We grew up together, and Ni'ma remained in the house until my father went bankrupt.
He found homes for most of the servants and slave girls and the rest fled, and when he died the only ones left were
Ni'ma and an aged serving woman who had been with my mother all her life.
I was her first man though she wasn't my first woman, but what keeps coming back to me isn't the beginning of our affair but the memory of that feverish year that preceded my transfer to Alexandria, the memory of a young officer full of excitement in a country swept by a flood of excitement. I worked all day and most of the night with my colleague, Tal'at, and our superior, Saeed, guarding the never-ending political meetings and speech-making, and we became without realizing it part of the masses we were supposed to be watching. Ecstasy swept through us as we listened to the speeches of Abdallah el Nadeem when he attacked the Khedive, the British and the French, and to this day, bits of his high-flown rhetoric still ring in my ears. I would return to the house at the end of the night overworked to the point of exhaustion, and I'd find Ni'ma waiting for me. She would have prepared dinner, glasses of whisky and iced water. She'd give me a glass to drink and insist that I ate, no matter how much I protested I'd had enough to eat and all I wanted was to sleep. She'd feed me with her own hand as I told her what had happened to me during the preceding day and night and she'd share my excitement or anger. But when she drew close to me I'd smell the penetrating scent of Egyptian jasmine that seemed to spring from the very pores of her skin. The opening in the front of her cheap cotton gallabiya, which she wore over her naked body, revealed her hairless golden-brown skin, the like of whose smoothness I have never known since, and all my sleepiness would fly from my eyes and I'd hurry to finish the meal. Then I'd take her, as though kidnapping her, to my room and the night of passion would continue till it was almost dawn, when I would at last put my head on her thigh so that she could tell stories, as she had done since we were children, and fall asleep. I would sleep for barely two hours before waking and going back to work, to the meetings and the speeches. I was young and could stand it, and it was what I wanted too. I had never in my life known such pleasure with any woman, slave or free. Most of them had been greedy, wanting just to take, or acting a part to please me. Ni'ma, though, took real pleasure in love and wanted me to feel the same pleasure, to make the love complete.
She was my friend, and with her stories would make me a child again. Then, with her love, she would make me once more a man. I loved her as I had never loved anyone else, but I realized that only when it was too late — if love is the name for the fever and madness that seized me when Ni'ma fled the house. I spent days and weeks searching for her in the hospitals, the police stations and the prisons, even in the brothels. I confessed my problem to my colleague and friend Tal'at, who said quite simply, 'Buy another slave girl! Don't believe what the newspapers say about the slave trade being banned. The Slavers' Market still exists and operates beneath the eyes of our glorious khedivial police, whose pockets are capacious. Buy a Turkish girl.' Then he laughed and said, 'But you grew up rich and know all about Turkish girls and "white meat", and you're losing your mind over a slave girl you say has brown skin? Now that shows real ingratitude! You should leave that kind of thing to the likes of us!' Tal'at understood nothing, but how could he when I myself didn't? Would I have found the courage to marry her, for example, if I'd found her or if she'd come back to me? The respectable officer marry a slave of unknown parentage? What a scandal!
She asked me, as she lay next to me on the bed, 'Does My Master Mahmoud love me?' I rebuked her: 'What nonsense is that, girl? If you talk like that again, I'll throw you out on to the street!' She laughed and said, 'You're right, Master Mahmoud. Nonsense.' And she buried her head in my chest, repeating in the midst of her laughter, 'What nonsense!'
But then she went out on her own into the street and disappeared. It was my good luck, or my bad luck, to be distracted thereafter by what happened in Alexandria, and the war, and the investigations.
Ni'ma still brings back to me the child and the man, the joy and the regret. I tell myself it was just another betrayal, but then I ask myself, 'And who, my dear Major Shahriyar, was the betrayer?'
Catherine appeared, having dressed, and said, looking into my face as she passed me in the main room, 'Still in a good mood, or have we changed a little?'
I didn't answer, and she said with a smile, 'Yes, a little. I think we've changed a little!'
'Perhaps,' I said. 'I'll wait for you outside. Please be quick.'
I opened the door. The sun struck me like a blow and I closed my eyes at the brightness. Immediately I put the round hard white cork hat on my head. A dubious gift from the British! It protects from the sun but imprisons the air in its deep cavity, making the blood boil in your head. The turban made out of a broad white shawl that they wear here might be better but I can't behave like them. It would be against instructions and against my dignity!
I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to seven. If the sun had started out with such harshness, how would it be by mid-morning? And all this for the sake of Catherine and her pharaohs! What part of their history or of that of Alexander concerns us here, buried in this remote desert? Before her renewed obsession with antiquities, she used to share my interest in the more recent past. We would talk about her wretched country and my even more wretched one. In fact, I don't know which is the more wretched. She told me of tragedies of which I was completely ignorant committed by the British in her country after they invaded it. How they had seized the best lands and farms and given them to British settlers, who had taken control of two-thirds of the island. They had banned the Catholic inhabitants from owning land and holding government positions and made these into a preserve for the British Protestant settlers. At certain periods, they had even forbidden the Irish to practise their religion, and, whenever they rose up against the oppression, savagely suppressed their uprisings. Then they dispersed them around the world, to the point that their migrants came to outnumber those who remained in the country. On one occasion, they drove off sixty thousand of them, men, women and children, and sold them into slavery in the West Indies. I thought to myself, 'At least the British didn't sell us into slavery outside Egypt. They were content to enslave us in our own country!'
A sudden braying brought me out of my reverie and when I turned round I found a boy leading two donkeys by their bridles approaching from the side that offered shade and coming to a stop at the bottom of the steps, his back to the house. He was on time but didn't say a word and didn't look in my direction. Like the others here, he was observing the law of distance and silence.