"No," says Isabel. "And you don"t really think that."
They are so alike, Isabel thinks. Not just the black hair and black eyes. Everybody here has those. It"s more the manner: the smile that"s both friendly and amused. Their way of throwing you compliments that you couldn"t be sure were quite serious. The sudden questions that cut through to the heart. But Amal did not quite have her brother"s spark, his vitality. Or rather she seemed to be holding her vitality - her aura - in check.
"Let"s stop for a moment," Amal said.
They had been on the road for an hour and a half. When they got out of the car, the air that hit them might have come out of an oven. They were pacing and stamping their feet when Amal noticed Isabel"s long skirt, the loose, long-sleeved top, the scarf tied casually over the hair.
"What is all this? A new image?" she asked.
Isabel shrugged. She had worked it out for herself. She had seen the groups of tourists in the old city, in the Bazaar, their naked flesh lobsterlike in the heat, the locals either staring or averting their eyes as they pa.s.sed by. And these clothes were much more comfortable anyway.
Amal smiled. "You still look good," she said.
They watched a woman coming towards them. Ahead of her a donkey walked, his head drooping patiently. Tied across his back was a big load of long yellow canes and with each step the canes swayed, as though something was in the balance - something that could go either way.
"Salamu aleik.u.m."
" Aleik.u.m es-salam." The woman stopped and she and Amal started chatting: Where are you headed? Who"s this moon with you? While the donkey took the opportunity to nose about for a green stalk in the dust.
Isabel had grown used to Amal chatting to people during their rambles in Cairo: the shop owners, the parking attendants, even the traffic police. But as the city had retreated further and further behind them, Isabel had felt herself grow - not uneasy, but somewhat less a.s.sured. Here she would not be able to get away. Here there were no service stops, no telephones, nothing but the road running through fields, a small town, then more fields. Occasionally there was a notice spelling out the name of a place she had never heard of before. Sometimes they were trapped behind a cart, sometimes behind a truck. That was the main traffic on the Upper Egypt road: trucks, carts and the dusty Peugeot station wagons that served as taxis in which each person bought a seat. And the road led into the heartland of the terrorists. Or at least that was what it said in the papers. She was putting her trust in her friend, but what if something were to happen to Amal? What if she fainted in the heat or got appendicitis? What would Isabel do? Amal herself seemed to have no fears and was talking happily to the fallaha and selecting one of her canes before the woman went on her way.
Amal stripped back the tough, glossy skin and cut off a segment. Isabel chewed on it, releasing the sweet juice, then spitting the dry white pulp discreetly out into her hand.
"Did she just give you that?" she asked.
"She asked if I would like it."
"You didn"t pay her."
"She didn"t want paying. It"s just a stick of sugar cane," Amal said as they got back into the car.
The first barricade was not too bad. They saw it from a distance: the red and white barrels, the kiosk at the side, the officers waving them to a halt. Amal wound down her window and the young officer leaned into it. Amal el-Ghamrawi and Isabel Parkman. American. My brother"s fiancee. Tawasi in Minya. Our village, our land. A few days ... Soldiers stood by with guns and the officer stepped back. "Look after her. We don"t want foreign blood spilled here."
After the second barricade, three hours from Cairo, the car broke down. When it started smoking they decided to press on, but when the smoke got too bad they had to stop. The temperature indicator was on red. They pulled in to the side of the road and opened the bonnet and smoke poured out everywhere. The sun was in the middle of the sky and it was blazing hot.
"What are we going to do?" Isabel asked.
"I don"t know," Amal said. But she did not seem worried. "Wait, I suppose."
"Do you have a rescue service here?"
"No," Amal said. "Oh, no. Let"s just sit in the shade and wait."
She took a striped rug from the car and laid it on the ground. They sat and ate tangerines; Isabel watched as Amal rubbed the peel into her hands and breathed in the scent. A car pulled up - one of the beaten-up old station wagons, empty apart from the driver, who looked out of the window and said: "Kheir? Is there something?"
"The car has stopped," Amal said. "It got hot and smoked and I was afraid to drive it any more."
"I"ll have a look," the man said.
He got out of his car. A small, dark man in brown trousers and a patterned shirt and well-worn shoes without socks. He got a cloth from his car and opened the radiator, which hissed at him and belched out more smoke.
"There"s no water," he said.
He went back to his car and brought out a jerkin of water. He poured some into the radiator and they watched it trickle away between the wheels.
"The radiator has a hole in it," he said.
"So, what next?" Amal asked.
The man said something and pointed into the distance, then he got a rope from his car and started to tie their car to his.
"Are you sure this is all right?" Isabel asked in a low voice.
"What do you mean?"
"Is it safe?"
"He says there"s a place nearby where they can fix the radiator."
"But it"s OK? Going with him?"
"Yes, of course," Amal said. "It"s perfectly OK." Then she turned back to the man. "My brother"s wife," she said, "khawagaya. We"re going to our village, Tawasi, in Minya."
"A thousand welcomes," he said, pulling on the knot, testing it.
He towed them for twenty minutes; twice the rope slipped and he tied it again. Then they turned off into a b.u.mpy side road and came to some ramshackle houses and a small mosque and a marketplace. He stopped in front of a concrete cabin with a couple of car wrecks lying outside. He got out of his car and yelled a few times and a man came out from behind the building. He had black grease all over him and was wiping his hands on a rag. Amal said, "Stay in the car," and got out and went towards him. The three of them stood in the glaring sun, talking. Without the air-conditioning the car was like a sauna and Isabel could feel the sweat springing into her scalp. Her head started to ache and the figures in the sunlight rippled in the heat rising from the ground. The mechanic came and vanished under the car. He got up and joined the other two again and they talked some more. Then something was settled, for the man who had towed them raised his hand to his head and went back to his car. Amal followed him and held out a hand, and Isabel watched the now familiar pantomime: the man backing, away smiling, shaking his head, his eyes on the ground, his hand on his heart. He backed right into his car, raised his hand again and drove away. Amal went back to Isabel.
"Let"s sit inside," she said. "It"ll be a little cooler."
Isabel"s head was throbbing as she got out of the car. Her dress was sticking to her thighs and she could feel the sweat running through her hair, under her arms, between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, behind her knees ...
Inside the cabin it was dark but not cool. It smelled of gasoline and it was cluttered with bits of cars, tools, tyres, all thrown in anyhow. Isabel"s head was swimming but she could not bring herself to lean against the grimy wall. A small boy appeared, also covered in grime. He brought two chairs and set them down close to the doorway. From the back of the shop he brought an ancient fan, balanced it on a piece of black machinery, connected it up to some wires hanging on the wall, and it started to rotate. He wiped the chairs with the hem of his T-shirt and grinned.
"Itfaddalu."
Isabel sank down on the chair but jumped up again as the leg buckled.
"Don"t be afraid," the boy laughed. He straightened the leg and wedged it with a bit of cardboard. She sat and the fan whirred at her. It didn"t even have a protective grille on the front.
"This place is a deathtrap," she said.
"Not if you"re used to it," Amal said with a funny smile. "Are you all right? You"ve gone pale."
"I"m fine."
They sat in silence till the boy reappeared with two bottles of Seven-Up, opened, the dented caps pressed back on to the necks. "Kattar kheirak," Amal said. She took one and handed the other to Isabel. They eased off the caps, wiped the mouths of the bottles with their hands and drank. Isabel watched as with bare feet, bare hands, no mask, nothing, the mechanic started using a blowtorch. Blowing, hammering, with no protection of any kind. And when he lay under the car, the boy lay at his side, holding a big electric bulb by its neck to give him light, and all the electricity seemed to come from wires twined into the wires dangling down the wall.
"Isabel," Amal said, and her voice came from a long way off. "I"m afraid you may be getting heatstroke. I"ll come right back."
When she came back she had a plastic bucket in her hand. It was bright orange and looking at it made Isabel feel worse.
"Just tilt your head a little." Amal eased the scarf off Isabel"s head and Isabel felt something cool slide slowly into her ear. Then the other ear.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Glycerine," Amal said. "It"ll take the heat away. Now hold this." She took a dripping flannel out of the bucket, wrung it out and placed it, cool and wet, in Isabel"s hands. She put another flannel on the back of her neck and a third on her forehead and stood holding them both in place. "You"ll feel better now," she said.
"I"m sorry," Amal said later, when they were back in the car. "It was silly of me to bring you. Maybe we should go back -"
"No," Isabel said. "No." And she meant it. She felt she"d been through the worst, and she had come through. She wanted to go on. "The car isn"t likely to break down again now, is it?"
"No. I don"t know. Maybe we should go back."
"But we must be quite close?"
"About another hour."
"I"m OK now. Really I am. And the car will cool down as we drive. Please don"t worry. That trick with the glycerine really worked."
"That was a memory out of nowhere: my mother used to do that for me. Oh G.o.d! Not another barricade -"
Isabel felt that she was further than she"d ever been from everything she knew. That she had delivered herself over into the hands of Amal al-Ghamrawi and it was like being a child again. When had she last been so dependent? She could not remember. It was the language too. She had been working on her Arabic and she could get by in Cairo. She could get the gist of a conversation. But out here it would all be in dialect and how much of that would she get? Everything would be up to Amal. Amal who just over a month ago was reluctant even to go out to dinner and who now seemed to think nothing of driving five hours into the countryside - it wasn"t even countryside, really, not as Isabel thought of the countryside. There were no motels, no gas stations. It was fields and then towns that managed to look half-finished and run-down at the same time. And people, always people and animals: donkeys, horses, dogs, water buffalo, goats, camels, all wandering across the road with the trucks honking at them. And the barricades. As they progressed further into the Said, the barricades became less formal; the uniforms gave way to fatigues and sometimes camouflage dress. The officers grew beards and grew their hair longer. One officer even wore a bandana round his head. They had stopped being a police force and had turned into an army in an alien jungle.
"Does she look like she"s kidnapped?" Amal had quipped when an officer asked for the third time, "Why are you taking her with you?"
"We"re not playing here," he said curtly. "You know what will happen if an American is harmed."
Another officer hurried up and said, "Let them go, let them go", and they went, but not before they had seen three young peasants, with blood on their galabiyyas and ropes round their wrists and necks, being pushed into the makeshift kiosk at the side of the road.
It was half past three when, after a series of b.u.mpy dirt tracks, they finally turned into green gates set into a white wall and came to a stop. Isabel"s first impression was of a film set from a movie about Mexico: a low-lying white house with vaulted domes and slits for windows. A woman appeared, followed by two young girls, and there was much hugging and kissing and exclaiming and Isabel was introduced: "Isabel, khatibet akhuya."
"Ya marhab, Sett Eesa," the woman said, and that became her name. Returned to its origin, without the Latin "bella" - just the name of the G.o.ddess of this land. Jonathan would have been amused. Once again, Isabel missed her father.
She loved the house. She thought it was air-conditioned when she stepped into the big central hall, but it was the thick walls keeping out the worst of the heat, the vaulted ceiling and the windows to the veranda coaxing in the air, making the most of it. Amal ran around showing her the rooms, showing her how the house worked: the three wings opening on to the veranda enclosing the lush, shaded garden, the mandarah with its separate entrance so the men could receive guests without exposing the women of the house, the big bathrooms with the Victorian tubs resting on their claw feet. Amal had, for the moment, forgotten the three young men on the road and was touched with happiness.
"You know, it feels as if you"ve come home," Isabel said.
"Does it?" Amal asked, surprised. "Well," she said, "I suppose - you see, my flat, I only got that when I came back. From England. So I guess this is home. I mean, this is what"s left of everything I knew as a child. All the furniture and everything."
And the pictures. Everywhere, the photographs in black and white and the watercolours vivid with light. Isabel walked round examining them.
"It"s rather crowded," Amal said. "The three houses in Cairo - all the pictures ended up here."
Isabel guessed immediately about the watercolours. "Anna"s," she said. "Are they Anna"s?"
"Yes, they are. Look here -" And there, in the corner, was the small, firm signature: Anna.
In one painting a courtyard was bounded by a porticoed gallery. In the centre, a fountain splashed on coloured tiles. A child knelt, looking down into the water. In another you looked through a gap between some flowering bushes into a wide lawn and at a man at the far end, standing with his back to you, pointing, as though indicating a spot where something was to be planted - or buried. In another, darker than the rest, a man lay on a divan; through the mashrabiyya behind him no light came. A woman crouched on the floor by his side.
"She was good," Isabel said.
"A proper English education." Amal smiled.
Isabel turned to the photographs. "Let me guess who everyone is," she said. "Oh, this one"s very grand -"
"That"s el-Ghazi Mukhtar Pasha, the representative of the Ottoman Sultan in Egypt. He was friendly with the big Baroudi, Mahmoud Sami -"
"Look at that beard. And all those medals and decorations. All that bra.s.s."
There was the family group of Husni al-Ghamrawi, his wife and his child. There was a portrait of an elderly man in the traditional white (imma and dark cloak. He had a white beard and moustache and under the dark eyebrows his eyes were thoughtful, even troubled. "Sheikh Muhammad "Abdu," Amal said, "the Grand Imam, but look at this one -"
And in that other portrait there was the sheikh, the beard and moustache now jet black, the brow more deeply furrowed, the eyes challenging, angry. And in the room allocated to Isabel, Layla al-Baroudi"s room, there was the portrait Isabel had been most keen to see: her own great-grandfather, Sharif Basha al-Baroudi.
"Listen, you"d better lie down and have a rest," Amal said. She came over and felt her forehead. "I think you"re all right. Do you feel all right?"
"Yes, absolutely. I"m just going to unpack. Can I use the drawers?"
"Use anything you like." Amal opened the drawers of her grandmother"s tall chest one after the other. "What is this?" Out of the bottom drawer she lifted a soft bundle wrapped in white linen. She laid it down on the bed and unwrapped it. Green fabric; unfolded, it revealed itself to be a large green flag, at its centre a white cross and crescent entwined.
"What is it?" asked Isabel, standing beside her.
Amal stroked out the creases. "It"s the flag of national unity. I"d forgotten I put it here. This dates from 1919." She looked up at Isabel. "Sad Zaghloul"s revolution. The first time in the history of modern Egypt that women went out and demonstrated on the streets. And this was the flag the people carried. To tell the British that all of Egypt, Christian and Muslim, wanted them out."
"Just this one flag?"
"Isabel! No. Hundreds. This was the one my grandmother must have used." She folds it back and tucks it under her arm. "You really should have a rest. I"m going to."
Neither of them mentioned what they had seen on the road.
The sun had set simply and without display, a plain red disc descending through a clear, darkening sky into a silver horizon.
As the light faded, the women had started to arrive: small, black tents moving silently up the path. At the door they took off their shoes. In the hall the black wrappings came off and the room was filled with the bright colours of their satin dresses: pinks and purples and greens resplendent against the dark furniture and plain white upholstery. Each had brought something with her: a dish she had made, a batch of fresh-baked pastry, some eggs, a watermelon, Christma.s.sy, when it was broken open, in its red and green. Some had small children with them who wandered round the room, then out of the open door to the larger world outside.
Amal had been hugged and kissed again and again. "And this is my brother"s fiancee," she said again and again. And then the welcomes, the blessings, the compliments: "The name of G.o.d guard and protect her." "He"s known how to choose." "She"s brought light to our village." "And she speaks Arabic?"
"Shwayya," Isabel offered.
"Khalas, stay with us here and we"ll teach you."
"Teach her? You"ll teach her our talk, the talk of the fallaheen?"
"What else? Shall we teach her the talk of the television?"
"And what"s wrong with the talk of the fallaheen?"
"When she goes to Cairo they"ll laugh at her."
"She can teach us English. What do you say? Will you teach us English, ya Sett Eesa?"