29

“My sorrow stretches from my heart to my throat. Whenever I touch my neck, my chest hurts.”—Zeinab Mahalawi

I folded the newspaper and set it on my lap with the photo of Abbas facing up. His funeral took up half the front page of Al-Ahram. A large banner headline blazoned his name, preceded by a Quranic verse. Below, in a smaller font, it read: “Abbas Mahalawi Bey has passed on to the mercy of the Lord.”

He was always obsessed about his last rites. He even wrote his own obituary many years ago when he left parliament and the National Democratic Party. Long ago, he taught me that paying condolences and commiserating with people in times of hardship was a shortcut to their hearts. I befriended dozens of ladies using this simple method: a telegram and a condolence visit, which afforded an opportunity to mingle with the bereaved’s acquaintances. It worked like a charm, especially with the ladies of Zamalek, who had once snubbed me but who later became close friends and tried to keep in my good graces because they would eventually need apartments for their children. Abbas must have used this method countless times in order to win personal favors and advance those secret business dealings of his. He certainly didn’t have any close friends.

I looked at his photo again. His white fedora, that half smile, the drooping right eyelid. My tear glands had turned to stone. I couldn’t cry for him yet. There was a malicious glee in those eyes. They said, I stripped you of everything you had, apart from your anger, which you can take to your grave. I passed a fingertip over his face, then pressed down on his eyes, hard enough to punch through the paper and leave a hole where his face had been. Using my fingernail, I tore downward toward his throat. Then I took hold of the front page, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it away—but not far enough. It perched at the foot of the bed. A breeze blew in from the balcony and lifted the rest of the pages, and they flitted around the room until they fell to the floor and hid beneath the bed. But the crumpled page with his photo didn’t budge from its place near my feet.

You met a horrid ending, Abbas, but you had it coming. I wish I could have killed you with my own hands. Fate beat me to it. It’s always been kinder to you than to me. So now you won, and you’re laughing at us from beyond the grave. You left all your diamonds, gold, and cash to your British son and had your lawyer make sure your assets in Egypt didn’t end up in our hands. You left me and Nadia nothing but the villa and the farm in Mahalla Marhoum—the scraps—even though we were your life partners. You would never have gotten where you were if it hadn’t been for us. God curse you to eternity and back.

Naturally, Nadia couldn’t make heads or tails of the map Abbas had left in his bedroom safe. Nor could I at first, when she showed it to me. What were all those silly circles about, when the safe in the basement was empty? I knew he hid his money somewhere like Cicurel did. The problem was where. The guy who destroyed our villa must have cracked the safe downstairs and emptied it out before skedaddling, but Abbas wasn’t stupid enough to leave his diamonds down there. He would have hidden them somewhere else—maybe someplace connected with his annual trips to London. As for the thief, now there’s a mystery for you. Why didn’t Nadia want to talk about that? Could she know who it was? She’d been hiding the newspapers from me, apart from the one with Abbas’s obituary.

Abbas must have had a really nasty falling out with somebody to make him want to kill us in such a brutal way. But who? Would he strike again or had my brother’s death quenched his thirst for revenge? So many questions left unanswered.

I fumbled inside the jewelry box next to my bed and pulled out the old photos. They brought a bitter smile to my face. If Abbas had found them, I wouldn’t be in Zamalek at this moment. I’d probably be lying down there next to Hassanein or, at best, banished back to Mahalla Marhoum decades ago. I looked at the photos of Abbas and those other men dumping the sack containing Hassanein into the pit and then watching as the truck poured cement over him. I developed the film and printed the photos myself. I lost count of the times I had to use them against him. He searched everywhere. But I hid them somewhere he never thought of looking: Paula’s jewelry box. He never suspected how scared I was, despite the weapon I held over his head. If I ever had to act on my threat, Abbas would have gone to the gallows and I would have gone to prison. I needed to remain free and I needed him by my side to help me. If only I hadn’t threatened you, Abbas.

So here I was. I’d lost my brother, I’d lost my voice, and I’d lost a chunk of my memory. I felt tired all the time, and since the fire I’d kept getting woozy. Or had the woozy spells started some weeks before that? Nadia had started to treat me differently. She’d grown remote. She eyed me with suspicion, and also with an unmistakable degree of disdain. I knew the look. I myself had directed it against a lot of women. Now it had boomeranged, and from the person dearest to my heart. Could I be wrong about that?

I was tired of my mind going around in circles, like the Tilt-A-Whirls I used to ride in the Mulid of Sayyid al-Badawi when I was a child. It was Abbas who kept an eye on me and my sisters while my parents watched from a distance. He was the one who made sure I didn’t fall off as I soared high in the air on the swing boat while my mother shot me warning glares when the hem of my gallabiya flew up and revealed my leg.

I removed the covers from my legs and hitched up my nightgown to inspect the burn scars. They were still large and ugly. Why didn’t Nadia have the doctors do some plastic surgery at the time? Why make me feel humiliated when my friends or neighbors visited? I’d have to tell her off about that.

Where was I? I looked around in confusion until I recognized my surroundings. Since my release from hospital, I kept getting memory lapses. Not only that: my parents and my sister Kawthar kept appearing before me. Kawthar was buried in Mahalla Marhoum. Abbas and I didn’t go to her funeral. In fact, Abbas forbade her husband from arranging a large funeral ceremony and publishing an obituary in the newspaper. My brother didn’t want news of our dirt-poor rural roots going around. I agreed with him. We were still at the foot of the ladder at the time, and a lot of nasty people wished us ill. On the other hand, when my mother died, he arranged a three-day ceremony in Cairo, in Mahalla Marhoum, and in the NDP headquarters. The sheikh reciting the Quran had to pause every five minutes to let in the hundreds of people who’d lined up outside the funerary tents to pay respects.

My own end might be near, but I was at peace with myself. At least I wasn’t a murderer like Abbas. And I did more for Nadia than her family ever would have. Speaking of them, I’d have to tell her that I tried to stop Abbas from accepting her as a pledge for the diamond, but he refused to listen. Then her parents died in that plane crash. Abbas’s accomplice all along was Fahim Effendi, who met his maker alongside his master. Loyal to the end, weren’t you Fahim, you son of a bitch? You couldn’t even bear to outlive your master.

I shifted my position in bed. I hadn’t lost everything yet. At least I still had Nadia. She’d pray for me after I died. And if Yasmine had a daughter one day, maybe she’d name her after me. The bastard Abbas left me with a pile of forged deeds and documents. Even if he had conned me out of his will like he’d conned me all his life, the people in Zamalek would remember me, not him. I was the one who was there when they needed a helping hand; I was the one who opened the doors of the Heart of Palm to them for holidays and celebrations. Come to think of it, I’d bequeath enough in my will for Nadia to carry on the tradition of a Ramadan table big enough to feed five hundred poor people. It would be called the Lady Zeinab table. Yes, the table of the Lady of Zamalek. In fact, starting from next Ramadan, I’d make it big enough to feed a thousand.

I opened my eyes to find my maid holding a glass toward my face.

“Your medicine, Madame Zeinab.”

I drank half the contents of the glass and pushed it away from my mouth. It was bitter. She tried to make me drink more, but I pushed her hand away again and glared at her. She had no choice but to obey. I’d lost the will to live. There was nothing left for me to live for. I closed my eyes so I could conjure up the image of my mother. I didn’t see her during her last illness before she died. My hands trembled as I clutched my pillow. When did my hands start trembling this way? Why couldn’t I remember anything clearly except for my family? Yesterday I heard my father’s voice scolding me for staying in bed till noon. “Hold on! I’m coming!” I shouted. Then I woke up and found myself in my room. I called for Nadia, then remembered I’d lost my voice.

I clutched the pillow as tightly as I could. Despite how hard my mother was on me, I missed her embrace. I felt so alone. I had such confusing feelings for Abbas. We’d grown so far apart years before he passed away, to the point that I wanted to kill him. Now I missed him. I signaled to the maid to fetch me his picture from the dressing table on the other side of the room. I smiled as I planted a kiss on his forehead. I put my finger on the top of his head and stroked his hair. I hugged the picture tightly to my chest and cried silently. How I wished I could regain the power of speech just once and then be struck dumb again forever. I wished Nadia could hear me tell her that I felt her pushing me away despite how close I’d felt to her my whole life. I was afraid she was going to leave me soon.

I tried to shoo away my maid, who stood looking down on me anxiously. She pulled up a chair and started to recite the Quran in my ears while she stroked the top of my head and held my hand. Good Lord! I hadn’t gone off my rocker yet. I just wanted to be able to speak so I could persuade Nadia to forgive me. I broke into tears again. The maid wiped them away using my silk handkerchief, which had my name embroidered on it in gold thread. It was my Mother’s Day gift from Nadia and Yasmine last year. I took it, folded it, and placed it inside my nightgown next to my heart. I didn’t wrong you, Nadia. I was as much Abbas’s victim as you were. Were we wrong to hide the truth from you? What would you have done had you known? You might have hated us and left.

She said nothing after I told her that she was Jacob Zananiri’s daughter, Batel. It was impossible to read what went through her mind when I told her that Abbas had accepted her as a pledge for the large Cicurel diamond that Zananiri was going to dispose of in Europe. Of course, I wouldn’t dare tell her the whole truth. I didn’t tell her that Fahim had forged a power of attorney authorizing us to make financial transactions in Zananiri’s name. Using this and other forged documents, we acquired all of Zananiri’s properties in Cairo. Fahim was a pro at forging deeds to estates belonging to deceased foreigners who had no heirs in Egypt, in order to keep the government from inheriting them. Zananiri’s assets were the yeast we started out with. As they grew, they compensated us for the loss of Cicurel’s gold and diamonds. They were actually Nadia’s inheritance, being the Zananiris’ only heir, but Abbas cut ahead of her in line, using the forgeries, and had Fahim put Nadia in an orphanage—under a false name, of course—in order to cover up their tracks. That was when she stopped being Batel Zananiri, who’d been reported kidnapped. Some months later, I managed to convince Abbas to adopt her. By that time, Abbas had been cleared of suspicion of kidnapping and the case had gone cold. So, for a short time, Batel became the daughter of a simple railway worker whom Fahim had known. Then, after taking her out of the orphanage and bringing her to live with us as his daughter from Paula, Abbas gave her his name. That was the key to the scheme to inherit the villa, and the key to a social profile acceptable to the people of Zamalek, who had never really accepted us. What suspicions they had when Paula died and Nadia appeared. But with time they forgot, or at least pretended to forget.

What made me grow so attached to Nadia the moment I laid eyes on her? Maybe I felt God had decided to compensate me for losing Lady. Maybe I felt the guilt of Mrs. Zananiri, who was forced to leave behind her daughter as a pledge for a diamond her husband planned to sell in Europe. Abbas never really loved Nadia. He played the role of father and grew into the part, but not to the point where the role took root in his heart. It was always a pretense. He made Murad divorce her because I pressured him. He agreed to her marriage to Omar Seif Eddin simply to spite me. He was always ready to sacrifice her if it served his purpose. He was even ready to return her to the orphanage after he got his hands on Zananiri’s property and after we left the old Cicurel villa. By that time, he had already renamed her Nadia after Cicurel’s daughter. He even gave her an extra foreign middle name, like Cicurel’s daughter had. It was only on her birth certificate. It was a weird name—Elwira, or something like that. I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. He was obsessed with Cicurel. He tried to model himself on him in every way, but I also suspected that, at least somewhere in the back of his mind, he wanted to throw the neighbors into confusion and let them think she was Cicurel’s daughter. It certainly wasn’t easy for us after Nadia came into our lives. No one believed that Abbas fathered her with Paula before she died. I’d never forget what he said about her: “She brought us bad luck: we lost the villa and a revolution broke out.” Were it not for me, Fahim would have put her back in the orphanage when Abbas told him to.

Surely it wasn’t right for Nadia to learn all of these ugly details. No. In fact, it was not her right. We were the ones who’d made Nadia. We did her a favor. Abbas showed her affection and he spoiled her. He’d give her things that I’d expressly forbidden in order to spite me. She wouldn’t know that, but still it would be so ungrateful of her if she thought ill of us.

It suddenly occurred to me that if she got hold of Abbas’s papers and learned the truth from them, she’d hate me and probably kick me out of the house. Abbas would never tell the whole truth. He’d make himself out to be the angel and me the devil. I decided to tell her everything before my memory faded for good. I had to make sure she understood, accepted the truth, and forgave me, even if it wasn’t really her right to know it all. I signaled to the maid to get me a pen and paper. I wrote everything I could recall. Then I broke down in tears.

The best years of my life took flight as autumn crept in and laid siege. Now the winter storms were turning the rest of my life to hell. All I had left were stories that had grown as old as my body and as flimsy as my memory. So many details had gone missing, fluttering away into oblivion like withered leaves. In a short time, no one would be left to remember them at all. They would hurt Nadia even more. She could turn against me, but she’d understand. She’d appreciate the position I was in and how I took care of her all these years. My stock of hope had nearly run out and my stocks of dreams and ambitions were depleted. My greatest desire now was to die in my sleep so as not to suffer more. The most beautiful things came and left in their allotted time. It was hard to have nothing left to do but lie here beneath my blanket, waiting for death to come knocking on my door some cold winter night. At least she’d know the whole truth before I was taken unawares by that cruel visitor who came only once in a lifetime.

Just as I folded the four sheets of paper on which I’d written my account in a large script, the door flew open and Nadia burst in like a sandstorm. She had a dark scowl on her face and she was too agitated to stand still. She gave some kind of signal with her eyes to the maid, who nodded and scuttled out the door. What were the two of them plotting? To kill me? Had the maid gone off to fetch a rope to tie me up before Nadia smothered me with my pillow? I trembled as I shrank into the mattress, pulling the blanket up to my chin as though it would protect me. A spasm seared through my chest and I felt short of breath. I hid the pillow behind my back and tucked the photos beneath them. If Abbas had been there, Nadia would never have dared to treat me this way. I gave her a loving look and struggled to smile. My lips felt stitched together with a thick thread. What was this? She’d turned to the closet and started to gather up my clothes.

I clapped in order to get her attention. With a gesture of my hand, I asked her what she was doing. She didn’t answer. I held out the folded sheets of paper. She snatched them from my hands, read a few lines, and gave me a strange look I’d never seen before. It only lasted a second. Then she started to read again as she moved away. She had confirmed my fears that the end was near. I would never tell her that the paper Abbas left her was a map to where he’d hidden the diamonds and gold: in our home in Mahalla Marhoum. I was pretty sure I’d figured out exactly where, but I wouldn’t even give her a hint about that until I made sure I’d won her back to my side.