar. An elegant lady was getting out of a large white car. She was in a pistachio-colored dress and a hat to match. I stood there admiring her for a second and then started toward the villa. Abbas gently took me by the elbow to hold me back, and smiled.

“Not this one, Zeinab. Hold your horses. We’re almost there.”

Why did Abbas stop the carriage so soon and make us walk the rest of the way? Maybe he didn’t want the driver to know where we were going. He never trusted anyone.

I was struck breathless by Cicurel’s widow when I first saw her. She had to be at least twenty years older than I was. I don’t think I was mistaken, because my mother had taught me how to read a woman’s age by the circles in her lower neck. Each circle stands for another ten years after twenty. But amazingly, Mme Paula was slender, her face was fresh and youthful, her shoulder-length hair was as smooth as silk, and her face, with its soft ivory complexion, was radiant. The heels of her feet were smooth, without a single crack, and she had shapely legs, which she must have been conscious of because her dress was cut quite a bit above her knees. Her eyes were as blue as the sky. I suddenly found myself wishing I had a daughter as beautiful as her.

Mme Paula welcomed Abbas fondly. The affection between them would have been obvious to a blind man. She greeted me with a simple nod, while she let her hand rest in Abbas’s for longer than necessary for a handshake. He was smooth and charming, his voice intimate and pitched deeper than usual, and he sat at the edge of his chair, leaning his whole body in her direction. They left me standing next to a column in the middle of the large reception room until my feet began to ache in my new shoes. I propped my back against the column and kept myself entertained by watching the scene from there. Paula looked completely taken by Abbas, especially when he sprinkled in some Italian. Her wide eyes seemed to devour him like a widow whose bed had grown cold. And why not? A young handsome man many years her junior—surely she wouldn’t let this opportunity slip through her fingers. But suddenly she turned to business. They spoke about her late husband and her ideas for modernizing the store. As they went on and on, I had to take off my shoes, flex my toes, move my feet in circles a few times. I cleared my throat to attract Abbas’s attention. He whispered something to her, in French this time. I picked up the word “femme,” having heard it so many times at M. Edmond’s etiquette school. She turned toward me and gave me a long scrutinizing look, the way a woman inspects herself and her clothes in front of a mirror. She picked up a little brass bell and rang it. A Nubian servant appeared wearing a red caftan with broad golden stripes, and a short crimson tarboosh on his head. Mme Paula told him to take me to the “office” and offer me some tea and sweets.

I tucked my shoes under my arm, ignoring the glare I got from Abbas—my feet just couldn’t bear it anymore—and trudged after the servant, though not without some curiosity to see the rest of the villa. The “office” turned out to be a large room with a table, a few chairs, a big refrigerator, and a large sink. The servant told me it was an “antechamber” to the kitchen, which was reserved for cooking only. Two blond girls came over to introduce themselves. One was called Helga. I forget the name of the other one. I stood up to greet them, thinking they were Mme Paula’s daughters. I’d started to sweat so much that my dress clung to my back. The servant told me they were maids, one Swiss, the other Greek. I stared after them as they went to tend to their business and nearly wept as I compared them, with their grace and beauty, to me.

For the next hour and a half or so, I did nothing but chat with Bashir, as the servant was called. He was a sullen sort, but he made me a cup of fancy tea that had a fragrance unlike any I’d ever smelled before. He served it to me with a large slice of cake. Somehow the fool had gotten it into his head that I was going to enter into service in that house. He started to go on about Mme Paula’s nature and her daily routine, wagging a warning finger at me from time to time as he explained her waking and sleeping times, the kinds of food she preferred or did not, the types of society people she entertained, and so on. I fought my anger at his presumption and feigned interest. All these secret tidbits might be of use to Abbas in his battle to conquer the heart of the beautiful widow. Still, I couldn’t suppress the urge to upbraid that guy. When he set the teapot before me, I pointed my finger at him, arched my eyebrows coolly, and said, “Fetch me some milk.”

As I sipped my tea, I pondered my brother’s predicament. Poor Abbas. How could he bring himself to marry a woman almost as old as his mother, even if she were rich and beautiful?

“Would you like a brief tour of the villa?” I looked up to find Bashir waiting for me to set down my cup and stand up. We climbed a flight of stairs to see the eight rooms on the second story. There was one that Bashir passed quickly without opening the door. When curiosity got the better of me and I tried the door handle, his face tensed and grew more sullen. “That’s Monsieur Cicurel’s bedroom. After he died, Madame Paula locked it up and moved to another bedroom.”

“Why? Is this where he died?”

“It’s where he was murdered . . . may God rest his soul.”

I snatched my hand from the door handle and muttered a prayer to ward off the devil. There’s something spooky about this villa, I thought, and a queasy feeling crept into my stomach. Just before this, we’d passed a large portrait of M. Cicurel in the corridor. I pictured that face, with its round wire-rimmed glasses and the straight black hair combed back from the forehead, lying dead on the floor, blood oozing out of a big gash in his head after it had been smashed in with an axe. I hastened to catch up with Bashir, who had started down the stairs to the ground floor.

From there, Bashir steered me toward another stairway, which we descended. We came to a halt in front of a door, but he merely pointed at it and said that it was the door to the basement, which he would clean himself. Again propelled by my curiosity, my hand reached to the handle, which turned smoothly. I slipped inside, leaving the servant staring with his mouth open at my audacity. By the time he caught up with me, I’d gone at least two yards into a space as big as a cotton field. Right in the middle of the place there was a large wooden desk, and behind that stood an obese man wearing bright red suspenders on top of a white shirt. He had a tan complexion, frizzy hair, and an ugly face in the center of which was a wide, bulbous nose. He was holding a pile of files in both hands and had frozen midway between transferring them from the desk to a nearby bookshelf as he turned to me with a bewildered stare. The servant started to upbraid me, but the man held up his hand, then dismissed him with a nod toward the door. After carefully arranging the files on the shelves, he turned back to me with a questioning look. I was too confused to speak or even move. He began to circle around me with a faint smile on his face. He looked about my age, but projected a presence that made him seem much older. Perhaps the reason I was afraid to speak was that I thought he was Mme Paula’s new husband and I was picturing how Abbas, who was in love with her, would be taken by surprise by this big bear of a man. What would happen if that man discovered Abbas’s real reason for being here? There’d be blood for sure. The two of them would fight to the death like the two cocks in my mother’s cage back in Mahalla Marhoum.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

It was easy enough to pick up from the way he looked at my legs and waist, and the huskiness that had crept into his voice, that he was interested in me as a woman. But before I could summon the courage to speak, Mme Paula and Abbas came in. The servant must have told them about my impudence. I looked down in order to avoid my brother’s reproachful glare. However, contrary to my expectations, his voice sounded friendly, which encouraged me to look up. He smiled as Mme Paula introduced the man.

“Hassanein al-Masri, our financial director. He was very close to Monsieur Cicurel. He helps me with everything. He’s been abroad and just returned two days ago.”

It was obvious the two men had never met before. My brother shook his hand warmly, despite the fat man’s scowl, and kept his broad smile glued to his face as Paula introduced him.

“And this is Monsieur Abbas Mahalawi, a building contractor and a friend of our dear Solomon. My husband had engaged him to do some renovations to the villa. He started the work three months ago. I’d like the two of you to coordinate with each other, Hassanein.”

“But we never found the work order, Madame.” Hassanein kept his resentful gaze fixed on Abbas’s face. “And it’s quite a sum of money. Also, the villa doesn’t need all that—”

“I’ve given my assent, Hassanein. The work’s already begun, and Monsieur Abbas isn’t going to ask for more money.”

I could sense my brother’s triumph, maybe less because of what Paula said than how she said it. With such enthusiasm and affection. Hassanein looked down in total submission. I started to relax, but I remained still, hands folded in front of me expectantly. It was Abbas’s turn to introduce me to Mme Paula and that fat man who’d had his eyes glued on me until she came in—glued on my legs, to be exact. I was afraid to walk, which would reveal my limp, but the corners of my mouth were preparing to smile. I’d already begun to feel enough bashfulness to make my cheeks flush and set my body tingling. This was the first time I’d experienced the admiring gaze of a man in Cairo, even if it came from one as ugly as Hassanein.

I caught Abbas’s eye, but he ignored me and continued to discuss business matters with Hassanein. At first I thought that he could have put that stuff off in order to introduce me. But then I realized he was trying to draw the guy out. He’d ask Hassanein questions about the layout of the basement. But Hassanein seemed set on excluding this part of the house from the renovation work. Pointing to the shelves he’d been arranging when I burst in on him, he said, “We can’t move out all these files and papers right now.” Abbas had moved to a basement wall to inspect it. He bent his ear toward it and hit it a few times with the palm of his hand, then said, “I’m afraid groundwater’s begun to seep into the foundations. We’ll have to have this checked out.” Hassanein gave Paula a long and meaningful look, though I couldn’t make out what the meaning was. Suddenly, Paula came over to me, patted me on the shoulder, and told him, “Let me introduce you to Zeinab. She’s a gift from Monsieur Abbas, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. He made a special trip to Tanta to fetch her when he learned that I needed an Egyptian girl to help me around the house and keep me company!”

I wished that the ground would open and swallow me up right then and there. My blood rushed to my head so fast that the room began to spin. To this day I can’t recall how I left the villa and made it back to Imbaba. But I do know that I was determined never to set foot in Zamalek again, and to take the first train back to Mahalla Marhoum.