Samia Serageldin - The Cairo House

‘See Alexandria and die,’ the ancient Greeks used to say. Gigi tried to remember the book in which she had read that. She loved Alexandria in the off-season, before the summer crowds arrived. She sat in the back of the car between Madame Hélène and her fifteen-year-old cousin Tamer as they drove up the desert road from Cairo. Omar, Tante Zohra’s occasional driver, was at the wheel, with Om Khalil, all in black, in the passenger seat next to him. Tamer gripped the dog between his knees, his long, lanky legs bent nearly in half.

Tante Zohra’s chalet, as small beach houses were called, was in Agami, on the far side of Alexandria, but they detoured through the city. Once past the salt marshes and long before they could see the Mediterranean, they caught whiffs of the sea breeze. Then they were driving along the Corniche, relatively quiet because it was only April. They stopped at Glimonopoli to buy granita : lemon and mango ices.

They parked on the Corniche. Gigi and Tamer leaned against the railing at the top of the sea wall and let the breeze blow in their faces as they licked their ices. The sun glinted on the crests of the steel blue waves that broke briskly against the sea wall. Gigi closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, her senses overwhelmed by the light and the warmth, the smell of salt and seaweed, the tang of lemon on her tongue.

At the chalet they were greeted by the familiar musty smell, soon dissipated when the creaky wooden shutters were flung open. Gigi found a battered straw hat in the hallway closet overflowing with sand-encrusted sandals, fins, goggles and inflatable rafts. She rolled up her pant legs and ran down the beach across the fine, sifting white powder. At the water’s edge she dug her toes into the cool, wet sand and the gritty, crushed cockleshells. She ran in and out of the surf, keeping a lookout for the loathsome jellyfish washed up by the tide.

‘Gigi! Will you come back in now? It’s getting dark.’ Madame Hélène’s plaintive voice called from the top of the path down to the beach. ‘Gigi! Come in now, you’ll be bitten by crabs.’

After dinner Tamer found the dog-eared deck of cards and the Scrabble game with the three missing letters; they played for hours in the dim light. The electrical voltage in Alexandria was 110 rather than the 220 prevalent in the rest of Egypt and the light always seemed weak there.

Gigi tried on the new dress she was planning to wear when Yussef came tomorrow. Mama’s ‘little dressmaker’ had just finished running it up for her. It was an apricot sundress with crisscrossing shoulder straps and a short, swinging skirt. Gigi twirled round and round in front of the mirror, making the dress flare up and out, and her long hair fly about her face. A Beatles record played on the small portable record-player. Tamer sipped a coke through a straw; it was flat and syrupy, the only kind available in Egypt for years now. When Gigi stopped twirling, she saw him gazing at her, and she pinched his cheek.

That night she dreamed that Yussef was coming down the beach towards her, but all she could see of him were his bare feet. He had black hairs on the toes. She turned and started running away. But suddenly something surfaced in front of her, terrifying eyes in pools of black ink.

Gigi fought off the clutches of the nightmare to find herself staring into the fierce, kohl-ringed eyes of Om Khalil. Om Khalil applied a lot of kohl before going to bed and washed it off in the morning. This morning she had apparently not yet done so, and the kohl was smeared all around her eyes.

‘Sitt Gigi, are you going to sleep all day? What time do you want lunch? What time is your company coming?’

Gigi looked at her watch on the bedside table. ‘Nine o’clock! I’d better hurry. Yussef said he’d come early. We’ll have lunch at two, Om Khalil, does that give you enough time? Just a simple lunch. I’ll come down and see about the menu. Where’s Tamer?’

‘Sleeping on the slope of the roof; if he slips down and breaks his neck it’ll teach him a lesson.’

Gigi yanked on her dressing gown and went out on the roof terrace. Her cousin was still half-asleep in the morning sun, his curly dark hair rumpled, a blanket over his shoulders. He didn’t turn in her direction. Gigi leaned against the sun-warmed wall. She wanted to ask him if he missed his father, if he wished his mother would come back from Lebanon. But the eyebrows drawn down like shades over the eyes warned her off. She touched his shoulder.

‘Come on, Tamer, we’d better get dressed. Yussef will be here any minute. Will you find Domino and chain him up?’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Yussef doesn’t like dogs.’ She sighed.

Tamer looked at her as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind. He went off to find the dog.

Gigi went downstairs to check on the preparations for lunch. She stopped short in her tracks when she saw Yussef standing in the middle of the foyer. ‘Oh! When did you get here?’

He smiled. ‘Just now. Your governess went to look for you.’

Involuntarily, Gigi’s eyes dropped to his feet. He was wearing canvas espadrilles. She couldn’t tell if his feet looked anything like those in her dream.

‘Excuse me a minute, I just have to dress.’

She ran back upstairs. Before the mirror she surveyed her messy hair and childish dressing gown in despair. This day was not getting off to a good start.

A few minutes later she came down, wearing the new apricot dress. They went for a walk on the beach. She carried her thin-strapped sandals and waded ankle deep in the water. He kept his espadrilles on and walked on the sand, a foot or two up from the water’s edge.

‘Father says I’d better be flying back to London as soon as I get back to Cairo.’

‘Oh, so soon?’

‘My thesis supervisor threw out all the data I’d collected over the past two months, he insists that I redo the experiments. Just because I took a shortcut! He just likes to give me a hard time, the old stick-in-the-mud.’

They walked along, Gigi swinging her sandals by the straps. She tried to imagine what life would be like for her in London. ‘Do you have to study all the time?’

‘Oh, no, London’s lots of fun! Parties, discos on the King’s Road.’

‘You have a lot of friends?’

‘Quite a few. Many of them are foreign graduate students like me. The one thing we all miss is home cooking. My mother is having a dozen stuffed pigeons, a leg of lamb and I don’t know what else prepared for me to take back to London. Then as soon as I get there I’ll call everybody to come over and we’ll have a big dinner.’

He sounded eager to go back, Gigi thought. She couldn’t see herself in the picture he was painting. Maybe she could put off making the decision till later, maybe they would have another chance to get to know each other better. ‘When do you think you might be coming back to Egypt?’

‘I don’t know, it depends on what my father decides. I doubt I can come back before summer next year. But I think he said a day or two before the wedding would be plenty of time. That is, of course, assuming…’ He trailed off a little awkwardly. Gigi too was embarrassed. It seemed bizarre to be discussing wedding plans with a man with whom she had not exchanged an intimate word. It occurred to her that he had not asked her a single personal question, about her likes or dislikes, her hopes or her dreams. Disappointment formed a lump in her chest. She knew she was hopelessly romantic, waiting for some intrepid explorer to discover her like some uncharted island; like the woman languishing dreamily on a deserted tropical isle in the advertisement for Fidgi perfume: ‘ Toute femme est une île ’ – every woman is an island.

Just then Domino appeared at the top of the dune, barking frantically as he ran towards them. Yussef stiffened and Gigi rushed to head off the dog.