It was one of those moments which make me want a cigarette. When someone starts to talk.
‘Let me tell you,’ he said. ‘During the Gulf War, when I was quite small. Not so small. After the houses where the people lived were knocked down and the big hotels all built, and the tourism schools teach that the tourist is always right; after they build the walls to hide the villages because the village isn’t so pretty, so they build the walls not the drains, anyway. Then there was the bombardment of Baghdad and the tourists don’t come, and everyone is scared, because so much is … spent for the people who will come. Just before the bombardment of Baghdad, when everything was just so … you know … I went with a visitor from Cairo to the grave of Thutmosis, in the valley of the kings, I think you know the one. There is a metal steps up the cliff, and climbing, and a pit, and steps down inside. My friend’s great-uncle was a guard in this grave. It is shaped like an egg, pale cheese colour with black pictograms, beautiful. The king made it hard to find, and now you just go every day.
‘You know photographs are not allowed in these graves without a pass. The flash destroys the picture. Too much light, too many people. One time, this day, four tourists come in and just start to take photographs with flash. The old man, the guard, says to them no photograph. All he can say in English, in French, in German (except also “Welcome Luxor”). He says it, in English, in French, in German. The tourists take no notice. He stands in front of them, in front of the pictograms. Then one tourist knocks him down. We came in next – me small boy and the lady visitor, the friend of my mother. The old man is on the floor, blood … the tourist taking photographs. The lady visitor picks him up, the tourist police come, fuss and bother, no one saw but everybody knows the old man is telling truth.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The old man was made to apologise.’
He looked at me straight, to see what I thought.
‘Luxor is a beautiful place but it is not good,’ he said. ‘No one is married before thirty because they have not enough money. Business is good for us but even for Sa’id to make enough money for himself to marry will take time. All the money is spent for him going to university, to Sorbonne, business studies – he did only one year, said he knew more than the professors, then economics. But everybody else is leaving school and not going to university. People come by so rich, tourists, Egyptians, Saudi, Europeans. And we are rich, my family. My father employs people. Sa’id does business with Cairo for him. We sell abroad, in Khan el-Khalili, we have the shop in Luxor and the fabrique on the West Bank. But Sa’id cannot marry. How is it for the poorer people? Wages are not good. The richness does not travel from the rich people to the poor. The poor people live in places that are built without permission and then the officials say they will knock them down and they will have nowhere to live. In Qurnah because the old village is just among the graves of the Nobles they are always trying to knock it down. They send in tanks, the village people come out with sticks. Just to show that they are people, who can hold sticks, not just some bit of litter. And now they build New Qurnah, and we are all to leave and go there.’
This was making me sad.
‘It’s the same everywhere, to one degree or another,’ I mumbled. Like that’s any comfort. But I have no sophisticated analysis of these situations. I just feel sad, and sometimes want to punch someone for not making the world a fair and just place. A reaction which has hardly changed since I was Lily’s age. Janie used to say there was no point because you can’t punch God. We stopped talking to him, though. Remained silent during ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, and hoped he’d take the hint.
‘Many people at home are very unhappy,’ he said finally. ‘Things happen you don’t hear about here. The last years … But Egypt doesn’t make a big noise of it to the world because they don’t want the world to stop to come. And it’s just Egyptian people, so the world doesn’t mind.’
Of course I knew what he was talking about. Those single paragraphs you read in the sidebars of the foreign pages: four policemen killed in an ambush at Naqquada; train shot at, suspects, fundamentalists, reports say. Like any one of a thousand problems, that only flick our conciousnesses when they happen in places where we’ve been on holiday. If I lived in Qurnah I could never leave. The Nile before you, five thousand miles of Sahara at your back, ancient Thebes the bones of your home.
Hakim was looking at me. I couldn’t remember the last thing he’d said.
‘I make coffee,’ he said, and did.
Oh yes. It was, ‘It’s just Egyptian people, so nobody cares.’
Then Zeinab rang. What with one thing and another I hadn’t spoken to her since Hakim’s appearance, so I told her about him. Or as much as I could with him in the room. He gestured me furiously not to mention his mother, so I didn’t. She wanted to come and see him, to welcome him and to check him out. Of course I’d told her about Abu Sa’id, over the years. We decided she should come at the weekend, and bring the boys. Then Brigid rang, was I still on for tomorrow. Yes indeed I was. How many of them? Three boys and Caitlin. All night? Fine. They could go on the lilos on the floor in my room, in with me and Lily. Squashy!
Perhaps a midnight feast might be in order. It’ll be Friday after all. Hakim announced his intention to go to the mosque. Then my mother rang, saying would we come for lunch on Sunday; then Harry rang, saying he was sorry he rushed me off like that, and was I all right, and I lied that yes I was, and we had an awkward pause, and said well all right then, ’bye then.
And then Hakim and I sat down with the phone books and I showed him how we needed to look for Tomlinsons or Lockwoods rather than Sarahs, and after a long and interesting chain of calls I was able to give Hakim a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘Your mother. She’s a lecturer at a university by the sea. It’s about an hour away. She teaches Arabic.’
I think there’s only one other thing I haven’t mentioned. Deep in the upholstery of the saggy old red armchair I keep in my study there is a very large sum of money. It is Janie’s ill-gotten gains from her career in pornography. I hid it there just over a year ago, having found it in a last tea-chest of her things that Mum had redeemed from the attic but not been able to face looking at. I hid the money in the hope that it would go away, because I didn’t want to face the ethical and emotional problems that it brought with it. Of course at the same time I didn’t want it to go away, too. It is a very large sum of money and I am after all a single mother of uncertain employment living in a council block, albeit in a separate kingdom on the most distant and salubrious storey of a pretty nice one. I haven’t counted it.
Mum asked me once, months later, what had been in the chest. I didn’t tell her, about the money or about the jewellery or about the peculiarly nasty pornographic videos. I think I said: ‘Oh, nothing, just some clothes and stuff.’
We don’t talk enough in our family. We’re so quietly convinced that we’re doing all right that we don’t discuss it. We’re all so rational that nothing needs to be said. And yet when I think what I have in my heart that I haven’t ever mentioned … Janie’s death, obviously. Not the fact of it but the niceties of the feelings it produced. Nobody ever blamed me for it, except myself. So I never had a chance to justify myself, defend myself, except to myself. I would have welcomed a judgement by a jury of my peers. Because you know it could have been my fault. There could have been greasy dead leaves or a manhole cover that I should have avoided. I could have been riding like a fool, or over-excited, or not paying attention. Over-accelerating