The Cairo House. Samia Serageldin
to drag the bleating, resisting beasts to the dog run where they would be penned until the morning of the feast.
There was a sudden commotion and panic; someone had forgotten to chain up the dog, who had come flying at the throat of the ram. The howling German shepherd was dragged away. Finally the sheep were safely enclosed. Two days later, before dawn on the day of the Feast, they would be taken to a shed in the backyard that was ordinarily used once a week by two washer-women who came to do the laundry, then on the following day by a man who came to do the ironing. The dog was also bathed there. But on that one day of the year, between dawn and daybreak, as tradition required for the sacrifice to be valid, the sheep would be slaughtered and skinned in that room, and the stench of blood would replace the scent of soap and starch. Then the walls and floor were hosed down and everything returned to normal for another year.
On the morning of the day before the Feast the bustle around the house had reached a pitch of controlled frenzy. In the salon, the Sudanese head-suffragi stood on top of a tall ladder, painstakingly unhooking the crystal drops from the chandelier, one by one, to be wiped with vinegar and water. Mama supervised, hair in curlers under a chiffon cap, wearing one of her favorite déshabillés: a faded, blue satin, shawl-collared affair with a sweeping skirt. Mama only dressed to go out, and then she spent at least an hour in front of her tulle-skirted vanity and her modern built-in closets.
The under-suffragi was pushing a heavy contraption across the parquet floor to polish it; twice a year the hardwood floors were hand-stripped with steel wool, cleaned, waxed, then polished with a chamois cloth weighed down by a massive brick of lead at the end of a stick. He pushed the unwieldy contraption forward and dragged it back with a clicking, sucking sound. One of the maids was using a bamboo duster to beat the back of a rug slung over the railing of the balcony.
I stood on the balcony at a safe distance from the dust raised by the maid, watching the arrival of the sheep. I remember the scent of jasmine from the bushes under the balcony – jasmine and dust. The cook came up to the balcony with some carrots to coax me to feed the lamb. A large, garrulous man with terrible burn scars on his chest, he was sweating from his recent efforts and the general excitement. All the household help seemed to go around with unusually dilated pupils in the days leading up to the Feast. ‘Blood lust’, my mother called it. The cook proudly pointed out the two animals to me, a ram and a lamb.
‘See the pretty little one, I chose him just for you.’
He went on to make a remark about the ram’s horns and his virility. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the remark qualified as one of the ‘indelicate expressions’ to which the cook was unfortunately prone, and on account of which I was discouraged from engaging in conversation with him. The poor man was aware of this failing of his, without quite being able to determine how he offended. The comical result was that he prefaced his remarks with a precautionary ‘excuse the expression,’ as when he referred to a breast of chicken or a leg of lamb.
I went back inside, up to my room, and whiled away the afternoon styling my long-suffering governess’ hair. Madame Hélène was over sixty, but she still had long, lush hair which she wore in a dowdy forties bun. I loved to pin her silvery hair up in complicated twists and braids. She always undid my fantastic creations before venturing out.
A persistent bleating from the backyard was followed by the dog barking. ‘Oh, listen to that bleating,’ Madame Hélène grumbled. ‘At least tomorrow it will all be over and we’ll have some peace and quiet.’
I took the bobby pins out of my mouth and slowly secured a twisted braid in place. ‘I wonder what happens, when they sacrifice the sheep, I mean. It would be interesting to watch, just one time, what do you think?’
‘Quelle horreur,’ Madame Hélène shuddered. ‘Don’t even think about it. Your mother would never allow it.’
‘Oh, it was just a thought.’ I slipped one last pin in her hair. ‘There, your chignon is done, you look like the Belle Hélène of the Greeks.’
That was not strictly true. Madame Hélène had big, bulging blue eyes, rather like boiled eggs, which I attributed to much weeping. She had told me all about her sad life. A Frenchwoman married to an expatriate Italian count with considerable property in Egypt, they had been dispossessed by the British during the Second World War. Her husband’s death had left her penniless and childless. She had been reduced to working as a governess for a living, although among her coterie of expatriate widows she only admitted to giving private lessons. She kept a small apartment in downtown Cairo, where she spent her days off. She had no close relatives left in Europe, but was very attached to a godson who lived near Lyons. She often talked about ‘le petit Luc,’, and wrote him letters. She kept a photo of him on the table next to her armchair in my bedroom: a photo of a boy with a thick thatch of blonde-streaked hair over a square, smiling face.
‘That photo is at least ten years old,’ Madame Hélène would sigh as she looked at the photograph every day. ‘He must be eight or nine years older than you, ma petite, I can’t remember exactly.’
I sat down and flipped through a book, but I could not keep my mind on the pages. I had never been particularly curious about the ritual of the sacrifice. By the time I woke up on Feast Day mornings, it was all over. It was over by the time my father was roused, at about six o’clock, to attend the early prayers. Even Muslims who rarely set foot in a mosque during the year attend the feast prayers, and, on these occasions, the carpeting is extended out into the courtyard of the mosque in anticipation of the overflow. Papa tended to be late, so he usually ended up in the courtyard, along with the cook and his helpers, who would also arrive late and exhausted, having just finished with the butchering.
Mama, who normally rose at about ten o’clock, would have been up at dawn, supervising the distribution of meat to the old retainers and the poor who regularly came to the house. A small crowd would have gathered by daybreak. The wetnurses were given the lion’s share, followed by the household help. The sheepskins invariably fell to the lot of the Nubian doorkeeper, who took them back with him to his village in the Nubia on his biannual visits home.
I would stay up in my room until it was time for me to dress and go with Papa on another round of visits. By the time I came home, calm would have been restored, and the people who had come for charity would have dispersed. Dinner would be served, with several dishes of lamb as required by tradition. I never touched it; the odor of freshly-butchered meat still lingered about the kitchen, wafting into the dining-room every time the door to the butler’s pantry swung open. The household staff would be in a hurry to clear the table and be gone for the holidays, except for the governess, who did not celebrate Muslim feasts, and for the doorkeeper, who had no family in Cairo.
It had never before occurred to me to be curious about what went on in that shed, between dawn and daybreak. But now I could not get the idea out of my head, not even when Papa took me with him on the first round of visits to relatives. The routine never varied; the aunts and uncles were visited in order of their seniority. Since Papa was the youngest of his eight brothers and sisters, his turn to receive visitors came on the last of the three days of the Feast. On the Eve of the Feast he took me to visit the Pasha, Papa’s oldest brother and the head of the clan. He lived in the family home in Garden City, which everyone called the Cairo House.
On the way we passed a truck full of smiling, excited people from the country. They were standing up in the back of the truck, swaying with its movement, singing and clapping. The girls wore neon pink, nylon gauze dresses, the boys new striped pajamas. We also passed pick-up trucks carrying bleating sheep marked for slaughter with a rose-red stain on their fat tails. By dawn the next day they would all be butchered. I stared at them with equal fascination and revulsion, trying to imagine the actual proceedings.
We drove down the Nile Corniche past the grand hotels and the long white wall of the British Embassy, then turned off into the narrow, villa-lined streets of Garden City. When we reached the family house Papa stopped the car and honked for the gatekeeper to open the gate. He parked in the back of the villa, alongside several other cars.
I followed him round to the front, past the fountain with its statue