The Cairo House. Samia Serageldin
used on feast days, and at weddings and funerals. Inside the long hall the marble floor radiated cold. I looked up through the atrium at the blazing crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling of the second floor, fifty feet above my head.
‘Let’s go upstairs to see your grandmother first.’ Papa headed for the wide marble staircase with the two curved balustrades. I followed him up, then along the gallery.
At the top of the stairs we were met by Fangali, the majordomo of the house. He adjusted the out-moded fez he wore on his head and tugged at his caftan as he came forward to greet us. There was something about him that eluded my understanding. The high-pitched voice, the ingratiating manner, contrasted with the thin moustache, the bold eyes. I wondered why he, of all the menservants, was the only one allowed to come and go freely upstairs, in the family quarters. I had vaguely overheard that, as a result of an accident at birth, he was not quite a man. I wondered if he was an agha. I had heard of the eunuches of my grandmother’s day, without understanding what the word signified. I didn’t dare ask. Years later I thought I understood, but later still, Fangali would spring a surprise on us all.
Fangali knocked perfunctorily on the door to Grandmother’s room and opened it, announcing in his peculiar whine: ‘Look who’s here, Hanem. Shamel Bey and Sitt Gigi.’
Grandmother was sitting on a chaise longue, her legs covered with a knit shawl. Fangali tucked the shawl around the child-like feet in satin mules, and left the room. It never failed to amaze me that this tiny woman could have born my tall, strapping father and his eight brothers and sisters. But it seemed as though the effort had drained Grandmother completely; as far back as I could remember, she had always had that vague air of detachment about her.
Papa kissed his mother’s hand and pulled up a chair beside her and I followed suit. She was saying to Papa, with an approving nod in my direction, ‘That little one can name her own mahr.’ I understood vaguely what the word meant: the dowry the bridegroom brings to the bride.
Papa laughed and rumpled my hair. ‘I’m going down to see your uncle in his study, Gigi. I’ll send for you when I’m ready to go, and you can come to wish him a happy Feast before we leave.’
I nodded and sat down beside Grandmother. Fangali brought us glasses of qammar-eddin, apricot nectar, and a tray with sweets. I nibbled absently on a glacé chestnut, my mind on the act of the Sacrifice. Mama would never allow it if I asked to observe it, but she had never expressly forbade it, so technically I would not be disobeying. I knew Mama’s rules well enough though: whatever was not explicitly allowed was forbidden. As for Madame Hélène, she slept in the room adjoining mine, with the door ajar, but she slept heavily, with a smoker’s nasal snore. I made up my mind: I would do it.
At that moment Fangali ushered in a shriveled old woman wrapped in black from head to toe. The sooty black eyes, ringed with kohl, darted sharply around the room. No one seemed to know how old Om Khalil really was, but it was rumored that the secret of her spryness was drinking nothing but vinegar and water for one day a week. She went from house to house, making jam, pickles, rosewater, kohl from pounded roast almonds, or special concoctions for recovering new mothers. The servants in each household treated her with the awe commensurate with her reputation for an undeflectable evil eye.
I tried to resist an involuntary frisson when I set eyes on the black-shrouded figure. I knew this reaction to an old family retainer was highly reprehensible, but children, like animals, have not yet learned to override their instincts. Seeing Om Khalil at the moment I had made my decision was a bad omen, and I hesitated again.
‘How are you, Om Khalil?’ Grandmother reached for some money from a tasseled purse she kept beside her for the steady stream of family domestics who came to visit on feast days. She had phobias about certain things; for instance, she insisted on having the maid wash any money that she handled, whether it was coins or bills. ‘It’s because she had such a bad experience during the cholera epidemic,’ Mama had explained. ‘She lost two children to cholera, they were just babies.’
Fangali came to fetch me. I kissed Grandmother and hurried downstairs. The door to my uncle’s study was open, and there were a dozen men sitting around the room. My eldest uncle sat behind his desk at the far end. He seemed even larger than the last time I had seen him, on the Lesser Feast a few months before. A big man, his bulk suggested power rather than obesity. His gray double-breasted suit fitted him perfectly, and the silk square in the breast pocket matched his tie. I went up to kiss him; he smelled of Cuban cigars and Old Spice, just like I remembered.
‘Happy Feast, little one, what a big girl you’ve become.’ He patted my cheek and reached into his pocket for a handful of shiny coins. It was the custom to give children shiny new coins for luck on feast days, and my uncle always prepared great quantities of them for all the children of the clan, and the children of friends and retainers, who came to visit.
I had heard that in the old days, before the revolution, before I was born, when my uncle had been prime minister, he had once paid the Feast Day bonuses to some of the Cairo police force, out of his own pocket – out of the family’s pocket, really, since it was all one and the same. During the revolutionary tribunals of 1952, this had been brought up as proof of undue influence. The Pasha had countered that, there being a temporary shortfall in the budget, he had only advanced the money out of his own pocket, in order to make sure that the poor policemen and their families would have the wherewithal to celebrate the Feast. I did not understand what all the fuss had been about; I thought it was about the new coins that children were given.
That night it took me a long time to fall asleep. I couldn’t make up my mind whether or not to risk trying to watch the sacrifice. Finally I dozed off. The call to dawn prayers from the minaret of the mosque nearby woke me. Every morning I slept right through the call to prayers, but that day it had woken me. It seemed like an omen. I sat up in bed in the dark, blinking at the dial of the alarm clock. Had the cook and his helpers started yet? The ram would be first. The larger, more dangerous animal is always killed first, before it has time to panic and resist. I strained my ears but I could hear nothing but Madame Hélène’s regular snoring through the door to the adjoining room.
I slumped back against my pillow. I tried to go back to sleep, but my whole body was tense, straining for the slightest sound. I thought I heard a faint bleating, but I couldn’t be sure. I sat up again, my heart pounding. It was now or never. I would just go down to the back garden, but I wouldn’t actually look into the shed. I jumped out of bed, and pulled on my yellow wool dressing gown. I slipped on my ballet slippers and tiptoed out.
Within minutes I had slipped out of the kitchen door and headed for the lighted shed at the bottom of the garden. I could hear a sort of scuffling, then staccato bleating and the low, urgent voices of the men inside. I recognized the voice of the cook, suddenly raised in warning:
‘Watch out!’
Then the encouraging mutters of the doorkeeper and the other men.
‘In the name of Allah!’
‘Easy now!’
‘I’ve got him.’
‘Allah Akbar.’
I tiptoed to the door of the shed, my heartbeat throbbing so loudly in my ears I could hear nothing else. I clamped my hand over my nose and mouth against rising nausea, and peered in. To this day, I am unable to tell for sure what I actually saw from what my overheated imagination filled in: the harsh light of a naked light bulb on the straining backs of the men bent over in a circle; blood spattering the walls; bound hooves flailing. I screamed and turned to run, slipped in the pool of blood seeping under the door, and fell unconscious.
As Madame Hélène was to tell me later, she was roused from her sleep by the shouting of the cook under her window. She looked out and saw me, lifeless and blood-spattered in the arms of the bloody cook, and started screaming. The cook was apparently shouting for her to come down so he could unload me onto her and get back to his work, but she understood little Arabic at the best of times and at that moment was completely hysterical.
The combined screaming and shouting