I Think of You: Stories (10 page)

“Nothing, maman. I’ve had enough.”

“But you’ve hardly had any of it!”

“I’ve had enough.”

Souma Hanim lays her spoon down and reaches out to feel Mira’s forehead. “You don’t have a temperature or anything.”

“Did I say I had a temperature?”

Tante Adila is rather noisily finishing the last spoonful of her soup. Hussein has laid his spoon down in his empty dish. Asya feels a soft touch on her ankle. She slips off one shoe and secretly strokes the kitten with her bare foot.

“Well, what’s wrong with the soup? Your Tante Adila and I are spending this whole trip in the kitchen for you to take two mouthfuls and leave the rest?”

“Maman, I’m full. I’m full. Ouf.”

Tante Souma changes tack. “Ah, chérie, take a couple more spoonfuls, darling, for my sake. C’est un bon potage, ça. Tu dois manger, chérie. Tu dois. Même pour le petit.”

Tante Adila collects four empty dishes and goes to the kitchen. Hussein, who speaks no French, sits silently staring out of the window.

“Maman, I just don’t want any more soup.” Mira clenches her hands and her engagement solitaire glints. Souma Hanim gazes at her daughter.

A crash in the kitchen is followed by a loud and scolding invocation to the Preventer of disasters. Adila Hanim staggers in using two bunched-up kitchen towels to hold a steaming and obviously dangerously heavy casserole.

Hussein gets to his feet. “Shouldn’t you have called me to carry that?”

His mother lets the casserole bang down onto the king-size Lady and Unicorn mat in the center of the table and— without answering—turns around and marches back into the kitchen.

He stands for a moment staring at the empty doorway, then with a slight shrug, sits down and resumes gazing past Asya and out of the window.

“Well then, tu va manger un peu de ce poulet au casserole?”

The rice is placed on the table and Adila Hanim sits down with a fresh stack of six plates in front of her. The struggle between the complaints rising within her and the necessity of saving face in front of these two strange women—her second son’s wife and his mother-in-law—have compressed her lips into a hard, thin line.

She starts serving. But as she bangs the spoon against the side of the plate to shake off a few grains of rice, she starts to mutter. “All day long I’m cooking and he doesn’t even bother to show up. Well, tell me. Say, ‘I’m sorry, Mama, I won’t be able to come.’ Since when have I forced him? Can anyone force him? Ever? To do anything? Never in his life has it been possible for anyone to make Saif do anything except what he has already inside his own head.”

Asya receives her plate with lowered eyes and murmurs her thanks. She sits, the creator of all this dislocation and misery, and nothing she can say can make anything any better. And leaving won’t help either. She can’t leave—at least not until she has finished all the food that Tante chooses to give her and sipped at a glass of mint tea. She has to get out soon, though, and she has to avoid any chance of another conversation with Tante. That will definitely happen if she insists (as she should, being the cause of their coming to this servantless country) on washing the dishes. Tante Adila will corner her
in the tiny kitchen and then … and then Asya might break down and tell her everything. So she must just be rude and escape immediately after the tea. Oh, if only Saif were here, he would have stopped his mother at the door and taken the dish from her and scolded her, he’d have talked to Hussein and caught Asya’s eye and grinned at the French remonstrances, he’d have held out scraps of food to the kitten, and Tante Adila would have been happy. Oh, if only …

Glancing up from her plate, Asya sees that Satan is in the middle of the table. Keeping his front paws at a safe distance from the hot bowl, he stretches his neck and takes elegantly pointed sniffs at the aroma of stewed chicken.

“Mange, chérie, mange,” Souma Hanim whispers solicitously, patting Mira’s drooping shoulder.

Hussein springs to his feet, his face dark. “God curse your father, why don’t you stay away from us?” he shouts and, grabbing the kitten by the neck, hurls it against the far wall. Asya stands up.

On the floor, in the far corner, the kitten crouches, utterly still. Souma Hanim glances up at Hussein, then goes back to concentrating on her daughter, who appears not to have noticed anything. Tante Adila continues to dissect her chicken wing.

“What have you done?” Asya tries to keep her voice low. “You’ve broken him. You’ve broken his back.”

Hussein sits down and puts his elbows squarely on the table. Asya runs around the table toward the kitten. She bends over, not daring to touch it in case it slumps broken in her
hand. Slowly and shakily, Satan gets up. He stands on trembling legs, shakes himself; then with a jaunty little leap, he is out of the room. Asya collects her handbag.

“Where are you going, child? Come and finish your food.”

“No. Thank you, Tante Adila, no. What has the kitten done that Hussein should throw him at the wall like that? That’s shameful, taking it out on a kitten. What has he done? I’m going, Tante. I’m sorry.”

Asya is close to tears. She drives round to Blake’s Hotel. She asks for her husband at the desk and then paces while she waits. He comes down smiling, in a pale cream cotton shirt and a maroon cravat, with a question in his eyes. What is the question? Is it merely “Why are you here?” Or is it “Now that you have seen what you are doing to your Tante Adila, are you thinking of coming back?”

“Hi,” she says. “Look, it’s wrong to leave that kitten there. Tante doesn’t like him and Hussein is treating him badly.”

“The cat?” He looks blank. “It’s only for a couple of days.”

“In a couple of days he could be dead.”

Saif smiles. “Hussein is going to murder a kitten?”

“He threw him across the room just now and practically broke his back. I don’t think you should leave him there.”

“I can’t bring a kitten to a hotel. It’s only a couple of days.”

His voice has hardened in that way she knows so well. He is both bored and unyielding. She knows what he is thinking; he’s thinking, Here’s another attack of the dramatics, another of the theatrical fits. Well, he can think what he pleases; he’s
well out of it now, isn’t he? She feels the tears rising to her eyes and knows that she has lost.

“Clara will be miserable if something happens to him,” she says.

Saif reaches in his pocket and takes out a pack of Roth-mans. “You’re concerned for Clara?” he asks.

The tears spill from her eyes and Asya turns away. She’ll take the kitten. She’ll go back and pick him up and take him away. It isn’t right to leave Satan with those people. It simply isn’t right.

Chez Milou

M
ilou sits behind the cash desk. There is a gray-checked rug on her knees and on the rug sits Athène. Athène is a comfortable dachshund the color of expensive leather. She is sleek and plump, but there’s no doubt that she is growing old; you can see it in her eyes. Occasionally she ventures onto the floor and pauses briefly amidst the feet of the waiters. But then Milou gets anxious and leans over to look and call for her, and Athène hurries back. She has to be helped onto her mistress’s knee by one of the waiters—usually old Sayim the Nubian. All day long Milou cuddles Athène. Milou’s manicured fingers have thickened, but she still wears her grandmother’s heavy Russian rings. Her hands are mottled with liver spots, and they are
uncertain on the cash register. They are heavy on Athène’s back, stroking her smooth length, fondling the drooping ears, or scratching the worried brow as the old dog whimpers quietly.

Milou might have married Philippe, but that was long ago. Now, all day Milou watches the frayed red velvet curtains screening the entrance to the restaurant. She knows all her customers, though she never smiles and only nods sternly to the oldest and the most regular. The young tourists who stray in and park their backpacks by the door puzzle over this large, grim woman with the red hennaed hair who never leaves her seat. Yet despite the slight frown that Milou’s features settle into when her thoughts wander, her customers find her a benign presence—and they come back.

To her left and slightly to her rear, so that she cannot see him unless she turns around, old Monsieur Vasilakis sits in a corner of the restaurant. He sits at a round table with a small black-and-white television flickering soundlessly on a cutlery cabinet in front of him and a carafe of red wine always at his elbow. Monsieur Vasilakis is nearing ninety, and almost all the friends who used to occupy the other chair at his table, share his wine, and stare companionably at his flickering TV have passed away. Milou usually knows exactly what he is doing even though her gaze is fixed in front of her. Today, it is Monsieur Vasilakis who is aware of his daughter’s corner; the cash desk has been extended by a table with a white cloth, and a chair has been placed beside Milou’s.

Milou observes the red curtains with particular purpose; she is expecting a friend. Well, Farah is too young to be quite
a friend; her mother, Latifa, is really Milou’s friend, and since their friendship dates from Latifa’s wedding night, Milou has known Farah since she was born. Latifa’s wedding night. Milou does not actually shudder or indeed feel anything much at all. But she remembers. She remembers the shame and the misery which for years that phrase had evoked in her; the shiver moving up her back into her shoulders and arms until her fingers tingled with it, the cold weight in her stomach that she had had to rub and press into something she could bear. Latifa’s wedding night: when Milou had fled down the dark servants’ staircase into Ismail Morsi’s apartment to find his daughter, the bride, in the bathroom pulling off her veil and demolishing the elaborate chignon her hair had been pinned into. “I hate this,” Latifa was muttering into the mirror, “and so does he. We’ll wear the stupid clothes and sit on the platform to be stared at like monkeys, but I don’t feel like
me
with this thing on my head and I am not having it.” Then she had turned and seen Milou. She drew her in and bolted the door. She sat her down on the edge of the bathtub and made her drink some water and Milou told her everything. How strange that then it had seemed that she must die, that tomorrow could not happen. And now it was as though the whole thing were a film she had seen. A film that had moved her for a while.

Milou had first seen Philippe amid the ululations and the clash of cymbals at a friend’s wedding in the Greek Orthodox cathedral on Shari el-Malika Street. Milou was twenty then. She was tall and well built and handsome. Her father, Khawaga

Vasilakis, sitting over his wine after their last customer had gone—watching her as she strode through the darkened restaurant folding up white tablecloths to take home for Fa-heema to wash—her father would often tell her then that she had her mother’s shapely legs and her exuberant auburn hair. He always made this observation sadly. Then he would shake his head and bite the ends of his drooping gray mustache as he stared into his glass. Milou knew that her mother was French, had been a dancer, and had been beautiful—maybe still was. She had abandoned her husband and the one-year-old Milou for, of all things, a Turkish soldier: a black-eyed, whiskered brigand who had swaggered off his ship and into the Allied restaurant in Alexandria one fine day in ’
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to wreck Theo Vasilakis’s life. After three years of alternately swearing to smash the whore’s face if she dared show it in the Allied and vowing that everything would be forgiven if only she would come back, for after all she was the mother of his child, Theo could bear Alexandria no longer. He sold the restaurant and took Milou and Faheema, the black maid who looked after them, to Cairo. He never saw his wife again and withstood all pressure to remarry. He opened Chez Milou (instantly “Shameelu” to the locals) on the rue Abd-el-Khaleq Sarwat and looked forward to the day when his daughter would be a partner and an adornment in the restaurant. Now that Milou was both, her father watched her constantly and lived in terror of the swashbuckler who would lure her away and ruin her father’s patched-up life for the second and final time. For a swashbuckler it would have to be. You only had to look at the
girl—the long, strong legs; the lean waist; the straight back; the broad forehead, wide-set eyes, and brilliant hair—to see the swarthy, muscled, sweating, tobacco-spitting son of a bitch who would claim her. Khawaga Vasilakis’s paunch trembled with apprehension and distaste and he chewed on his mustache.

But Milou saw Philippe amid the incense and the burning candles in the Greek Orthodox cathedral and thought he looked like an angel: the boy—he could hardly be called a man—was so fair and so still. He sat at the far end of the pew on the other side of the aisle, the bridegroom’s side. He was so separate that he appeared to belong more to the shining Byzantine icons on the walls than to the mass of breathing, moving people around him. Milou could see only his head in a three-quarter profile. His face was pale and fine-featured. Gleaming black hair rose smoothly from a white brow. His nose was chiseled; his mouth wide, his lips narrow and ascetic. She could not make out the color of his unmoving eyes. But it was a quality of serenity, a combination of his utter stillness and the way his head shone like an illumination in the dim cathedral, that so captured Milou.