Louisa Young - Desiring Cairo

Abu Sa’id never told me what happened to his family, if he ever had one. Never spoke to me of the boys’ mother. We just sat on the step, drinking karkadeh, the tart crimson tea made from hibiscus flowers, smoking, listening to music on his old Roberts radio, listening for Nadia to wake. He would play his ney for me, and sometimes I would dance a bit, imagining myself a snake in the Nile to the serpentine warp of the flute, and he would break off and tell me to sit down, with an old person’s laugh at a young person’s foolish pleasures, though he wasn’t so old. Fifty, perhaps. Once he played me a tape of Yaseen el Touhami, the Sufi poet, and rapidly translated his improvisations for me. El Touhamy never goes anywhere to be recorded. If you want to record him, you have to go where he is. And they do – to the mosques and the moulids, to the streets. We can have recordings if we want, in our poor necrophiliac way, but he and life and creation are doing their living business. I loved that. I wanted to be elevated enough to refuse to listen to him on tape. Wanted to share the purity of his creative transcendence. But alas I am not a Sufi, I am a mere London girl. And I was enchanted by the sound of him reproduced and preserved on the slightly stretched tape, crackling slightly on the banks of the Nile, with the palms black against the rose and gold of the beautiful sphinx-shaped cliffs behind Qurnah, to the west, and Abu Sa’id murmuring the words for me, a low and clarificatory counterpoint to the rhythms. He spoke beautiful English, too, though he didn’t write it.

Abu Sa’id, his kindness. I wondered that he had sent Hakim alone, without getting in touch.

Hakim was looking into his thick dark coffee, twiddling his spoon and making an irritating little clinking sound. He looked about ten, like when I’d first met him. He lifted only his ambiguous eyes to answer my question.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘I will tell you, but now I cannot tell you. For now I need just your trust.’

Oh?

I looked.

‘I will stay just for one week,’ he said.

‘In London?’ I asked, but I knew what he meant.

‘In your house. Please? Then all will just become clear in the fullness of time.’

I was sad that he had sensed unwelcome from me, though I knew I was giving it off. I was ashamed. You cannot be unwelcoming to an Arab. There is something so wrong about it. What churls we are, we English, with our privacy and our territory and our cold cold hearts. In Egypt when men speak to you on the streets what they say is ‘Welcome’. There are signs in the streets of Hakim’s home town saying ‘Smile you are in Luxor’. Yes I know it’s for the tourists but even so. When I think of the kindness, the generosity, the hospitality of people I knew – and hardly knew – in Egypt, let alone of Hakim’s father … Shame.

‘You must stay as long as you need,’ I said, and I meant it.

The sitting room is also the kitchen, and I wasn’t putting him in there, so I had the choice: put him in Lily’s room, in which case she would be in with me, and probably in my bed; or put him in my study, in which case I would have to get a job because I certainly wouldn’t be doing any work at home. I don’t want a job. I don’t want Lily back in my bed, I’ve only just got her out of it.

I put him in Lily’s room. She was narked at the idea, initially. Wouldn’t you be? Finish your first day at big school, and what do you find but your normally very territory-protective mother has moved a man into your bedroom. I told her about him as we walked back from school. She was on ‘Mummy there’s a guinea pig can we have a guinea pig please please can we have a guinea pig’ and I took the opportunity to mention the new living creature that we already had.

‘I don’t want a man, I want a guinea pig!’

‘He’s more a boy than a man,’ I said, hoping to endear him to her. ‘And he’s quite like a guinea pig. He has lovely silky hair.’

‘A boy? You said a man.’

I still hadn’t decided quite which I thought him. A boy, of course, would be easier. I could mother him.

‘How old is he?’ she wanted to know.

‘I think he’s about nineteen.’

‘That’s a grown-up,’ she said, disappointedly.

‘Wait till you see him.’

‘Is he going to live with us?’

‘Just for a little while,’ I said.

‘Will he be my daddy?’

The way they come at you. Out of nowhere. She doesn’t mention daddies for months on end and then, matter-of-fact as you like, something like that.

‘No honey, he won’t.’

‘But daddies are the men that live with children.’

‘Not only, love. Some daddies live with children and some don’t, and some men that live with children are daddies and some aren’t, but Hakim isn’t in our family, no – he’s just coming to stay, like Brigid’s boys do, and Caitlin. Just for a bit.’

‘But we don’t know him.’

‘I know him, love.’ Sort of. ‘I knew him in Egypt before you were born.’

‘Mummy you’re very clever.’

‘Oh good. Why?’

‘You know so many things I don’t know.’

My heart filled with joy at her sweet absurdity. Such are the everyday pleasantries of my life.

*

She started coughing the moment she walked through the door.

‘Lily, hon, this is Hakim, Hakim, this is Lily.’

She took one look at him and then she started to curl. Curled her face into my stomach, her arms around my waist, her feet around her legs, her mouth into a simper, her eyelashes into a flutter. Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it. The last one was cousin Max, on my father’s side: six foot one of teenage Liverpudlian love-god, with long yellow hair and a playful disposition. He gave her a piggyback and she just went around saying ‘Max Max Max’ for a week.