Body and Soul (11 page)

Magdi loved Alexandria. He always seemed to Eden to be happiest when he was here and just slightly out of place when he was abroad. She was delighted to be in his company again. Eden was aware that he was looking at her as he once had, interested in
her from a romantic and sexual view. She slipped her arm through his and snuggled closer to him in the rear of the car, kissing him lightly on the cheek, grateful to him for wanting her in that way again.

‘Where are we going now?’ she asked.

‘That’s up to you. I thought I would take you to lunch at Pastroudis. Unless you would rather go home?’

It was the look of lust in his eyes that told her home meant lunch and an afternoon of sex, but grateful as she was for him wanting her in that way again she was not ready to resume anything sexual with Magdi. Why she had not figured out. Too many years of his not wanting her? Maybe she had had enough sex in the past few weeks? Or was she sensing that running from one sexual partner to the other was not the answer to her quest? There were too many unanswered questions so she told him, ‘It’s years since I have been to Patroudis. Let’s stop first at the bar of the Cecil for a gin and tonic.’

Magdi smiled at the suggestion about stopping at the Hotel Cecil. It was the place where he’d first met Eden. And so in silence the two of them rode along the Corniche to the hotel that overlooked the Eastern harbour. It was a small place of eighty-three rooms that had had its hey-day before and during the Second World War. Now it limped along as a nostalgic venue to stay or more especially to meet in the bar.

One stepped from the car into the sun and heat and up the few stairs to the entrance to be immediately swallowed up in the dark coolness of the lobby: a place of dusty palm trees, a little worn out like the carpets and the open lift, cooled by the blades of the whirling ceiling fans. The welcome here was friendly and served up by the many white-robed and turbaned
sufragis
and the concierge who had been there for as long as Eden could remember.

The sight of Magdi and his guest brought the concierge and the hotel manager from behind their stations. For Eden the Cecil was a home away from home, or at least had been in her past. She had even brought Garfield here while giving one of her recitals in Alexandria.

The bar was nearly empty, the barman effusive in his pleasure to see them again. As they sat and drank Magdi and Eden relived old memories.

‘Remember the night we met?’ he asked.

‘Every detail. I had been to a party at the Yacht Club for a Saudi prince. He found me irresistible and sent a flunkey around to invite me to his rooms. He assumed I would be thrilled by the invitation. When I declined it, and I might add most graciously, his go-between told me, “It would be very foolish for you to reject and invitation from the Prince. If he wants you, he will have you.”

‘When I told him, “Don’t be ridiculous,” he kissed my hand and told me, “You will see.” I forgot all about it and enjoyed my evening with friends though they did not laugh off the invitation as I did.

‘When we arrived here at the Cecil, the door was locked. My escort rang the bell and it was opened. He insisted on seeing me safely to the lift. It was so quiet in the lobby. I remember thinking the staff on duty seemed twitchy then told myself it was just my imagination. Stepping out of the lift, I passed you in the hall. You waited for the boy to let me into my room and return to take you down in the lift. I remember thinking he was unusually nervous. Once he’d put the lights on and lowered the shutter to the balcony he all but fled from the room. I only had time to kick off my shoes when the door to the hall burst open and the boy dashed back in and shot the bolt on the door connecting the room next door to mine. Then he pulled me by the hand towards the hall and kept repeating, “Sorry, sorry.” I kept pulling back, trying to stay in my room. Then you came to my rescue. The prince had had someone pay the boy to open the door between the two rooms. He was going to be in the adjoining one. I remember so well your paying off the boy and telling me it was not safe for me to stay at the Cecil until the prince was out of Alexandria. So I went home with you. It all seems so funny now but that night it was sinister.’

‘It took him years to forgive me. And still a decade after the incident he was saying I probably did you a disservice. You might have been a princess now.’

From the Cecil they went to Pastroudis where they dined on
the seafood for which Alexandria is noted: endless platters of large grilled shrimp served with lemon and butter, a mound of aromatic buttered rice and a bottle of Montrachet. There they saw many of Magdi’s friends and in minutes caught up on all the scandal, who at the moment was having an affair with whom. Eden and Magdi, of course, were being gossiped about themselves.

And with good reason. For as much as Eden had decided to not go to bed with Magdi, her resistance was low and that first night when they returned to his villa, they made love to one another. It was sex with more affection and satisfaction than she’d thought she would achieve ever again in his arms. There were no bad memories to be caught up in as there had been with Laurent yet more than the mere sexual gratification that had come from the night with Sotiri and Sebastian. Magdi’s and Eden’s was a sexual reunion that worked for both of them. He was very sexy and adventurous in bed, met his match in Eden and loved her for it. He had after all been the one to introduce her to the wild side of sex where things she’d never dreamed of could bring on heightened orgasm, where she lost every inhibition, where there were no taboos.

However, after several days the same old feeling of wasting time interfered with Eden’s playtime and she was back to practising and thinking about her concerts at Epidaurus and of feeling no longer invisible but whole, looking and feeling the woman she had once been and still was.

Chapter 11

‘It’s time I was thinking of going home, back to my house in England. The wild flowers will be up from their winter sleep, the orchard will soon be a blaze of pink, and I have a great deal to do before my concerts. But I always find it a wrench to leave Egypt,’ Eden told her host.

‘We haven’t been on a trip yet. You can’t leave before we make a few excursions. Where would you like to go?’ asked Magdi.

They decided to motor to the Wadi el Natrun, sixty-three miles south-west of Alexandria, their objective to visit the monks who lived in a complex of monasteries near the Natrun oasis that dated from the second century AD. It was a very special desert place that received few visitors, the monks disliking intrusion of any sort from outside.

Magdi and Eden had been there before and it was for her one of the special places in the world. The atmosphere of the visits never left her. She carried the stillness of the desert, the passion of the monks to live only for God, with her every day of her life. She had been inspired previously by the monks and the monasteries, believing that this was the place on earth closest to God. It had so marked her that one of her compositions for the cello and two violins inspired by Wadi el Natrun had had critics acclaiming it as ‘God’s music’. It was one of her finest works.

And so the boot of Magdi’s car was loaded with fruit and sweets, a sack of flour, sugar and salt, a case of wine, a carton of candles as gifts for the monks, and a hamper of luscious food for a picnic for Eden, Magdi and any of the monks prepared to
accept Magdi’s hospitality. That was always hard to predict as for the most part they followed the ascetic rule, not living for food or luxury of any kind.

Eden decided that she would take her cello with her and, if they so desired, would play the piece that they and the Wadi el Natrun had inspired her to write.

They set off at five o’clock in the morning when it was cool and so they might have a full day of stepping into another world and time, for the four Wadi el Natrun monasteries and their ancient ruins were surely that. The Coptic community, Christian Egyptian, had impressed Eden by their devout and austere life in the solitude and serenity of the desert wilderness.

They arrived at ten in the morning with a document signed by the Coptic Patriarchate in Cairo giving them permission to visit. That was the only way an outsider was allowed here. Once more Eden was overwhelmed by the Wadi el Natrun monasteries, the monks, the ruins and the desert. There was a silence here as in no other place on earth. It ate into her soul. The heat and dust choked her and, just as she had on her first visit, she wanted to weep for the power of nothingness, the simplicity of this life, for the ultimate sacrifices that could be made for the love of God.

Here was a place that levelled life out, brought it to the lowest common denominator. What did it really matter after all whether she had felt herself just one of the millions of invisible women? What was this pathetic need to be loved and have a sexual life when confronted with the stillness and peace of the desert and these robed men who lived in a special ecstasy all the time
just
by surrendering the world and all desire?

Eden, Magdi and their driver were greeted warmly once they had produced the document. Until then the monks, the few who could be found or seen, had scuttled away from them. They were offered water from the well. It was cool but tasted of sand, maybe even a little brackish, but it would have been crass not to accept their humble offer of hospitality.

Inside the first monastery they were shown icons, the monks’ few treasures of ancient Coptic fragments of robes, bibles and manuscripts. Afterwards they spent several hours talking to the
monks about the monastic life in the Wadi el Natrun. They would not indulge themselves in sharing Magdi’s picnic but did gratefully accept an invitation to hear Eden play the piece she had written inspired by their life.

Later she left her cello in the monastery and even with the heat of the day bearing down on them Magdi, Eden and Gamal, accompanied by an elderly monk, trekked under large black silk umbrellas through the desert to a small oasis of several palm trees. There, under the shadow of a tree, they drank chilled beer which seemed the only thing that could quench their thirst and ate roasted pigeon stuffed with buttered cinnamon rice and a Tabouleh salad of wheat, mint and flat-leafed parsley.

After lunch Magdi stretched out on the sand and slept. Eden, however, left the party to walk to the top of a sand dune, quite close by. The monk wanted to follow her for safety reasons. It was too easy to lose one’s bearing in the desert. Eden’s insistence that she wanted to go alone and her promise not to walk out of sight of the oasis granted her her wish.

Walking in the desert is hard work at the best of times and climbing the dune was very hard work. But climb it she did and her reward was an unobstructed view of dunes undulating away for as far as the eye could see. The silence was profound, like nowhere else in the world. The bareness of a place with not a trace of man or beast to leave so much as a footprint has its own overwhelming beauty. Eden sat down on the summit of the dune with her back to the oasis. For a while, she had no idea for how long, time seemed to have stood still, was no longer relevant. She simply sat looking out at the sea of sand and sky.

The heat beat down from a white sun hanging in a cloudless sky, but it was a dry-as-a-bone sort of heat and there was a hot lazy breeze coming in from somewhere beyond. The heat seemed to beat all thought from her brain, leaving an emptiness that was in itself sublime. Then quite suddenly her mother and father appeared to her almost as a vision. They were the young and beautiful people they had always been; she sensed they still loved her and were happy together wherever they were. The men in her life flashed before her then. She was aware of having loved each of
them in a special but transient way. They were forgiving of the loss of her love for them. Only one of them issued a poisonous feeling. It was Garfield and she could not understand why. He, of all the men who had been a part of her life, was the one to whom she had given herself up completely. It was he whom she’d allowed to ruin her life;
he
who’d left
her
.

She felt rather like the drowning man whose life flashes past him before he goes under for the last time. Suddenly they were all gone and Eden felt cleansed by the experience. She could see for the first time that men could not accept her independence. They were used to being the partner who played games of love with their women. They were the ones able to walk away from a relationship when it no longer interested them, and a new one did, without a qualm. All her life
she
had dropped men as men usually drop women and
she
had marched on.

All that … here in the desert seemed unimportant and had little to do with the big picture of solitude and sacrifice. She realised that she had always had an appreciation of the life that was right for her and those involved with her. She felt humbled by the desert and grateful that she had never abused the talent that fate had dealt her, that she had sacrificed relationships which had not proved sustaining. Now for the first time she could understand and forgive Garfield for walking out on her, when she could not give him what he wanted. She could even face the fact that she had allowed his dumping her so ruthlessly to take her ten years to get over.

She could faintly hear Magdi calling her from a distance and in a flash all her new awareness slipped into place, settled in her soul and out of her mind.

The heat was relentless. The trek back to the monasteries seemed to Eden to be swifter, easier, than they had experienced on the way to the oasis. There the monks had set up a makeshift canopy of black cloth on four rickety poles for shade for Eden and her cello on a stretch of sand that faced the emptiness of the desert.

After lying down in one of the cells for half an hour she gave her concert to the few resident monks who lived there. She played the
piece she had composed inspired by her last visit here, ‘Desert Voices’, and thought how privileged she was to be able to return to the Wadi el Natrun to play it. The silence, the scent of the desert, the music: Eden knew she would never again have such a profound experience no matter how well she played it or where. Magdi and she were silent all the way back to the villa except when he told her, ‘I have never been so moved by a piece of music as I have been today. You are blessed.’

Eden knew that, had always known it. It was what made her humble about what and who she was, why she never abused her talent, why it had always come first in her life above all else. Of all the men who had loved her not one of them understood that the burden of creativity, success, to have the gift of greatness, was what controlled her. Or if they did they hadn’t known how to accept it and love her for it. If one of them had, she knew she might have a husband and children now and still be with that man.

The pieces of her past seemed during this journey to be falling into place, making a picture, solving a puzzle. She had a better picture, a more realistic one surely, of her life and herself. Those love affairs had failed because they had run their course, and suddenly that seemed only fitting and right. This was no cheap rationalisation but an understanding so profound and positive that she knew she could now go home. Her career was back on track, so was she as a woman admired by and desirable to men. Love was just around the corner, all she had to do was be on the right street. She smiled and laughed because her life was rich and full and there was the right man out there somewhere for her. She was as sure of it as that the sun would set this evening and rise again in the morning.

That night she and Magdi made love. The sex was as thrilling as ever, the joy of orgasm took Eden over and she experienced sensational pleasure all through the night. In the morning over breakfast she announced to him that she wanted to go home that day.

He arranged her journey and accompanied her to Cairo. There were several hours to wait before her flight and so they decided to
go to the Mouski, the old bazaar situated near the street also called the Mouski, the oldest commercial centre in Cairo. Eden and Magdi walked the narrow, picturesque lanes lined with tiny shops, sheltered from the sun by wooden awnings. It teemed with milling crowds and mingled scents. In the streets craftsmen worked in the same manner as their predecessors had five centuries earlier on copperware and ivory. Gold and silver jewellery was displayed in dirty windows. Perfume, gems, spices and silk were arranged in the shops and out in the lanes. Offers of coffee enticed people into shops to browse.

The Mouski is made up of several
souqs
, markets or bazaars, the best of which is the Khan al Khalili. That was where Magdi and Eden were headed, not to shop but to visit a cafe, Feshawi’s, perhaps the most famous tea and coffee shop in Cairo. Its atmosphere transports a visitor centuries back into the past. Feshawi’s has a tradition of being especially popular during the month of Ramadan, particularly around midnight when it is full and lively. Eden had spent many a late evening there with the intellectual and political friends she had made in Cairo. It was where they gathered to gossip and exchange ideas. The smoke from the water pipes and cigarettes mingled with the scent of the Khan Khalili: garlic, spices, all sorts of heavy floral perfumes. It was reflected in the many gold-framed full-length pier glasses hung on the walls reflecting people so that the small area seemed always to be packed with patrons. It was here that the Egyptian musicians would have met, where the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy would have spent his time when visiting Cairo, where on visiting Egypt Tennessee Williams and his entourage would take up several of the small round marble-topped tables. It was the Deux Magots of the Middle East.

They were greeted with enthusiasm by the white-robed and turbaned staff who recognised them and showed them to a table named after Matisse, next to one they referred to as Picasso. Eden and Magdi might have had one called Mafouz but Feshawi’s only whispered that was where he sat because Egypt’s famous novelist was still alive and usually there with a friend.

Feshawi’s was a meeting place but also a crossroads where one
might expect to meet anyone from the past or present. But the last people Eden had ever expected to meet were Garfield and Dante. She had always known that one day their paths would cross and had wondered how she would feel then, what she would do. There had been many imagined scenarios but not the one that was happening now.

The two men were sitting further back in the long narrow cafe, accompanied by a well-known American writer whom Eden had met when she was with Garfield. They had taken an instant dislike to one another. Eden felt weak-kneed. She wanted to turn away and flee from Feshawi’s but she seemed unable to move. Magdi led her by the elbow to the table offered to them and they sat down. He had not seen Garfield and only did once he had been seated. He and Eden were in an awkward position. To flee from the cafe would be a sign of weakness. There was nothing to do but sit it out.

After the initial shock of seeing Garfield in Feshawi’s of all the places in the world she might have bumped into him, Eden composed herself with a massive effort. It took several minutes for the colour to return to her face.

‘Do you want to leave?’ asked Magdi.

‘Certainly not. It was bound to happen that I should bump into him somewhere. No, certainly not, let
him
leave.’

Eden listened to herself and her words gave her strength and the ability to put this unfortunate meeting into perspective. She turned her attention to Magdi and the coffee and sweets that had been placed in front of her.

‘Are you all right? You seem to be,’ he said.

Eden heard the concern for her in his voice. She appreciated his loyalty and wanted to dispel his anxiety. ‘Yes, I’m quite all right. I can assure you Garfield will never upset me again. Nor will I allow him to spoil anything for me, not for five minutes. The most dreadful thing about seeing him is that there is still chemistry between us. I still find him incredibly attractive from a sexual point of view. There is something about him I want to love, even now, but I will never let that happen again. He was the great love of my life but that’s over.