Flowers in Flames

• 1 • Despite the long passage of time, I still vividly remember that red-letter day. The day I saw Mikhail Rajaee at the aristocratic Utopia Club. Our encounter differed from previous ones, which had been frequent when we were children, but less so as adults. He was a few years over thirty, puffed up by his job, while I was striding towards twenty, fully and clearly a woman. Our families knew each other well. Both families were part of the small Coptic community and lived in Sur in the west of the country. It was a city neither large nor sophisticated, where kinship and friendship, and even passing acquaintance, were held dear. Mikhail Rajaee was an accountant with the city council, headed by the old and arrogant Turk Yusuf Dameer who governed the district. Mikhail had been officially appointed by the central authority, and he was a tough tax collector. Those who had to deal with him directly no doubt found him irritating, but his actions were beyond reproof, as he frequently told me. He was responsible for bringing in the taxes that the local governor and coffers of the state demanded. Tax revenues came from agriculture, grazing, trade, the caravans, as well as the high levies imposed on the houses of ill-repute in the red-light district, where a succession of miserable women plied their trade. My father, Jamari Azer, was the wealthiest, most renowned corn merchant in the district. The other influential and rich merchants nicknamed him Big-Boss Jamari, but to me he was always Dear Daddy, even when in a bad temper. I shared with him good and bad dreams alike, and would claim that a great friendship sparked between us, which both of us strove to maintain. He talked to me about work, the difficulties he might face; how he might be reasonable or stringent; what he accepted and what he refused. I talked to him about young women’s things, including if my period came late, fashion and models, romantic stories, hairstyles, perfumes, and the deep-seated desire of every girl to find someone like her father and marry him. He accepted all this nonsense with a warm and welcoming heart. My mother did not talk much. Actually, she did not like using the local language, although she knew it well. She limited herself to a few words and expressions to cover the market, household objects, and day-to-day items, and a small, carefully chosen vocabulary for conversation and feelings, when its use was unavoidable. She was from the outskirts of Florence, Italy’s most artistic city. An amateur painter, she tried to capture the redolent variety of the Orient on wood, or on canvas when my father came across it on trips to Egypt. I have no idea why Valerina Espergan Mayer, the beautiful Italian painter, who belonged to an ordinary, if cultured, family, married a Copt from a distant and chaotic African country, which she only reached by venturing on camelback, and that she rarely left due to the length and hardship of the journey. Why, too, did a young Copt, with ambitions of becoming a merchant, court a girl from the outskirts of Florence, whom he met by chance in Egypt? I have never been able to divine what happened when they first laid eyes on one another, who looked at whom first, and how a way was paved for their emotions, until they became one. I thought little of it, and did not ask my father or mother. I just kept repeating to myself that it was Cupid’s arrow, which I believed in despite its outlandishness. Cupid, the god of love, laid feelings’ foundations, built them up, and granted them to those he wished. I was terrified that the crazy mythological figure might shoot his arrow at me. He might cast me in the path of a beggar, a lunatic, or a man with no heart, and I would be snared. Fortunately that did not happen, at least not permanently. But when I first got to know my own feelings as a woman, I was mixed-up emotionally. I often fell for people that a young girl of my age would never usually find in the least attractive – crushes that soon faded away and were long forgotten. How I laughed whenever I remembered going weak at the knees before decrepit old men like Nuh Tukari, an old hand of my father’s in his sixties; my friend Merikar’s father Amm Mufakkir Fandouri, the Greek wine and spirits merchant; and my father’s friend Qatan Muhammado, the African traveller from Guinea in his fifties, who helped me up the day I tripped over a stone in the street. He took me home so my family could thank him, and I continued to be infatuated with the warmth of his helping hand. I was in a swoon for days, then it all ended. There was also the elementary science teacher appointed by my father to instruct me at home, away from the priests who had monopolized education in Sur at the time. His name was Issa and he was known as son of Maryam. How did his ever-so ordinary smile keep me awake at night? Actually, it was horrid, but in my confusion I thought it enchanting, until I realized its true meaning and stopped quivering in his presence. My mother knew my moods and feelings well. She knew I got overwrought whenever I was afflicted by the occasional silly transient love. I never told her anything, and she didn’t ask. Even so, I knew she knew. Once, as I was walking through the sitting room – which was large and well appointed, as befitted the house of a leading merchant – I heard my mother, who was standing in front of the mirror, tell herself plainly and calmly in her mother tongue, which I understood well, that Khamila needed to see a psychologist during her next visit to Egypt. She then nodded her head in agreement. I was terrified and, for days after, only sporadically showed myself to my mother. In fact, I was ill. I had a phobia of psychologists, a condition that was rare but did exist, as far as I knew. I sweated, shivered, and saw my face creams and body and hair lotions on the dressing table suddenly disappear and then reappear. I would stroke my long thick hair, and very often not feel it. I would cup my breasts, and find them to be the size of jujube fruit. I would cry out during ferocious nightmares that haunted my broken sleep. When, after a few days, the symptoms went away, I swore that if my mother proposed the trip, I would not go to Egypt under any circumstances. My father did not notice my brief illness. Fathers might notice invisible spots of oil on the front of their dark shirts; a vase, for which they paid a tidy sum, missing from its usual place in the sitting room; the slight lameness afflicting an expensive horse with a stone lodged in its hoof; or the innocent look of a female servant. Yet seldom, if ever, did they notice the feathery lines around the eyes of their sleepless children, or the action of pregnancy, labour, and years of childcare eroding the hearts of their women. I was an only child, and from early on knew I always would be. There was a time when the house might have been filled with boys and girls, but in the end it didn’t happen. When I was small and whiny, I looked around and saw no other whiny child in the house but me. When I was a teenager, I looked around with languishing feelings and saw no other teenager in the house but me. The neighbours’ children, whom I often clung around, being naughty and swapping toys – dolls made out of stone, clay, and cotton – were just the neighbours’ children. They shouted, laughed, fell over and got up again, crying in dirty clothes, but in the end they slept in other houses, far from my loneliness. Did I cry out of loneliness? Then again, did I cry at all? I don’t know whether I cried over the lonely childhood I’d been fated to, or whether I accepted it with an ordinary melancholy, or perhaps even with happiness or with no particular feeling at all. On one occasion, when I was four or five, I asked my mother to buy me a sister with long hair, so that I could cut it, and a brother with big ears I could laugh at and nickname Donkey. I had heard Naeesa, the neighbour’s girl, who was two years older than me, use that nickname for her brother and laugh. She also once showed me a curl of fine black hair, which she said she had cut from her sleeping sister’s head. That day, I saw my mother on the verge of crying. I did not see actual tears, but imagined them. Stoney-faced, she gave me the scissors she used to trim her hair and clothes. Then she knelt down on the ground, spread her thick hair before me, and begged me to cut off all I could. I didn’t do it. I didn’t, but I don’t know why not. I tried many times to recapture the reasons children do or don’t do something. But I couldn’t. In her high-pitched voice that only came out rarely, and in the language of her Italian family, my mother shouted, ‘Cut it… Cut it, Khamila please.’ I did not cut it, and instead dropped the scissors and fled to my room.