19

“I firmly believe that were it not for two things, my secrets would spread. Those two are my lips.”—Abbas Mahalawi

I was all for the idea of marrying Paula once Fahim explained it in full. The same with Zeinab. In fact, she was more enthusiastic than I, as though she’d been praying for it. After the marriage, I moved into the Heart of Palm, while Zeinab spread the news of the marriage and the beautiful baby daughter I had with Paula. She told people that Paula and I got married in secret, so we kept it that way out of respect for her wishes. Then the baby had to be delivered prematurely and incubated. It was such a fraught period, and it delayed our ability to rejoice. With each retelling, she added a detail here, a twist there, like our mother used to do with the stories she told women back in the village. Before long, the news reached every corner of Zamalek. Quite a few people suspected that the child was Zeinab’s. Even so, we received numerous congratulations, which Paula would never hear since she’d slipped into a coma and eventually passed away one night two years and a few months after Nadia was born. Eventually, people forgot the subject.

After moving into the Heart of Palm, I left my apartment in north Zamalek to Hassanein’s wife and her child, Tarek. Abdel-Naim asked me to let her have it free of charge in view of her helpless condition without a man. I agreed, since I didn’t need the apartment, and out of respect for him, although I didn’t quite agree with his logic.

Zeinab’s and my first order of business was to get the deed to the villa transferred to our names. We delayed the announcement of Paula’s death for three days in order to give Fahim enough time to grease the appropriate palms at the Foreign-owned Properties Registrar and other departments at the Notary Public Authority in order to complete the paperwork. Then we buried Paula secretly, at night, in the pauper’s cemetery. The next task was to transfer the title of Paula’s new Cadillac to Zeinab. That was done at the Cairo traffic department, and quickly, again thanks to Fahim’s connections.

The Cicurel brothers didn’t know what hit them, but they didn’t take it lying down. They refused to believe my marriage to Paula was genuine, despite the official documents I had to prove it, and proving she had borne me a child. They kicked up a hell of a fuss, starting in the courts. They had a lot of weight to pull, through connections that led to right across the threshold of Abdin Palace. I turned to Pouli, but he elected to stay out of this one.

The specter of expulsion loomed. Our lawyer, whom Fahim had hired, told us that we were in a weak position. Paula wasn’t the sole owner of the Heart of Palm. She had co-inherited it with Solomon Cicurel’s brothers, who let her live there but retained their part-ownership. We hadn’t known this. They won the suit against us in the preliminary court, but we didn’t give up. We had our lawyer file an appeal on the grounds that we had new evidence to produce: documents confirming the transfer of the title to Nadia Abbas Mahalawi, the daughter I had with Paula, whom I had married several years before her death, as other documents confirmed. According to our new lawyer, our position was now much stronger.

*

“My father wants to see you, Abbas. He’s taken a turn for the worse.”

I lowered my newspaper and looked up at Fahim Effendi. He looked haggard. About a year or so earlier, Prince Mohamed Ali Tawfiq had won another concession from the palace to develop Zamalek. That was expectable, since he was King Faruq’s nephew. The prince engaged three up-and-coming building engineers and excluded Abdel-Naim. Then the palace refused to renew Abdel-Naim’s construction license. Pouli refused to help. He got Abdel-Naim a half-year extension so we could complete works in progress, but he would do no more. After that half a year, Abdel-Naim and his work crews were banished from Zamalek. It was heartbreaking to watch their straggly return across the bridge to Imbaba for the last time. The next thing he knew, he had the tax authorities on his back. He had, in fact, evaded some taxes but not all, though he couldn’t prove that. They dragged him through the wringers of lawyers’ offices and courtrooms, and brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. I didn’t abandon him, but I kept my distance. True, I was still his partner. But now that I’d become Pouli’s partner in the pharmaceutical industry, that partnership was no longer as important to me as it had been. I didn’t get a large percentage of the earnings, even though I owned the factory. But the income was good and the operation enjoyed the protection of the palace. I had to be careful. I couldn’t afford to lose that, what with the loss of the diamonds and gold in Zananiri’s airplane crash and the looming end of Abdel-Naim’s construction company.

Nevertheless, at Zeinab’s urging, I made one last appeal to Pouli in the hope that he would agree to some kind to subcontracting arrangement with the new building contractors in order to keep Abdel-Naim’s construction firm afloat. Pouli refused out of hand, but it was his attitude more than his refusal itself that bothered me. Not only was he condescending, he threatened to fire me from our pharmaceutical company as though I were his employee. That was true enough on paper, but I still owned the company. I left his office that day defeated, unable to utter a word of protest. He was too powerful.

There was no more I or anyone else could do. The winds had shifted. They now filled the sails of Abdel-Naim’s competitors and left his ships marooned. Had Abdel-Naim done something to incur someone’s wrath? Had an ill-placed word gotten back to palace ears? Had he bragged to someone about how he’d bribed Pouli? I asked him about this when I went to visit him on his sickbed. He looked away and muttered a stream of curses against everyone, all the way up to the royal throne. That confirmed my suspicions. I had nothing to gain from sticking my head out for him.

“I’m leaving Fahim in your care after I’m gone, Abbas. I can’t have him going back to the village with nothing.”

I had to bend my ear closer to his parched lips. His once-booming voice had become as frail as the rest of him. His heart had been unable to bear the humiliating exile from the kingdom he’d built over the decades. He’d started out when Zamalek was uninhabited apart from some scattered shacks and hovels. Over the years, he helped turn it into the most elegant quarter of the capital.

Abdel-Naim passed away, heartsick, several weeks later. The younger son, Asran, took his wife and child back to his native village in Upper Egypt. Fahim stayed with me. His father didn’t need to bequeath him to me because I couldn’t have dispensed with him anyway. As I told Fahim on more than one occasion, I’d need him next to me in my grave to forge my sins into virtues before the angels started reckoning.

I made Fahim my personal secretary at quite a respectable salary. Not that I had any actual work for him or myself at the time. I had an office in a basement where I managed my business affairs, most of which had ended when Abdel-Naim’s construction permit was terminated. Apart from that, I had the bank assets I’d inherited from Paula, her shares in the Cicurel stores, and the factory in Alexandria that I owned with Pouli. Apart from that, I lived in a villa in Zamalek overlooking the Nile and I had a driver who opened the car door for me with a bow as I removed my white fedora, climbed into the back seat, and let the car take me to wherever it decided to take me.

Then one day, some months later, while we were on our summer holiday in Alexandria, we awoke to the news on the radio that the army had overthrown King Faruq. The first thing that sprang to mind was my factory in Alexandria. Pouli had taken advantage of the arrangement we made to save the company from Sandro’s underhanded dealings in order to take control over it. Later that day, Fahim and I went to visit the factory. We timed it so we’d arrive after the morning shift and just before the curfew. We took a lot of papers with us. Even before we returned to Cairo, they’d forced the king to leave the country.

A few months after our return to Cairo from Alexandria, Zeinab burst into my office. “The lawyer called and told me that we lost our case on appeal. We lost the villa, Abbas! They’re going to kick us out of here!”

As they say, disasters come in threes. I called up Fahim to help us find a solution. Three days later, he showed up with a grin from ear to ear and a solution in that diabolical brain of his: the villa next door. That was where we’d buried Hassanein when we were laying its foundations. The owner had died before construction was completed and, there being no heirs, the work had to be halted in the middle of the final stages. Fahim offered to take care of the red tape, as only he knew how to do. Then we completed construction at our own expense. Fortunately, there was very little to do. The villa was already livable. It was the spitting image of the Heart of Palm, inside and out, including the basement. Zeinab was over the moon when I approved of the plan. We took the precaution of putting it in Nadia’s name. That would prevent it from being seized during the wave of sequestrations, because she was an Egyptian born of an Egyptian father.

When it came time to move, Zeinab insisted on keeping Solomon Cicurel’s large bed, which was still in his bedroom in the west wing. I was mystified by her insistence on that matter. For my part, I had the villa’s nameplate removed from the wall next to the front gate and reaffixed next to the gateway to my new villa. There would only be one Heart of Palm in Zamalek. We took a lot of other things as well, leaving the old Heart of Palm as hollow for Cicurel’s brothers as the core of a palm tree without its heart of palm. In any case, they didn’t get a chance to enjoy it for long. It seems that the July 1952 revolutionaries had it in for the Jews, because some years later they set their sights on their department stores and estates. After Les Grands Magasins Cicurel were nationalized, the brothers tried to transfer the deed of the villa to one of their employees in the hope of being able to sell it. Fahim told me that as soon as he caught wind of their plan he managed to put a wrench in their paperwork at the Foreign-owned Properties Registrar. The following day, I went to the Authority for the Liquidation of Feudalism in my capacity as an ordinary citizen. The government had publicized telephone numbers and addresses members of the public could contact in order to report cases of foreigners trying to sell their assets illegally. I called one of those numbers and made an urgent appointment.

When I arrived, I encountered a young officer whose wooden nameplate on his desk identified him as Murad Kashef. After inspecting me from head to toe, he showed me to into the office of his boss, a brigadier general. I showed him the original contracts of the old villa proving Cicurel’s ownership. It was sequestered the following day. Naturally, I’d taken care to conceal all the papers concerning Nadia and Paula in my safe in my new home. Not long afterward, the Cicurel brothers left Egypt altogether, and I began converting all my liquid assets that I’d earned from Pouli and Abdel-Naim into gold bars and small diamonds. These I hid in the basement of the new Heart of Palm for fear the sequestration madness would spread.

That day, after I reported the Cicurels’ attempted ruse, I had an idea that I hoped would secure protection for my new villa and other properties. Just as I was about to exit the building that housed the Liquidation of Feudalism, I decided to retrace my steps to the desk of the young, low-ranking officer, Murad Kashef. I told him that I had other information to report that might be of interest to the authorities. It pertained to an eminent individual. I could tell I’d aroused his curiosity, despite the peeved look he gave me for disturbing him again.

“And who might this eminent individual be, Abbas Effendi?” he said with a sneer.

“Antonio Pouli Pasha, sir.”

I’d woken up unusually early one day in late September. The autumn breeze was flirting with the fronds of our tall palm tree in the middle of our garden. I was having my morning coffee out back near the dock and scanning the newspaper headlines. When I turned the page, my eye caught a headline announcing that my village in the Mahalla Marhoum district had had its name changed for the second time, along with a lot of other villages. The occasion was the fourth anniversary of the revolution. Or was it the fifth? I’d stopped keeping track. Our village was now called al-Fallaha—the peasant woman. God only knew which peasant woman.

Suddenly I heard a commotion coming from the direction of the front gate. I quickly set down the newspaper and stood up to find out what was going on. I encountered Zeinab coming down the front stairs, looking anxious. A huge moving van was parked out front. The movers were shouting instructions to each other as they carried furniture into the old Cicurel place. The foreman told us that a high-ranking army officer and his family were moving in. The villa had been empty for so long it felt like our new neighbors had popped up out of nowhere. As it turned out, though, I recognized the new owner and we quickly became friends. He was the same brigadier general to whom I had submitted the evidence on the Cicurel brothers’ and Pouli’s properties. We began to exchange neighborly visits, but he controlled the buttons on this relationship. It was he who decided when I’d call on him and vice versa. To welcome the new neighbors and curry favor with the officer’s family, Zeinab sent over dishes of food that she was a whiz at. Before long, she was receiving orders for favorite dishes to be delivered at specified times and in specified quantities.

One Friday afternoon, while we were sitting and chatting about this and that next to the Nile near the dock behind his villa, the brigadier said, “That business about Pouli was a master stroke. Well done, Abbas, my boy! If it hadn’t been for you, we would never have found out about that pharmaceutical factory and its franchise, because all the official documents are in the name of some Italian guy called Sandro Vanini.”

Just the mention of that name made me clench my jaw so hard I nearly broke a molar. How it pained me to recall how I managed to rescue my Alexandrian company from Sandro, only for it to end up out of my reach forever after it was sequestered as though it were Pouli’s. Oh well, at least I’d prevented Pouli from indulging in my wealth, and I’d won the friendship of a high-ranking officer in the bargain. Naturally, I hadn’t dared so much as hint that I was the original owner. I didn’t want to give off a scent that would send the authorities growling and baring their fangs in my direction, so I let them hold on to the impression that I was some mid-level employee.

The brigadier gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder, which lightened the fact that he had called me “Abbas, my boy,” even though I was older and wealthier than him. He asked me about the properties belonging to certain Jews and other upper-class families in Zamalek. He thought I had more tips to offer because of my partnership with the late Abdel-Naim, who had built so many of the Zamalek villas, and by dint of my marriage with Paula Cicurel, whose estate I’d inherited. I said I was surprised the authorities weren’t aware of the facts, since everything was recorded and all the original documents were on file.

“Sadly, many wealthy families used the same trick as the Cicurel brothers but haven’t been found out yet,” he said. He explained how some property owners arranged nominal sales of some of their homes and assets to their servants, drivers, or other people in order to evade the nationalization measures and sequestrations. “Some of them hadn’t even registered their properties to begin with. On top of that, we discovered forgeries in the files at the Foreign-owned Properties Registrar. Even the rubber stamps had been stolen a decade ago and were used to forge original-looking deeds and documents. As you know, the government inherits the estates of foreigners who are heirless. Those people ripped off the government.”

“F-F-Forgeries?” I couldn’t help the stammer. “What did they forge? Have they arrested the people who stole the stamps?”

“We don’t know who they are yet, unfortunately. But we fired two Jews and four Italians from our department because we suspected they might be involved. We also halted the registration of a lot of properties in Giza and Alexandria pending investigations. Anyway, I’m having a young officer who works for me—Murad Kashef—conduct extensive inquiries. Murad’s a sharp one. He could tell you where the devil hid his son.”

I relaxed and leaned back in my seat, and took the occasion to offer to help by supplying any further information and documents I could come up with. I was eager to secure his confidence in order to keep the authorities from asking me how I got my wealth.

“That would be great, Abbas my boy! As soon as you get the papers ready, pass by my office. We need honest folks like yourself.”

“Yes, sir. In a month at the outside, I’ll send you all the documents that I—”

“No, I want to see you in my office in two days with what you have.”

His tone was haughty and his fingers pointed at me like I was a servant, but I accepted his orders with a wide smile. That evening I phoned Fahim and told him to drop by. He had dozens of ledgers and receipts from the original owners that I could use in order to finish the task quickly. With his help, I prepared a thick dossier on the people who’d had houses built by Abdel-Naim’s firm. Zeinab supplied a lot of additional details based on stories she’d heard about the jewels that had once bedecked the ladies of Zamalek and then disappeared into thin air. She told me about a lot of prominent Jewish families, like those of Youssef Cattaoui Pasha, a close friend of King Fuad, and Sir Robert Rolo, a former director of al-Ahli Bank. She had gotten to know them from the times when she’d accompanied Paula to their homes. She practically gave me a full inventory of their contents. Zeinab missed nothing and she had a memory as systematic as an archive. The minutest details were engraved in there and she could retrieve them easily in order to furnish descriptions of everything from jewels and antiques to the smallest piece of furniture in the homes she visited with Paula.

But she certainly could get sidetracked. She would go on and on about some of the idiosyncrasies she would never forget. She had Fahim in stitches when she recalled something about the Menasces, a Jewish family that had been awarded various medals and honors by the Austrian emperor. According to Zeinab, the head of the family, Menasce Pasha, was a snob, and very finicky about whom he shook hands with. He had this fixed notion that Egyptians picked their noses all day long in order to kill time. That was why he always wore gloves. The only time anyone saw his fingers was when he played piano. “He’s got a large plantation estate near Qanatir where he hides some of his money in the form of gold bars. His wife doesn’t know about it.”

The Copts came in for a good share of Zeinab’s gossip. She had stories to tell about prominent Coptic families who were major landowners and feudalists: the Wahbas, Khayyats, Ghalis, and Simaikas. Many of them married into British families in Egypt. That became a crucial part of my report, of course. I had her recount the tittle-tattle she’d picked up at the weekend parties at the Wisa family’s sprawling hacienda in Asyut and the hunting trips they organized in Fayoum. She also gave me the lowdown on Bobby Khayyat’s annual Christmas parties and his legendary wealth. For the cherry on top, I added the curses and insults against the revolution that I overheard with my own ears at the Gezira Club. My memory served me well there. Some of the juiciest came from the mouth of none other than Egypt’s star polo player, Victor Simaika, whose expletives against the Free Officers resounded across the club’s polo grounds, which was one of my favorite places for basking in the sun during the cooler seasons.

After nearly forty-eight sleepless hours, I reported to the office of my neighbor, the brigadier, at the Liquidation of Feudalism Department. His office director, Murad Kashef, glanced briefly in my direction then turned away. After a moment, he turned around again, inspected me from head to foot, and said coldly, “Aren’t you the guy who told us about Pouli’s properties?”

“Yes, I am, sir.”

“Are you’re going to keep popping in here every other week? You could have saved yourself the trouble and spilled it all in your first visit.”

“I have an appointment, sir. With the head of the committee for—”

He jerked a finger toward his mouth, ordering me to remain silent, then instructed a sergeant in attendance to show me to the waiting room next door. I swallowed the insult, though it made my blood boil. I was kept waiting for more than two hours. If I fidgeted to make my seat creak or took a conspicuous look at my watch, Kashef shot me a glare that meant, “Don’t even think about leaving without permission.”

At last I was shown into the brigadier’s office. Instead of the welcome I’d expected, he treated me with total disdain. What had made him change 180 degrees from one day to the next? He didn’t even invite me to sit down. He kept me standing as he flicked through some papers in a midsize manila folder. Then he looked up.

“Acres and acres of farmland in Mahalla Marhoum. Five thousand pounds in the bank. A Cadillac. A villa in Zamalek. A secret marriage to a foreign widow. How’d you get all that, Abbas? Do you think we’re asleep at the wheel, you dolt? Did you think we wouldn’t find out you’re a screen for the rich?”

“Go on! What happened then?” Zeinab asked breathlessly, sitting at the edge of my bed, one foot tucked under her butt as always.

I sighed and rolled onto my side in order to tell her the rest of the story, though I wanted nothing more than to sleep. Interrogations were followed by more interrogations. Murad Kashef accusing me of serving as a front; the brigadier telling Murad to ease up and showing sympathy—or so I thought until they switched roles. In the end, they believed me. I was not the titular owner of property belonging to foreigners trying to evade confiscation. The property I owned was truly mine. What saved me in the end was the file Fahim prepared containing the payment receipts and check stubs for all the villas he’d built with his father. Were it not for his meticulous record keeping, everything I owned would have been confiscated. I gave them my and Nadia’s titles as heirs to Madame Paula’s bank accounts and her Cadillac, which spared these assets from sequestration. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that they’d ask others for information about us, just as they asked me for information on others. Everyone was running around ratting on everyone else while the authorities could see everything. Even though I cleared myself, they didn’t let me go free of charge. They decreed that my villa was henceforth the property of the sequestration authority, which had the magnanimity to lease it to me for fifty years for a nominal sum.

“Do you want to know what the brigadier said to me before I left?”

Zeinab nodded.

“He said, ‘We just did you a favor, Abbas. Now nobody in Zamalek’s going to say, ‘Why’s he an exception?’”

“Fifty years? Let’s hope we live so long!” Zeinab said. “Who knows? Maybe Faruq will come back and sack them all. What matters now is that it’s all over. You won’t have to go back there again.”

“Wrong. I’ll be working for them starting the first of next month. I’ve been recruited on the basis of my expertise in the pashas and villas of Zamalek.”

“So, what of it? As they say, stick close to the rich and their luck will rub off on you.”

In less than a month, the appointment was official. I was decreed a member of the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism. Some years later I would become its secretary. On the day the decree was issued, I left the office of the brigadier, bid farewell to the thunderous looks Murad Kashef gave me for no reason, and headed to Garden City to assume my new functions. I drove westward toward the Nile, passing the parliament building and its retinue of elegant villas. Were those villas protecting the parliament or soliciting its protection? I took a left, then swung right, entering Garden City. What a contrast to Zamalek, where the streets are long, wide, and straight, and the villas are comfortably spread out and nestled in spacious gardens. Garden City’s narrow, meticulously tree-trimmed streets twist and curve between elegant facades that follow the contours of the roads like a meandering train of palaces.

As I wound my way through those streets, I had a rush of exhilaration I’d never experienced before. It was as if we’d inherited the whole of Egypt overnight. I was filled with excitement, confidence, daring—a sensation unlike any other. Every cloud has a silver lining. It turned out the change I’d feared had benefited me more than I could ever have imagined when I first set foot in Cairo. King Faruq had dreamed of fathering a son to inherit his throne and his kingdom. When he finally succeeded, he found hundreds of heirs apparent, who rose up in rebellion, overthrew him, and inherited everything he owned. I was now one of those heirs. Each of us would get his share of that wealth and of power and influence.

At last I found the address they’d given me: a large residence once owned by an ex-minister who had been one of Egypt’s most eminent aristocrats. His estates had been confiscated about two months earlier. One of them was the palace that now housed the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism.

Out of the hundreds of estates I’d entered in my new capacity as an agent for this committee, my first remained the most memorable. In the company of a senior ranking officer, a military police detail, and an army of pencil pushers from the Ministry of the Exchequer, I entered the villa of Prince Youssef Kamal in Matariya. At that very moment, Prince Youssef returned from a foxhunting trip in the desert nearby. One might have thought Egypt hadn’t had a revolution yet. I was impressed by how fashionably he was turned out that day: supple leather boots up to his knees, a camel-colored moleskin hunting hat, a jacket in British tweed with a pattern of small blue squares shot through with beige threads, and dark khaki hunting trousers tucked into the boots and billowing slightly above them. He saluted us with his leather riding crop, lifted his hat as a gesture of respect to the officer who headed our committee, and took a seat as he asked what our business there was. The officer in charge showed him the sequestration warrant, and asked him to open his safe and to permit our men to take an inventory of the entire contents of his palace. His Excellency agreed, but on the condition that he be given time to change his clothes first. He stood and went upstairs, where he remained for over two hours, giving our staff sufficient time to inventory the ground floor and relieve it of a significant number of portable items.

I smiled to myself as I recalled that night many years ago when our gang of five broke into Cicurel’s home and I was casting about for a bauble or two to slip into my pockets. Our officers and employees at the Youssef Kamal villa did exactly the same. They pocketed a silver ashtray here, a small crystal one there. One removed a painting from its wooden frame, folded it carefully and slipped it inside a government-issue manila folder. Apart from such souvenirs, ornamental plates and vases, figurines, and silver picture frames with pictures of the prince and family were lifted from the walls and from tables and laid side by side in a large trunk: the mass grave of the prince’s belongings, history, and memories.

The commanding officer, worried by Prince Youssef’s prolonged absence, told a nearby soldier, “Go up there and get him even if he’s buck naked. We can’t let him do something crazy and get us all into trouble!”

Before the soldier was halfway up the stairs, His Excellency the prince reemerged and descended the stairs with a leisurely swagger. He was now even more dapper, in a light-gray suit, holding his trademark short cigar. Rather than fear, I read contempt in his eyes. He slowly surveyed the walls and rooms, and quickly grasped the situation. He smiled derisively and said, “If you would donate the proceeds to a hospital, I would so be grateful.”

He called for his private secretary and instructed him to have the servants open all the rooms. Then, indicating some wooden crates, he told our commanding officer that they contained paintings and books. Some he had donated to the School of Fine Arts he had founded in Cairo many years ago. Others were supposed to be shipped to the Egyptian Academy of Arts in Rome.

“Do you mean you planned to smuggle them abroad?”

The prince’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Politely but firmly, he explained that the contents of those crates were his rightful property, acquired from the revenues of his lands. He had disposed of such items in this manner frequently over the years, ever since he’d helped found the academy in Italy. He stared at the officer’s face for a second, heaved an exasperated sigh, and excused himself so he could have his coffee on the balcony. Before leaving, he reached for an ashtray that the department employees had overlooked and presented it to our commanding officer. The officer thanked him and was about to put it in our trunk when the prince interrupted him.

“That’s to extinguish the cigarette that’s in your mouth, sir. That’s a Persian carpet you’re standing on, not a straw mat.”

The officer immediately ordered his men to leave the books. Everything else they were to show him personally, especially the carpets!

Seizing the opportunity of the commotion, I slipped out to the balcony and greeted the prince. He shook my hand in a friendly way, although he was clearly in a foul humor. There was so much I wanted to say in response to his arrogance and contempt, but the thunderous look in his eye drove the words off my tongue as fast as birds taking flight at the crack of a shotgun. I tried to explain to him briefly why the sequestration process was necessary, at least as I understood it. He saw my argument in a different light. He had little patience for socialism. The redistribution of wealth was a goal accomplished through taxation not sequestration, he said. He then turned to the importance of education and appreciation of the arts, every now and then casting a glance beyond me into the interior of his house. He concluded with words that both cut to the quick and provoked me. Lowering his voice, he said, “What I see is not an inventory of my possessions. It’s a ransacking. They’re nothing but a bunch of thieves. But you, sir—what are you doing with them?”

“What I do is no concern of yours. What matters is that you understand that your home is a museum of riches that belong to the people because it was built on the backs of the poor and the land worked by Egyptian farmers.”

He turned away and stared fixedly into the distance. I was so annoyed by that snub that I reported his description of the inventory to our commanding officer, who had been watching me suspiciously from afar. The officer, more indignant than before, told the prince to remove his gold watch and ring. He then sent the clerk with the ledgers to the prince, and had the prince sign below endless columns of inventoried items, followed by a statement vowing the direst penalties for any negligence or dereliction in the fulfillment of his full responsibility for the items of furniture that we had left in his possession in his capacity as a trustee charged by the government with the safekeeping of the public property of the Egyptian people.

Before leaving, I helped myself to a piece of Damascene brocade work. A member of our staff had brought it to the officer from an inner room. As the officer felt the fabric, he asked the others’ opinion. When they told him it was made of some cheap material, he used it to wipe off the crumbs of his lunchtime sandwich from his hands and mouth and tossed it aside. I slipped into my pocket. I was well aware of its value. Many years ago, Paula had sold smaller pieces for a couple of hundred pounds each. When I got back home, I showed it to Zeinab. She flipped it over a couple of times, shrugged, and said it would make a good potholder. I snatched it out of her hands. The next day, I wrapped it carefully and presented it to my boss. To spare him the embarrassment of his ignorance, and to spare myself from his wrath, I told him the staff had not recognized its true value. He flipped it over in his hands and looked at me glumly.

I volunteered the answer to the question in his eyes before his mouth had to pronounce it. “The committee overlooked it, sir. Meaning that, technically, it doesn’t exist. I suggest making a gift of it to the wife, sir. I’m sure she’ll like it.”

He gave a satisfied nod, smiled, and stuffed it into his briefcase. It occurred to me that more aristocratic tokens of this sort would keep me in his good graces. I soon discovered that dozens of others in the department had the same idea, and on a grander scale. Most of them would end up stabbed in the back by peers before their stars rose too high.

After the breakup of Egypt’s short-lived union with Syria in 1961, the orders came down to nationalize pretty much everything. “It’s to keep the big industrialists and entrepreneurs from turning against the regime,” the defense minister told us. He said that he had irrefutable intelligence about secret meetings in which they plotted to overthrow the government and eliminate Nasser. No one ventured a question, of course. As the nationalization wave rose, most of us kept our heads down. The heads that rolled belonged to those who imagined they had the wealth and influence to defy the wave.

Since it was unlikely they knew Cicurel like I did, regarding his genius at converting and concealing his wealth, I doubted the authorities suspected what I was doing with mine. But you can never be too careful, I thought in the privacy of my basement at the Heart of Palm. Just that day, my boss had confided, “Everything’s changed, Abbas. It’s too cutthroat. I’m thinking about taking a very long holiday in London, and not coming back.” If he, who was closer to those whose orders he carried out, was afraid of their wrath, how was I supposed to feel? I ventured no comment, so as not to betray my own fear. I’d learned from experience that they smelled fear faster than the Zafer missile. Beneath the dim light in the basement, I secured the last tire around its frame and patted it. About this, at least, I could feel a little safer now. As far as the government knew, all I had to my name was my salary, my inheritance from Paula, and the villa at a nominal rent from the Sequestration Department.

The sequestration process that Prince Youssef experienced took place in many other estates where I helped with the inventories in the service of my country. Most of the acquisitions were sold in public auctions, the revenues accruing to the national treasury. Five years after presenting that gift to my boss, I was promoted to deputy chairman of the committee, which put me within reach of the chairmanship itself. But I lacked the courage to so much as think about reaching for it. There also came a point when I stopped taking part in the sequestration raids and confined myself to desk work. I’d already had my fill of “overlooked” items and feared drawing attention to myself if I overindulged. I was constantly haunted by the specter of being on the receiving end of one of those raids. I’d seen it happen to many others who’d once been close to the higher-ups. Since that time, I would never go to bed without first checking to make sure my gun was below my pillow with a bullet ready to fire and a second in the chamber. The first was for whoever tried to arrest me. The second for myself.