The Mistress of Nothing (9 page)

“Sheikh Yusuf,” says my Lady, “I didn’t know you were of such a radical opinion.”

“Common sense,” replies the sheikh, and without looking in the room I can hear that he is blushing.

“It won’t seem so common the day they come to arrest you,” says Mustafa Agha, laughing.

My Lady is eager to learn more about the current situation and its history, and our guests speak more and more freely. Mustafa Agha always takes the view that the Khedive acts in the best interests of Egypt and its people and that the canal will ensure Egypt’s future role in the world of commerce and trade, while the magistrate, Saleem Effendi, and Sheikh Yusuf continue to express their doubts that the interests of the Khedive and the Turkish Empire he represents are truly one and the same as the interests of the Egyptian people, despite the independence from Constantinople that Ismail Pasha claims. The men keep their voices low when they are talking, as though they are afraid of being heard beyond the walls of the French House, but it is clear that they want my Lady to hear what they have to say. These discussions remind me of the arguments she used to enjoy at her supper parties in Esher, where she would feel the evening had been especially successful if at some point absolutely everyone present was shouting. Universal suffrage was a particularly popular subject in Esher and even I found myself warming up with the debate, though of course I was never called upon to express my ideas. In Esher the claret had its influence on the politics, but here everyone remains sober at all times and, indeed, they seem to find the discussion itself sobering and sometimes the evenings end on a somber note, though my Lady claims they’ve simply worn themselves out with the arguing. “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” she says.

Whenever these contentious topics arise—and they arise more and more frequently—Mr. Abu Halaweh stops in the middle of whatever task he is performing (chopping herbs, grinding beans into a paste, rinsing dark ripe tomatoes in a basin) and goes very still, listening. I first noticed this when I asked him a question and, unusually, he did not reply immediately. I looked up from my work and was surprised to see him standing rigid, not moving, as though he’d spotted an asp on the floor. Afraid to move myself, I tried to see what he was seeing, until I realized he was not looking but listening. And I shook myself from whatever reverie had been occupying my thoughts—watching a boat pass softly up the Nile—and attuned myself to the discussion taking place in the next room. Now that he sees I am following the conversation as attentively as he does, Mr. Abu Halaweh supplements his translation with his own commentary: our dragoman is firmly on the side of the
fellahin.
This does not surprise me. It’s not for me to have an opinion on these things; what do I know of Egyptian politics? But it seems to me that these discussions are becoming more and more intense, as well as more frequent.

The heat increases daily now, and I find it an inspiring and awesome thing. It has made sense to me of the Egyptian habit of rising before dawn, sleeping in the afternoon, and socializing in the early evening. Some days after lunch when I’ve settled my Lady in her room with her letters and books, knowing that she will soon sleep, I leave the house to wander through the village. I wear my summer bonnet, which remains the last vestige of my English dress, as I like the shade it affords and I’m not fully accustomed to wearing a headscarf yet. I’m sure I make an odd spectacle. I try to get the layers of my Egyptian clothes in the right order, and I attempt to hold it all together with the shawl tied around my waist as Umm Hanafi and her daughters showed me; I’m sure I get it very wrong, but the villagers are used to me and it is, indeed, much cooler and lighter than my English dress could ever be.

The French House sits at the far end of what was once a great temple, and the modest mud houses around it rest on top of layers of rubble and sand. If you look carefully you can spot remnants of the temple decoration; not far from us the top of a monumental stone head sticks out of the ground, and the outside wall of one dwelling is comprised of a slab of rock carved with an intricate tableau of ancient gentlemen and ladies and hieroglyphs. The colors of the paint, though faded, are clear, and I almost always pause to study it when I pass by. Two figures, a man and a woman, reach out towards each other with graceful elongated arms, while the sun casts its rays over them; beneath their feet, the rows of hieroglyphs. I have no idea if these are gods or Pharaohs or both, but their pose, formal and yet intimate, speaks to me, although I’m not entirely sure what it is saying.

There’s an Englishman who is staying across the Nile, but he has not been at all friendly to my Lady and has not paid the French House a single visit. I came upon him one day over in the ruins at Karnak; he was wearing a great sunhat tied under his chin with a scarf and he was sketching with absolute concentration. For a brief moment I considered speaking to him (the village grapevine had already informed us of his nationality), but he looked up at me with such surprise and horror that I wanted to vanish. He folded his sketchbook, got up from the broken column on which he was seated, and walked away without speaking. I reported him to my Lady, of course, and the next time she had one of her salons, this man and his business were the sole topic of conversation.

“Antiquities Service,” said Mustafa Agha, “he’s been sent to spy on me.”

“What?” said my Lady.

“Mariette has accused me of stealing and selling antiquities! It’s most insulting,” said Mustafa Agha, looking both puffed up with anger and deflated with shame at the same time. I knew the name François Mariette; he was the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in Cairo.

“But you do steal antiquities and sell them on the black market, Mustafa, my dear friend,” said my Lady. “Everyone does, don’t they?” My Lady herself was forever parceling up things we find in the rubble of the temple—scarabs, small statuettes, even bits of antique jewelry—and sending them back to friends and family in England. “Just last week,” she continued, “a
fellah
brought me a very nice silver ring he had stolen out of the new excavations. ‘Better you have it than Mariette, who will sell it to the French and pocket the money himself; if I didn’t steal it, he would,’ he said to me.”

“What did you do?” asked Mustafa Agha.

“I bought it from him, of course. Here it is,” she held out her hand for everyone to see. “It’s lovely.”

Mustafa Agha admired the ring. “But you must not speak to this man,” he said. “You must not tell him any of this; he’ll have me arrested.”

“Well, don’t worry about me speaking to him, Mustafa; he ran away from Sally the other day. Spooked, he was, clearly. We won’t be inviting him for tea.”

RAMADAN ARRIVED, THE HOLY MONTH OF FASTING FROM DAWN TILL
dusk. All activity in the French House slowed to a snail’s pace in the daytime as no one had the energy to do much of anything, except me, and I found I could think of nothing but food all day, even though I was not fasting. Mr. Abu Halaweh continued to cook for us, which both my Lady and I thought was beyond the call of duty, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Besides,” he said to me one morning when I tried to relieve him, “you might poison her with your food.”

“Omar!” I shouted, and I attempted to swat him with my spoon but he ducked down low and got away. Then I realized I had used his Christian name, not his Christian name of course, but his given name, and said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Abu Halaweh.” I bowed my head and placed my palms together, the way he did when he was showing respect, and wished I had a veil to draw across my face. In Esher there were always a few servants with whom I never progressed beyond formal address; Sir Alick had a butler everyone, including Sir Alick, called Mr. Roberts, even after he had been in the household for more than a decade. There were others with whom I used first names straightaway, and others still who didn’t really have names but were known by their position, like Cook, of course. But as soon as I’d said it, “Omar” felt right to me.

He shrugged. “This is my name. You may use it, I’m happy.”

“Please,” I said, “you must call me Sally.” Of course I blushed, and I paused for a moment at the thought of impropriety, but I shook this off quickly. Our complicity had deepened, and after we began to use our first names, it was hard to believe we’d ever done anything differently.

While Ramadan continued, visitors to my Lady’s afternoon salon dropped away, and Saleem Effendi and Mustafa Agha sent gifts of incense and scented soap by way of apology. Luxor was very quiet. At sunset Omar was able to break his fast; he would have laid a small plate of dates and a glass of water for himself earlier, in anticipation. While my Lady was unable to persuade Omar to join us among the cushions for our afternoon reading session, during Ramadan he did consent to share the evening meal with us, such was the sense of occasion. We took to eating together in the salon as the sky over the Theban hills went from deep and starry blue to black. I would carry in a basin of water, soap, and napkin for my Lady to wash her hands—cleanliness is highly valued in Egypt, so much so that I’ve begun to think we English must appear rather grubby when we travel in this country—then I prepared basins for myself and Omar as well. I lit the many candles while Omar brought the food into the salon on a large silver tray that he set upon a low stool, and we three sat on cushions around it. We had both become accustomed to eating in the Egyptian manner, using the right hand only to scoop up the rice and beans with the delicious herbed and salted bread that he makes. We drank lemonade and tea and toasted each other and all our best qualities. My Lady told jokes and, more often than not, we’d have to explain the punch line to Omar, which would prove even more amusing. We’d laugh and shout and every once in a while I’d allow my Lady to persuade me to do my impression of the dancing girl houri whose performance we had witnessed in Edfu. I don’t know why or how this had become my party trick, but it had. Dancing for an audience, however small and familiar: no one in all of England would have believed me to be capable of such a thing. And the most peculiar thing was, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it enormously. It was a very bad impression, I was clumsy and slow on my feet, but it never failed to make us all roar. My Lady and Omar reclined on their cushions and they applauded me.

We’d grown so relaxed and familiar with each other; I see now that this was extraordinary, that the shifts and changes in our relationships to one another were, for all three of us, unprecedented. My Lady had always treated her staff well, but now we’d moved beyond any of the formalities left between employer and employee. Omar had stuck to the old structures for longer than me, but it was as though the devotion required during Ramadan had produced in him a license, a new sense of freedom.

During Ramadan I expected Omar’s appetite to be enormous, but in fact, as the days went by he seemed to eat less and less and, like everyone else in the village, approached life with increasing languor. My Lady took ill, which was hard for us to bear given how well she had been feeling. Not the usual coughing and spitting, but something else, as though the fast-induced sleepiness of the village had worked its way inside her. She said she felt tired, bone tired, but more than that, I think homesickness had overtaken her once again, unexpectedly. Whenever I entered her room I’d find her either looking at the photographic portraits of her children and Sir Alick that had been sent to her at Christmas or sleeping with the photographs laid out next to her divan, on her writing table.

Those evenings that my Lady was too unwell to join us, Omar and I continued with our new tradition of sharing the meal, the windows of the salon flung open to the night. As well as bats, the eaves of the French House were populated by tiny owls that looked as though they had hopped straight from a hieroglyphic frieze, and there was one that would sit on the windowsill and watch us eat. By now the night air was warm and soft but still cool enough to provide a welcome contrast to the day. Omar and I would lie back on the cushions and talk late into the evening; I think we were both surprised by how much we had to say. And we said most things at least twice, once in English, once in Arabic, with many digressions and explanations along the way. I had never spoken so freely with a man, and Omar had never spoken so freely with a woman: I know this because he told me.

“I never met my wife,” he told me, one evening, “before the day I married her.”

“That doesn’t seem to me like such a bad way of doing things,” I said. I found myself thinking of the little maid, Laura, who had got herself into such trouble in Esher. “What was it like,” I asked, “the first time you saw her?”

He smiled and shook his head and, when I did not understand his reply, said, “I don’t have enough words in either language.”

I marveled at the conversation: a man had confided in me. The night breeze ran across my skin; the little owl hooted, then flew away. I felt as far from Esher as it was possible to be; it was as though not only did I inhabit a different land, but I inhabited a different body.

LUCKILY MY LADY RECOVERED FROM THIS LATEST BOUT QUICKLY AND
needed none of the special treatment that we all so dreaded. She decided to mount an expedition to the Valley of the Kings before the nights grew as hot as the days. Omar organized the little ferry-man to take us across the river in the late afternoon, and donkeys to carry us once we reached the other side. The path to the Valley is long and winding, and for a time we traveled alongside the fields where the crops were ripening. The soil is so enriched by the annual summer inundation of the Nile that farmers can plant two or sometimes three crops in rotation, and once the barley and lentils have been harvested, they sow follow-on crops of maize and cotton and sugar cane; they use an ingenious system of canals for irrigation, waterways built in ancient times. The soil is black and rich and pungent as far as the annual Nile floods reach, but beyond that, as though a line has been drawn, the ground turns scrappy and hard as the desert begins. I find the division between the voluptuous green flood plain and the white stony hills quite alarming, as though the land has issued a warning: go beyond here and you are doomed; beyond here you will not survive. My heart sank as our little procession turned away from the plain to head up into the Valley, and I struggled not to show my apprehension; my Lady and Omar were so engaged in their discussion of the landscape and the farmers that she had met and spoken with on previous outings to this side of the river—several of whom came out to greet us as we made our way past their smallholdings—that they did not notice the grim look on my face.