22

“Egypt’s much prettier from high up, if you got something worth seeing once you’re up there.”—Zeinab Mahalawi

Even though I was the one who insisted on it, Nadia’s divorce from Murad was the third blow in my life after the death of Lady and Sandro’s flight and then murder at Abbas’s hands. I’d wanted Nadia to be with a powerful man like Murad, but he’d grown weak in the last year of their marriage. Not only had I lost hope that he’d be reinstated, he was a step away from prison. Those were dark days for us, when Murad refused to give Nadia a divorce and then fled the country after they charged him with conspiring with the defense minister to overthrow Nasser. To my surprise, when I told Nadia to get a divorce, she said, “I’m not thinking about divorce at this time.” She’s a stubborn one, so instead of trying to fight, I’d bring her around slowly. I told her Murad’s times had come and gone and that his days ended the day the field marshal committed suicide, like Abbas said. I warned her that Murad dragged us down, but that only made her want to stand by him even more.

When I realized it was pointless trying to convince her, I nagged Abbas. That worked. One day he returned from one of those long summer trips he used to take to London, handed me the divorce papers signed by Murad, and said, “Murad’s agreed to the divorce and he’s going to stay in London. I did my part. Now you go break it to Nadia.”

Eventually I got Abbas to explain how he did it. Murad agreed to the divorce in exchange for an exit visa, which Abbas managed to wangle through his connections. Abbas was going to notify the authorities on the day Murad was due to travel in order to get him arrested at customs and thrown into jail. Murad was shrewder. He refused to give Nadia a divorce until after he was safely out of the country. He handed Abbas a check for twenty thousand pounds as a guarantee. When Abbas got to London, he handed the check to some intermediary in exchange for the divorce papers. I couldn’t pry more details out of Abbas. Eventually we forgot the matter or, more precisely, we tried to put it out of our minds.

Nadia had a lot of suitors after the divorce. She turned them all down, even though some were very suitable in my opinion. It seemed that the softer I grew as I aged, the more muleheaded she became. After her experience with Murad, I wanted her to have a stable life with a respectable man who appreciated her and her family’s worth, but she wanted a man her own age who “loved her like she loved him.” I was sure she couldn’t understand Murad’s needs as a man—why else would he have taken a second wife behind her back? That, too, I learned from Abbas after the divorce. How I’d prayed she’d have a child or two with Murad. Maybe they just needed more time, though Abbas and I had begun to wonder whether Murad was sterile. Whatever the case, after the divorce I had to figure out ways to fill up her day. I wasn’t going to let her out of my sight. There was no way I was going to let the fortune I’d built up with Abbas slip out of our hands.

“Monsieur Edmond has been waiting in the hall for an hour, Madame Zeinab.”

I nodded and dismissed my servant. Edmond could wait a little longer. More than half an hour later, I had him present himself to me in the back garden next to the Nile, where I was having my morning coffee and reading the papers. He stood politely, hands clasped in front of him, the upper half of his body pitched slightly forward. After leaving him like that long enough to quench my thirst for revenge, I spoke, but without looking at him.

“I want you to give my daughter Nadia piano lessons.”

I could hear his hesitation. I slid my reading glasses down my nose a bit, and looked up at him coldly. “Weren’t you a music teacher before you opened that school for etiquette in Zamalek? I hope you haven’t forgotten how you started out, Edmond.”

He nodded and stuttered, “I’m at your service, Madame Zeinab. But that was such a long time ago and I haven’t taught—”

“I’ll pay you five pounds an hour. We’ll make it once—no, twice a week. Surely that’s better than hanging around the Gezira Club all day because you’re jobless.”

Edmond bowed stiffly and left. Actually, he backed out. He only turned around when he was near the end of the lawn. Then my servant called out to him, holding up an envelope. He remained in place, as instructed, forcing Edmond to retrace his steps to collect the envelope, which contained five pounds as an advance. He bowed himself out again, but he couldn’t restrain himself. Even before he was out the gate, he opened the envelope, counted the bills, and nearly jumped for joy.

Unfortunately, neither our circumstances nor the conditions in the country were looking up, which added another type of worry. I wasn’t the only one who felt that Anwar Sadat was weak and unwelcome. Abbas, who’d worked with Sadat in the National Assembly for three years, put it differently: “He hasn’t begun to fill his chair yet.” Whatever the case, I put off my projects for five full years until after the October War. Then, almost overnight, everything changed. We entered a new era in which Egypt opened up to a whole wide world from which we’d been cut off for nearly twenty years. Our opinion about the president changed too. Whenever Sadat cropped up in our conversations, Abbas would say, “The guy turned out to be as crafty as a Delta peasant. A wolf with a fox inside him.”

My plan was to get into the construction business like Abbas did with Abdel-Naim in the old days. He wasn’t happy about the idea, so it took some elbow twisting to bring him around and get him to agree to my conditions. He was showing signs of wanting to settle down and retire, contenting himself with the fortune he’d made. He kept forgetting that the fortune didn’t belong to him alone. I was his partner, fifty-fifty at least, and he needed constant reminding of this fact, especially since I was sure he was hiding some of his assets from me because of his annual trips to London. What did he get up to over there?

I’d watched his climb up the career ladder. From the Feudalism Liquidation Committee to the Socialist Union Party secretariat, and from there to the National Assembly’s Central Membership Committee. He was a member of the boards of directors of the Nasr Automobile Company and Egypt Insurance Company, but he no longer wanted to invest in real estate. He’d converted all his cash into diamonds. He picked that up from Cicurel—that and selling them in Belgium. Or some of them. He said. From there he flew off to London for a long holiday. He’d tell you it was for R&R, and that was all he’d say on the subject. Afterward, he came back with a sizeable amount of cash. I saw it as yeast, which could rise into skyscrapers if he wanted, but he just hoarded it.

Finally, when I managed to make him see some sense, he opened my eyes to a new method, though it would take guts and a lot of pull. “Forget about the old villas and palaces,” he said. “Look at the large spaces in between. What you have to do is buy them up bit by bit, and let Fahim take care of the paperwork.” It worked like a charm, thanks to the network of connections Fahim had built up over the years in the Notary Public, the local and foreign-owned property registrars and other government departments. Before long, barely a month went by without some new high-rise lifting its head in the Zamalek skyline.

Business really took off a few years after the 1973 war, when money began to flow again, and we started to call our new apartment blocks “towers,” which helped attract Saudis and Gulf Arabs. The ground and first floors we rented out to commercial establishments: big-name restaurants and patisseries or upmarket clothes and shoe stores. Large sections of the area designated for garage space in the official plans were partitioned so they could be converted into smaller commercial spaces. These we rented out as grocery stores and other shops to serve the tenants’ day-to-day needs. Fahim’s connections with the municipal inspection authorities came in handy here, but it was my money that paid for it all. Or, more precisely, my half of Abbas’s money, as per our old agreement, which he always tried to wriggle out of.

The exhilaration I felt when visiting one of my buildings was indescribable. At least ten men rushed out to greet my Cadillac as soon as they saw it coming. They swarmed around it, raising their hands to greet me, and bellowed out good wishes. My driver slowed and pulled to a stop right in front of the main entrance, where they cleared a space large enough to fit three Cadillacs. Out of the back window I caught sight of some of the men racing to catch up so they would be ready to welcome me when the driver opened the rear door. Some bowed and kissed my hand. I was the most famous lady in Zamalek. Everyone knew me by sight. If they saw me in another part of town, they’d whisper and point to me in admiration. I was a hero in the stories they wove. I was one of the first things on their minds; they were one of the last things on mine. They prayed for tokens of approval during my monthly inspection tour with the local real estate agents, who had me to thank for being able to operate in Zamalek. I’d chosen them carefully, based on Fahim’s recommendations.

It was the khamsin season and one of its sandstorms struck, blasting our faces with hot, sandy wind. I climbed back into the car, rolled up the window tightly, and waited for it to pass. In no time flat, the storm painted the buildings with a dusty gray film. Then it passed, though I could still see some eddies of whirling dust and dirt particles. I rolled down the sand-covered window and smiled. The first thing that came to view was the shop window of one of the outlets of a chain of stores I’d opened in most of my “towers”: Elrimas for hijabs, abayas, and outfits for the fashionably veiled.

But it was not a fully satisfied smile. I still felt something was missing, and that irked me. Why was it that a lump still formed in my throat whenever I bumped into that wall of ladies from a society in which I felt a stranger? They came from a distant past in which I’d stood on the fringes. I’d tried to change that ancient society, but to no avail. They switched to French when I was around. Although I could follow snatches of their conversation, I could never get the French I knew to roll off my tongue like they did. I got nervous for no reason, and my tongue got tied up in knots. They reminisced over the long-gone times of Madame Paula. They sighed wistfully as they recalled her elegance, grace, and poise. I sensed I was the butt of subtle winks and insinuations, but I said nothing. I clenched my jaw so tightly I feared a molar might break, and I heard my heart thumping in my eardrums. After I left them, I returned to the kingdom I’d built. I took heart in the sight of my towers, soaring high enough to block the sun, and I let the admiration and praise of small shop owners work like salve on my wounds. I swore I’d spend every piaster I had, until I owned every last inch of Zamalek, so I could see my adversaries become my followers and grovel at my feet.

Fortune smiled on me when I set out on this project. I was able to demolish more than thirty of the villas that my father-in-law, Abdel-Naim, built with Abbas and before Abbas. My towers now stood in their place. Naturally, I didn’t tear down any of the old villas in my neighborhood, so we wouldn’t be disturbed by a big influx of residents and the noise and bustle of shops and shoppers. Abbas did his part to keep other real estate entrepreneurs from our part of Zamalek. He also gave me a compliment in his funny way: “They screwed us when Abdel-Naim and I built these villas for them in the 1940s. We got piasters. But your good Lord made it up to us. Praise the Lord!”

My path was not strewn with roses, contrary to what some of my friends imagined. I was forced to “donate” half a plot of land I’d acquired so the government could build a school on it. Then came the time when we found ourselves the object of a smear campaign in the press. Abbas asked me to bend with the wind so he wouldn’t lose his new position, so I bent and sacrificed a small villa to the Governorate of Cairo. President Mubarak had just appointed him to the National Democratic Party secretariat. I was sorry to see Sadat go. I missed those days when we could do everything we wanted and felt like we owned the country. Then the guy got himself assassinated right in the middle of his army. I was terrified we were going to lose everything we owned. When I mentioned this to Abbas, he laughed and said, “Nothing’s going to change, Zeinab. As your mama, God rest her soul, used to say, ‘Those rabbits are all from the same litter, even if one’s black, the next one’s white, and the one after that is gray.’”

We’d finished our lunch in the revolving restaurant in the Cairo Tower and were now having our coffee. We sat at an inner table because Abbas didn’t like heights. Just before sunset, I suggested we go up to the observation deck to admire Cairo’s beauty from above. I reached the circular deck before him and leaned against the iron railing, which, like the top of the tower, folded out like lotus leaves. I looked out across Zamalek, at its few remaining villas amid towering apartment blocks. I loved to look down on things from above. I could easily make out ten buildings that I had built recently. I told Abbas to come closer to the railing so he could get a better view, but his fear of heights held him next to the inner wall, where he stood with that ebony cane of his. He only used that cane to make him look dignified. His shadow stretched to his left and grew bigger and bigger until it stopped at my feet.

“Believe me, Cairo’s is prettier from up here!”

“It might be even prettier from a different angle,” he said with a crafty smile on his face. He returned to our table and I followed, pulled by the force of my curiosity. With that crafty smile still playing on his face, he pulled out a map and spread it out on the table. It was a map of Mohandiseen, a part of town in Giza that had been targeted for development. I didn’t know how many times I’d asked him to get me a copy of the urban-planning map after I’d heard it had come off the drawing board. Now he swept his hand over it with a grand gesture and said, “Take your pick, madame.”

I stared, mouth agape, unable to believe my eyes.

“Just imagine, Zeinab! All this is just fields, apart from a handful of villas and about fifty apartment blocks.”

“You mean they were fields. We’re going to plant apartment blocks and skyscrapers there!” I laughed and set my finger on a red square.

“That’s already taken. We can only choose from the blank ones,” he said.

“Who got there first?”

“There are a lot of folks who are bigger than us, Zeinab. There are the officers in the army and the police. Prominent judges and doctors. Accountants and journalists with pull. And before them come ministers, senior officials, and even former officials, but with a reach that extends to the present. Then there are the others like us.”

“Plus, there are a lot more people who’ve got money now. Don’t forgot about them. They’re going to want their share too.”

“Wrong, Zeinab. Those are our customers. They’re the ones who are going to buy our units so they can live next door to the bigwigs. That’s how the country’s been working for the past twenty years. And it’s going to go on working that way for the next fifty years at least.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t convinced.

“Just choose the blank lots or the villas, because it’ll be easy to knock them down.”

I thought for a moment. Then I set my finger down on a long green strip that almost circled the whole of the residential area like a belt.

“That’s for low-income people,” he said. “The government’s going to build low-cost housing there.”

“So, we’ll build it for them.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it for us.” He paused for a moment, then said, “It’s weird. Each new quarter has got to be surrounded by a belt of slums. It’s as though they want to use the poor to frighten the rich. Why would they want to do that?”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong, Abbas. That’s the kind of planning that works in our favor, as you’ll see with every square foot we sell.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“All those new residents are going to need servants and workmen. When servants and workmen live nearby, services are more easily accessible and cheaper. Just you leave that part to me and don’t worry your head about it.”

“But those homes are supposed to be for government employees and others who need a roof over their heads. Not for servants and workmen. It’s about politics, Zeinab.”

“Let them do the politics and let’s us think about what’s good for us. No government employee is going to want to live in an apartment the size of a rathole. He’ll take advantage of the government offer, then sell it at a profit. So, all you have to do now is cash in one or two of your bonbons so we can get some new buildings built.”

Abbas gave the dry laugh he gave whenever I told him to sell one of his “bonbons,” meaning his diamonds. He said the price of diamonds was falling and he didn’t want to risk the nest egg he’d built up over the years in order to buffer us against hard times. “You never know when somebody’s going to stab us in the back,” he said. Backstabbing was something he knew about, having done it to so many others.

“Come off it,” I said. “Just sell off a couple of the small diamonds.”

Then he came up with a brilliant idea for getting money without us having to dig into our own capital: bank loans.

“We’ll pass the interest on to our customers. We use the money from the bank to build. Then we pay back the loan with interest after the sale—”

“How’s the bank going to guarantee it gets its money back?”

“The villa. We’ll use the Heart of Palm as collateral. I got the deed back from the Sequestrations Administration two months ago. The villa’s got to be worth at least two million pounds now. That should do it.”

Over the next two years, Egyptians living abroad in the Gulf bought up everything we built, even while it was still ink on paper. They paid up front and in full. We earned millions. It was so easy. At first, we came under attack in the press because of the building that collapsed in Zamalek, but we were able to prove that the construction permit was in Fahim’s name. He spent a couple of months in jail pending trial, and then was acquitted in the first hearing. As a safety measure, we put all new construction permits in his name, in case more buildings collapsed. I’d always admired the way Abbas’s mind worked. I never overestimated him, despite having had to threaten him at times because of the evil side that always got the better of him. For example, I found out that he’d transferred the deed to the villa and everything else that had been in Nadia’s name to his. I had to force him to write out a will leaving half of this property to Nadia and the other half to me. He gave me a copy, which I’d hidden in a place he’d never find, and I watched his glum face as he put his copy next to a bunch of small files in his safe. I didn’t see any diamonds in there. He was up to something fishy, and whatever it was I swore I’d soon find out.

Abbas seemed to return from some faraway thought, and gave me one of those penetrating looks of his.

“Is it true you don’t let Copts live in your buildings?”

“No, I swear!” The question took me completely by surprise. “Most of them left Shubra and went to live in Heliopolis. Anyway, the Gulf Arabs and Saudis have got money to burn, and they don’t haggle.”

He held that look for a while, then said that complaints had reached the People’s Assembly, accusing me of persecuting Christians. Was this a roundabout way of telling me to stop hosting Sheikh Bahrawi’s religious sermons in the Heart of Palm? I knew Abbas wasn’t thrilled about this, but it was a good way to attract prospective buyers to our apartment buildings and to broaden my influence among the new society women who’d become my friends and customers. Surely I wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to do this. I knew of a lot of homes that opened their doors to well-known sheikhs who gave their fatwas in exchange for a meal. So many women were taking the veil. It was a fad, and you just had to flow with it.

“Come on, Abbas. Just think that we’re doing a good deed that will reward us in the hereafter.”

At a signal from my finger, he rolled his eyes and tilted his ear leftward, toward my mouth. Lowering my voice, I said, “It was Sheikh Bahrawi who suggested we build a little mosque on the ground floor of all our buildings so we’d be exempt from real estate taxes.” I could tell he was impressed, though he tried to hide it.

“Taking care of mosques is a big responsibility,” he said.

I leaned back in my chair, confident that I had him beat on this one. “My doormen take care of them. They fetch their relatives from Upper Egypt to do the work. Anyway, what’s it got to do with us? The government sees what’s going on and says nothing. If it were wrong or forbidden, surely they would have said something by now. Anyway, if push comes to shove, all our papers are in order, God bless Fahim!”

He fell back on his old maxims: “You have to bow before a strong wind” and “It’s a thousand times better to survive in the shadows than to shine at the top and become targets for the worms of the earth.” That was when I came up with the idea of a new marketing system. I told Abbas it would end all the fuss about who could or couldn’t live in our buildings. “We sell the units unfinished. The customers paint them, tile the bathrooms and kitchens, install the floors, kitchen cabinets, bathroom suites, and the like.”

He didn’t take to the idea at first. He couldn’t see how it was connected to the business about Copts and Muslims. “Don’t play games with me, Zeinab,” he snapped. “You’re going to draw a lot of attention to us.”

“Remember how we had to fumigate empty apartments once a year so we could rent them out? Times have changed. Money’s flowing now.”

But the truth was, I was dodging the question. Ever since I agreed with Sheikh Bahrawi to let him give sermons at home in exchange for him inaugurating my buildings, I’d been blessed with fortune. He was the one who suggested I “shun the Coptic neighbor and the unveiled Muslim.” So I did, and my sales soared. I couldn’t tell Abbas this, of course. I focused on the larger profit margin and managed to squeeze some funding out of him. Due to their slightly reduced prices, the unfinished units went like hotcakes. That only increased Abbas’s anxieties. He came back to me about his fears of all the attention my booming business was attracting in the press. That could get government regulators sniffing around us and invoking an anticorruption law that would compel him to make a full financial disclosure. Abbas could never disclose the source of his money, of course.

I consulted Sheikh Bahrawi about this and relayed his advice to Abbas immediately. “Make the apartments available to the people in the agencies we fear most, with comfortable installments.”

The idea impressed him, but he didn’t expect it to succeed. I explained the idea in detail, as the venerable sheikh had explained it to me: “Every government agency has a social club that provides services to its members. What we do is offer them a service: easy installment plans that look so affordable they don’t sense their real value. On the one hand, we lose nothing over time; on the other, we earn their eternal protection.”

“But do you think they’ll go for it?”

“Are you kidding? They won’t believe their eyes. Before you know it we won’t be able to keep up with the demand. What’s important is to choose which of them deserves this service.”

Abbas came around to the idea quickly, for a change. He didn’t want to get into an argument or a long discussion. I learned why soon enough, and it ruined my sense of satisfaction. When I went upstairs to fetch something, I found his suitcases lined up by his bedroom door. He’d be heading to the airport in a few hours to fly to London, where he’d spend the summer, like every year. He didn’t want anyone to disturb him before he left. For the fourth time, I reminded him to have Fahim get the titles to the last five apartment blocks we completed put in my name. Those mysterious trips to London worried me more and more because of the amounts of money he was transferring to his bank there. That was a piece of information I’d picked up recently from the director of our bank during one of Bahrawi’s sessions in our house. She’d taken the veil recently. Either he was engaged in some business venture or he’d gotten married. Whatever it was, he was as tight-lipped as ever. When I demanded to know how he spent my money in England, he snapped, “You’ll never get enough, will you, Zeinab?”

I knew I’d never pry an answer out of him, but, before he left, I took him down to his office, out of sight of Nadia and out of earshot of the staff. I closed the door and took a slip of paper from my purse. It had four names with file numbers next to them. I handed it to Abbas with a look that said, Do as I say. He snatched the paper, looked it at, and said, “Not again, Zeinab. We’ve gotten more than enough of your friends’ sons into the police academy over the years, not to mention the ones that got hired in—”

“That’s what you say every time. But you know as well as I do how these people serve our interests. I choose them very carefully. Or have you forgotten how Fahim got acquitted like a knife through butter? Even those two months in jail were like a holiday in a hotel. Get those four guys enrolled, Abbas. I’ve given my word.”

“It’s no use. You’ll never get enough.”

That silly refrain again. He’d said it so frequently over the past couple of years. I ignored it. I didn’t think the way Abbas did. He was too cautious, but I wanted to own every inch of land I set foot on, which meant I had to have solid backing in every government agency. I was afraid of his treachery, but I still had big dreams. My treasure chest of dreams was as full as Abbas’s safe.

In the two or three years that followed, he continued that same routine of flying off to London at the beginning of the summer and returning to Egypt at the end. He transferred large sums of money to England and withdrew lots of money from his accounts here, as I learned from the director of our bank.

I was getting more and more worried about my money and about Nadia’s rights since her divorce from Omar Seif Eddin. I didn’t want Nadia and her daughter to suffer hardship after I was gone. I didn’t think she’d marry a third time. Why did I agree to him receiving a full power of attorney from her? Now he was gone, and had put everything in his name and put all of us at his mercy, and at a time when I wondered whether he was entering his second childhood. The old codger had taken to making grabs for our maids’ behinds whenever they passed him. At least that was what my new maid told me, and I had no reason to doubt her since I’d hired her myself from Mahalla Marhoum.

Then, all of a sudden, his trips to England stopped. The last time he returned, he looked totally broken and defeated. But would he talk about it? No. For a year and a half, he wouldn’t budge from the house except to go up to the farm for a day or two. He wouldn’t even take Fahim with him on those trips anymore like he used to. At home, he just stared into space most of the time. It was almost as if he’d given up on life altogether. At Sheikh Bahrawi’s advice, I engaged a famous law firm in Britain to have them find out what Abbas got up to over there. The sheikh used that firm himself, and he gave them a good recommendation for me. The recommendation didn’t help lower the fees, though. They cost the earth, but they gave me a piece of information that was worth every piaster, even if it hit like a punch in the belly. That was when I decided I had to get rid of him, because otherwise our money would slip through his fingers to some stranger.

Imagine! Pulling such a dirty trick at his age. He goes and marries some nurse and has a child with her. A son, no less! I swear, Abbas, if you think you’re going to give him any of our money, you’re dreaming. I swear on my mother’s grave, I won’t let half a piaster get away from us.

If only I could have him declared legally incompetent. My lawyer here in Egypt told me I’d have to prove he was a doddering idiot. I could prove he was a stingy miser, but not an idiot. I turned to Fahim, but that goddamned brother-in-law refused to help, even on the sly. I’d been generous with him, but he remained as loyal as a dog to his master, who fed him more and had been the first to take him in.

So I decided to take Abbas unawares and confront him. I thought I’d throw him off balance and make him quake like I did every time I threatened him. This time his face turned as hard and gray as stone. He gave me that steely look that bored deep into my eyes and made me tremble like I used to forty years ago. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t even twitch a muscle in his face. He just turned himself around in the wheelchair he sat in most of the time and rolled off, leaving me more afraid than I’d felt in a long time. After standing stunned for a second, I shouted at his receding back, “I’m going take what’s mine and Nadia’s! Starting tomorrow!”

He didn’t look back. Then I realized how violently my knees were shaking.

I had no choice but to put my hope in fate, and I prayed for it to ease the burdens on my heart and end Abbas’s time here on earth swiftly Unfortunately, fate decided to go for me instead, after prying into my thoughts. I was so absorbed in them that night that I slipped and fell down the stairs and broke my leg. After some weeks confined to my bed, all the ailments that come with old age began to assail me and restrict my movements. The villa’s garden was the farthest I could go. Soon my health declined further, until I found my world confined to the four walls of my bedroom.

Meanwhile, fate conspired with Abbas. It gave him back some health and allowed him to keep all his senses, despite his advanced years. So he could still plan and plot from his wheelchair. But I still had one card up my sleeve: my new maid from the village, who never left my side and did everything I said. There was one last stop on the Abbas train. We’d reach it some weeks from now. Then I’d part ways with him forever.