They drank the coffee. Zahra noticed that the living room was clean and the seats comfortable, not new but shiny. She also noticed some musical instruments — a lute, a tabla, a tambourine, cymbals, an accordion — scattered all over, some shiny, some old and dusty, but on the whole it was a comfortable place and appealing to the eye.
After they drank the coffee, Sitt Lula got up to bring some dance outfits to show them. Zahra looked at Sitt Maryam in dismay, but the latter calmly said, “Let’s see the outfits and leave without looking at anything else. We’ll never come to the piazza again.”
As they were hurrying down the stairs, Lula shouted, “Please send my greetings to Khawaga Dimitri and Sheikh Magd al-Din and to Camilla and Yvonne. I promise you I’ll dance at their weddings — I surely will!”
She had also told them about the foreign impresario who had promised her a trip to Europe, adding that there she would make good ubbayyig, and when she saw that they were puzzled, she said it meant she would make good money.
“The women who run the dance troupes have their own lingo,” she explained, laughing. “You say, for instance, today it is megamema, which means you’re out of work, and abriz means going to the bathroom, arkbi means food, and ayma means a big profit. There are many harder words that no one except these women can understand, because it’s all inspired by hashish.”
That strange meeting remained engraved in Zahra’s mind for several days. She looked at Sitt Maryam in confusion and fear; she had committed a sin against Magd al-Din.
One day Sitt Maryam surprised her by telling her in front of her daughters, “Why are you tormenting yourself, Zahra? You can go ahead and tell Sheikh Magd about our meeting with Lula. There’s no problem. I told Dimitri about it, and he laughed. But he said we shouldn’t go to the piazza, exactly as I had told you, and to buy our things here from Sidi Karim or from far away, from Bahari.”
So, it was not very serious; she could tell Magd al-Din. But she never did, Magd al-Din appeared to be in a state of constant silence. She wondered what he was so preoccupied with.
In that regard, he was not any different from Camilla, who returned to silence and despondency. She only spoke a very few words to Zahra—”How are you,” “Good morning,” “Good evening,” and nothing else. Zahra now saw her eyes always welling up with tears. The truth was that Camilla had become certain that she had taken a road of no return. She had advanced in her study of French in the Berlitz school in the summer, and when her regular school started she had not stopped her French lessons, changing her schedule from a morning to an afternoon one, as evening classes had been banned since the beginning of the war. There were two days on which she left Nabawiya Musa school, went to Berlitz, and returned home at about four o’clock. Yvonne had stopped taking French, deciding to resume it the following summer. Camilla asked herself many times why she was persevering in her study of the French language and longing to read the great poets — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Éluard, André Breton, and Aragon — but she had no answer. She once found herself during a lesson repeating to herself the sentence that she had uttered unintentionally during the first lesson, “Je l’aime,” and discovered that she repeated it to herself frequently. Then she added, also without much thinking, “et il m’aime aussi.” Her eyes opened like two flowers and her small, rounded breasts quivered as fire swept through her tender body and she felt her nose catch on fire. Two days later, after she got out of school and had reached Fuad Street and was walking in the cold shadow of the big buildings on that wonderful Alexandrian autumn day, she felt that someone was walking along with her on the other side of the street, neither going ahead nor falling behind her. She felt rays coming from his direction, hitting her right check, waking up her blood. She turned and saw him. Fainting was not a sufficient solution. Her feet almost let her down, and she would have collapsed had she not leaned on a wall for a few moments. Then she saw him in front of her, smiling and happy.
“How is French?”
Strength came back to her. She answered with a question, “How did you know?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that before I left you I had seen in your eyes a desire to do everything that I liked to do.”
They walked. She left her hand in his. He was back, with that strange talk that she did not understand. He seemed to her like a rainbow in the sky. She did not understand what that feeling meant; she did not know if she had thought about it before, but that was how he seemed to her, really: a rainbow crossing the sky in a fire chariot drawn by rainbow horses.
“Woe to you, Camilla, woe to you,” she said to herself after silence had descended for a short while.
“What did you say?”
“Will you wait until I finish my lesson?”
“I will wait for you until the end of time.”
“You talk funny, Rushdi,” she laughed. “I don’t understand you at all.”
“What do you say we change the lesson this time and walk for a little bit?”
They walked to Rami station. They stood on the corniche, invigorated by the cool breeze and the sea spray. He feared the lecherous eyes of the soldiers, white from England and Australia and black from all over the world, so he walked quickly with her to the opposite sidewalk, with its old, typically Alexandrian cafes filled with Greeks, sailors, and soldiers as well. A number of drunken soldiers came out from the Windsor, hurrying together with a number of young women who wore short khaki skirts that reached above their knees despite the cold. Each soldier had his arms around one of the young women as they walked and sang, opera style. He told her, laughing, that students were now saying that after the war the English should leave the country but leave behind the young women of the ATS. Camilla knew that they were conscripts, but he told her that their official jobs were as secretaries and telephone operators in the English camps and establishments, that they had different military ranks exactly like the men, but that their real job was to entertain the soldiers. He said they were not just English but French, Greek, Cypriote, New Zcalanders, Indians, and South Africans and from all over the British Empire. Camilla never thought beyond the literal meaning of these pretty young women in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, abbreviated by the press to ATS and pronounced al-Atsa by the Egyptians. They stopped in front of the statue of Ismail Pasha in Manshiya.
“Let’s stand here like a couple of European tourists,” he said.
“Have you been to Europe before?”
He had put his arm around her and she felt his ribs under his shirt and light pullover, and he felt her fleshy warmth.
“I must go one day.”
“You’ll take me with you?” She clung to him even more closely.
“We may very well find that to be the only option available to us,” he said, reminding her of what she had managed to forget in the summer. If only she had never studied French!
They kept on walking. Many fezzes appeared in the square, with its cafés that attracted brokers; merchants; stock-exchange experts; seekers of fame, fortune, glory, and happiness; would-be pashas and beys coming from the countryside to do business; and sailors who had gotten tired of the cheap bars of Bahari and the cheaper women of Haggari and who came here in search of better bars and prettier women. The square was also filled with horse-drawn carriages that raced along with their human cargo. And above it all was the statue of Muhammad Ali Pasha, ready to take off as the wind mirthfully played in the wide open space and on the ground where it kicked up the little leaves that had fallen indolently from the tree in the middle of the road.