Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
The Map of Love (8 page)
In his first interview with the Governor of St Helena, Napoleon said emphatically: ‘Egypt is the most important country in the world.’
Lord Cromer, 1908
I can see her now, my heroine: she sits at the window of her bedroom in the Greek widow’s pension, her letters neatly folded, her new journal open on the table towards which she leans to command as wide a view as she can of the Eastern Harbour; two arms of the city stretching out to encircle a portion of the Mediterranean. Did Anna see, as she looked to her left, the lights of the Fort of Sultan Qaytbay? Her edition of
Cook’s Tourist Handbook
does not mention the old fort at all. Did James Barrington tell her that this, more than anything, perhaps, is an exemplar of that tired phrase, ‘the palimpsest that is Egypt’? For here the Pharos — the great lighthouse of Greek Alexandria — once stood, and from its ruins and with its stones the Mameluke Sultan Qaytbay built his fort in 1480 against the Crusaders coming from the north, and within that fort a mosque was later built, and the minaret of that mosque was destroyed by Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour in the bombardment of 1882.
Isabel talks of making a film of Anna’s life, the opening credits rolling across a long shot of the old fort. I say, ‘It’s a military museum now, I don’t know if you’d get permission.’
‘Sure I would,’ she says confidently. ‘The guidebook says at dawn its stones look like they’re made of butter. It would be a great shot: a fairy-tale cake of a fort, creamy against the blue sea. You could even see it from the sea to begin with, then swing around as the boat docks —’
‘It would have docked in the Western Harbour —’
‘Then the camera pulls back and back and back until we’re with Anna in her window, seeing what she sees.’
‘It was night-time,’ I say, literally, stubbornly. I want to keep Anna for myself; I don’t want her taken over by some actress.
‘That’s a detail,’ says Isabel.
Anna looks out of her window. It is night-time. I insist that it is night-time, and between the lights of the fort and the lights of Silsila the Mediterranean is a black, blank expanse ahead of her. Her hair is brushed and lies soft on her neck and shoulders. She wears a peignoir (is it a peignoir? I like the word; tasting of the nineteenth century, of fashion and a certain type of woman, of Europe and the novel. Anna Karenina might have worn a peignoir as she prepared for bed; certainly several of Colette’s heroines did, but my English Anna seems worlds away from Coline and Rézi who are her contemporaries) — a peignoir gathered at her shoulders and falling over her breasts in silken folds. Perhaps it has a trimming of soft fur around the neck and at the end of the long, loose sleeves. It is in a pale, pale grey shading into blue. The card propped up on my dressing table calls this colour ‘Drifter’. This colour card has been of no use to me for years, and yet I cannot bring myself to throw it away; it startles me that an object of such beauty should be held in such low esteem — and yet there they were in every B&Q, Salisbury’s HomeBase, etc., not to mention the specialised paint stores and hardware stores: hundreds of cards, stacked, inviting the most casual passer-by to pick one up, glance at it, and throw it into the nearest bin. But look what it does with the seven basic colours; it lobs you gently into the heart of the rainbow, and turns you loose into blue; allows you to wander at will from one end of blue to the other: seas and skies and cornflower eyes, the tiles of Isfahan and the robes of the Madonna and the cold glint of a sapphire in the handle of a Yemeni dagger. Lie on the line between blue and green — where is the line
between blue and green? You can say with certainty ‘this is blue, and that is green’ but these cards show you the fade, the dissolve, the transformation — the impossibility of fixing a finger and proclaiming, ‘At this point blue stops and green begins.’ Lie, lie in the area of transformation — stretch your arms out to either side. Now: your right hand is in blue, your left hand is in green. And you? You are in between; in the area of transformations. Enough. Enough. And yet, I imagine that Anna would have had these same thoughts about whatever version of the colour card there was in her day, for she was a woman who was arrested by small things, by shades of colour.
Cairo
8 November 1900
Dear Sir Charles
,
It is now a week that we have been in Grand Cairo and I have met with the greatest consideration and kindness from everybody here. I have been to dinner at the Residency, where Nina Baring has kept house for her uncle these two years. I am told Lord Cromer is a changed man since his bereavement and that the gentlemen of Chancery were much relieved when Miss Baring came, for she is lively and vivacious and teases her uncle and makes him smile. She has presented him with a complete set of silver brushes inscribed ‘Mina’, which occasioned a certain amount of perplexity at the Agency until she recounted a family tale according to which the Earl used, as a child, to pick up any object he could carry and cry ‘mine-a, mine-a’ till that became his childhood name. You can imagine how I thought of you upon hearing this, and I imagined you throw back your head and laugh — as you used to — then say, ‘That accounts for his attitude to Egypt, then.’
I find myself seeing many things here through your eyes, imagining that I know what you would think of them. I know you would be interested to learn — if you do not know already — that there is a newspaper, newly started here, that speaks against the Occupation. I learned this when someone mentioned at dinner that the paper
, al-Liwa,
is stirring up the people by
writing against the Boer War and describing the methods used by the British army there. My ears pricked up at this — on your account — but to my questions Lord Cromer merely said it was a publication of no significance, paid for by the French and read only by the ‘talking classes’. After this the subject was dropped by tacit agreement and replaced by discussion of a Baron Empain and a French company that has bought a great tract of land in the desert North-East of Cairo and is planning to build a city there along French lines. When I questioned Mr Barrington later about the paper, though, he said that he believed it was paid for by subscriptions — although the French may have helped to begin with — and that it prints ten thousand copies a day. That seems a great many in a country where most people cannot read. I must see if I cannot get a copy and send it to you, although of course it will be in Arabic.
I must tell you, dearest Sir Charles, that your views are well known here, but the respect you command is such that no one has shown me anything but solicitude and kindness.
We are staying, as I told you in my telegram, at Shepheard’s Hotel, which is poised between the old and the new Cairo, and I have been once to the Bazaar with Emily. It is exactly as I have pictured it; the merchandise so abundant, the colours so bold, the smells so distinct — no, I had not pictured the smells — indeed could not have — but they are so of a piece with the whole scene: the shelves and shelves of aromatic oils, the sacks of herbs and spices, their necks rolled down to reveal small hills of smooth red henna, lumpy ginger stems, shiny black carob sticks, all letting off their spicy, incensy perfume into the air. It is quite overwhelming. I had not, however, imagined the streets to be so narrow or the shops so small — some of them are hardly shops at all but mere openings in the wall where one man sits cross-legged working at some exquisite piece of brass or copper. It is difficult, though, to examine the place at leisure as people are constantly calling out to you and urging you to buy their wares. I hear you tell me that those people are there to make their livelihood and indeed I know it is so, and I would buy, only I do not know the proper price of things and I have heard that you have to bargain and I have no
experience in conducting that transaction. No doubt I will learn. Emily was much relieved to get back to the Hotel for she constantly feared we would be abducted and dragged into one of the dark, narrow alleys we sometimes came upon between shop and shop — and when I asked to what purpose, she said we should be sold as slaves, for it is well known that Cairo is a great centre for that trade. My assurances have proved of no avail and she is determined that neither she nor I will venture again into Old Cairo except under British guard! So you may be assured that all will be well with me and that I am most scrupulously looked after here in Cairo. Your loving …
And what of Emily? Anna’s references to her sketch out the portrait we have come to expect of a lady’s maid of the period: Emily ‘chides’ Anna into going out into the garden; Emily wishes to be allowed to dress Anna’s hair in a more elaborate style; she distances herself from the spectacle of the parade in Alexandria; she is fearful in the Bazaar. I try to focus on her as she waits on the sidelines, guarding the picnic basket, the rugs and the first-aid box. How old is she? What does she want for herself? Is she saving up to start a milliner’s business? Does she have an illegitimate child lodged with a foster mother in Bournemouth? Does she want something for herself? Or is Anna her whole life and occupation? Can she yet do what Hesther Stanhope’s maid did, who in Palmyra caught the fancy of a passing sheikh but was denied permission to marry him? Would she do what Lucy Duff Gordon’s Sally did and melt into the back streets of Alexandria, pregnant with the child of her mistress’s favourite servant, Omar al-Halawani? I don’t know; so far, nothing in Anna’s papers gives me any clue.
Cairo
14 November 1900
Dear Caroline
,
I have been in Cairo for close on two weeks now and I have seen a great many curious sights — the most curious of all perhaps being
the sky, which is perpetually blue in the daytime and innocent of any wisp of cloud. How different it is here from November in England. I would so like it if you were to come out, for I am certain you would enjoy it. I dined at the Agency last night (the second time since I have been here) and I fancied myself exchanging glances with you across the dinner table when the conversation turned to the Khedive’s visit to England last summer and what a success it had been and how honoured ‘the boy’ ought to feel (this from Lord Cromer) at the Queen’s giving him the Victorian Order. I remembered you bringing over the
Illustrated London News
(indeed I have kept the copy) and how we read it in the garden —
— and there on the cover is the Toast to His Highness: a long table loaded with candleholders, flowers, epergnes and fruit bowls. Ranged behind it — the caption tells me — are the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke of York, the Marquess of Salisbury, the Lord Mayor of London and the Gaikwar of Baroda. The company raise their glasses. In the centre, tilting slightly to his right, towards the upright, tiaraed figure of the Princess, the Khedive — easily the youngest man there by thirty years — bows and leans with both hands on the table as though for support. As a Muslim, he should not drink alcohol. Looking in from the right of the picture is another fez-wearing head: the elderly Turkish ambassador, holding his wineglass uneasily by its stem, looks in a concerned manner at the young Khedive. Above ‘Abbas Hilmi’s head hangs a heavy-looking instrument with a tassel on its end —
— and Sir Charles came in and looked at the cover and the mace hanging from the wall of the Guildhall above the Khedive’s head and said, ‘That’s to pop him on the fez if he steps out of line.’ I believe that was the first time I had laughed since Edward’s death.
I am sure that Sir Charles’s opinions are well known here — indeed they must be, for, far from making a secret of them, he has published and declared them whenever possible — and I cannot
imagine they are regarded with any sympathy by this company. No one speaks of this in front of me of course, partly out of natural courtesy, and partly because of the consideration they feel is due to me for Edward’s sake. But I hear them mention Mr Blunt, who holds views identical to those of my beau-père, and whom they regard as a crank who chooses to live in the desert, and they use of him the phrase ‘gone over’ by which I assume they mean he sees matters from a different point of view. I own I am curious to see Mr Blunt but he does not come into Cairo Society and I cannot call on him unless I am invited by Lady Anne. Nothing, it seems to me, could be further from the spirit of the desert than life at the Agency — indeed, while you were there you would not know you were not in Cadogan Square with the Park a stone’s throw away instead of almost paddling in the waters of the Nile.
It must be so hard to come to a country so different, a people so different, to take control and insist that everything be done your way. To believe that everything can
only
be done your way. I read Anna’s descriptions, and I read the memoirs and the accounts of these long-gone Englishmen, and I think of the officials of the American embassy and agencies today, driving through Cairo in their locked limousines with the smoked-glass windows, opening their doors only when they are safe inside their Marine-guarded compounds.
Lord Cromer himself (or ‘el-Lord’ as I am told he is commonly known throughout the country — a title, they say here, that denotes both affection and respect) is a large, commanding man with sad, hooded eyes and thinning white hair. I cannot pretend to know him at all well, of course, but I have observed him at the head of the dinner table, where he sits and exudes a quiet strength. He is a man of very decided opinions, to which the conversation in his presence always defers. I suspect you would not be able to work with him for long if you did not subscribe wholeheartedly to his views. He is sunounded by his gentlemen, chief of whom is Mr Harry Boyle, the Oriental Secretary. He is
most interesting as a character (Mr Boyle) and I think makes something of a point of a certain eccentric untidiness or even shabbiness of dress and unruliness of moustache, but Mr Barrington tells me it is said that he has a very sound understanding of the native character and he does speak the language — although Mr Barrington stressed that his knowledge was only of the vernacular — and it is this understanding that has made him so useful to Lord Cromer and brought the two men so close that Mr Boyle has earned the nickname ‘Enoch’ (for walking with the Lord!). Lord Cromer himself speaks no Arabic at all — except for ‘imshi’, which is the first word everybody learns here and means ‘go away’, and of course ‘baksheesh’.
I am hoping to learn a little more of native life here, although I must say I have no idea how to put that hope into actual form. But I feel it would be a little odd to come all the way to Egypt and learn nothing except more about your own compatriots. I believe if Sir Charles were here he would be able to show me things I cannot yet see on my own. In any case I am very sensible that I know very little of the country and must be content to try to educate myself until such time as I am equipped to form my own views.