Jasmine Nights (35 page)
The following day, while she was asleep in the crook of his arm, he lay tense and watchful as he listened to the unmistakable roar of a Spitfire engine moving overhead; for the first time, he recoiled from it.
When he opened the shutter, a flock of birds flew through the vaporous air the aircraft had left behind, and Alexandria, battered, abandoned, came into focus again, and he was frightened for it. Nobody could say with any certainty how much of it would remain next month, next week even. All the talk now was of one final push.
‘Are there a lot of them?’ She’d been watching him.
‘A lot of what?’ he said cautiously. He combed her hair with his fingers.
‘Aeroplanes.’
‘A few.’ It was unusual, he thought, to see aircraft moving so flagrantly over the city, and wondered if some were being delivered to LG39. They were desperately short now.
‘Are you worried?’
‘No.’ He hesitated, knowing what he said might stay with her for a long time. ‘Please don’t worry about me. I’ve had a wonderful time. I’m sorry I nearly spoilt it last night.’ He got up, closed the shutter, and got back into bed with her.
‘Saba, no!’ He put his arms around her; she was howling, but without much sound, just deep breaths and swallows, a look of vivid distress in her eyes as she tried to control herself.
He dried her eyes on the corner of the sheet.
‘This has been the best week of my life,’ he said. He buried his face in her hair and they clung together as if it was their last moment on earth.
Their breakfast on the following day was curiously formal, as if part of them had already gone. They went to Dilawar’s and ordered coffee and croissants which she toyed with and half ate. They arranged to meet between her rehearsal and what she now called ‘the blasted broadcast’.
‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy it once you’re there,’ he said, diplomatic today. ‘It’ll cheer the troops up.’
‘I hope so,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll be back as soon as it’s over.’ She looked at her watch and said she’d better go.
Before she left, they said goodbye to Ismail together – the handsome youth often stared at them from behind the beaded curtain that separated the café from the kitchen. A hungry, unabashed stare. A few nights earlier, during a general conversation with him about the war and Egypt and his life, he’d told them he thought they were lucky. He could never afford to get married; he lived with his mother.
They’d glanced at each other shyly during this outburst, pleased that he thought they were husband and wife.
They shook his hand, gathered their things, and walked out into the blare and glare of the street. As Saba’s tram moved off, Dom stood and waved at her from the street corner. He had no fixed plan yet for the rest of the morning – he’d hoped he would spend it with her. He felt sick with fear as he watched her go.
As Saba wove in and out of the trinket sellers down by the Corniche, she was thinking of Dom in all his manifestations. There was the brown-skinned Dom whose body, both predatory and tender, claimed her at night, eyes gleaming in the candlelight; the silly schoolboy who sang to her from the bath and made her helpless with laughter; the kind and fatherly man who brought cups of tea in the morning and separated oranges fussily on the tray into neat segments; the clever one who challenged and mocked her, and who every now and then withdrew into an intense silence that frightened her; the ghost in their wardrobe who wore oil-and blood-stained overalls, who knew how to use a revolver – who refused to talk.
He still hadn’t spoken about the day he was shot down, which made her wonder if other friends had been killed or if he’d made some irretrievable mistake that haunted him. Sometimes she wondered if he felt unmanned by her having seen him too vulnerable for masculine pride in hospital. She couldn’t tell. When conversation strayed in this direction a shuttered look came to his face and she got nothing.
But last night, sitting opposite him at Dilawar’s, their toes touching under the table, she’d thought,
you can’t die. I love you too much
, as though intensity of thought could stop it, and then a strange sort of rage at him for frightening her so, and now a terrible hollowness inside her because he was leaving so soon, and so was she. But there was something else too, almost too confusing to contemplate, or was it simply self-protective, the almost automatic and balancing and surely wrong thought that their parting left her free to work again. Could all these separate parts of her ever be smoothly joined? She somehow doubted it. Even on a morning like this, it was comforting to slip, like an animal into some secret pond, into the half-light of the club and know that for the next two hours she would only think about her singing lesson with Faiza.
The chairs were up on the tables when she walked in, and the air was stale and cigarettey. From upstairs the muffled sound of tango music, the kind of staid European tango that Faiza liked, not the wild South American brand, next came Ella Fitzgerald. Faiza’s taste in music was broad; you could say her soul was in the East but her head, and wherever it was a sense of style resided, in the West, and Ella was her favourite jazz artiste. She liked to gossip and tut about the singer’s awful start in life – the brothels, the homes – as if they were close friends, and it was Faiza who had made Saba pay attention to her idol’s musicality, her impeccable timing.
Faiza was jiggling around to ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ as she opened the door, a pencil stuck behind her ear. During the day she wore a faded robe and large unfashionable specs and looked like anybody’s auntie from Alexandria; it was at night that the garish frocks and hectic make-up, the brilliantly dyed hair (a wig as it happened) appeared.
Saba knew more now about Faiza’s plans, which were ambitious. Before the war, and thanks to Ozan, she’d had a successful career singing on the Mediterranean circuit – in Italy, Greece, France and Istanbul. Now, having gone down well with the GI’s and British audiences, her grand plan was an American tour. She might sing at the Apollo, or meet Ella Fitzgerald in person – Faiza lit up like a girl when she discussed all this, and although Saba privately felt that at fifty-five she had one foot in the grave, she had been helping Faiza with her English pronunciation, in return for help with the Arabic and Turkish songs.
After rehearsals they’d drunk tea and already talked of many things – music and food, poetry and men. Faiza admitted that her husband when young had beaten her. Like many Egyptian men he’d believed that virtuous maidens did not sing in public – it was neither proper nor respectable. It had caused her much pain for many years and a great split inside her. But in the end, she said, she’d been right to insist on doing what she knew she was put on this earth to do. Now, she didn’t give a damn – sorry for the word – what other people thought or said about her. And eventually, she said with a shrug, and a cynical twinkle in her eye, she’d made enough money for husband and children to forgive her.
The other big love of Faiza’s life was Mr Ozan’s father, another rich businessman, who had discovered her, a rough-and-ready girl, singing at a Bedouin wedding. He’d heard something special right from the start, and later encouraged her to dress properly, to learn languages, to listen to artistes from all over the world. Thanks to him, she now had the kind of life she’d once only dreamed of: enough money to buy herself and her widowed mother a very nice house in a village near Alexandria, even a motor car.
Today, they were working on getting the words right for ‘Ozkorini’. Umm Kulthum’s recording of this song had swept the Arab world.
Faiza showed Saba, with many terrible and exaggerated grimaces, how she must learn to use the frontal bones of her face to sing this well. She needs nasality, Faiza calls it
ghunna
, also an intentional hoarseness (
bahha
) that is hard to do and indicative of huge emotions. ‘Listen to how her voice cracks at the end of this song too. Faiza darts to the gramophone, young in her enthusiasm.
Umm is, in her estimation, a far greater singer than all the Piafs, the Fitzgeralds and the Washingtons rolled into one. She had already implied that Saba ran the risk of performing a kind of blasphemy when she sings her songs; that she would never in her lifetime learn the whole thing for herself. Even if her Arabic was good enough, English people did not listen to music in the same way. In Egypt it was like worship, like prayer. In old classical Arabic singing a performer would often repeat a single line over and over again, and by doing so rouse the audience to an almost orgasmic and ecstatic state. A single concert might go on for four to six hours. When Umm Kulthum sang her radio broadcasts, bakers stopped baking, bankers banking, mothers let their children lie on their laps. People flew in from all over the Arab world to hear her; both the Allies and the Axis had used her in their radio broadcasts. That was power. The kind of power that made demands on an audience.
This was not the first time Saba had heard this encomium, and today she desperately hoped Faiza would nutshell it. Downstairs, Faiza sat in a circle of light near the piano, Saba waiting for the nod of her head that said she could begin. They were working on the middle portion of ‘Ozkorini’, a song that had already stretched its tentacles deep inside her. When the music started and Saba began to sing, her voice was throbbing and raw with pain. She was begging Dom to stay alive.
‘This is the best you have sung,’ Faiza said when she stopped. ‘You did it from here.’ She made a circular swirling movement with both hands in the direction of her guts. ‘You are nearly ready to sing her.’
The sound of clapping made them jump.
It was Ellie, in a white dress and the usual perfect coiffeur. Her shadow flew across the wall as she walked towards them.
‘Sorry to burst in on you, Sabs,’ she said, ‘but I need a quick word. Marvellous music, by the way. You sound just like the real thing.’
Saba, still in the song and vulnerable, blinked towards her. She could hear Faiza’s cat underneath the table, the sound of its rough tongue mixed with its purring.
Faiza’s smile was lemony – she disliked being interrupted during rehearsals and being seen without full make-up by people who didn’t know her well.
‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘I’m going upstairs to get dressed.’
‘Saba, for God’s sake, where have you been?’ Ellie said when they were alone. A sweat shield had worked loose in the arm of her dress. She snatched it away and put it in her handbag.
‘You know perfectly well where I’ve been.’ Saba was fed up with this charade. She’d seen Tariq’s suitcase at the Pattersons’ house and knew he’d stayed there while she was away. ‘You said the broadcast was tonight.’
‘You really should have told me,’ Ellie continued shamelessly. ‘Anyway, a new man from ENSA phoned this morning; he wants to see you right away. He’s staying at their offices on Karmuz Street. There’s a taxi outside. The driver knows where it is; I’ve paid him and tipped him, so don’t get stung again. When you’ve seen him, come straight back home to the Pattersons’, and I mean it. No more running off. Honestly!’
But there were no ENSA offices on Karmuz Street, or if there were they’d been burned down long ago, along with the other miserable ruins. Instead, the driver drove fast down a nondescript road two hundred yards ahead and stopped next to a street stall that sold lurid, flyblown sweets threaded on to strings.
He gestured to her to get out; he led her across a crumbling pavement and banged on the front door of an apartment with a green grille outside it that was padlocked.
Several locks were clicked, Cleeve opened the door. He was wearing glasses, had darkened his hair and was dressed in a shiny dark travelling salesman kind of suit.
‘Sorry about the Charlie Chaplin get-up,’ he said. His breath smelled of cigarettes and mints and something staler. ‘I’m travelling incognito this time.’
He glanced quickly up and down the empty street.
‘Upstairs,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve got some news.’
He took her to a scruffy room, with overflowing ashtrays and a stained mug of coffee on the table. His suitcase was on the floor, half unpacked.
‘Sit down.’ He pointed at a sagging sofa. ‘Quite a bit to fill you in on. How are you, darling, by the way? You look marvellous.’ He drew the blackout curtains; the lamp he switched on stained his face in a strange hallucinatory wash of green light.
‘Thank you,’ she said, thinking that sometimes too much happening in your life was worse than too little.
‘Right.’ Cleeve lit a cigarette and stretched his legs out. ‘I’m catching the train back to Cairo tonight, so I don’t have long, but let me bring you up to date.
‘Ozan has definitely decided on Istanbul for his party – he has a house there on the Bosphorus – much safer and more fun. He wants you to go with him for the party and for a limited run at his club. We’d like you to do this if you can, and frankly, you’ll be much safer there – perfectly natural for a half-Turkish girl to go home and sing in the country of her birth. Are you happy to do that?’
A crash of conflicting thoughts went through her head. The desire to be brave and do good things for her country, excitement at singing in a foreign place, the fear of putting the Mediterranean between her and Dom – although his leave, it was true, had been cancelled for the next month, the arrangement felt precarious.
‘How long will I be away?’
Cleeve gave his charming, lopsided smile.
‘No more than a week at the absolute most. Ozan has promised to pay you well, you’ll be put up in a nice hotel, and we’ll keep an eye on you from a distance.’
‘Should he pay me? It doesn’t feel right.’
‘It’s the safest way. If he doesn’t, it will look suspicious.’
‘What do I have to do?’
He looked at her in a friendly way. ‘Again, the answer is maybe nothing, maybe a lot – we simply don’t know yet.’
He spread a map on the table. ‘At the moment, Istanbul is the most important neutral city in the world because it’s roughly equidistant from Germany, Russia and the Western powers. The country has become very popular with German secret-service agents on large expense accounts, which is where our friend Ozan has cleaned up at his clubs. Some of these chaps are jokes, they’re just keeping their heads down until the war is over, but there are other people there with vital information to share.