14

“He didn’t realize that I’d become a suffix: the ‘less’ after ‘love.’”—Nadia

He admired my composure, loved my submissiveness, relished his power over me, offered a compliment in passing, and was insensitive to my torment. Yet I felt safe with him. Was I starting to love him, or just getting used to him? When I told him I was afraid to be left alone, that’s what he did. He left me alone to embrace that fear, and I embraced it so tightly that I grew afraid to let it go.

I’d become a painting in a gilded frame, my luster dulling from being left on the walls of Major Murad’s cold feelings. I was there for only three years, but they felt like three centuries. Time added craquelure with a generous hand. My body began to sag from lounging at the club and from the hours spent chatting and gossiping with my friends or at the homes of my aunt’s acquaintances.

The age gap between me and Murad hit me as soon as we arrived in Ras al-Bar for our honeymoon. He imagined that every man we passed eyed me with lecherous intent. He had such a boorish way of reacting that he turned my life into hell. He locked me in his cage of jealousy and fed me gifts through the bars: jewelry, some cash to splurge on shopping, a wild night at a disco on the weekends. When he got the urge for sex, he’d climb into my bed and finish in a few minutes. He gave no thought to how I felt, to helping me feel pleasure or giving me time to satisfy my urges. He always switched off the lights, leaving me with no memories to give me some gratification afterward. When he finished, he buried his head between my breasts until he caught his breath.

Murad was a strange, untamable beast. He had an insatiable hunger for everything around him. He was unrelentingly ferocious toward anyone who thought of encroaching on his territory and his money and property, which were growing rapidly. I came somewhere toward the bottom of his priorities.

Five days after we arrived in Ras al-Bar, we received a telegram from my aunt asking how I was doing. That meant: how did my first night go? She also hoped to hear from me soon, which meant: call immediately. It was a long conversation, which she concluded with the news that “they” had “dispensed with the services” of my father. What that meant was that my father had suddenly been fired from the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism—the committee formed to document and administer sequestered properties. She didn’t have to spell it out. I knew what was expected of me.

Murad was sitting on the veranda of our large wooden cottage that looked directly onto the beach. With tear-filled eyes, I pleaded, “Why do this to my father, Murad? We’re married now.”

With a smug smile, he said, “Yes, we’re married. But not thanks to him. He pretended to agree to the marriage. Then he started to whine like a woman and complain about me. He thought he could scare me off. Instead, I helped him to early retirement.”

I was galled by the way he spoke about my father. I kicked the side table where he’d laid his cigarettes and ashtray. The rattle also shook him, a bit. I ran into the house in tears, but as I was about to throw myself onto my bed I sensed him right behind me. I switched direction, raced to the window, and jumped out before he could grab me.

I ran for a bit, then stopped in a lane between some reed beach huts and a row of romantic wooden cottages belonging to the Cecil Hotel. I turned this way and that, wondering which way to go. This was where Egypt’s upper crust spent their summers. They formed a powerful barricade against his wrath. Murad’s public image was of paramount importance to him. He couldn’t bear to see it marred by the tiniest scratch or speck of dirt.

He approached slowly, with a crafty grin on his face. He lit a cigarette, exhaled, and, keeping his voice low, he asked me to come back to the cottage where we could talk about this calmly. He didn’t say what “this” was or offer a hint of apology. There was nothing reassuring in the set of his jaws and that rigid smile. I refused to budge. He remained calm but determined, repeating his request in a soft voice. Eventually I caved in to his polite persistence. But the moment I walked through the front door, he pushed me from behind with both hands, and then locked the door and window. At first I thought he was going to hit me. Instead, he took me by force. I was too afraid to resist. With total single-mindedness, he threw me on the bed, forced my legs apart with his thighs, violently tore off my underwear, and buried his head in my neck and between my breasts. When, after a couple of minutes, he’d finished, he climbed out of the bed and went to the bathroom. The sound of the water gushing over his body was as deafening as always. I detested myself.

I knew almost nothing about Murad’s work. He rarely spoke about it, and when he did he was always vague. Maybe he did work for an important security agency, as he liked to hint, leaving the rest to my imagination. Or maybe he was a temporary supervisor of the sequestration committees, as I’d read in Al-Ahram once. But then, in the few family gatherings he attended, he let it drop that he was on temporary assignment at the office of the Minister of Defense. The “temporary” lasted a long time.

Later that day, in Ras al-Bar, he started to talk about the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism for which my father had worked as an agent. From the way he spoke, it was clear that Murad wanted to convey the message that Abbas Mahalawi was a mere civilian employee under Major Kashef’s command. We were on the terrace of our cottage, where he like to spend sunsets working his way through the bottles of ice-cold beer nestled amid chunks of ice in a large metal bucket, with me there to keep him company, for which purpose he taught me how to drink beer. He began to relate stories about how, before the revolution, the rich had thrived on plundering Egypt’s wealth, which they used to buy gold ingots, diamonds, and jewels, and to build villas and palaces, after which they transferred all their money abroad. I was amazed but, at the same time, on guard in case he was preparing to speak offensively about my family again. But he didn’t bring them up at all. He was more intent on vaunting his heroic achievements in the battle to recover all that purloined wealth. The boasting must have soothed him, because all of a sudden, with no prompting on my part, he made a short phone call to his office to tell them to reinstate my father. When he hung up, he smiled at me as though to say “problem solved!”

When we returned to Cairo, I told my aunt how rudely and harshly Murad treated me. I couldn’t bring myself to speak about what happened in bed. I parried her persistent questions with an enigmatic smile and feigned coyness.

She looked away and grumbled, “There was a time when you admired him. Or have you forgotten? Praise the Lord that he satisfies you in every way.”

Naturally, my aunt blamed me for my marital difficulties. Whenever I complained to her about how he treated me, she called me a nitwit and a failure because I couldn’t understand my husband. “You’re slower than a lummox pulling an ox,” she commented sarcastically one day.

Long before I got married, she used to carp at me: “You got to kill the man inside you.” She’d say this at my resistance to spending hours on end window-shopping downtown and wandering up and down department-store aisles. She disapproved of the fact that I was a quick dresser. It would take me less than five minutes to get ready to meet my friends, often skipping the makeup. She would hold me back and make me spend more time in front of the mirror. Standing behind me with a critical eye, she’d impart advice: apply more rouge, don’t pin your hair up, let the neckline down a tad, bring the hem up. . . . From her endless storehouse of sayings, she’d add: “A man’s brain is in his eyes, dummy,” “If you’re pretty in his eyes, he’ll be putty in your hands,” and “The wife who dolls up gets her man home before sundown.”

These pieces of wisdom created a barrier between us and shut her ears to all my complaints about Murad during the first year of my marriage. I couldn’t bring myself to share my troubles with my father. He’d already suffered enough humiliation when they suddenly dismissed him from work and took away the government car and driver on the same day, and then just as suddenly reinstated him some days later. He must have felt like a puppet on strings that could be cut any moment. He was completely at the mercy of Murad’s mood. Should it sour, the curtains would fall, the lights would dim, and my father would be stuck shuttling back and forth between our garden and the Gezira Club day after day, like the white rook in chess: confined to moving horizontally and vertically, and with no game plan other than to pray for the death of the black knight that threatened his survival.

The mysterious nature of his work often compelled Murad to spend as much as a week away from home, and so I began to feel a bigger void than ever. Ironically, despite his absurd jealousy while he was in Cairo, he encouraged me to go out—to the club, for example, or to call on my friends—while he was away on business. When he returned, he’d be eager to hear about everything I did while he was away. Who did I see? What did we do? What did we talk about? What was the latest gossip? He only had to say a word here or there to keep me talking for hours. He did exactly the same with Aunt Zeinab, strangely.

I felt safe with Murad. That was what attracted me to him. Nevertheless, I was uncomfortable with that heavy military guard outside our apartment building. It was impossible to go anywhere without his knowing it, even though I never did anything to merit suspicion. Whenever I left the building, the guards would ask me, very courteously of course, where I was going, and offer to accompany me. I would refuse and even rebuke them. At times I felt their eyes following me, trying to penetrate my brain, which confounded my tongue for no reason. The boom of their greeting to Murad, if he was with me, sent a queasy tremor through my stomach. “Pasha!” they shouted, stiffly saluting with hands held to forehead. He’d respond with a listless half salute, jerking his hand up no higher than his cheek, barely looking in their direction. You might have thought he was whisking away a fly.

My long day began at the club in the afternoon and ended at ten thirty at night at a friend’s house or with my aunt. Zeinab continued to treat me like an adolescent instead of a married adult. She refused to allow me to drive, let alone own a car. She forbade me to go to the cinema or the theater, which I loved but which she hated, without my husband. Mme Maysa was out of bounds, if she happened to invite me over. I hated accompanying my aunt on her visits to her friends. Their mindless chatter bored me and made me feel how different they were from me and how like her they were. I was looking for something I lacked. Since I couldn’t put my finger on it, I couldn’t find it.

I did visit Maysa, of course, but secretly. These were the only social visits dear to my heart. I’ve always loved that woman. I’d long known my aunt harbored an implacable hatred for her, despite her outward friendship toward her. To me, Maysa was generous, kind, and considerate in word and deed, even if she was strict at school until her retirement. I certainly had more pleasant memories with her than I did with my aunt. When I was young, she would take me for small excursions in her car on Sundays. She’d have her driver take us into the inner quarters of Imbaba or Bulaq. When the streets were too narrow for the car to pass, we’d get out and walk. How warmly she was greeted by the women seated in front of their houses in those cramped alleyways! They’d leap to their feet with joy when they saw her, and invite her into their extremely poor homes. She’d have tea and cookies with them. To me the cookies were dry and tasteless, but she’d smile and say how delicious they were. Then she’d reach into her purse and pull out some white envelopes—some thicker than others, depending on the need—and gently, tactfully, almost pleadingly, she’d encourage the women to accept them.

Once, unable to restrain my curiosity, I asked her who those women were. She smiled and said, “They’re good people. They help me get closer to God.”

I was so impressed that I had to relate this experience to my aunt. She pursed her lips and said, “She’s just like the rest of them. A bunch of thieves. So what if they try to make their money look clean.” Then she scolded me and forbade me from going on those Sunday excursions, which forced me to invent ways to do it on the sly.

Maysa’s circumstances changed drastically during the years in which I grew from childhood to adulthood. She was forced to cease her charity expeditions and even leave her home. I was in my fourth year at university when they took possession of her villa. Her brother, Amr Pasha, suffered a depression and confined himself to his bedroom. Maysa was forced to virtually beg for a monthly allowance from the Sequestered Properties Department. She tried to sell some of her movable assets on the sly. First it was jewelry and various belongings that the sequestration authorities had overlooked. Then she put her French bed and the rest of her bedroom suite up for sale, followed by paintings and small carpets that the employees at the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism thought were valueless. But she couldn’t find buyers. According to my aunt, there were people who specialized in buying up the contents of the old villas, and these same people were in cahoots with the Sequestrations Department. They secretly notified the authorities about the contents of the homes they had entered after their owners had died, and while the heirs were trying to sell off the belongings. I later discovered that my father used his connections to keep those people from buying Maysa’s furniture so my aunt could get first dibs. Somehow Maysa learned of this and stopped the sale of her bedroom suite. She would rather borrow from friends than sell her bed to my aunt. It took a whole year for my aunt to get her way. As the months went by, Maysa thought my aunt had forgotten about it, but my aunt found someone to buy it on her behalf so, by the end of the year, she was finally able to sleep in that bed.

I pleaded with my father to try to help Maysa out through his influence with the Sequestrations Department. He did nothing. Murad, when I turned to him for the same purpose, forbade me to bring up such matters ever again. My aunt couldn’t restrain a malicious glee, but I avoided getting into an argument with her. I never could compete with her rapid-fire tongue and that arsenal of folk expressions that often left me tongue-tied. To my surprise, Maysa had a store of French ripostes that she’d fire off, as though she’d overheard my aunt, which made me laugh.

I couldn’t understand why they were doing this to such a refined woman who had nothing to do with politics and whose only crime was that she’d come into a respectable inheritance from her aristocratic father. Could the same thing happen to me if my father died? Or did we fall into the exempted category because of my father’s and my husband’s influence? My aunt felt certain we did. As she put it: “We’re the masters in this country, dimwit.” There were dozens, if not hundreds, of families like us who had elegant villas and priceless jewelry and antiques. But no one touched them. However, try as I might, I couldn’t get either my aunt or my father to help me understand this mystery.

Eventually, my curiosity drove me to Maysa. She thought for a moment then said sadly, “You’ll see for yourself soon enough, when the momentum stops. At that point, the whole of society will be laid bare.”

That left me more mystified than before. I pressed her to explain, but she didn’t want to speak more on the subject. She only said, “Education, Nadia! That’s our downfall!”

As she silently contemplated my face with tear-filled eyes, I wondered whether she was drawing a comparison between my generation and the current generation of students and their teachers. I didn’t press her further, out of respect for what she must be going through, but I couldn’t help drawing a comparison between her and my aunt. As attached to my roots as I was, something drew me toward Maysa. She reminded me of the mother I had never met, and I felt I belonged more to her than to Zeinab. It was an unsettling feeling.

Maysa, at the time, was unaware that much worse lay ahead for her. Over the next months, as I watched that unfold, I felt we were all sliding down a slippery slope. The sequestration authorities confiscated Maysa’s home. She vanished, resurfacing several months later after moving into a small three-room apartment. Amr Pasha had been assigned to an administrative post in the public sector. When he spoke of this experience, he would laugh and mimic a triumphant boast: “I am now Third Warehouse Secretary at the National Bata Shoes Company!” Then he’d add that he’d resigned before even learning the company’s address.

Maysa, due to her deteriorating economic circumstances, converted one of the three rooms into a dressmakers’ salon, catering to the well-to-do. To my surprise, my aunt brought her many customers. Most were from her new circle of friends and acquaintances among the wives of officers, senior government officials, and even some ministers. Often, she’d insist on personally accompanying these women to Maysa’s atelier. She had also begun to act superior to Maysa, sometimes deliberately humiliating her in front of the new customers. She even started to call her merely by her first name, “Maysa,” stripped of the “Madame” that my aunt had affixed to her name for as long as I could remember.

As much as possible, Maysa avoided dealing with my aunt in person. She would assign her assistant to tend to us, and confine herself to a nod at her and a kiss on my cheek upon our arrival and departure. She even had her assistant deal with the payments. I was confused by my aunt’s contradictory behavior toward Maysa. Why would she practically invent excuses to visit her atelier if she disliked her? When I put the question to her, she denied my suspicions and, of course, upbraided me for my insolence. Her mouth then twisted into a moue, and out of it popped: “When you do what’s right, you’re met with spite!”

Then came the day when I was trying out a new dress in Maysa’s atelier. There were a number of other women in that sparsely but stylishly furnished room. Suddenly one of them gasped and pointed to the pearl necklace that Murad had given me for my birthday.

“Mon Dieu! That’s Princess Samiha’s necklace!”

My cheeks burned and my hand flew to my neck as though I’d just been sentenced to hang. My aunt spun toward the woman and called her “ignorant.” The necklace was a family heirloom my husband had inherited from his mother. As the tension thickened, Maysa entered from the adjacent room and, before I knew it, it was war, with Maysa on the accuser’s side.

“Pardon-moi, Zeinab,” Maysa said in a proud and self-assured voice, “but the resemblance is very strong, and what with all the talk these days about the looting of jewelry from families of good standing, well—”

“My name is Madame Zeinab and I’ll have nothing more to say to you until you learn how to address persons of good standing!”

We left before I could finish the fitting. My aunt, who had preceded me to the door, sent the driver back in with the payment for my dress. She didn’t even put the bills in an envelope, as though the money were a handout. Maysa sent the money back with the driver—inside an elegant envelope—along with the unfinished dress. Afterward, my aunt started circulating a rumor that Maysa’s atelier cheated the clients by switching the expensive fabrics they brought her for inferior-quality ones. When Murad came home for the weekend, I wept as I related this incident to him, but he seemed unruffled. He even showed some sympathy for the woman who’d attacked me.

“She’s right, you know. A lot of things were stolen by government employees at the time of the sequestrations. To this day, we have a hard time finding the rightful owners because of the poor organization at the time. Why don’t you tell me who that woman is? Maybe we can help her.”

I truly did try to help that woman who’d caused me such mortification. I phoned Maysa to learn the address. A few days later, a friend of mine told me that the police raided Maysa’s apartment and sealed it on the grounds that she was operating a commercial activity in residential premises without a license. The news was splashed on the newspapers’ crime pages with her picture and a caption identifying her as the daughter of a former pasha. I then learned that the woman who had remarked on my necklace had also vanished from Zamalek. She would not be seen or heard of again for many years, as would happen to Maysa and her brother Amr.

Soon after that, some of my friends and acquaintances had begun to avoid me at the club. If they were forced to share my company because we were invited to the same function at someone’s home, they would remain silent until I left. Meanwhile, my unfinished dress remained hidden in a corner of my closet for years, which pretty much summed up my condition as well.

Murad was punctilious in his weekly invasions of my bed: the same time, the same duration, the same performance, the same rituals, with no emotion whatsoever. Occasionally, I would get a gentle embrace after he’d finished, perhaps as a kind of a pat on the back. This carnal routine brought to mind Tarek’s romanticism, which set off a struggle between my mind and my heart: I wanted Murad for the sense of security he gave me and for appearances’ sake in society, and I wanted Tarek in private, invisible to all but me. As though I’d conjured whispers beaconing from the distant past, I decided to look him up. I went to his home in Zamalek, but only after taking a circuitous route for fear of being followed. The doorman told me that Tarek’s uncle Salem lived there now by himself, and that Tarek had left the country long ago.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. Some foreign country.”

On my way home, I passed by the Heart of Palm. I went straight to the basement, where I knew my father would be working with his secretary, Fahim. After chatting about this and that, so as not to draw his attention to my real source of concern, I asked him whether he’d heard that Tarek had left the country. He turned to fiddle with some files, so he had his back to me when he said, “Tarek went to join his father in Brazil and left the apartment to his uncle Salem. He’s chosen his own path, dear. May God grant him success.”

Tarek’s disappearance preyed on my mind the rest of the day. He’d left the country as suddenly as his father had so many years ago. I’d hoped the Ismail Yassin film that was on TV that evening would distract me, but it didn’t make me laugh as his films usually did. Murad had come home earlier than usual that evening. We’d had dinner together and afterward, with the aid of an ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen, he rolled himself a hashish cigarette. He hooted with laughter as though this were the first time he’d watched the film, even though we’d seen it together in the cinema before. Afterward, he settled himself more comfortably on the couch. Then, looking me straight in the eyes, he asked, “Why did you try to call on Tarek al-Masri today?”