The Hidden (44 page)

In the morning, I am summoned early. I am washed by the nurse and given a clean robe. The robe is a lemon-yellow colour, bright and cheerful. I think the nurse feels sorry for me. Then she gives me a new black chador. She combs my hair before I veil myself. She squeezes my arm supportively as she asks me to follow her to the waiting carriage that will take me to the courtroom.

The streets around the courthouse are lined with people. It seems that I am a spectacle once more, and they have come to gape at me. Ushered into the courtroom, I am seated before the altar that will accommodate the qadi.

The room lulls to a deathly silence as we wait for his entrance.

At last the qadi comes in and walks slowly to take his place. He is carrying a Qur’an. He does not look at me. He looks at the floor as he walks, deep in contemplation. A boy, one of his assistants, announces his presence as though he were a god.

He says, “Qadi in this case.”

The qadi reads out my name and my crime. He opens the Qur’an and reads a sura. Then he closes it and announces to the room, without even looking at me, “Death to the woman who murdered al-Shezira Pasha.”

The room cheers. The boy assistant steps forward to me and asks if I want to say anything.

I stand up, remove my chador, and unveil myself. The crowd stares in disbelief and then begins to mutter obscenities.

The qadi still does not look at me. I say this: “I am the daughter of the sultan, a royal princess who dared to love and choose her own destiny. I was raped and tortured by my husband. Yet I am still considered a criminal. The law gives men permission to treat me this way because I am a woman. Yet I am the mother of all the men in this room. If you sentence me to death, you are sentencing the whole of womankind to death and depriving the entire world of its only nurturer. My father was murdered, but still you find it necessary to condemn me before you condemn the murderers of my father. I damn you all to hell with no God, no Allah to spare your souls.”

Screams of hatred erupt from the crowd. Still the qadi does not look at me. This qadi could not be more of a coward. I am escorted out of the courtroom and into the crowds.

I am still unveiled. I have resisted all attempts to cover me with that foul headdress. I have nothing to lose now, nothing to be afraid of. Rocks pierce my face, and I feel blood trickling down, warm and salty into my mouth.

I close my eyes in the arabieh, the carriage that will take me back to my cell, as I am gripped on both sides by two armed soldiers. But I am taken to Virginie’s house and locked once more in the sitting room. Another doctor comes and informs me what will happen to me. This time I allow the physician to examine me.

“Your baby is healthy, Sayyida, thank God for that,” he says kindly. He looks me in the eye because I will no longer wear the veil that has shrouded and oppressed me for so long. In his eyes I see sympathy. I see humanity. I see a warmheartedness in his features. I smile at him weakly. I do not know what has happened to force such violence into the hearts of men. The qadi and the prison wardens, the soldiers and the men in the courtroom are Egyptians like me, with wives and daughters and mothers and grandmothers. Yet they want me dead—because I
dared to live my life the way I wanted, because I dared to try to put an end to my suffering.

“I am so glad,” I say without emotion.

“I have ordered that you be allowed to stay under house arrest in Zamalek for the duration of your pregnancy. Nothing will happen to you until you have given birth. I estimate that your baby will be born in around five months. You must rest as much as possible and avoid fits of depression or anxiety. Then, I am afraid, I have no choice but to follow the orders of the court and to release you back to them.”

I hang my head.

“You have a visitor,” he says.

“I do?”

The doctor goes to open the door to the sitting room. Ushered in by a new set of armed guards, is Saiza.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Aimee waited patiently for the Sayyid Mahmoud to return, but her heart thundered unabated in her chest. She felt as though she were waiting for the delivery of a death sentence. Finally, after what seemed like an age, he returned. She stood up eagerly to greet him as he entered and watched him as he inhaled deeply. He steadied himself against the door as he shut it quietly.

His complexion had turned a murky shade of grey, and his mouth had become a thin slit. He hung his head, shaking it. His teeth were clenched, and his arm was trembling. When he looked up at her, he stammered as he spoke.

“I don’t know how you will take this news, Sayyida. I managed to reach my friend. It appears I was correct. The man you say is your father, Alexandre Anton, is still in Cairo.”

Aimee clutched her headscarf, wide-eyed and dry-mouthed. “I see. Do you have an address?”

Mahmoud swung his head away. He sighed, then ran his hands over his face. He walked over to the sitting room sideboard to pour himself a whisky from the decanter, and gulped the drink down.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, I do.”

“Well, Sayyid, may I have it?”

Mahmoud threw back another swig and put his glass down again on the sideboard.

“I don’t think—”

“I am his daughter, Sayyid,” Aimee insisted, trembling. “Please don’t keep me waiting any longer.”

“I am so sorry,” Mahmoud said. “I am so very sorry.”

He stared at her long and hard, little beads of perspiration erupting on his forehead.

“I have an address, but I don’t think it will be any good to you.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“Your father is missing, presumed dead.”

“How? What—?”

“He was last sighted at the Abdin Palace tonight.”

“My father? At the palace, tonight?” Aimee gasped. She was suddenly chilled to the bone.

“Please,” she begged. “Let me go to him. At least give me his address.”

“Are you fully prepared for what I have to tell you?” Mahmoud said.

Aimee nodded.

“Your father is wanted by Intelligence and by the Military Police.”

Aimee stared at the floor. She did not understand. Her father? A wanted man? Surely he had gotten it wrong?

“Why was he at the palace tonight? Had he been invited to meet the king?” Aimee asked.

“No, Sayyida. You did not hear what I said. Your father will be arrested when he is caught, but he might be dead already because of the bomb.” She slumped down in her chair and said nothing.

“Your father belongs to the Group,” Mahmoud went on.

Aimee shook her head and gritted her teeth. She knew what he was going to say now. There was only one thing he could possibly say.

“You know about the X? It’s been on the radio. They are believed responsible for the bombing at the palace tonight.”

“The X,” Aimee whispered.

“Your father—my source has told me,” Mahmoud started to say. Then, gauging her reaction, he paused for a couple of seconds before continuing. “He has many aliases. The last name my friend heard he was using was Taha Farouk.”

Her body felt numb. When she looked up, she saw Mahmoud mouthing some words, but she didn’t remember much after that.

She remembered vaguely her aunt’s cousin calling her a cab, getting into it and telling the driver where she wanted to go. She remembered feeling absolutely nothing, as though her body were an empty shell incapable of any human emotion.

As the car rumbled along, the words of a poem came to her, Maman’s song, the song Saiza had sung to her as a little girl. It was the song she’d written down in her exercise books at boarding school, the Arabic swirls and loops the only legacy passed down from her dead mother.

Hezba Sultan
her name whispered behind closed doors
in the garden
in the misty vapours of the hammam
her name dances with the sounds of harem laughter until it
disappears forever.

And as she mouthed the words with stony resolve, she rammed the handgun, discreetly hidden in her trouser pocket, hard against her left thigh, leaving bruises on her skin. She was going to find Farouk, going to Zamalek.

The journal of Hezba Iqbal Sultan Hanim al-Shezira,

Cairo, October 1919

“You are allowed fifteen minutes together,” the guard says, and the doctor presses my arm gently before he leaves the room, shaking his head in anger at the guard’s callousness.

“Saiza,” I cry out, enfolding her in my arms and sobbing violently against her neck.

“Hezba, shush,” she says, holding me close, rubbing my neck and my back soothingly.

“Saiza, I am so tired,” I say, and she takes me by the hand and tells me to lie down on the mattress, while she bathes my face.

“They’ve sentenced me to death,” I tell her. Saiza bends over me and kisses my face. Her tears splash over my cheeks and her body spasms with sobs.

“We will get you free, darling,” she says.

“Have you news of Virginie?” I ask her.

“She is not well, Hezba,” Saiza says. “She has been removed to a hospital in Old Cairo. Her husband has been exiled. Virginie faces a prison sentence for harbouring two criminals.”

My heart is breaking, for all the wrongs that are my responsibility, for Virginie, for Rachid, for Saiza who is sobbing. These are the people I love, and I am the cause of their suffering. “And Alexandre?” I ask her.

“He has been sentenced to ten years in prison.”

Turning away from Saiza and without looking at her, I say, “Saiza, you must take my diary, hide it away, please give it to my child when she is old enough to understand.”

Saiza leans over me and turns my tear-streaked face to hers. “I’ll do anything you say, darling sister,” she says.

“The court could never have seen it, you know that, don’t you?” Saiza hangs her head but carries on stroking my hair.

“I know.”

“When my daughter has grown up, and she has married, give it to her then. Only then might she understand. And tell her I love her. I love her already, and I’ll carry on loving her, even after I have gone.”

Saiza stifles another sob and says, “Don’t talk like that. Don’t say those things. We will get you free, Hezba.”

I nod quietly, but I am too tired to hope for this outcome. I think about my diary and how it has been my only friend. I feel desolate. I kiss Saiza and feel the wetness of her tears against my mouth.

“I trust you,” I say, “but tell me you will allow no one to read my journal, Saiza, not even you. It is for my daughter, the daughter I will never know.”

“What if your child is a boy?” she asks.

“Then destroy it,” I say. “It is not a journal to be read by a boy. But I know you won’t have to do that, Saiza. I know my child will be a girl.”

“You can trust me,” Saiza says.

“I am getting tired now,” I say, “too tired to carry on writing in this thing. I have struggled to continue with it these last few weeks. I have written it because I want it as a witness to my life, the only true account there is.”

“Of course, darling,” she says, and I turn away from her again and look out through the window at the evening-streaked sky.

I watch night spread its fingers across the earth. I feel my strength leaving me, ebbing away. For the time being, I am content to lie here and drift in and out of sleep with Saiza holding my hand.

I can hear Rachid’s voice as I doze, hear in my memory the lilting laughter of the harem children as they play in the gardens of the palace. I fall into a shallow sleep at last. I dream of Nawal, of Maman and Papa, of the peddler woman and riding across the desert at night with the wind in my face and fire in my veins. I dream of Alexandre,
my Alexandre, our love, our past, our future. I dream of the house at Kerdassa, of the sweet coffee, thick as mud, of the scent of oud and the palm trees bending in the wind, of a hammock gently rocking, of a baby, my baby, a little girl, who will grow into a woman, a little girl who lives in a better world than this one. A little girl I will call Aimee.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Just before dawn, Farouk stood smoking in his garden. Watching the heavenly shafts of orange and gold light emerging on the horizon to the east, he shivered. The shock of the coup, the bomb blast, the destruction, Aimee’s haunted face as he pressed her to him and then released her to the streets of Cairo—it all sickened him.

The whisky decanter stood on the stone table, half empty. The whisky made him feel a little better. It had blocked out some of the pain. Bruised and blood-soaked from the night, he contemplated his own death for the hundredth time. He should have died tonight. He’d seen Issawi’s expression of wide-eyed shock as the bullet had entered his brain. He’d felt Littoni’s massacred body fall against him.

How he wished the bomb had killed him. Instead the force of the blast had simply sent him flying. He had landed hard against one of the palace outer walls. He had suffered no real injuries, except cuts and bruises bruising and a slight ache in his left ankle. In the ensuing chaos, he had crawled through the smoke to a side street and found a car. The driver had wanted to take him to the nearest hospital—such wonderful Egyptian warmth and caring, Farouk had thought at the time—but he’d insisted the driver take him home to Zamalek.

At Zamalek, he thought about Aimee, and guilt slivered through him. He had lied to her because he had wanted her to lead him to Issawi. He had been convinced that she and her husband had been in league with Issawi. Where was she now, her angelic innocence destroyed? She had vanished, and now he would never have the chance to explain.

He pulled himself together and drank some more whisky. His thoughts turned to Gigis, his houseboy. Gigis had been like a son to him and would have the house. Gigis would marry and could bring his bride to live here. Gigis would preserve the Zamalek house as a living shrine to Farouk’s sister. None of the antiques, the paintings, the ornate chairs, the massive bookshelves filled with important volumes or the letters he’d written to her in his early years could be sold or disposed of.