18

“When a man is not clear in his priorities between me and another woman, it is no great honor if he chooses me.”—Nadia

“You haven’t answered my question, Nadia.”

I don’t think I’d ever been so rattled as when Murad asked why I went to visit Tarek. He smiled smugly as he puffed on his cigarette. He boasted of knowing the most intimate details about everything and everyone in Egypt. “Some people think they can get away with anything, but me and my men are always ten steps ahead of them. We can count their breaths for them. Refute their thoughts before they’re even out of their mouths, then make them pay hell for it.”

After recounting his triumphs, he asked me once again about my visit to Tarek. He was growing impatient. I lied at first: “Since his mother’s death, I’d been helping him out with some money, but secretly so as not to wound his pride. His mother used to work for my aunt. She was like a second nanny to me when I was growing up.”

Murad didn’t believe me. “Anyway, I’m not going to pressure you right now,” he said. “You can tell me later in your own time. But if you’d asked me beforehand, I’d have told you that Tarek al-Masri was in prison.”

“Tarek’s in prison?”

“Yep. He got ten years. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood. They made an underground organization and we found bombs, weapons, and pamphlets at their place. The country’s going through rough times, Nadia. We barely get a wink of sleep.”

I myself didn’t sleep that night. I was tormented by worries for Tarek. After what Murad told me, on top of what I’d read in the press about the Muslim Brothers’ conspiracies, I wondered whether Tarek could have changed so much that he would have joined them. He’d always been a nonconformist, but without ever knowing what he wanted. I cried for him and because of him and, as dawn approached, I prayed for him. Only when the morning light streamed through the curtains did I fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.

I woke up in the late afternoon, groggy and weary. I found Murad stretched out on the living room couch, as though he hadn’t moved since the night before. But, in contrast to the previous night, he was amiable and solicitous, which somehow made me want to open up to him.

I told him that I’d felt close to Tarek since we were children, and that was what made me pass by his place to see how he was doing. Murad didn’t utter a word as I spoke. He seemed to take what I said in stride, almost as though he already he knew it all, including my most distant memories. His hand stroked my hair gently, which encouraged me to ask how Tarek was doing in prison. “They have a better life inside there than out,” he said. Then he barked with laughter and held his hands far apart from each other. “They’re all as fat as cows from eating so much and sitting around doing nothing!”

I asked Murad to tell Tarek’s uncle about this so that he wouldn’t go on thinking Tarek was in some other country, like the doorman had told me.

Murad laughed again. “You are so naive! It was his Uncle Salem who informed on him. He told us that Tarek held secret meetings in that apartment in Zamalek. He wanted to take possession of it so he could use it as a gambling den. They’re scum, Nadia.”

I said nothing. I didn’t wholly believe Murad. Nor could I deny my feelings for Tarek, even though I was sure he’d changed. My mind churned over questions without answers until a violent headache made my temples throb. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back on the couch, picturing Tarek behind bars in a dark-blue prison uniform, with a dark-blue cap, and significantly fatter than he was before. The loud, persistent ringing of the phone shook me out of my thoughts. Murad stood up and headed to the red phone. That meant it was the office of Field Marshal Abdel-Hakim Amer calling. He picked up the phone and listened, saying nothing but “Yes, sir . . . Yes, sir . . . Yes, sir . . .”

He sat back down and began to pay unusually close attention to the football match between Zamalek and Damietta. Just before the end of the first half—Zamalek was two points behind—the red phone rang again. Murad listened for some moments, then said eagerly, “Understood, sir . . . Yes sir. It’s war, of course . . . I’ll tell them right away.”

He replaced the receiver of the red phone gently in its cradle, then snatched up the receiver of the black phone, his other hand flicking through a small address book for a number. He now spoke with the voice of a commander who expected to be obeyed without question. I’d seen him change this way before, like an actor who could switch instantly from one role to another. He told the person on the other end that Field Marshal Amr wanted war in the second half.

“They want war in that field. Did you get that, or do I have to repeat it?” he shouted.

He slammed down the receiver and returned to the couch.

“Is everything all right, Murad?” I asked, not quite believing my ears. “Is there really going to be a war with Israel, like we keep hearing?”

He laughed so hard that he rolled onto his back. Then he kissed me on the forehead and said, “Didn’t I tell you you’re naive? If Israel dared lay a finger on us in Sinai, we’d burn them and throw them into the sea. Zamalek’s losing against Damietta. His Excellency Abdel-Hakim Amer’s a Zamalek fan and he will not accept defeat. So he wants that team to think they’re fighting a war they have to win at all costs.”

I smiled. I must admit I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but I felt the force of his authority, which excited me. I tried to focus more closely on the game, if only to alleviate the boredom, although I was also busy applying my red fingernail polish. Murad, his face glued to the TV screen, explained that he’d just phoned the Zamalek team’s coach in the changing room at the stadium and told him to give the team a pep talk, telling them that when they got back into the field, they had to play as though they were fighting a decisive battle. That was what he meant when he told the coach that the field marshal ordered “war in the field.”

The second half opened with a change in the Zamalek team’s lineup, which, according to the sportscaster Mohamed Latif, was “very strange” and “unprecedented.” The goalkeeper Shahin had been replaced by Mohamed Harb, the third reserve goalie, who’d never played in a match before, as Latif remarked sarcastically. The game ended with a crushing defeat for Zamalek: six-nil! Only later did it click that the goalie’s last name—Harb—literally means “war.”

War did break out between us and Israel just six weeks later. It lasted only six days. Murad had been called in and didn’t resurface until after the defeat, when Nasser gave his resignation speech. I moved back in with my father for the duration. The army driver who’d been assigned to me drove through the dark and silent streets to the Heart of Palm. A government decree had ordered a blackout in the capital so that Israeli planes couldn’t identify and strike strategic targets, as my father had explained over the phone. So all street lighting was banned, meaning not just streetlights but also lighting from shopping windows and electric signs. Dark-blue semitranslucent sheets of paper, like the type we used to use to cover our textbooks at school, were pasted onto the windows of houses and apartments to block rays of interior lighting that might turn them into targets. Some dark paint had been used to dim our headlights and those of the other cars around us. The driver told me it was made out of bluing solution.

Along the way, I noticed a lot of recently constructed red-brick walls in front of apartment-building entrances. They were about a half a yard thick and three yards wide. I also saw a lot of sand-filled burlap bags stacked on top of each other in front of stores and ground-floor windows. “Their purpose is to absorb the shock waves from the explosions of bombs dropped by enemy aircraft,” my driver told me in the matter-of-fact voice of a military expert. I felt I was in the middle of a bizarre nightmare.

“Have Israeli airplanes reached Cairo, Mahmoud?”

“May the Lord protect us, and may He be praised whatever happens.”

The vague answer and the resigned way he said it increased my alarm. I feared an Israeli air raid could strike at any moment. We were held up for a while because of protest marches. People carrying pictures of Nasser were calling for him to retract his resignation. The demonstrations weren’t large, but they were spontaneous. I felt gloomy and depressed. Suddenly my cheeks burned with shame and humiliation. Then, just as suddenly, I subsided into despair. For the first time in my life I felt that Egypt was lost, that it had truly “lost its momentum,” as Maysa once said it would. She was the only one I’d ever heard say that. My father said she’d been infected with the pessimism virus from her ambassador brother.

For days, I barely left my room at the Heart of Palm. Then Murad resurfaced. He was tense, fidgety. All self-confidence had gone out of his voice, which was taut and high-pitched. He looked bedraggled, like he hadn’t slept in a week. He said it was all the fault of the field marshal and the air force commanders. He repudiated the defense minister he had worked for, hitched all his wagons to Nasser, and burned his bridges behind him. I’d never seen him so outspoken before. I was surprised at this boldness, and even more surprised when I found myself sympathizing with him. I sensed he was suffering from a crisis deep inside him and it had left its marks on the tired face and hunched shoulders I saw later, when we were alone in my room. He spent the night in my arms.

“The sons of bitches. They made us walk home in the desert in nothing but our underwear, Nadia,” he said. His tears choked off his voice and fell on my chest. I held him tighter. He clung to me as he turned his head, like an infant looking for his mother’s breast. His body jerked a couple of times, but nothing more. They were more like spasms of fear than desire. He rolled to the side after a moment, then left the bed, head bowed. I didn’t hear the sound of water rushing over his body this time. The silence enveloped us in its heavy thickets until morning.

Murad didn’t come to my bed again for months. His appearance altered remarkably during that period. He’d aged almost overnight. His hair had grayed after he’d given up dyeing it. He lost a lot of weight. For a while, he refused to leave the house. Most of the time he spent reading the newspapers, watching TV, or speaking for hours on the black phone with his colleagues. The red phone had stopped ringing. His condition worsened after they broke the news, one morning, that Field Marshal Abdel-Hakim Amer had committed suicide. He started to take it out on me, as though I had caused the defeat. At first the abuse was verbal, but it soon turned physical. He got a lot of money from me, but hadn’t spent a piaster on our home since his return from Sinai. My father grumbled, but yielded to my aunt’s pressures. “The cloud will pass,” she’d say. “As soon as he gets back to work, he’ll make it up to us.”

That period after the war with the ghost of Murad was one of the worst times of my life. He was defeated on the inside and I was the only thing around for him to conquer. He’d climb on top of me, cut off my breath, yet never satisfy himself or me. He’d become impotent, flaccid. He’d threaten to divorce me and leave. I prayed for him to fulfill the threat, but he’d back down at the last moment. He’d say it was for my sake, so I wouldn’t have to face these difficult times alone. A volcano was building up inside me and sometimes it would erupt. I’d shout at him to release me, to set me free. But he wouldn’t.

There was a woman on the march inside me who refused to stay hidden, and to Tarek she was as exposed as a seaside veranda to a surging sea. I ran into him soon after his release from prison, which was a couple of years after the 1973 war. As I studied his face, I nearly reached out to hold it between my hands, but my mind held me back and quickly erected a wall to hide behind. I waited for him to hop over that wall. He didn’t, so I let my shadow peep out to guide him, only to find he had built his own barriers. This distance between us destroyed that initial flush of affection, and our conversation turned arid and devoid of emotion. However, it did not slow the advancing footsteps of the woman inside me.

At first I found it hard to believe it was Tarek al-Masri standing right in front of me. He was pallid and scrawny, completely the opposite of what Murad had led me to believe. He was broken and defeated, haunted by a sense of shame that had become lodged in his face. He told me of his ordeals in prison, the humiliation he’d experienced there for no reason. His eyes glistened with welling tears. Laden with sadness, they overflowed and plunged down his cheeks as though committing suicide in search of a redemption they would never find. Nothing would ease the strains on that haggard face. I didn’t have the words to comfort him. He was miles away, even though I could hear his breathing clearly and see his chest trembling from emotion. I moved toward him, on the verge of tears myself, pleading for him to stop.

“You got married, of course.”

“Yes . . . about four and half years ago. But now—”

“Some Zamalek dude. From university, huh?”

“No. An officer at the Defense Ministry. His name’s Colonel Murad—Murad Kashef. I’m sure you don’t know him. He was a neighbor of ours in Zamalek, but—”

Before I had a chance to tell him that Murad and I were divorced, Tarek sprang away from me like he’d been bitten by a scorpion. “I’m not crazy! You’re the one who’s crazy!”

I stood stunned by the gleam in his bulging eyes that stared straight into mine. They frightened me, but I tried to draw closer to reassure him.

“They stripped me naked and made me perform like women and animals!” he shouted.

I put my hand over his mouth, begging him to calm down and lower his voice. My tears pleaded with him to listen. He shoved my hand away violently and started to talk about how they had tortured his mother and other women. I tried to tell him again that I was divorced. He clamped his hands to his ears, pressed his eyes closed, and shouted, “Stop it! Stop it! It’s all because of you! It’s your fault!”

I tried to reach out again. He shoved my hand away and turned aside. I stepped back, at a loss. Neither of us had done anything wrong. Both of us had been tortured for wanting something else out of life. We both searched for a missing part of ourselves, only to encounter pain. How could I get through that haze of sorrows to explain this to him? When he told me that his mother had been raped and killed in prison, I feared he was going delirious. I stood transfixed, helpless, my anxiety mounting until my aunt suddenly appeared on her balcony. “Tarek!”

He looked up, gave her a brusque wave, and turned to leave, but he found Bashir in his path, blocking his way. “Madame Zeinab would like to see you.” He made it sound like an order issued from on high. Tarek trudged after him.

I wondered what thoughts were running through his mind as he stole glances at this place or that in the villa’s garden. I caught up, quickly wiping away my tears so my aunt wouldn’t see them. She had just reached the bottom of the granite staircase in the reception room. She moved slowly and with difficulty now that she’d put on weight, then came to a stop, leaning on her cane, which, for the last two years, had been her constant companion. She welcomed Tarek with feigned affection, then took a seat as she told him to tell her about his plans for the future. Stammering like a student who hadn’t done his homework, he supplied short, disjointed answers that only aroused pity. My aunt knitted her eyebrows and adjusted her head covering to hide the relentless assault of gray. With her other hand, she reached beneath her shawl and pulled out a small envelope, obviously containing money. Holding it out to him, she terminated the interview coldly.

“You know the house. If you need anything, just pass by. Your mother did so much for us. We never forget our servants.”

It seared my heart to hear her describe his mother that way. I’m sure that was what made him tense up suddenly. But he said nothing. He shook the envelope by a corner as though weighing it. Was he wondering whether to accept it or not? Was it too little? Would he reject it because it wounded his pride? He seemed confused, and his confusion worried us. I trembled at the thought that he might do something reckless. My aunt had stood up and was now resting on her cane, leaning forward as though to willing him to leave. His mouth twisted into a strange smile, out of which came an abrupt laugh as he waved the envelope high in the air for a second, then stuffed it in his pocket and left, shoulders hunched, without saying goodbye. I waited, but he didn’t stop at the door to look back at me like he used to when he was a boy and a child before that. I turned to my aunt, but quickly looked away. If I’d looked at that triumphant glint in her eye any longer, I would have run to my room in tears to fight back old feelings that I shouldn’t let resurface. At least not now.

“Well, imagine that! Practically a beggar, but thinks himself such a hotshot. Talk about a mangy cat showing off his coat!”

My aunt didn’t expect me to comment. I was saddened by Tarek’s sudden reappearance and disappearance, so much so that I lost my appetite and socialized rarely. I’d apply fingernail polish and remove it a few hours later. I had my hair cut whenever it grew an inch. Then I had it cut so short that my aunt quipped that I looked like a woman in a nuthouse. But instead of the upbraiding I’d expected, she seemed pleased at the return of “the man inside me,” which she used to nag me about. When I was growing up, I used to deliberately provoke her by combing my long hair with my fingers in front of her. She’d grab my hair and tug it, then say she was just joking. I could tell from the force of that tug and the look in her eye that it was envy. When I used to try on new clothes, walking in front of her slowly like a fashion model, she’d pout, look away, and change the subject. I felt something about me irritated her. Was it because her hair was short and curly? Did it have to do with my friends and the way they mocked her accent, her weird sayings, or that funny way she had of sitting on a couch with one foot tucked beneath her? Or maybe it was because I couldn’t bear the chickens and rabbits she raised behind the shed near the dock.

But I do know that, when it came to me, n and o were the first letters that formed in her mind, even before her tongue and mouth shaped the word. Everything I wished for she opposed. And she always had her way: about my hobbies and past times; about my puppy, which she’d poisoned; and about the parrot I’d bought but that she let escape after it said her name in a rude way, even though I’d taken such pains to teach it how to pronounce “Zizi” properly.

She was the one who chose most of my friends and barred others from visiting me and me from visiting them. When Sara, my Jewish friend from my childhood and schooldays, returned to Egypt with her father, my aunt forbade me from visiting her. She even refused to allow me to phone her. I found her adamance on that matter so strange. I couldn’t go to the theater because it bored her and I couldn’t go to the movies unless they were playing a film she liked. Just as she pressed me into a marriage with Murad, she pressed my father into securing my divorce. My aunt’s wishes formed the intransgressible boundaries within which I moved. After my divorce, she became even more overbearing. “A divorcee is on everybody’s tongues,” and only she knew how to keep them from wagging. “I’m looking out for your own good,” she’d say.

I kept my problems to myself and kept myself to my room as much as possible until my father returned from abroad. Why did he never take me with him? What was the secret behind those mysterious trips he took to London at this time every year? How did he get Murad to agree to my divorce? He would never answer these questions.

Several days after my father’s return from one of those trips to London, Zeinab went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. She took the ferry because of her fear of flying. Airplanes were “the devil’s work.” It was one of those fears of hers I could never understand, but at last I had some respite. I had at least two weeks to inhale the fragrance of freedom. I asked my father for permission to go up to Agami with some friends for three days. He gave his assent without even asking me who I was going with. Was he trying to atone for old sins? His only condition was that I return to Cairo two days before my aunt was scheduled to return. He gave me a hundred pounds, though I wouldn’t need so much money, and off I went, bursting with pressures ready for release.

Agami at the time was still a small, elite resort just west of Alexandria, overlooking the Mediterranean’s turquoise waters. It took only two nights there for my life to turn around again. It was there that I met Omar, and that was how long it took me to detect the meaning in the way he looked at me and to hear the voice coming from his heart. I fell prey to his boldness and how he stood out from the others, and I succumbed to his depth and his warmth. I must have come to Agami primed to fall in love, emotions charged, and ready to surrender even before the hunter sharpened his weapons. I was an easy catch for those wide eyes when they laid siege to me and aimed deep inside. I didn’t need time to step back, reflect, hesitate, as was the case with Murad, and Tarek before him. After every advance he made, I looked forward to the next. I tried to anticipate it, but he’d still surprise me, which made my affection for him grow.

I didn’t wait until it was safe. The woman inside me signaled to the sluices before I knew it. I thought I was hidden behind the dam, but it was transparent, fragile, like crystal, and it fell softly, with a gentle tinkling, at the onrush of this manly wave. I yielded as it surged forward then gently ebbed, etching a furrow where my heart could plant flowers and let them blossom into love. How I longed for that tremor I’d missed for so long. It was as instantaneous as when Tarek, all those years ago, touched my braids in a way that possessed me body and soul. Omar’s first look, his first words, his gestures, the way he moved, the way he did everything, his love for life—all these traits enthralled me and turned me into a sleepwalker following in his wake.

On my last morning in Agami, I followed him out to the beach, where he was cleaning the seaweed off a long board. I was already mentally prepared to set sail with him to some remote shore. I had no fear and no intention to return. As I approached, Omar Seif Eddin turned to me with that beguiling smile that set off a turbulence inside me and said, “Want to take a ride with me?”