All the same, he found out, after my first few attempts to placate him, that I was not the sort of person he had imagined. I am not one to endure a slight. I gave him cruelty for cruelty and hatred for hatred. I suggested to him when we were first married that we take a journey to Egypt, because Ancient Egypt had for so long bewitched me and because I hoped that if we went somewhere far away we might succeed in growing closer and understanding one another better. I said we could divide the costs of the trip because the money left me by my father was enough for my share. But Michael considered the very idea a sign of madness. Meaningless folly and dissipation. I could learn everything I needed to know about Egypt from books, if indeed my mind was capable of taking anything in. I challenged him. I began to study the language of the Ancient Egyptians. I studied hieratic and demotic on my own. None of this pleased him. He would snatch the books from my hand and tear them to pieces because I was wasting my time on things of no value instead of working in the house; I should make an effort, at least, to perfect the languages that I had started on. I would get up very calmly, take a book from his library, and start ripping it up. He would fall on me and beat me and try to stop me, and I would take more books and hit him with some of them and tear up what I could. We almost killed one another with the books in those battles, and with our fists in others. Indeed, things would have ended with a crime or a scandal, for I often thought of fleeing the house and the whole country and would have done so but for my apprehension about what would happen to my mother and Fiona, and had not his miserliness and stubbornness killed him first.
He insisted on considering the cough that racked his chest an ordinary bout of cold. He treated himself with herbs, hot drinks, warm rum, hot and cold baths, and all the remedies that he had ever tried or heard about before. We watched as his body withered and his cough turned into a bark whose mere sound inspired terror. Neither my urgings, nor those of Fiona or my mother, were of use in making him show himself to a doctor. It wasn't worth it. The last remedy he had tried, or the last drink he had taken, was the tried and true cure that would put an end to the illusory cold. In the end, when he started spitting gouts of blood with the cough and went to the doctor, it was too late.
The sight of him in bed in the hospital, his face the colour of chalk as he gasped for breath, incapable even of coughing, horrified me. The horror was there, but when I searched in my soul for some true sorrow, I could find none, even when he looked at me with panic-stricken eyes as though asking for a rescue I couldn't provide. And I was alarmed at myself when he died, because I found within myself, and in spite of myself, an exhalation of relief that shouted, 'At last!',
It wasn't intentional. I didn't kill him and I didn't wish death on him, but he came to an end as a result of his own acts, and what fault of mine was that? Despite this, I did my duty for the period of mourning and gave a good performance of all the required outward shows. Fiona's grief, though, was real. How should I know? Maybe she truly did love him even though she denied it. Or perhaps it was her heart, which felt for everyone. How should I know? As though my life weren't complicated enough already!
Four years with Michael killed many things in me, and two years with Mahmoud brought them back to life again. It's true. Nothing less than the genuine resurrection of a new woman. The cure may have started with the journey to Upper Egypt that I was able to make with the money Michael, who had saved it penny by penny, had left me. As I moved among the antiquities looking at the pictures and statues and reading by myself the writings carved on the columns and walls and entering them in my notebooks, I felt that this was a pleasure above any I had dreamt of. Then I met Mahmoud. What a blessing to find someone who was Michael's opposite in everything! He gives without stinting and knows no limits, not even to the contradictions and shifts of his moods!
Here he is at last.
I hear his familiar footfall on the stairs.
Come, Mahmoud! We shall travel to the desert together. We shall be reborn there together too, and in that rebirth I shall not let you escape. You will be mine.
3. Mahmoud
So this is the 'garden of the spirit', as Saeed called it! His spirit maybe, not mine. It moves nothing in me, this yellow 'garden'. Except anger, perhaps.
The desert stretches away before my eyes and there is nothing in it but sand, dunes, rocks, and the mirage that shimmers in the distance. Searing heat by day and biting cold by night. From time to time, chains of grey mountains like the remnants of a single mountain transformed by a bolt of lightning into splintered rubble.
Catherine and I ride on camels at the front. She wears riding dress, the trousers puffed out at the thighs, and is the only one with a saddle with an awning of thick cloth, like an open howdah. The guide, and the Bedouin of the caravan, show concern for her. They put up a tent for her at night while they themselves sleep in the open, sheltered from the winds by their kneeling camels. The ten soldiers who joined the caravan with me ride at the rear, with the exception of Sergeant Ibraheem, my orderly, whom Brigadier General Saeed attached to my service before the journey with his personal commendation.
As each day passes on the road, a deeper silence reigns over the caravan, and all eyes are directed to the front, gazing into the emptiness. What does each of them think about? I don't know, but the silence floods my mind with cries and images that awaken all the past — all who are alive and all who have passed away. It may be that this started before the journey. I think about many things, especially the end.
Am I afraid of death? Of course. Who isn't? I ask myself how it will take me — at the oasis with a bullet? Or as an ordinary death after an illness, long or short? In some passing accident? By strangulation in the bathhouse or poison put in my food? Will it come without any preamble whatsoever? Hundreds of shapes hide in the dark corners of the road, waiting to pounce on me in a single leap that is itself the end. I make every effort to forget my mother, but on this trip I cannot. I see her waiting for me that night when I came home, sitting in her large chair next to the bed, the maid lying on the floor, fast asleep. I knew that my mother never went to sleep until she had assured herself of my return and asked her customary question — had my brother Suleiman sent a letter from Damascus? Usually there was no letter, but I would reassure her that I had heard that he and his children were well. I kissed, as usual, her head and hand and asked her whether she needed anything. She asked for a cup of water because she couldn't bring herself to wake the maid. Before I reached the door, she cautioned me, 'From the brown jug.' Then 'and in the brass cup' caught up with me. I went to the main room, where the jugs were kept on a tray on the sill of the north-facing window, and I lifted up the brown jug, which she would always perfume with mastic and cover with a fine pierced cloth, and which really did cool the water more than the others. I poured the water into the brass cup decorated with coloured foliage and returned to the room, having in mind to tease her about the cup, which was the only one she would drink from because my father had given it to her one day. A minute or two had gone on these things, and when I opened the door, cup in hand, I saw her head drooping on her chest. I went up to her, calling out, but she didn't answer me and I discovered she was gone.
I went two months incapable of taking anything in. I would repeat to all who offered me condolences everything that had occurred between my leaving the room and my returning to it, as though these details concealed some secret or riddle that would explain what had happened. And my legs shook when I walked. I didn't understand and I still can't understand.