‘Frankly, Madam, you’re an embarrassment to the corporation. Not only are you being paid for doing virtually nothing – with your lamentable Arabic you’re incapable of doing much of anything – but you get paid a lot, a huge amount to do the little you do. It’s an intolerable situation. Management can no longer put up with it. They can no longer make allowances for your ineffective presence in the store. It was clear from the moment the store was nationalized last year that something would have to be done. Management has been ultra-patient, you must admit. But we reached the point where something needed to be done.’ Claire’s immediate supervisor, a burly man who reeked of cologne and wore sunglasses indoors, spoke slowly as if he was uncertain whether Claire understood him. Puffing on his cigarette with a weary air, he went on, ‘At a meeting yesterday, it was decided that the time has come to solve the problem, so a decision was made to transfer you to a branch in Minya.’
‘Minya?’
‘Yes, yes, Minya! Starting the first of next month,’ he said casually, as though speaking of a routine occurrence.
‘But I have an elderly husband who is not well and a daughter who is sixteen years old,’ Claire said without disclosing the fact that her daughter was about to go to Germany on a scholarship.
For a split second, her supervisor seemed uneasy. He fidgeted on his chair. ‘Well, take them with you,’ he said. ‘Take them with you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Claire said bewildered and, drawing on her best Arabic, argued, ‘The fact that I speak French and English is of some use, here. More so than in Minya. Here, my salary is not so out of line with other employees’ salaries. I can even think of one person whose salary is higher than mine. In Minya, salaries must be much lower than in Cairo. Won’t I be even more of an embarrassment to the corporation there? I really don’t understand.’
‘First, I don’t see how you can compare yourself to Ustaz Hamdi, as it’s him you must be referring to. He reads and writes Arabic. There’s no mistaking him for a Khawaga. But the point is that we’re not forcing you to go to Minya. Far from it! Whether you want to keep working is entirely up to you.’
‘If I stop, I wouldn’t get much of a pension. I am fifty-eight years old,’ Claire said, with as much calm as she could muster.
‘I cannot make that decision for you. I called you to my office to communicate to you the decision management made yesterday. I’m sorry but your family problems are yours, not theirs. You have almost a month to look after your family affairs, which is not bad. We could have ordered your immediate transfer and insisted you be in Minya within three days. I am not sure you realize this. You’re working in the public sector now. What more can I tell you?’ The supervisor got up hastily, walked to the doorway and yelled down the hallway, ‘Ahmad, have you forgotten my afternoon cup of coffee? I need it badly. I’m getting a headache.’
For once not overcome by her usual indecisiveness, Claire walked out of that meeting determined to go to Minya and see a lawyer. She wasn’t in a position to quit eighteen months away from her pension. It was clear to her that the management had come up with the Minya idea to force her to do so; under the new labor laws they could not fire her.
She would stick to her resolution and go to Minya, a city about 155 miles south of Cairo, where she worked for eighteen months in a store that sold an odd assortment of items – from ladies’ underwear to light fixtures and home appliances but also copy-books, pencils and erasers. And she retained the services of a leftist lawyer, Hamid Hassanein, the son of Alexandre’s friend Maher and grandson of an ex-prime minister, whose family had owned huge tracts of land in the Delta before the agrarian reform. In between stints in jail for communist activities, despite his halting speech and unprepossessing countenance, the young man was making a name for himself as a labor lawyer willing to take on hard cases. He was rumored to have been involved in organizing the worker–student demonstrations held in February of that year – the largest Egypt had seen since 1954 – in which a crowd stretched out over a mile-long path had wound its way from Cairo University to the Maglis-al-Umma, demanding elections and an end to the police state. The lenient sentences received by Egypt’s top officers for their mishandling of the June 1967 war had sparked the demonstrations as well as heated debates about what had gone wrong for the country to have suffered such a crushing defeat. Was the single-party system to blame? Had God inflicted that punishment on Egyptians for embracing socialism, a departure from Islam, or had the problem been insufficient socialism? Was it, more simply, the case of the men in charge being corrupt and self-seeking – Nasser himself, however, remaining unassailable? Elements from all walks of Egypt’s political life – the Muslim Brotherhood, the liberal center, and the left – had participated in the February demonstrations, with the left playing the biggest role.
Claire did not hold his political activism against Hamid Hassanein. Quite the contrary, she thought it spoke well of the man. She had difficulties though imagining him in a political context because he was so self-effacing, which made her think all the more highly of him. He took on her case without requesting she pay him anything. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘let’s see whether we get anywhere, we can discuss my fees later.’ He also told her, from the outset, that he was doubtful the transfer decision could be reversed, though he would give it a try. His main objective would be to protect her pension entitlement and ensure its proper calculation as he feared that the corporation’s management would, when the time came, try to do her out of some of it. He was right. The court dealing with Claire’s transfer to Minya upheld the transfer. Then, when Claire retired at age sixty, the corporation undervalued her pension. A court case that lasted for six years would in the end be decided in her favor. During those six years, Hamid Hassanein spent time in jail intermittently on account of his political activities.
The evening after being told of her transfer to Minya, Claire went to play bridge at a friend’s place.
‘You’re going to Minya?’ her friends asked in shock. ‘Years ago, Minya may have been alright. Several big landowners used to have second homes there. It also had a large Greek community. But now the city is dead. Completely dead. And if one does not like the heat – you certainly don’t – it’s uninhabitable in the summer. Are you really serious about going?’ one of them asked point blank.
‘Yes,’ Claire said while trying to concentrate on the game. Usually, she kept her problems to herself but had made an exception that evening which she was now regretting.
‘It’s an extremely courageous thing to do,’ her bridge partner said.
‘Courage presupposes some choice. I don’t see myself as having a real choice in the matter,’ Claire said, suppressing her growing irritation at the unhelpful remarks.
‘It’s monstrous on their part to be doing that, knowing how totally unsuitable the position and the city are for a person like you.’
‘I suppose that’s the point they’re trying to make. Is it not?’ Laughing an artificial laugh, Claire added, ‘They decided to put me through a mini cultural revolution. I guess that’s it.’
‘But Claire, are you being realistic about your ability to cope with life there? You’ll be working in a store that sounds like a hole, surrounded by people with such a different mentality,’ her hostess asked while circulating snacks.
‘With enough books, and if I find a few bridge partners, the time will pass.’
‘You might find bridge partners at the Greek Club, if it still exists. But do you think it wise to consult Maher’s son? I would be nervous. He has two strikes against him. He is ancien régime and apparently a communist – quite a combination. Did you know that he has been in jail?’
‘My inclination is to trust a man who has been in jail for his convictions.’
‘Well and good, but won’t the judges hold that against him?’ Gabrielle, also invited, said.
‘I was told that his practice has been growing so he must be winning some cases,’ Claire said.
‘Let’s hope he manages to keep you in Cairo,’ the hostess chimed in. She knew of the tensions between the two sisters.
‘If I win tonight, I’ll take it as an auspicious sign,’ Claire thought.
She lost.
On her way home in a cab – she had left with Gabrielle whose car was being repaired – she went over the game, concluding that two of her bids had been poor.
‘Stop worrying about it,’ Gabrielle advised her. ‘You have bigger problems.’
‘Oh, stop, Gabrielle. Stop!’ Claire cried out with an intensity that suggested she may have been close to one of her rare outbursts. ‘Why is everyone so keen on highlighting the difficulties I’ll be facing?’
‘All right, all right,’ Gabrielle exclaimed and backed off. Usually the one to make scenes, she would be thrown off balance the few times Claire did, or seemed about to. Gabrielle was about to ask Claire how Alexandre, who had had two small strokes in the course of the year, was taking the news but thought better of it.
As if she had read Gabrielle’s mind, Claire – now calmer – said, ‘Alexandre will be moving in with Constance. It won’t be the first time.’ She was referring to the year he had spent at Constance’s, ten years earlier, after a major row brought on by an affair she was having at the time.
‘So he knows,’ Gabrielle said.
‘Not yet, but I talked to Constance.’
‘What did she have to say?’
Claire shrugged. ‘What do you expect her to say? “No” after all these years of self-sacrifice?’ After a brief pause, Claire added, ‘Batta and her daughter will be helping her. I made the necessary arrangements.’
Alexandre’s custom was to send his letters express, no matter their contents. In keeping with that habit, his handwriting was bold and hurried-looking.
Just over two weeks after her arrival in Minya, the elderly doorman of the small hotel in which she was renting a room handed Claire such a letter. She had just stepped into the hotel bathed in perspiration. It was 1:30 p.m. The temperature was almost 44 degrees Celsius – not uncommon in Minya in August. Claire set the envelope on a rickety hallway table. Like most of the city’s buildings with past grandeur, the hotel had a dilapidated look. She closed her parasol and got a fan out of her handbag.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ the doorman urged her, moving a shabby armchair closer to where she stood. ‘I’ll get you a glass of ice water.’
‘Thank you, thank you, don’t bother with the water,’ Claire said, frowning as she glanced at the envelope. The letter was from Constance, not Alexandre – she could tell from the handwriting – and that alarmed her.
Alexandre had had another minor stroke. For two days, he had been thoroughly confused, mistaking Constance for her, and his own reflection in the large mirror hanging in his room for his brother Nicolas. As on the previous occasions when he had suffered from minor strokes, the confusion went away but he was left feeling feeble and, though lucid, was irritable, wanting company almost all the time. The doctor said that his irritability should pass but his wanting company might not.
‘Not bad news, I hope,’ the doorman said.
‘In truth, not so good,’ Claire said and asked him how she could place a call to Cairo.
‘Don’t you worry,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll look after this for you. I’ll go to the telephone company and book a time for tonight, after you come back from work. How would that be?’
‘That would be really good,’ she said as she got up to go to her room. She had planned on dropping in at the Greek Club after work for a bridge game. It was the prospect of that outing that had kept her going the last couple of days. As she climbed the hotel’s dusty staircase with leaden steps, she brooded upon the unpleasantness she had been put through at work since her arrival, and had a sinking feeling there was more of it to come.
The first thing she did upon entering her room was to switch on the big electric fan she had bought the day after her arrival, moving it as close to her bed as possible. Next, she half lay on the bed, her back against the wall, her hand resting on her damp forehead. She undid the buttons of her blouse but felt too tired to get out of her clothes, too tired to reach for the copybook on the bedside table in which, to let off steam, she had made it a habit to keep a record of her troubles at work and chronicle the events of the day.
‘What shall I tell Constance? What can I tell her?’ Claire wondered. Then the inevitable regret, ‘Why, oh why, didn’t I stay in Beirut when I had the opportunity?’
Claire’s salary was public knowledge in the Minya store before she set foot in it. On her first morning at work, a little girl no older than ten – the relative of one of the store’s six employees, in the store with her mother to get herself a birthday dress – kept staring at Claire and eventually, just before leaving, said to her giggling, ‘Can I ask you a secret question?’ ‘Sure,’ Claire replied. The little girl whispered in her ear, ‘Is it true that you’re earning much, much more money than anybody else in the store except for the director? Ten times more?’ Later that morning, when the shop assistant’s helper complained of a toothache, one of the four shop assistants suggested loudly, ‘Well, if you need Rivos, I’m sure that Madam can afford buying you some. Madam could afford buying you a lifetime supply of Rivos.’ Except for the one woman shop assistant – a young woman called Mona – all the assistants on the floor burst out laughing. Where things stood could not have been clearer. Mona would become Claire’s protector in the store, whereas the men, some more systematically than others, would take turns making life unpleasant for her. Within a week of her arrival, a couple of them would tell her in private that their actions did not reflect their true feelings but they feared the repercussions of showing her any sympathy.
Each employee had a chair on which they were authorized to sit when they had no customers. On her second day at work, Claire’s chair disappeared several times in the course of the morning. ‘Can’t you take a bit of a joke?’the culprit said when she finally showed her exasperation.
The third day, an electric fan standing close to her Women’s Wear Department was moved away on the pretext that hers was the cooler part of the store. Then, her fly swatter went missing. ‘Madam needs a chair, a fan, a fly swatter. But we’re here to work. Maybe Madam does not realize this,’ the shop assistant in charge of home appliances said, not an ounce of levity in his tone. He did not even try to pretend he was joking. Later that day, hunting for her chair – she needed to sit to tack the hem of a dress a customer was trying on – the man declared for all to hear, ‘But if she cannot kneel to do the job, isn’t it time for her to retire?’ causing Mona to exclaim, also for all to hear, ‘Enough nonsense;’ words that had on Claire the effect of a most precious balm.
On the fifth day, there was a lull, although shortly before closing time her persecutors’ ringleader, the assistant in charge of home appliances, raised, out of the blue, the subject of the 1967 war. Looking in her direction, he asserted that the Khawagas in the country were either indifferent to what that defeat really meant for Egypt and the Arab world, or, even worse, secretly happy at the terrible outcome. And, hadn’t they, in all likelihood, rejoiced the day Nasser announced his resignation only to bemoan his subsequent decision to stay on in response to popular support, the sales assistant asked, clearly rhetorically. Claire chose to ignore these remarks, in part because she would have found it difficult to express her views persuasively on such matters in Arabic. Besides, the man was unlikely to believe that she felt as strongly for the Palestinian cause as she did. So what would have been the point?
Mention of the Khawagas in the country in that derogatory tone was to become a frequent occurrence after that, particularly when some of the few remaining members of the Greek and Syro-Lebanese communities of Minya began dropping in, sometimes to buy something but other times just to chat with Claire. ‘Madam thinks that the store is a club,’ one or the other of the shop assistants would mutter. She pretended not to hear.
Her second week at work started with her being told by two of the shop assistants that, from now on, she would have to walk the goods bought in her department over to the counter where they were wrapped, as the shop assistants’ helper was too busy to lend her a hand. ‘But he is doing that for everyone else!’ she objected and went to complain to the store’s director, who hardly ever came out of his back office. He commiserated with her, saying that he wished he could help her but this was Upper Egypt, where outsiders were never much welcome, as he himself, being from Alexandria, had unfortunately experienced. The following morning, he called her to his office with an offer he would have to run by top management in Cairo: would she consider the position of Mufatescha – a supervisory position that might secure her the respect of her co-employees? It would involve her filling him in on all that was happening and being said in the store. She declined, invoking her bad Arabic. ‘But you don’t need to say much, just to listen to what is being said,’ the director countered. She agreed to mull it over, knowing that she would not accept, even assuming the offer was serious. The job’s duties went against her nature. Besides, the offer smacked of a trap: a supervisory role would likely exacerbate, not curb, the employees’ hostility towards her. ‘I cannot force you,’ the director said on hearing her final decision, after which he made her another, most incongruous, offer. He was thinking of borrowing money from the bank for which he needed a guarantor. If she were willing to act as his guarantor, he would act as hers. ‘But I’m not thinking of taking a loan,’ she said weakly, as she had no wish to alienate him. ‘Think about it,’ he said with an unctuous smile. ‘You never know. At some point, you might well need some extra money so it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.’ She left his office cursing herself for having gone to see him in the first place.
That very same day, a sales assistant in trouble for the disappearance of a couple of watches went up to her and said angrily, ‘I’m a dangerous man, you know. I am capable of doing much harm, of hurting people. I thought I should let you know that.’ His threats – he looked fierce as he uttered them – left Claire in a state of consternation. Had he got wind of the director’s idea of giving her a supervisory role in the store, and had this been his way of warning her that she would be well-advised never to make an unfavorable report about him? She had been thinking in fact of offering him some money, to help him with the fine for the vanished watches. His threat made it impossible for her to make the offer.
On her return to her hotel room that day, Claire would write in her copybook:
The staff hold me responsible for their poverty; they compare their lot to mine and don’t see me as a victim. They see me as a very privileged person, whose presence in the store is an affront to them. I can understand them. I would have felt the way they do. Would I have reacted as they have? I don’t know. I don’t fault them. I fault management 100 percent. Those in charge put me in a hopeless situation while giving the store employees yet more reasons to be unhappy with their lot. They have failed in their duties as managers since I will not resign and, although they have managed to sow the seeds of hatred towards me, I’m sure they have sown them towards the corporation too. I don’t know what turn events will take, but should something happen to me, management and only management would be the guilty party.
Then, in a postscript, she had added:
Work gives man a feeling of self-worth. It connects him to society.
And in a second postscript:
Mona has asked me to teach her French. I have agreed. I’ll spend a couple of hours a week doing that. On Sunday morning and maybe once a week after work. In my hotel room. She is a very bright young woman. I have a feeling that she will learn fast. Thinking of the difficulties she is facing in life – having to give her meager salary to her father to help support eight children whom she has been mothering since her own mother’s death – should reconcile me to the difficulties I am facing. I have decided to brush up my English by reading The Forsyte Saga.
Still feeling the effect of getting from the store to the hotel – barely ten minutes walk but much of it in direct sun – Claire remembered that Alexandre’s seventy-ninth birthday was in two weeks’ time. He was thirty-seven when they first met, and thirty-nine when they married.
If he truly loved her, he would have let go of her a long time ago and urged her to remake her life instead of hanging on to her, she thought, not for the first time.
‘The nonentity I have become,’ was how he had described himself the day after his sixty-ninth birthday, in a letter asking her to consider a reconciliation. At the time – he had moved in with Constance – his use of that epithet had filled her with a compassion so strong that she had, at once, agreed to meet him for a beer at Groppi’s – a meeting that would lead, after several more, to his return home. Now his describing himself in those terrible terms seemed to her more a ploy aimed at softening her than a cry from the heart. In truth though, it was not just his holding on to her that had kept her locked in the marriage. With her sense of fair play, how could she have abandoned him, once she had foisted on him children that may not have been his; children whom he, no matter what he may have suspected, had accepted as his, be it out of pride, in self-delusion, or as a way to keep her? She had wanted children from early on in the marriage, yet, by thirty, still had none. After Guy, her desire for children had become all consuming, much exceeding her desire for love. She would gradually come to see her marriage as affording her the possibility of having children, no matter whose they were. That was how she had come to terms with it. And perhaps the children were his. Paradoxically, she might have found it easier to leave him, had she been certain that he was their father. She would have felt she owed him less.
When, after several attempts, Claire managed that evening to place her telephone call to Cairo – the line kept on breaking – it was to hear Constance tell her, ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that your leaving for Minya caused his stroke. He was very, very worried about you, he talked all the time about what a terrible thing it was for you to be sent there. Those who sent you there are responsible for his stroke, those wretched creatures.’
‘How are you holding up?’ Claire asked her. Constance was nearing her eighty-first birthday.
‘I couldn’t have managed without Batta and her daughter. They take turns. Batta is here during the day, her daughter does the night shift. Thank God for the two of them. Batta is a real gem. Just like her mother used to be, God bless her soul. I cannot say the same about the daughter, but I should not complain. No five minutes go by without him calling for someone, whether or not he needs anything.’
‘Has Charlotte been helping out?’
‘I cannot expect her to help much. She’s busy getting ready for Germany. She has been shopping with Gabrielle. I have a feeling she’s finding it a major adjustment to be living with Gabrielle. It cannot be easy. Alexandre wants to talk to you. Let me hand him the phone.’
Alexandre’s voice on the phone was faint; usually it was clear and strong. He started by saying, ‘Don’t worry about me,’ then, immediately asked, ‘When are you coming. When? Soon, I hope.’
Claire promised she would do her best to come to Cairo within the next four weeks.
Two days later, in the middle of the night, Alexandre fell on his way to the bathroom – the one time he had not rung the bell for help – and fractured his hip. He underwent an operation the next day.
Gabrielle cabled the news to Claire.
It would take Claire three days to obtain permission to go to Cairo. The director of the Minya store had to refer the matter to his superior in Alexandria, who had to refer the matter to the corporate headquarters in Cairo. ‘I would think that you’ll stop working soon then,’ the Minya director told her as he handed her written authorization for a week’s emergency leave. ‘Don’t you think?’
Claire ignored the question.
For once sympathetic, her co-workers, even her tormentor from the appliance department, seemed sorry for her. During her three days of waiting for the authorization, her chair was not moved once, the electric fan was moved back close to her department, no remarks were made. Thanks to young Mona, everyone in the store knew about her situation.
Three nights in a row, Claire went to the Greek Club to play bridge. Staying in her hotel room was too oppressive, the question of what to do should Alexandre never walk again – a likely outcome at his age – gnawed at her.
At the club, she made the acquaintance of a middle-aged Greek woman, a paediatrician, who would become a good friend. The woman was still living in Minya because of a twenty-year-long affair with a man unwilling to leave his disabled wife, something for which his lover admired him.
During those three days of waiting, it seemed to Claire that she could perhaps get used to life in Minya as long as the atmosphere in the store remained serene.
Coming out of the train in the Ramses train station, despite the sea of people, Claire spotted Gabrielle and Charlotte before they saw her. It would have been hard to miss Gabrielle – tall and with striking salt-and-pepper hair. Of her three daughters, Charlotte was the smallest. Wide-hipped, with a crop of curly jet-black hair and an olive complexion, she was by far the most Egyptian-looking. Aunt and niece were unsmiling.
‘Is it possible that I arrived too late?’ Claire thought as she made her way through the crowd. The train ride had been long and exhausting: no air conditioning and a one-hour delay in Beni Suef. Cairo felt almost as hot as Minya. It was a blistering end of August all over Egypt.
When Gabrielle and Charlotte saw her, they waved and hurried in her direction.
Before the usual hug and kiss, Gabrielle said, ‘It happened early this morning, he became delirious yesterday. He kept calling you and calling his mother.’ After a brief pause, Gabrielle went on, her voice uncharacteristically mellow, ‘He also called for Nicolas a couple of times.’
Pale despite the heat, Claire turned towards her daughter and asked, ‘Were you at the hospital this morning?’
‘No,’ Charlotte said, quickly adding, ‘but we were on our way to the hospital when it happened. Nuni was there.’ Charlotte, her sisters and Gabrielle’s daughter Aida called their Aunt Constance ‘Nuni.’
Claire took a deep breath, looked away for a second, then asked, ‘How is she taking it?’
‘Better than one would have expected. She said she could not have looked after him, that she is too old for that. And, with you in Minya, there was no obvious solution,’ Gabrielle answered.
‘She said that?’
‘More or less.’
‘I see.’
‘I brought the car. I’m driving. Do you want to go home first?’
‘Yes, take me home first. I’ll call the hospital.’ To Charlotte, Claire then said, ‘He loved you very much.’
Charlotte whispered, looking awkward, ‘Yes, I know.’
A few minutes later, while Gabrielle was driving, shouting warnings out of her window to drivers and pedestrians alike, Claire, seated next to her, turned to the back and said, ‘Charlotte, you shouldn’t judge your father on the basis of the man he became late in life. You’ve known him as an elderly man to whom life had dealt blows. You’ve known him as irascible and difficult. There was a time when he was an altogether different man.’
‘What’s the story behind my name?’ Charlotte asked.
‘What do you mean?’ Claire asked.
‘Nuni once told me that Father had insisted on giving me this name, and when I asked her why, she laughed and said that one of his first loves was a Charlotte. Is it true? Not that I would mind if it is. I’m just curious.’
‘It’s true. But it was not one of his early loves. He was already in his mid-thirties then. Charlotte was the woman he fell in love with when he spent a few months in Switzerland during his two years of travel in Europe, after he had cashed in his pension as a civil servant.’
‘He told you about her?’
‘Yes he did.’
‘And you did not mind his wanting to name me after her?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘So, what happened to that love story?’
‘She was married.’
‘How long after that did you meet him?’
‘Five years or so.’
‘How old were you the first time you met him in Uncle Yussef’s office? You told me, but I’m not sure anymore whether you said sixteen or seventeen.’
‘Fifteen as a matter of fact, about to turn sixteen.’
‘It’s really hard to believe that you were almost three years younger than me when you fell in love with him.’
‘It did not happen on the spot.’
‘Tell me again how it all started. It’s such a great story. Tell me everything! I want to hear all the details,’ Charlotte said, becoming all animated.
‘I had met him a few times in Uncle Yussef’s office. Uncle Yussef and Aunt Farida were all taken by him. They thought he was very clever, very witty. After that, I met him at one of Uncle Yussef’s Sunday lunches. He sat next to me and talked to me about Stendhal, about The Charterhouse of Parma, which he considered superior to The Red and the Black. I disagreed. He was surprised to hear I had read both. He said that women generally preferred The Red and the Black. He had a very engaging conversation, a very engaging voice too.’
‘And then?’
‘A few days after that lunch, I was studying for the bac, getting ready for the philosophy test. I was certain that the notion of courage would be central to one of the essay topics so I was thinking of possible opening lines, pacing up and down the balcony which was right above Uncle Yussef’s office. When I tried to get back in the apartment, someone had locked the door (Claire omitted to tell Charlotte that she had taken refuge on the balcony to avoid hearing the voices of her mother and sister who were in the midst of another of their many arguments; their voices were too distracting for her to concentrate in her bedroom, too upsetting too). Instead of knocking, I decided to step onto a ledge to get to my bedroom balcony, as my balcony door was open. Just as I was about to grip the railing, I slipped and fell on the veranda of Uncle Yussef’s office, where he and your father happened to be sitting, having coffee.’
Charlotte was riveted although she already knew the story.
‘When I came to, it was with your father bent over me, his hand on my brow, saying, “She’ll be all right.” Uncle Yussef was in such a state that your father took charge and had the suffragis carry me to our apartment, where they put me on my bed. In the meantime the doctor, whose clinic was directly opposite Uncle Yussef’s office, was called. Apparently I slept for almost a full day after that, and when I woke up, I was told that the first word I uttered was “Alexandre.” On my desk, there was a big bouquet of flowers he had sent. My mother decreed that I was in love with him.’
‘Were you?’
‘It’s all a bit of a blur now. In any case, my mother saying so caused me to think I was.’
‘So your mother was in favor, even though he was thirty-seven and you were sixteen?’
‘She wanted a male presence in the family to counteract Uncle Yussef. Your father seemed like a man who could provide that counterweight. Besides, as I said, he had a lot of charm.’ Claire refrained from disclosing to Charlotte that Gabrielle too had been initially enthusiastic about Alexandre.
‘We’re almost there,’ Gabrielle announced in a gruff voice.
Still talking to her daughter, Claire said, ‘His being so difficult the last couple of years is typical of people who have had strokes. The doctor said so.’ Then she added, as though in passing, ‘He introduced you to the world of cinema. Remember the year I was in Beirut, when he allowed you to skip school and took you to the cinema instead? You got to see a series of Russian movies, one based on a Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Lapdog; he wrote to me about that movie, saying how much he had enjoyed it.’
‘I remember that movie. I remember liking it. We also got to see several Yussef Chahine movies. Many featured Faten Hamama. I thought she was wonderful. Even better than Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind,’ Charlotte said, warming to the subject.
‘That was the year you dreamed of becoming a movie director.’
‘After my degree in anthropology perhaps,’ Charlotte said, ‘I might do documentaries.’
‘I think you should,’ Claire said. ‘Youthful enthusiasms can take you a long way if you cultivate them.’
‘I’ll drop you and park the car,’ Gabrielle said, her tone still surly.
‘Perhaps I should walk over to Constance’s place,’ Claire said as she stepped out of the car.
‘She’s waiting for you at home. With Batta. They have become inseparable,’ Gabrielle said. ‘You come with me to the garage. I might need your help.’
Charlotte looked at her mother.
‘Go with your aunt,’ Claire said and, with a quick gesture of the head, indicated to her daughter not to make a fuss.
Since the death of Uncle Yussef, the building in which Claire lived was becoming grubbier by the day. His son took no interest in the building whatsoever. ‘Why would I and how can I, if I cannot raise the rents? I will the day they do away with rent controls,’ he explained whenever the subject came up.
Time had not inured Claire to the building’s degradation. She felt both shame and revulsion at her surroundings. Most buildings in downtown Cairo were suffering from neglect but none as much as hers. The glass panes of many windows in the stairwell and landings were broken. The windows overlooked an internal courtyard with a secondary staircase intended for service people. That courtyard was now littered with garbage, in which mice and cockroaches nested. Instead of the old marble fountain at the building’s entrance was an ugly kiosk rented to a man who sold cold drinks and peanuts.
On entering the building that evening, Claire paid no attention to the state it was in. She was thinking of Alexandre, trying to relive the man he had been when they first met. She found herself listing characteristics, but that was the extent of it: tall, sinewy, dark-haired and fair of complexion, often wearing the tarbush, often with some clever repartees, often doing the handsome thing; well-read, and well-informed; sought after in salons, impetuous but soft-hearted; in sum, a man with plenty of charm to make up for his lack of means and obvious career trajectory after he had left the civil service, where he had held the position of permanent secretary in the law department of Egypt’s prestigious Ministry of Public Works. It was the death of that man years earlier, not his death the day before, that struck Claire as the truly terrible thing, as she waited for the only working elevator in her building to reach the ground floor.
Omar, the doorman, a quarrelsome sort with whom Alexandre used to argue almost daily, paid her his condolences and, standing quietly by her side with her suitcase in hand, managed even to look affected.
Constance and Batta were sitting in the hallway when Claire let herself in. They both got up. Next to ample Batta dressed in black, Constance, also dressed in black, looked like a miniature. With a small limp due to two consecutive fractures of the same hip, she walked towards Claire. Batta followed.
Claire kissed them both. Constance’s eyes misted. Crying, Batta said, ‘I’ll miss him. He had a short fuse but a good heart, and that’s what matters. I’ll never forget his wise words when my husband took another wife, “Batta, you’re too good for him. He does not deserve you. He’ll come to that realization sooner or later. Then he’ll be knocking at your door and you may not want him back.” He was right.’ After dabbing her eyes, she added, ‘I’ll go and prepare some fresh lemonade, but first let me put your suitcase in the bedroom.’
‘Did he suffer much?’ Claire asked Constance.
‘No ... well, perhaps a bit ... not much though, not much.’
‘What happened? In the end, I mean?’ Claire asked.
‘Kidney failure, the doctor said. If he had not been such a heavy smoker, things might have turned out differently.’
For a moment, the two women, both still standing, were silent, each looking pensive.
Claire broke the silence. ‘Thank you for all you did. It could not have been easy for you. You were very close to each other.’
Constance nodded, her eyes again misty. ‘We quarreled a lot though. We always did. But I suppose that’s natural; we were so close in age. He was my mother’s favorite. Of the four of us, she liked him the best. She spoilt him and he humored her. After my father died, the two of them squandered the family’s assets. She never, never thought about tomorrow. He let her do as she pleased. He shouldn’t have. He was after all the oldest son.’
‘So, she’s still begrudging him that,’ Claire thought.
The two women were quiet again.
‘He could have been a real somebody,’ Constance suddenly said. ‘He had so many talents. To think that when he graduated from the Jesuit school with prizes in French literature, philosophy, history, Arabic, Latin and English too, the principal told my mother he had a brilliant future ahead of him.’ Constance shook her head. ‘Who would have predicted it? Who? If only he had stayed in the ministry where he was much appreciated but no, he got it into his head that the working environment was no longer congenial and quit even though they wanted him to stay on.’ Constance sighed then said, ‘Well, you know the story.’
‘Yes,’ Claire said. She knew the story, one version – Gabrielle’s version – being that Alexandre had wanted to quit anyway to go roaming in Europe, which he did for a couple of years. That was when he fell in love, in Switzerland, with the woman called Charlotte, apparently a countess.
‘I know that Gabrielle thinks he resigned on a whim because he’d had enough working. She’s wrong. He liked his work and was much respected. Would King Fuad have awarded him a decoration, if he had not been highly regarded?’ Constance asked. ‘Would he?’
Claire speculated, ‘Perhaps he left because he knew that, as an Italian, he would start facing difficulties in the ministry. Times were changing. Nationalist sentiments were running high. It was the Saad Zaghlul era. It was 1924 after all. Perhaps he thought that, for men like him, the writing was on the wall.’ She felt dizzy all of a sudden and said, ‘Let’s leave the past alone, now we must organize the funeral. I ought to talk to your cousin George since he is in charge of the Conti crypt. I presume he knows about Alexandre.’
‘He does. He came to the hospital twice.’
George Conti was a rich man. Unlike Alexandre, who quit studying law to work in the Ministry of Public Works, George completed his law studies but never practised. He was interested in making money. Always discreet about his wealth he would escape notice under the Nasser regime. Had Alexandre outlived him, as his one and only first male cousin he would have stood to inherit a substantial fortune. The two men were exactly the same age.
‘It was really good of George to come to the hospital,’ Constance said. ‘As you know, he was barely on speaking terms with Alexandre. But family is family, and George is a family man.’ After breathing a heavy sigh, she went on, ‘His mother and ours were as different as can be. His mother was a penny-pinching Copt, who never touched a drop of liquor; ours, a spendthrift Greek, who did not mind a glass or two of wine. No wonder they never got along. We would have been infinitely better off with a mother like George’s. Alexandre would have hated to hear me say that. We would have ended up in a big fight. He was blind to our mother’s faults and she to his. I loved her but I loved her with open eyes.’
Claire had heard all this before. ‘I expect Simone will be able to make it to the funeral, but I’m not sure Djenane will. Her theater group is touring in France. It’s her first big role,’ she said apologetically.
Extremely protective of Claire’s three girls as she was of Gabrielle’s daughter Aida, who had just got married and was living in Washington D.C., Constance leaped to Djenane’s defense: ‘Djenane should do what is best for her. He would understand.’
‘Would he?’ Claire was not so sure.
‘He loved you deeply,’ Constance said unexpectedly.
Claire bowed her head. For never-married Constance, love seemed such a straightforward thing: he loves her; she loves him; she does not love him; they love each other ... Constance had no difficulties seeing love, or the absence of it.
They heard the click of a key. Gabrielle and Charlotte walked in.
‘Well, I’ll go home now,’ Constance said and got up.
‘Charlotte, walk your aunt home,’ Claire told her daughter.
‘No need to. Batta will walk with me part of the way.’ Constance hugged Charlotte.
‘Good evening, Gabrielle,’ she told her sister-in-law.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Gabrielle offered.
‘No, no, Batta will.’
‘As you please then.’ Gabrielle was visibly annoyed by what she took to be a rebuff. ‘Doesn’t Batta want to go straight home though?’
Just then Batta appeared in the room, shrouded in her melayah, insisting that she would walk ‘Mazmazel Constance’ home.
Gabrielle stormed off to the kitchen.
Claire walked them to the door, saying to Constance, ‘I don’t need to tell you that you’re as welcome here as you have always been. You have the key.’
‘I know, I know,’ Constance said, looking all of a sudden grief-stricken though she did not give way to tears. Batta put her arm around her. ‘I have some things for you,’ Constance continued. They’re in an envelope. Alexandre’s keepsakes. When he moved in with me a few weeks ago, he brought the envelope along. I’ll bring it tomorrow. I meant to today, but it slipped my mind.’
Just before starting down the stairs – like Alexandre, she avoided elevators – Constance turned around to tell Claire, ‘I was the oldest of the four and yet I’m still here, and they’re gone. That’s not right.’
The first time Claire met her, Constance had been standing next to her sister Helene and their mother on the landing of their apartment on Ramses Street not far from the train station: from their balcony, the three women had seen Claire and Alexandre enter the building and were waiting on the landing to greet the couple whose marriage was to take place only two days later. Constance was in her early forties, Helene in her mid-thirties, and their mother in her sixties. Wearing somber clothes, their hair pulled in severe buns, without any make-up except for some kohl, they had seemed ancient to eighteen-year-old Claire, the daughters barely distinguishable from the mother. At first, Claire had not known what to talk about – neither to the mother nor to the sisters. They had given her the impression of living such a cloistered life. There were no books in sight in the apartment, which had surprised her as Alexandre was a big reader. Constance and Helene had gone to her school, La Mère de Dieu. This would give her a subject of conversation but barely. Half-way through the visit, on discovering that Constance loved to draw and finding her sketches really quite good, Claire, who also drew well, had warmed to Alexandre’s older sister. Yet, when the visit was over, she had asked herself whether she was doing the right thing to be marrying into a family so different from hers, and also whether Alexandre had so delayed introducing her to his family for fear she might get cold feet.
Standing by the entrance door of her apartment, as Constance had on that first meeting, Claire wondered what had become of Constance’s drawings, then heard Gabrielle, in the background, telling Charlotte that dinner was on the table.
Bread, cheese and watermelon were laid out on the dining-room table.
‘You must be hungry,’ Gabrielle told Claire.
‘Not really,’ Claire said, ‘but thank you all the same.’
‘Not feeling well?’ Gabrielle asked. ‘You look pale. Charlotte, get your mother a glass of water.’
‘I think I’m getting a migraine.’
‘Eat something then. It may ward it off.’
Claire would have preferred to go and lie down in her room, yet, out of politeness, felt obliged to take a bite.
‘When are you thinking of holding the funeral?’ Gabrielle asked.
‘It will depend on when Simone gets back. We should be hearing within the next twenty-four hours.’
‘How long can you stay?’
‘They authorized a one-week leave but I would think that, in the circumstances, it can be extended, though I would not count on it. They want me out. That’s clear. They’ll do all they can to drive me into the wall and corner me into resigning.’
‘You must go and see your lawyer first thing in the morning.’
‘First thing in the morning, I’ll go to the hospital, though it’s true that he goes to his office so early that I may be able to catch him on my way. Where’s Charlotte?’
‘On the phone probably. By the way, I bumped into Marie Sussa on Kasr al-Nil Street yesterday. She just returned from Beirut. There’s apparently turmoil brewing in the Palestinian camps. People are saying that this was bound to happen; that Lebanon would become an indirect casualty of the Six-Day War.’
‘So you’re suggesting that I’m better off in Minya than I would have been in Beirut,’ Claire said. Gabrielle had been against her moving to Beirut.
‘I am merely telling you what Marie said, namely, that there are problems on the horizon in Lebanon. There’s instability in the air.’
‘I think I ought to lie down’, Claire said. ‘I cannot afford getting a migraine now.’
‘Would you like me to come along to the hospital?’ Gabrielle asked.
Knowing how much her sister dreaded hospitals since Nicolas’s death, Claire declined. ‘Can you send a telegram to Iris though? She was fond of Alexandre. So was Anastase. Bella happens to be in Geneva right now so she’ll find out from them. As for Aristote, I am certain that Constance will contact him.’ Claire fell silent, recalling how Bella and Aristote had met through Alexandre, and Anastase and Iris through Aristote. The love matches – she and Alexandre, Bella and Aristote – had failed, whereas the marriage of reason – Iris and Anastase – had succeeded.
Rather than to her room, Claire went to Alexandre’s at the far end of the apartment. She sat on the narrow single bed next to which hung his mother’s old cross. Not much of a churchgoer, he was nevertheless quite attached to the cross. The room was badly in need of refurbishing, the paint uneven, the hardwood floor peeling, and the few pieces of furniture were ill-assorted. Claire had offered, several times, to refurbish the room but each time he had refused, saying it was not worth it, not worth her assuming any extra financial responsibilities. Over the years, he would refuse to come out of his room the few evenings a year she gave dinner or bridge parties. ‘How can I show my face at your gatherings? Put yourself in my shoes,’ he screamed once, after she had suggested he might at least put in a brief appearance. Entitled to a substantial pension on leaving the ministry, he had cashed in the biggest chunk he could and spent that handsome sum on travel and high living in Europe in his mid-thirties. For several years after he came back, he worked – mostly for Yussef Sahli – and what he earned, he spent. Once he stopped working, without a penny other than the derisory amount left in the pension, joining gatherings attended by men of means – some courting his wife – was too painful a reminder of his social fall.
‘You put yourself in mine,’ she had retorted. ‘Am I supposed to relinquish all of my social life?’ She had gone on throwing parties – not as often as she would have liked – during which he would stay in this bleak room.
He was in his early sixties when he quit working for Yussef Sahli and no other job came his way except for the occasional translation. From then on, his morning routine would consist of waking up at five o’clock, showering – always with cold water even during the coldest months of the year – preparing breakfast for the girls, paying a quick visit to Constance if they had not had an altercation the previous evening, then going to the Café Riche where he read the French and Arabic papers, and met men his age or older. They were all retired. The men in his group, Muslims and Copts, included an Azhar scholar and a couple of ex-diplomats who, like him, had fallen upon hard times. The only Khawaga in the group, he fit right in thanks to his impeccable Arabic, tarbush, and years of public service. At lunch, he would return home, spend the early afternoon buried in his dictionaries or some biography. The evenings he would spend at Groppi’s with the same set. They would talk about the past and international affairs, avoiding the dangerous subject of domestic politics. Now and then though, they slipped and discussed contemporary events in Egypt, after which they would joke, with some nervousness, that their age should shield them from trouble. Alexandre had not been particularly opposed to Nasser but then why should he have been, having nothing to lose? After Groppi’s, he would stop by the grocery store to buy cheese and olives, by the bakery to get some fresh bread, then, from a street vendor standing by the bakery, he often bought a lottery ticket before returning home for dinner. He would be in bed by nine o’clock or 9.30 at the latest – just as Claire was getting ready to go out. That had been the rhythm of his life during its last fifteen years.
In its austerity, its down-and-out quality, his room resembled Claire’s hotel room in Minya. ‘Enough,’ she thought, ‘Enough!’ and got up brusquely, which was unusual for her. Instead of going to lie down as she had intended all along, she grabbed her handbag in the dining room and told Gabrielle and Charlotte that she was going to Constance’s place and would be back in half an hour.
‘But why?’ Gabrielle asked.
‘She has something to give me.’
‘What about your headache? Why not send Charlotte?’
‘No, no, I’ll be back quickly. I need some fresh air.’
‘That’s not like you.’ Gabrielle said. ‘You usually prefer to be indoors.’
‘If Simone calls, make sure one of you takes the details of her flight,’ Claire said, rushing out of the room.
Claire would open the big brown envelope in which Alexandre had kept his mementoes the next morning, at daybreak.
First, she took out of the envelope a large picture she had never seen before. It was of the opening of the Egyptian parliament with bulky, sullen-looking King Fuad on his raised throne in the middle; below him, standing, Saad Zaghlul was giving a speech, flanked on each side by the seated parliamentarians. Also seated but around a table, at the center, were the various ministries’ permanent civil servants. Amongst them was Alexandre, easily recognizable by virtue of his extremely erect posture, the sharpness of his jawbone and the fairness of his complexion.
Next, she took out of the envelope a small box containing the royal decree awarding Alexandre his decoration. She took out the medal too.
Then she examined a picture of her taken at the zoo shortly after her memorable fall from the fourth floor. Just sixteen years old, she had recently had her hair cut in a slightly boyish bob.
Encircled by an old elastic band were three pictures of three women in their twenties or early thirties. One very pretty, one less so, and one with a penetrating gaze under heavy eyebrows. No names were written on the back of the pictures, only the place and the year in which they were taken: Cairo 1922, Geneva 1925, and Zurich 1926. The one taken in Cairo – the picture of the very pretty young woman – would have been, Claire guessed, a picture of a woman from a wealthy background, to whom Alexandre had been quasi-engaged. As told by Constance, the story was that he had broken up with the pretty young woman after hearing of rumors that he was after her money. His explanation had been simpler: ‘It was not meant to be,’ he told Claire the only time she asked him about it.
Written in pencil – Alexandre wrote mostly in pencil – and folded many times over was the draft of a letter he had sent Claire ten years earlier, in which he was saying that, though degraded in his own eyes to find himself in that equivocal position, he could not but accept the liaison she was having at the time because it brought her material comforts he could not provide; he was referring to a car and a driver. Claire remembered the letter all too well. To read the draft – not much different from the letter she had received – upset her more than it ought to since she was already familiar with its contents. Pity, but also anger for letting herself again be moved to pity, welled up in her: if only she could have been left with traces of Alexandre’s former self as opposed to being confronted afresh with the diminished man! Tempted for a second to discard the draft letter, she nonetheless refolded it as neatly as she had found it and put it back in the envelope. To throw it away seemed to her a disrespectful and callous thing to do.
From the envelope, she pulled one more piece of paper – a tiny scrap that would have come out of the small notebooks Alexandre typically carried in his shirt or coat pocket, on which he would jot down thoughts, summarize articles, and keep track of sources he might want to consult some day. Occasionally, he would copy a few lines of a passage in a book or poem that had struck his fancy. The hand holding the piece of paper was firm but the corner of Claire’s mouth trembled as she read the few lines of a poem that Alexandre had copied:
How difficult for one who has failed,
for one who has declined, to learn the new
language of poverty and new ways
...........................
How will he face the cold glances that will
indicate to him that he is a burden!
Claire stuck that piece of paper back into the envelope, then reached for a big bag Constance had given her. It contained the frock-coat Alexandre had worn on meeting King Fuad at Ras al-Tin Palace in Alexandria to receive his award. The coat was as new, though it reeked of naphthalene. Claire decided that the coat would go to Simone, the medal to Djenane, and the accompanying decree to Charlotte. Her hope was that this small legacy would restore the man in their eyes.
Even though he had converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of sixteen, since he was to be buried in the Conti family crypt in the Greek Orthodox cemetery of old Cairo, Claire thought it best to hold Alexandre’s funeral in a Greek Orthodox church. She had not forgotten the fuss made by the priests in charge of the cemetery over her little boy’s burial.
During the service, which she could not follow as it was in Greek, Claire wondered whether the priest officiating was saying something about Alexandre and if so, what? Alexandre’s profile was singular even in the context of the hybrid milieu to which he belonged: an Italian who wore the tarbush; spoke, read and wrote Arabic like an Egyptian; went to a French school; Greek Orthodox by birth; may or may not have been of Greek origin on his father’s side, but certainly was on his mother’s; a convert to Roman Catholicism yet buried in a Greek Orthodox cemetery; a man who declared he had a profound Christian faith but would never spend more than five minutes in a church because they made him claustrophobic and subject to dizzy spells during mass, so he said; a man with a privileged childhood and rich and powerful friends yet penniless at the end of his life ... to say nothing of his marriage so little like a marriage.
Had she ever loved him?
Yussef Sahli’s wife Farida attended the funeral with Aristote, Bella’s estranged husband. Her mind not altogether there, she asked the young man standing next to her twice during the ceremony, ‘Who are you?’ and also asked him, ‘Remind me, who is it we’re burying?’ The young man was Hamid Hassanein, Claire’s lawyer. His father, Alexandre’s friend Maher, was in bed with pneumonia.
The evening of the funeral, Iris telephoned Claire from Geneva. ‘I was very fond of Alexandre,’ she began, ‘my father talked to me a lot about him towards the end of his life. He said more than once that Alexandre had too much pride and that was his problem. He said he was a man who had not adjusted to the changing times; that he belonged to a bygone era. It was clear that, in spite of their quarrel, he was still fond of him. I got the feeling he would have liked to see Alexandre one last time.’
‘It’s all so unfortunate,’ was all that Claire said in response, suspecting Iris to have made up this story. She did not tell Iris that, in her uncle’s dying days, she had suggested to Alexandre he go see him. His response came back to her almost word for word:
‘What would be the point? To pretend I am no longer angry with him for treating me like his flunkey all the years I worked for him? Summoning me to his office up to thirty times an hour – yes, up to thirty times – to tell me drivel! Calling me at home at dawn or at midnight to say something he could have easily told me in his office! Using me as entertainer – please don’t interrupt me – yes, entertainer at his soirées! When he was in need of someone to animate the conversation, he would not rest until I agreed to go, which I usually did for your sake. But that one evening he insisted I go to his place to play a game of backgammon with a potential business partner, I had had it. You know the rest! No Claire, I won’t go see him. I don’t wish him ill, but I cannot pretend all is forgotten.’
Had Alexandre ever wondered about the nature of her uncle’s affection for her? That was a subject neither he nor she had ever raised.
After Iris’s phone call came a telegram from Bella, ‘I expect it will be hard for you ... in a certain way. Love, Bella.’
Bella had guessed right: it proved to be hard on Claire, in a certain way. Alexandre’s death should have brought her relief – if only from the scenes he customarily made – scenes with Constance and Gabrielle, both as irascible as he was, but also with the girls, with the household help, with herself. He and her uncle had been alike in that respect, except that Alexandre’s explosiveness was more understandable; there were good reasons for it. So yes, his death ought to have made life easier for her. And it did, though without bringing her any light-heartedness. Instead, after Alexandre’s death, Claire’s spirits sagged. When she returned to Minya, her co-workers treated her with the courtesy accorded the newly widowed, but that did not last long. Within a few weeks, the harassment resumed, with management doing nothing about it. It was now clear to all in the store that she was not about to quit. Her workdays required a staying power she managed to summon, but, perhaps precisely because they were so grueling, she found herself running over in her mind, many times a day, what her life might have been without Alexandre. The more she let her mind wander, the more she held it against herself that she stayed in her marriage – albeit only with one foot – for her staying did not seem to have made anyone happier; neither him, nor her, nor her daughters, who had had to live in an atmosphere of perpetual tension. In Minya, Claire’s character took a morose turn. To combat that tendency – her mother’s specter loomed over her – she became an assiduous member of the bridge group at the Greek Club.
At the end of her two years in Minya, she concluded that the time she had spent there had not been all that bad. She had made some friends, kept her bridge skills going, read the Forsyte Saga in English as well as much of Edith Wharton’s work, and discovered Natalie Sarraute. And she had got to know Hamid Hassanein, whose selflessness, humility and dedication in fighting the battles of the little guys harked back to her youthful spirit and made her think of her father. Thanks to her lawyer, in the bittersweet make-up of Claire’s character, some sweetness remained. When she returned to Cairo, he urged her not to bear too much of a grudge against her co-workers as their reaction was understandable. She assured him she had understood (which she had), but it did not made the experience any easier.
Claire had been back in Cairo for a couple of months when, following a meeting aimed at bringing about a reconciliation between the PLO and King Hussein of Jordan, Nasser died after collapsing with severe chest pains. He had already begun steering the country to the right – a move now accelerated by his successor, Sadat. For Claire’s lawyer and his leftist comrades, who had seemed to be gaining momentum after the June 1967 war, the future looked bleak again. Their days of being hounded were not over. And soon, the Muslim Brotherhood would overtake the communists in popularity, making Claire remark that Nasser may have been an aberration.