The Map of Love (16 page)

We sit in the living room and Tahiyya goes to make tea, picking her way gracefully through the baskets arranged on the kitchen floor.

‘Cairo is filled with light,’ I say. And he places his hand on his heart:

‘It’s lit up by its people, ya Sett Hanim.’

We sit in silence for a while, our eyes fixed on the floor.

‘A precious step,
Am Abu el-Ma
ati,’ I say.

‘May He make your standing ever more precious, ya Sett Hanim,’ he says.

Am Abu el-Ma
ati is getting old. With every passing year the network of wrinkles on the brown face becomes a more detailed etching of the times he has lived through. I don’t know his age, of course, but he’s been around for ever. His father was my father’s chief man on the farm, and when my mother and I moved to Cairo
Am Abu el-Ma
ati came up to see us four times a year. He brought news, the accounts and our share of the produce: baskets of chicken, eggs, butter and grapes, mangoes, dates, whatever fruit was in season. And always loaves of freshly baked peasant bread. And when, from time to time, we went to Minya, there he would be at the train station, waiting with the parasol to shade us into the small carriage and drive us to Tawasi.

A month after I came back for good he was on my doorstep, and around him the baskets, looking just as they had twenty years before: each one crammed with food and covered with a large white napkin, its striped blue edges wedged in tight at the sides. When I had asked how he’d known I was back, he had smiled and said, ‘It’s a small world, ya Sett Hanim.’

Tahiyya brings in the tea and I make her sit with us. Our village is not her village, but it’s a village after all and getting news from it makes her happy.

‘What news,
Am Abu el-Ma
ati?’ I ask.

‘All good, praise be to God.’

‘And the family, how are they? All well, please God?’

Am Abu el-Ma
ati has two daughters and three sons. He had four but one was killed in the war in ‘67. One of his sons fanned in Iraq but came back after the Gulf War with nothing except his life — and that was precious enough. Another is working in Bahrain, and the oldest is ‘in the sea’ with a merchant ship. The widow, wives and the youngest of the children all live in our village. His two daughters were married
in Minya city itself but one has been widowed and come back to Tawasi. She works in the clinic.

‘Praise be to God,’ he says. Bit by bit I get the news: the births, the deaths, the arrivals, the departures, the feuds, the weddings.

After he finishes his tea and puts his glass down he says, ‘Won’t you come to us for a while, ya Sett Hanim?’

‘I’d like to,’ I begin and then I say, ‘Is there something?’

‘Not at all,’ he says. We pause.

‘It’s just there are a few little things — if you came it would be good,’ he says.

‘What sort of things?’ I ask.

‘Well …’ He draws out his handkerchief, coughs into it gently, folds it and puts it away. ‘There are a few problems.’

‘What sort of problems?’

‘The school,’ he says, ‘they’ve closed it.’

Mustafa Bey al-Ghamrawi, my great-grandfather, was a firm believer in education. In 1906 he had been the first to put up money for the new National University, and, together with his nephew Sharif Basha al-Baroudi, he had set up a small school in a village on the family land and put the revenue of ten faddans in trust for it. His son, my grandfather Husni al-Ghamrawi, had added an adult class to teach the fallaheen to read and write. My father, Ahmad al-Ghamrawi, had in turn added a small, basic clinic, staffed by a nurse and a midwife -and now by
Am Abu el-Ma
ati’s daughter. When Abd el-Nasser built a primary school for the village, our school held literacy classes for the adults. And in ‘79 extra classes were added for the children to try to make up for the plummeting level of the education they were getting.