“She listened to my heart and lungs, took my blood pressure and did a quick CAT scan with a handheld. Then she asked about periods. Only I didn’t know what those were, so she explained and I said they hadn’t started. Which was when she asked me to get back on the couch.”
Zara sighed.
“I don’t think she’d ever seen a female circumcision before. When she came back she had Sister Angelica, our school doctor, in tow. She was maybe thirty-five, though she seemed much older to me.” Zara spoke as if this had all happened decades earlier, rather than just five years before. “It was the first time I heard a woman swear . . .
“Apparently, because there were now laws against female circumcision, Sister Angelica thought it didn’t happen.”
“What did she do?”
Zara’s laugh was a bitter bark. “After she’d slammed the phone down on my mother, she went to see my father at his office. It’s probably the only time he’s stood there, utterly speechless while a woman shouted at him.”
“And then?”
Silence was Zara’s answer. An absence that stretched so thin that Raf finally decided Zara must have fallen asleep, but he was wrong. She was busy remembering the bits she didn’t usually allow herself to remember.
“They cut the stitches,” she announced flatly. “Sister Angelica did it herself. There were five in total, each separate, transparent and beautifully neat, pulling together the sides of my . . .”
Zara stopped, starting up again, minutes later, as if she’d never paused.
“Sister Angelica cleaned the area where the inner labia should have been and removed an oval of surgical plastic designed to create enough space for urination . . . It had been done in a hospital, you see. A good hospital with qualified doctors and a resident anaesthetist. And that was the problem. Because if it had been done by a jobbing midwife with a piece of broken glass in a back room, then I’d have struggled, which would have made it hard to cut away as much as my mother wanted.
“You know what Sister Angelica did after that? She bought me a German porn mag . . .”
“She . . .”
“I knew it was German because I’d started learning German the year before. Every spread had women naked with other women . . . I remember the Sister gave me a large cup of coffee and left me with the magazine and a mirror. By the time she came back I’d worked out the differences for myself. But Sister Angelica slipped up with the magazine because it wasn’t until later, when I was sharing a shower with another girl that I discovered that some girls have this . . .”
Zara slid her hand across Raf’s hip and touched the very edge of his pubic hair.
“I don’t, you see. Also I don’t have small labia, a clitoral hood or the very top of my clitoris. But apparently I got lucky.” Her voice was hard. “They could have done a full Pharaonic instead of a mild Sunna. You know what that is?”
Raf knew, but he shook his head. “Tell me,” he said.
“The first thing you’d have had to do, come our wedding night, was slice through scar tissue. But even with all Dad’s money at her disposal, my mother couldn’t get the hospital at El Qahirah to go that far. So, you see . . .”
Raf did. Like most things in life, luck was subjective.
CHAPTER 44
26th October
Hani dreamed of gardens. This wasn’t unusual, gardens figured heavily in her stories and in most of the computer games she liked. In fact, Rashid III took place entirely in a nest of walled gardens, complete with fountains, djinn, houris and tiny gazelle. Only her own computer was now dead and, anyway, she’d finished all the levels of Rashid III months ago. All levels/all difficulties/all characters. It hadn’t been a very hard game.
The software was cheap, though. And that was probably the reason Aunt Nafisa had let her have it.
When Hani woke, at the first call to prayer, she lay there under the covers, which she wasn’t meant to do, and thought about gardens. Then she thought about God. After that she thought about gardens and God. And then she got up, wrapped herself tightly in her dressing gown and went to find Raf.
“Jannah means garden or heaven,” Hani told herself as she opened her door. “And paradiso also means heaven. So paradiso means jannah. SS Jannah. And I’ve got a list of other clues.”
She was talking to herself because Ifritah wasn’t there. Raf had said Hani could come to the mansion with him and Khartoum but the grey cat had to stay with Donna at the madersa. That was because Ifritah was a wild cat and no one had taught her to do her business outside.
Hani had been planning to look up on the Web how to house-train a cat that was already mostly grown-up, but now she couldn’t do that either. So Ifritah had to stay where she was.
The man who stood guard outside Raf’s door was called Ahmed. Hani knew this because she’d asked him earlier. He was big and dark and sometimes he looked at her and shrugged to the others when he thought she wasn’t looking.
Ahmed said nothing, not even when Hani shined a torch in his face. Just raised his eyebrows and turned the handle for her. Hani realized what the raised eyebrows meant when she saw a lump in the bed next to Uncle Ashraf. The lump was sleeping, safely tucked under a sheet, but Hani could see Zara’s hair poking out at the top.
Hani tried very hard not to be shocked.
After a little while, she decided that she was shocked and went back to her room. Ahmed said nothing to Hani on her way out either. Instead of going back to bed Hani got dressed, wrote Zara a note that she left with Ahmed, then went down to the kitchens to find Khartoum.
The rest of the day, while Ashraf worked at the precinct and Zara walked, ghostlike and silent, through the formal gardens at the mansion, looking at statues without seeing them, Hani sat at a kitchen table with an Italian dictionary, three volumes of Dante and a notepad. After a while she decided it might be easier if she just concentrated on the pictures.
The volumes of the Divina Commedia came from the General’s study, as did the notepad and fountain pen. So too did a list of all the working computers in the city that still had functioning modems/lines/firewire. The list was handwritten, distressingly brief and the original was meant for Ashraf’s eyes only. Which was why Hani kept the copy she’d made in her pocket.
Ashraf came back as Tuesday evening began its slide into darkness, trailing his shadows behind him; although Hakim and Ahmed didn’t go with Raf when he walked out into the garden to talk to Zara. Whatever he said to her, they slept in different rooms that night.
CHAPTER 45
27th October
Astolphe, Marquis de St. Cloud was enjoying himself. Unfortunately for Raf it was mostly at his expense, though the real target of the Frenchman’s quiet vitriol was Elizabeth Elsing, as St. Cloud insisted on calling Senator Liz.
Following yesterday’s decision by the Grand Jury that Hamzah should indeed face charges, Senator Liz seemed unusually keen that the defendant be tried immediately, found guilty by lunchtime and executed before tea.
Which was fine, except for the fact that Hamzah Effendi had yet to be formally arraigned. And the reason this had been delayed was that it took until noon for the American woman to agree that St. Cloud should hold the chair. Senator Liz also seemed slightly put out by the number of explosions happening across the city.
“Bring in the prisoner.”
“Bring in the prisoner . . .”
The courtroom was small but it was in the nature of ushers everywhere to shout. Raf heard his demand echo down a corridor outside, then heard an answering tramp of feet. The first argument of the day, long before the scrap for precedence between St. Cloud and Senator Liz, had been about the suitability of the room itself.