28

“Everybody laid their plans when they started out. Fate kept the surprises for the end.”—Nadia

Yasmine and I had left home for the New Year’s Eve gala at ten p.m. I was exhausted with worry and not in the mood at all, but it was the only way to escape the strange ideas that were pursuing me like furies. If only I could kill Murad and get him out of my life forever. I was shocked at myself for even thinking that. I had never felt that way about anyone before, but the thought had been whirling around in my head for hours. I would tell Tarek about Murad’s threats and ask him to end that nightmare. I was sure he would do that for me.

A gentle nudge from Yasmine brought me back to my whereabouts. Indicating the violinist, she said it that was her favorite instrument. She was only nine, but precocious. Amazingly, the violinist resembled Tarek quite a bit. He was absorbed in a solo piece. He finished to an enthusiastic round of applause and I joined in, even though I had barely listened to it. Yasmine, still applauding excitedly, looked at me and asked whether I was tired. I nodded. The audience fell silent as the orchestra struck up the next piece. I stole glances at her beautiful face as she became rapt in a raucous Japanese composition that was unfamiliar to most of us. But my mind was not on the music. The hammering drums of anger drowned it out. Murad couldn’t be telling the truth. Yet he said he had the documents to prove him right. Could it be true that I was not Abbas’s daughter, but the daughter of Cicurel or, instead, of a simple railway worker whose family put me in an orphanage? Why had Abbas kept this from me? Why had he given me his name? Why did his sister Zeinab have to meddle in my life so much that she had ruined it? Who were those two people to me really? What put them in my path and let them set its course?

My thoughts turned to my supposed brother Ibrahim—or “Abraham,” as Murad called him. I pictured him with long, curly sidelocks and a little black cap on the back of his head. I mentally clucked my tongue at myself. How ridiculous could I get? My mind was such a muddle. Then my supposed “real” name popped to mind. I was on the verge of tears. I focused on Yasmine’s serene, dreamy face in the hope it would pull me out of this vortex, but suddenly my fear welled up again. In a matter of days, Yasmine, along with the whole of Zamalek, would know the truth if Murad went through with his threat. It would kill her. I prayed it was all lies, but I had to protect her. How? I was at the end of my tether. My nerves were sputtering out like the candle commemorating my birthday, most of which was ruined by Murad. I left my seat at least three times, pretending I felt nauseous. I shed torrents of tears in the bathroom. As I contemplated my bloodshot eyes in the mirror, I felt a powerful urge to commit suicide. The knocking on the bathroom door shook me to my senses. I returned to my seat in the concert hall, planting a slight smile on my face to allay Yasmine’s concerns for me for the remainder of the concert.

Afterward, the audience, elated by the music and the celebratory atmosphere, went outside to watch the fireworks. I jumped at every boom and flash. Later, there was a traffic jam at the exit as people in cars and on foot waited for the president’s convoy to pass. He too had attended the performance at the Opera House. Normally it would take only a few minutes for us to reach the corner of our street by taxi. Tonight it took over half an hour. There was a barricade at the end of our street, so Yasmine and I got out and went the rest of the way on foot.

I was transfixed by flames rising from the roof of the Heart of Palm as we quickly wove our way through the backed-up cars and crowd of pedestrians. The flames didn’t seem large, but the powerful jets of water made them leap and dance. As we came closer, I could see that parts of the walls were blackened. Our tall palm tree had fallen. Its crown was charred. It had crushed two cars on its way to earth: our black Cadillac and our neighbors’ car. The flames had scorched the Cicurel villa next door, and a portion of the wall between it and our grounds had collapsed. There was a hole in the wall of the basement. The ground next to it was carpeted with pieces of brick and shards of glass. Many cars parked in the vicinity had been pelted by flying debris. Dozens of firemen were struggling to control the fire, which, I learned, had broken out about an hour earlier. The lights on top of the police cars and ambulances flashed across the faces of the hundreds of onlookers who were craning their necks, even from afar, to watch the disaster. I pushed my way through the crowd, supporting myself on Yasmine’s shoulders. An officer approached and introduced himself as an official from State Security Investigations Service, the SSI.

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. My condolences.”

I burst into tears, though he hadn’t yet told me who had died. Suddenly I saw my aunt being carried to an ambulance on a stretcher. I rushed toward her. She had a narrow escape, one of the firemen told me. The fire hadn’t reached her bedroom, but it took the firemen a long time to find her because she was hiding behind a large column on the second floor. She must have rolled herself off the bed and dragged herself on her arms to get there. Her eyes bulged in abject terror. Her hands clasped her jewelry box like a lifeline. She stared at me in alarm and confusion, but said nothing. According to one of the rescue workers, she had lost the ability to speak. That must have been why she hadn’t called out from her hiding place. I pried the jewelry box from her grip with great difficulty. Her body jerked and she vomited violently. As they quickly slid her stretcher into the ambulance, the attendant physician attempted to reassure me: “It’s from the severe shock. But the good Lord has granted her a new life.”

For more than half an hour, I remained outside, until the fire was extinguished. I recalled trying to get into the basement several times, but they held me back. Apart from that, my recollection of everything else during that period was vague, until the SSI officer reappeared in front of me. What was a state security investigator doing here? The officer told me that the two bodies were still in the basement, and that the medical examiners and forensic technicians were examining the crime scene.

“Was there somebody living in your basement?”

The ground beneath me began to spin again. The officer took hold of my arm to keep me from falling as they brought a chair to where we stood near the villa gateway. Yasmine took my other hand and stood next to me silently, tears streaming down her face. We couldn’t sit inside the villa. They wouldn’t allow us in, but it wasn’t clear whether this was because of the damage the fire had caused. I caught sight of our staff in the garden, in tears. They were huddled together in a row, some with rumpled hair, others barefoot. There was soot on their clothes. Two soldiers were guarding them. The officer told me that they were under suspicion and would have to be detained. I turned to the villa. There were large cracks in the front wall, a portion of the stairs to the front door had collapsed, and half the first-floor balcony no longer existed—perhaps the heat of the fire was too much for it and it had ruptured into the bits of brick and stone strewn across the front garden. There were two corpses in there, the officer had said. So Tarek must have died, along with my father. Had they met? Spoken with each other? How could my father have made his way down to the basement in his half-paralyzed condition? Someone must have helped him. But who? Not Fahim. He never came over at night. Tarek? I looked up at the officer, wiping away my tears so I could see him more clearly. I shook my head to indicate that no one had been living in the basement. Then I asked him what caused the fire.

He studied my face for a moment, then said, “An incendiary bomb.”

The answer thundered between the walls of my skull. At that moment, the rescue workers emerged from the basement carrying the two bodies on stretchers, both covered with white sheets. I stood up, asking the officer if I could take a last look. He nodded. A rescue worker lifted the sheet off my father’s face. The sight was unbearable: his face was an atrocious grimace. The contents of my stomach spurted out of my mouth as I staggered back. The officer took my arm to lead me away, but I insisted on seeing the other corpse. I wanted to say goodbye to Tarek too. I struggled to steady myself as they lifted the sheet from the face. It was Fahim.

Today, I learned who I really am. I’m Batel Jacob Zananiri, the daughter of a Jewish diamond merchant. He and my real mother died in a plane accident after he had left me with Abbas Mahalawi as a security deposit for a diamond.

I am a bird with wings clipped by adversity. It wants to fly but it can’t even keep its head up as it walks. I had no tears left to cry. I grappled for a sense of direction with no one to help point the way. When I searched through old trunks filled with memories, my wounds reopened. Hundreds of old photos lay scattered before me. None showed my real mother and father. There were pictures of me as an infant and a child, pictures of Zeinab and Abbas with Paula, and even some of Fahim Effendi. I came across photos of my wedding with Murad and photos of some of my childhood friends in the backyard near the dock. I stared at a photo of the Heart of Palm bedecked in festive holiday lights. Now, a month after the incident, it stood dark, charred, and gloomy, on the brink of collapse. I feared it would be condemned by the municipal authorities.

I was a fractured reflection on the surface of a stagnant pool, someone torn from her roots her entire life, with only her remaining years to piece together her origins. I sifted through the pictures and papers for a third, fourth, fifth time. Every time, the train into the past screeched to a halt with a loud whistle at Zeinab’s ugly face and Abbas’s laconic smile peering out at me from ancient photos, telling me in unison: “You have no roots but us. Accept your fate and don’t be ungrateful. We erased your history.”

I reread, for the third time, the letter Zeinab had given to me after her release from hospital. I could barely believe my eyes. She and her brother did to me exactly what the government did to the Egyptian Jews when it expelled them: confiscated their property and erased their history.

I was like Sara, my childhood friend, who lost her mother and then had to emigrate and leave everything behind her. The same thing had happened to all the other Jewish families who had been our neighbors in Zamalek. I would have been one of them, going to temple on Saturdays, carrying my little velvet bag with my prayer shawl and Torah. Afterward, I’d come out holding a green sprig like the one the rabbi used to give Sara, who kept hers until the fragrance faded. How could I bring myself to hate Abbas’s son when I was a Jew like him? We might not be able to choose our faith but we can choose our humanity.

The truth about me cut deep. Faces flashed before me of people who’d had to leave, never to return. For me, there was nothing left but fog, the whistling wind, and the deafening ticks of a pendulum drawing me forty years back to the day my father and mother died in the plane crash. I too would have died if they hadn’t left me behind, a hostage to their greed. Could they have had some premonition of impending danger? Did a voice whisper to them to spare my life by consigning me to Abbas and Zeinab, thereby abandoning me to this slow death I was enduring today?

I do know they abandoned me for the sake of money. Perhaps my mother felt she had no choice and succumbed to my father’s pressures. Maybe it wasn’t greed that drove him. Maybe he was poor and needed money so he could give me the dignified life he felt I deserved as his only child for whom he had waited so long. No. No, he couldn’t have been poor. Otherwise he couldn’t have left behind all that property for Abbas and Zeinab to plunder. No, my father was as avaricious as Abbas. I didn’t deserve to be related to him.

I broke into in tears again. It was futile to search for answers. My poor brain threw in the towel.

I moved into one of Abbas’s small apartments in Zamalek with Yasmine and Zeinab. During the month after the incident, I was summoned at least four times for questioning. In the last session, I was given yet another shock—or, more accurately, cause for bereavement. Most of the questions revolved around some Christian man called Amgad Munir Radi, whose ID card they found in our basement. It had Tarek’s picture on it. To compound my surprise, he was known to the police as an active member of a terrorist cell. They recognized his photo and found a match with fingerprints from our basement. They told me he was the one responsible for the Maison Thomas bombing.

Tarek must have discovered Abbas’s large safe while he was down in the basement. He must have decided to help himself to its contents when he saw Abbas and Fahim down there. But why in the world were they there to begin with? Abbas hadn’t been down there for about a year, and it had been several weeks since Fahim had last been to the villa. Tarek would have seen them open the safe. Then he probably overheard them say something that made him show himself and force them to speak. Why else would he have tied them up and beaten them, as the police told me he had? He then planted one of the time bombs of the sort he used in the Maison Thomas attack. He’d had them in that briefcase of his all along. No wonder he’d kept it clutched in his arms as he slept and refused to show me its contents. He brought the house down on the people I’d once thought of as my family. I’d told him that Yasmine and I were going out that night. So he took advantage of our absence to avenge himself against Abbas and Zeinab. As well as against Fahim, who had the ill fortune to cross Tarek’s path that night, because surely he meant nothing to Tarek.

The investigators let me know another curious detail. They said that Tarek could have blown up the villa and everything around it sky high, but instead he used a relatively small amount of the explosive substance and oriented the bomb in a way to minimize its impact. Why would he do that? My heart told me it was to spare me.

Tarek might have grabbed what he believed was Abbas’s fortune, then killed him, set off the bomb, and fled. Yet he only got crumbs. That little safe, which was spared from the flames because of its steel casing inside a recess in the wall, couldn’t have contained much money. It probably contained only documents. What documents? Documents about me and my true identity? The memoirs of Abbas Mahalawi? Did Tarek take them? Why? They found him hiding out near Abbas’s farm in Mahalla Marhoum. What on earth drove him there? He’d burned everything he had on him before he died. He was killed in a shootout with the village guards, who thought he was a thief. Now he was dead and I’d never be able to learn the rest of the story from him.

The basement safe lay empty. All of Abbas’s papers were in the safe in his bedroom. There was nothing special about these documents except for one. It was a design of some sort, like an intricate crochet pattern. I could only make out what seemed to be a palm tree with a lot of tiny circles around it.

“What does this paper mean, Madame Nadia?” the investigator asked.

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen it before.”

“Whose handwriting is this?”

I lit another cigarette as I shook my head to indicate I was as mystified as he was.

Had Tarek found out about the real me that Murad mentioned? If only he had known. If only he could have told me he did it for my sake. Why did he come to the villa that night? Had he planned a robbery from the outset?

I could hear echoes of his voice. They called to my soul like a melancholy reed flute, but they made my mind sound the war drums against everyone and everything.

The investigations were still in progress. Many of the same questions must be nagging at the investigators, but I wasn’t going to risk telling them why Tarek was in our house. There was no point dragging my wounded pride through a maze of red tape. I had more than enough to deal with thanks to what I’d learned about Tarek and learned from Murad and Zeinab.

I was under suspicion. That was obvious from the questions they asked me and the many times I was called in. It was equally obvious that they were stymied. I was the only link they could find between Tarek and Abbas and Fahim. They couldn’t figure out the nature of that link and I would never lead them to its source. I would not let them into the chambers of my heart. They would never understand that I had loved only once in my life and that I’d received so many shocks that I’d lost all sense of being alive. I moved like an automaton, purely for Yasmine’s sake. The only one who knew the truth was Murad, and he was blackmailing me and draining the last of my will.

“We would appreciate a convincing answer this time.” The investigator’s voice interrupted my thoughts. I stared at my lap in silence. He asked me again how I was related to the individual on the forged ID they found in the basement. This time, though, he used Tarek’s name. “We know that his mother used to work for your aunt,” he said, as though expecting this piece of information to jolt me into a confession.

I injected a tone of great surprise in my voice, which I hoped sounded convincing: “The poor woman died twenty-five years ago. I haven’t seen Tarek since. That picture on the ID—it’s so strange. It doesn’t look like Tarek at all.”

I almost felt sorry for the inspector, whose furrowed brow betrayed his helplessness and frustration at my silence and my persistent denials. He breathed a long, exasperated sigh, then extracted a small file from beneath some others and gave it to me to read. My nerves were so frayed by this time that they couldn’t tolerate more surprises, but since this latest one was so absurd, I was able to approach it with a welcome sense of detachment. I raised my eyebrows as I read the autopsy report on Abbas Mahalawi. The medical examiner had found that he had been administered small but regular doses of a toxic substance. His last dose on New Year’s Eve may have caused his death before the explosion, but that had not been confirmed yet.

“God rest his soul. Abbas must have had a lot of enemies,” I said. “I knew nothing about his work or his acquaintances. If you find out who was behind this, please let me know.”

I wasn’t particularly interested in who killed Abbas. To me, he died the day Murad revealed who he really was. Then Zeinab mutilated his corpse when she revealed that I was Batel, daughter of the Jewish diamond merchant Jacob Zananiri.

During the three months since Abbas died, Murad pestered me nearly daily. He threatened to expose me to the police, to my daughter, and to the whole of society if I didn’t accept his terms. Poor Yasmine! She was at her wits’ end from the tension at home due to my strained nerves. She couldn’t stand Murad and even less his boorish son, a student in the military academy who visited us with his father once.

“Do you think that Omar Seif Eddin would take custody of Yasmine if he learned of your real identity?”

That wasn’t a question. It was blatant threat. I had no shadow of a doubt that this would be Murad’s next move, but even if he managed to contact my ex-husband, I could already venture a guess as to how he’d react. Omar had lived in Paris since our divorce. He called up Yasmine every few months to see how she was doing. He’d seen his daughter three times in all since he moved to France, and that was when we went to Europe. The communications between us were sparse, but I knew he’d left his French lady friend and that he was in financial straits. At least he had no desire to come back to Egypt and would never think of taking my daughter from me. He couldn’t afford to support her and he didn’t want the responsibility. Yet the very thought of losing Yasmine struck me with mental paralysis. I gave Murad some deeds to some of Abbas’s properties in the UK and asked him to go to London to help me sell them. My aim was to shut him up with a gesture to reassure him he would get what he wanted. I would never let a soul take my daughter away from me.

Yasmine begged me to arrange a holiday for us together so that I could take a break. I’d practically have a nervous breakdown after every visit from Murad, but I couldn’t leave Zeinab alone at home. Although she was released from hospital ten days after the incident, she never regained her ability to speak and she’d lost the will to live. It was clear from her feeble signals and gestures that she was waiting for death; indeed, willing it to come. Strangely, they found in her stomach traces of a very small dose of the same poison they’d found in Abbas’s body.

Had Zeinab tried to commit suicide or had someone slipped poison into her food as well? But who? The doctors couldn’t answer and, of course, Zeinab wouldn’t. She refused to even hear of the subject. My suspicions went immediately to Tarek al-Masri, but that line of thought only drew me back into a labyrinth.

I still had an hour before the appointment with my shrink, whom I’d recently begun to visit regularly. I didn’t feel much better, but I’d begun to accept reality. I hadn’t told Murad that I was Batel. Something told me it would be wiser to keep him in the dark about the real beginnings of my story. If writing is therapeutic, Murad was the complete opposite. He had a knack for turning me into a nervous wreck. He and that sleazy son of his with the smarmy smile, wraparound sunglasses, and lewd innuendos.

I swallowed my third tranquilizer, opened my red diary, and picked up my pen.

Nadia was never my real name, but no one would tell me the truth. I’ve picked up stories here and there, and arranged them so I can see them clearly. But there is still a piece of the picture missing. All of us float on a sea of fictions. Some of us get dragged down by an undertow and drown. Others cling to the life raft of penance in the hopes of reaching the shores of truth, even if spent and emaciated. Because, perhaps, they will still have a chance for redemption and a new beginning.

I reread the passage carefully. It seemed logical and it expressed my current condition now that Murad had showed me the documents. He gave me copies, and these, together with Zeinab’s last letter, formed the naked, horrifying, grievous truth. Were someone else in this position to ask my advice, I’d tell them that sometimes ignorance is a blessing.

At any rate, it was now my turn to play my last card. Then the picture would be complete and we’d see who came out the winner, though unfortunately, in this game, I feared we would all end up losers.

*

I reopened the jewelry box that Zeinab was clutching when they rescued her from the fire. In addition to some jewels, it contained a paper on which Abbas had signed some properties over to her. For the first time, I noticed that a portion of the wooden lining had been chipped away. I could make out the edge of a photograph beneath it. Unable to pry it out with my fingers, I fetched a pair of tweezers. After some difficulty, I extricated three small, ancient photos. They all showed the same subject: a lot of men in a construction site, standing next to a hole with a large sack at the bottom. One picture showed a truck that seemed to be dumping sand into the hole. The photos were grainy and the light was poor, but I could make out Abbas among the men. When I showed the photos to Zeinab, the color drained from her face, but I was unable to pry information out of her. Apparently, she’d decided to say no more than what she had written in her last confession. If she thought that cleansed her, she was wrong. I had not forgiven her yet. I returned the jewelry box to her. Then I held out a piece of paper and pen, and asked her again to answer my question. She looked away. Then she took the pictures and carefully reinserted them in the box.

As I lay on the couch, I contemplated the large painting of Abbas Mahalawi that the servant had fetched from the basement of the burnt-out villa in Zamalek. He stood tall and proud in a hunting costume made of British tweed and an elegant camel-hair cap. He cradled a large hunting rifle in one arm. I’d never seen him with it. In fact, I never knew he went on hunting expeditions at all. It was unclear when the painting was made and, as I searched my memory, I doubted I’d ever seen it before. Judging by Abbas’s features, it was probably painted in the sixties. My hand, as though under its own volition, snatched up the crystal cigarette lighter and hurled it at the painting, creating a long slash down the middle. I got up, strode up to the painting, and tore his face into tiny pieces, leaving a headless body in hunting suit. I lit my fourth cigarette and turned my thoughts to Murad’s proposal: his silence in exchange for half my wealth. Obviously, he wanted to secure his and his son’s future using Abbas’s money. Soon I’d have all of it, since Zeinab Mahalawi already had one foot in the grave, according to what the doctors told me.

“Aren’t we going to Europe like you promised, Mommy?”

I exhaled the cigarette smoke upward and gave Yasmine a big hug, kissed her on the forehead, and forced myself to smile. Then I reached for the phone, dialed, and waited. The person at the other end greeted me effusively after I identified myself. I told him I wanted to reserve a suite and supplied all the necessary details.

“Will this be a short-term stay, ma’am? We can make it renewable if you wish. . . .”

“No. Make it a year . . . Yes, a year at least, please.”

I replaced the receiver and contemplated the photo on my ID card. I felt the muscles in my face contract. Into a smile or a grimace? I couldn’t tell. But at least I didn’t cry.