“I am at home nowhere.”
She stared at him. “Really? Why?”
He shook his head. “My grandfather Selim never meant me to follow in his own footsteps. When I was a little boy he told me always that something great was in store for me. I learned to feel that where I was born was not my true home. I belonged somewhere else, but I did not know where. Then my mother took me to the capital….”
“Zara told me that the palace organized your education from an early age,” she said, interested in his story in spite of herself. He had a deep, pleasant voice. He engaged her interest against her will.
“Yes, but I did not know it then. Curious things happened, but I was too young to demand an explanation. Only when I approached university, and my mother gave me a list of courses to follow in my studies. Then some suspicion I had felt became clearer. I demanded to know who controlled my life, and why. But she would tell me nothing.”
“And did you take the recommended degree?”
He laughed lightly at himself. He never told his story to strangers, and he did not understand why he was telling Clio. She had made it clear she was no friend.
“I never knew! I tore up the list, like a hothead. I said, now I am a man, I choose for myself!”
“And then?”
He shook his head, shrugging. “I graduated, I enlisted in the armed forces—and then again I felt the invisible hand of my protector. They put me into officer training. I rose more quickly than individual merit could deserve…still my mother was mute.”
She could hear the memory of frustration in his voice.
“But you did eventually find out.” Clio wondered if this story was designed to disarm her hostility by justifying his treatment of her sister. Well, let him hope. He would find out soon enough that what she said, she meant.
“Yes, I found out. It was on the day the princes came of age according to their father’s will. The Kingdom of Barakat would be no more, and in its place there would be three Emirates. There was a great coronation ceremony, televised for all the country to see. Television sets were put in the squares of the villages—a spectacle for the people, to reassure them of the power, the mystery, the majesty of their new princes.”
She was half-smiling without being aware of it, falling under his spell.
“I watched in my mother’s house. Never will I forget the moment when the camera rested on the faces of the princes, one after the other, coming last to Prince Rafi.
“Of course I knew we were alike—whenever his picture was in the paper everyone who knew me commented. But what is a photograph? True resemblance requires more than the face. That day…that day I saw Prince Rafi move, and speak, and smile, as if…as if I looked in a mirror instead of a television set.”
She murmured something.
“And then it fell into place. The mystery of my life— I knew it had some connection with my resemblance to Prince Rafi. I knew that the old man I had called my father was not my father.
“‘Who am I?’ I cried to my mother, trembling, jumping to my feet. ‘Who is Prince Rafi to me?”’
“Did she tell you?”
He nodded. “My mother could no longer refuse, in spite of the shame of what she confessed. She was disappointed that the great future that they had promised for me for so many years had not arrived on this momentous day. ‘He is your uncle,’ she told me. ‘The half brother of your father, the great Prince Aziz. You could be standing there today instead of them.”’
Jalal paused, a man hovering between present and past. “Of course I knew—every citizen knew—who Prince Aziz was, although it was over twenty-five years since he and his brother had so tragically died. Singers sang the song of King Daud’s great heartbreak.”
His eyes rested on her, but he hardly saw her. He was looking at the past.
“And this noble prince, this hero dead so young…was my father.”
Clio breathed deeply. She had been holding her breath without knowing it. “What a terrible shock it must have been.”
It would be something, a discovery like that. In a young man it might motivate…seeing where her thoughts were leading her, Clio mentally braked.
He nodded. “I was a lost man. As if I stood alone in a desert after a sandstorm. Every familiar landmark obliterated. All that I had known and believed about myself was false. I was someone else—the illegitimate son of a dead prince, grandson of the old king…how could this be? Why had I not been told?”
“What a terrible shock it must have been.”
“A shock, yes. But very soon I felt a great rage. If they did not wish to recognize me because of the illegitimacy of my birth, why had they taken me from my ordinary life, for what had they educated me…? Why had I never met my grandfather, the king, and my grandmother, his most beloved wife, in all those years when my future was being directed—and to what purpose was it all? My grandfather was dead, and I was left with no explanation of anything.”
He paused. The boat sped over the lake, and he blinked at the sun dancing off the water.
“What did you do?”
He glanced towards her, then back to the past again. “I made approaches to these new princes, my uncles. I demanded to know what my grandfather’s plans for me had been.”
“And they didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. They would not speak to their own nephew. I had been taken from my mother’s home, but those who had done this thing would not let me enter my father’s.”
He turned to gaze intently at her. “Was this not injustice? Was I not right to be angered?”
“Zara told me they never knew. Your uncles, Rafi and Omar and Karim—they didn’t know who you were. Isn’t that right?”
“It is true that they themselves had never been told. They said afterwards that my letters, even, did not make the point clear. They thought me only a bandit. But someone had known, from the beginning. My grandfather himself…but he had made no provision for me in his will. No mention.”
“Isn’t that kind of weird?” It struck her as the least credible part of the whole equation.
His eyes searched her face with uncomfortable intensity.
“You would say that my uncles knew the truth, and only pretended ignorance until they were forced to admit it? Do you know this? Has your sister said something?”
She shook her head, not trusting the feelings of empathy that his story was—probably deliberately—stirring in her.
“No, I don’t know any more than you’ve told me. It’s just very hard for me to accept that a woman wouldn’t insist on meeting her only grandchild, the son of her own dead son.”
His face grew shadowed. “Perhaps—perhaps my illegitimate birth was too great a stain.”
“And so they never even met you?” Clio tried to put herself in such a position, and failed. She herself would move heaven and earth to have her grandchild near her, part of the family, whatever sin of love his parents had committed.
“Nothing. Not even a letter to be given to me after their death.”
No wonder he felt at home nowhere.
He was silent as they skimmed across the endless stretch of water, that seemed as vast as any desert.
“What did you do when your uncles refused your requests?”
He