The Map of Love (38 page)

‘I have some good, excellent whisky. Here —’ Ya
qub Artin gets up again. He goes to a sideboard in the far corner of the room. ‘And since our friend will not drink, there is more for the two of us.’ He upends the bottle over the two glasses. ‘It is almost a crime to put water in it, mais alors —’ He carries a glass over to his friend. ‘Let us drink to your dawning happiness!’

Isma
il Sabri toasts his friend in lemonade. ‘You need children,’ he says. ‘We all need children.’

‘I could see that she was inventing me. Piecing me together as we travelled.’ Sharif Basha places a match to the tip of his cigar and takes several short, strong puffs.

‘Ah! The Hero of the Romance! The Corsair! And why not, my friend? You have the looks —’

The desert and the stars and an ancient monastery with a mosque nestling within its walls. Those were his settings.
Those and the old house out of the paintings that had brought her to Egypt in the first place. And what would she make of his doubt, his despair? Of how he sometimes hated himself for piecing a life together under a rule not of his choosing? ‘A citizen life, ruled by an alien lord.’ Could she ever know him? Could he ever know her? Or would they always hold fast to what they imagined of each other so that life together would for each be more lonely than life alone?

‘We cannot speak each other’s language. We have to use French.’

‘Well,’ Isma
il Sabri reflects, ‘perhaps that is better. You make more effort, you make sure you understand — and are understood. Sometimes I think, because we use the same words, we assume we mean the same things —’

‘Ah! The poet!’ Ya
qub Artin cries. ‘You see! That is true. That is very true.’ He lifts his glass.

‘I have been meaning to ask you,’ Sharif Basha says. ‘Is it not time we had a collected edition? One has to keep pieces of paper in a file —’

‘He refuses,’ Ya
qub Artin says. ‘It is too much work.’

‘If you print it I shall buy fifty copies for the school in Tawasi.’

‘I think he is afraid if people see what he is doing he will be attacked —’

‘I’m not afraid!’ Isma
il Sabri laughs. ‘I simply haven’t got all my poems —’

‘They will say he is destroying poetry.’ Ya
qub Artin leans forward to offer the plates of food to his friends.

‘They are saying that already,’ Sharif Basha says, picking up a small piece of flat bread, twisting it into a miniature shovel and dipping it in the beaten white cheese.

‘Nonsense! If anything, I am preserving poetry. No one has time to read those huge long rambling epics any more. If poetry is to have a place in modern life, the poem has to be short and intense —’

‘Comme l’amour,’ Ya
qub Artin says thoughtfully, taking an olive stone out of his mouth with delicacy.

Sharif Basha laughs: ‘he never stops, the old Don Juan.’

Ya
qub Artin shrugs. ‘Eh! What do we have to live for? He is lucky —’ gesturing towards Isma
il Sabri. ‘He is a poet. He will live for ever. But you and I, mon ami, we live today and are gone tomorrow. Like this —’ he puffs an imaginary fleck from his palm — ‘just a breath and we are gone. You have your practice, the cases you defend. What will they bring you? Joy? Eternal life? Go. Go marry your petite Anglaise. Carpe diem.’

Isma
il Sabri hands Sharif Basha a piece of paper on which he has written a few words. Sharif Basha reads out loud: