Chapter Eleven Hannah
October 1951
Cairo, Egypt
Over and over, Alistair insisted that he was only defending his wife. The same words, repeated like the chorus of some popular song.
I had no choice, had I? The devil was going to attack her.
They were speeding back toward Cairo in the big black Mercedes-Benz. The setting sun blazed orange before them. Lucien gripped the steering wheel with bone-white hands. Next to him, Beverley lit a trembling cigarette.
“I shall have to report this to the embassy,” he said.
“The devil you will.”
“Ainsworth, for God’s sake.”
“Beck won’t say anything. Will you, Beck?”
Lucien glanced at the rearview mirror to meet Hannah’s gaze. Beverley sucked on his cigarette and looked out the window.
Lillian burst out, “This is ridiculous. Of course we’re going to report it. We left a man dead on the streets of Ismailia—”
Alistair pounded his stick. “It was self-defense!”
“He wasn’t going to hurt us.”
“Wasn’t going to hurt you? Did you see how he attacked Beck?”
Hannah glanced at the side of Lucien’s face. In the sun’s glare, she couldn’t see the bruise or the cut very well, but the swollen jaw bulged like an orange.
“In any case,” Alistair said, “I have diplomatic immunity.”
Beverley turned his head to the back seat, incredulous. “Are you mad, man?”
Alistair crushed out his own cigarette and tossed the stub out the window into the desert.
“I don’t think that fellow meant to hit Mr. Beck,” ventured Lillian.
“Damn it, Lillian. It doesn’t matter, don’t you see? We’re in it up to our necks. If the mob finds out that chap was shot by an Englishman, all hell’s going to break loose.”
“The poor man. The poor fellow.”
Hannah turned to stare out the window. In the glare, she saw a field of snow meeting the horizon. “Maybe he didn’t die,” she said. “Maybe he survived.”
A pitying silence filled the car. A hopeless weight.
By the time they reached Cairo, the sun had fallen and Alistair had gone to sleep against the window. Lucien stopped the car outside the Beverleys’ handsome house in Garden City and opened the doors without a word. Hannah got out of the car to say goodbye. Under the wash of the streetlight, Lillian’s face looked like wax.
Beverley turned to Hannah. The brim of his trilby dug hollows around his eyes and under his cheeks. “Sleep on it, shall we? Tomorrow morning we’ll decide what’s to be done. Clear heads.”
“Whatever you think best. I’ll speak to Alistair.”
“Good girl.” He looked over Hannah’s shoulder and back to her face. In an undertone, he said, “What about Beck? Can we trust him?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“We can’t have any misunderstandings, Hannah. You comprehend my meaning. There is a great deal at stake.” He fixed her with his eyes.
“Of course,” she replied.
“Good girl,” he said again.
Lillian leaned forward and embraced her. “Good night, dear. Do try to get some rest.”
“And you.”
Lillian pulled back and held Hannah by the shoulders, as if she were inspecting her for disease. Her lips shook. She burst out, “It was the drink.”
“Yes, probably,” said Hannah.
“The cognac. He’s a decent fellow, I’m sure.”
“Jolly awful business,” muttered Beverley, pulling his wife away.
Lucien helped her get Alistair upstairs to their apartment. She struggled to undress her husband, to slide his pajamas over his limp arms, his limp legs. She made him swallow his pills and drink a glass of water. He stared vacantly across the room as she tucked him in.
“I do have diplomatic immunity, darling,” he said. “There’s no need to worry.”
“Yes, darling.”
“You’ll be quite safe, I assure you. As my wife, you’ll be protected.”
She turned off the lamp and walked into the sitting room, where Lucien still stood in the middle of the rug, hat dangling from his hand. How dusty he looked, how exhausted. The cut no longer bled, but his jaw looked as if someone had slid a black ball under the skin.
“How is he?” Lucien asked.
Hannah shut the door behind her. “Something to drink?”
“Whiskey.”
She walked to the liquor tray and poured him a glass, neat. “I’m sorry there’s no ice,” she said.
He took the glass from her fingers. “I don’t like ice.”
“I mean for your jaw.”
“A damp cloth will do.”
Hannah slipped back into the bedroom and ran a washcloth under the faucet. When she returned to the sitting room, Lucien stood by the liquor tray, pouring another glass.
She indicated the sofa. “Sit here.”
He sat on the middle cushion. Hannah took the bottle of whiskey from the tray and knelt in front of him. Tenderly she cleaned away the dust and dried blood and applied some liquor to the cut. He stared at the wall and winced.
“It’s not deep,” she said. “But it will probably scar.”
Lucien took the washcloth from her hand and examined her fingers. “Tell me about your husband, Hannah.”
“Alistair, you mean?”
“No.” He looked up. His eyes unsettled her, so green and close. “Your first husband.”
Hannah startled. “What? How did you know?”
“I guessed, that’s all. Some man’s ghost in your heart.”
Hannah pulled her hand away and sat on the rug. Lucien lowered himself from the sofa cushion to sit facing her, resting his back against the upholstery.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said.
She gathered her knees to her chest. “He was Hungarian, like me. We met at university in Vienna. My first year. He was older, a doctoral student. We went to the same coffeehouse each morning. For months, I used to watch him talk to his friends. He was the kind of person who made you want to watch him. Every movement. Every word. But I didn’t think he noticed me at all. Then one day he walked to my table and asked if I would go to the opera with him.”
“What did he study?”
“Philosophy.”
“And you fell in love?”
Hannah allowed her knees to fall to each side, so she sat cross-legged on the rug, between Lucien’s spread legs. She stared at the hollow of his throat. It was smooth and perfectly formed so you might place a walnut there. Or you might place your mouth there and lick the warm skin with your tongue.
“Yes,” she said. “I fell in love.”
They’d wound up on the banks of the Danube at two o’clock in the morning. Somehow they had walked there from the opera house on the Ringstrasse, talking all the way, mostly János asking her questions and Hannah answering them in long, rambling, unguarded sentences. Then the river appeared before them and they stared at the dark, tumbling water, bemused.
“This is terrible,” János said to her. “You will get in trouble, coming home so late.”
At the time, Hannah lived in a flat with three other students and a housekeeper who was more like a chaperone. Her name was Bernadette and she was very strict. Possibly she had called the police already. Possibly they were out looking for her this very second.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hannah said. “I’ll give them some excuse.”
János reached for her hand. “Or we might get married.”
“Married? Are you crazy?”
“No. I have wondered for months whether I might be in love with you, and now it’s certain.”
“But we’ve only just met. We hardly know each other.”
“I don’t think I have ever known anyone so intimately. Have you?”
She reflected on the past several hours. “No. But you can’t deny we only properly met yesterday.”
“I don’t deny it. But do you think it’s a coincidence I’ve taken my coffee at the same damned café every morning since September?” He lifted her knuckles to his lips and turned her hand over to examine her palm. “If you don’t feel the same, then say so. I’ll return you to your flat and trouble you no further.”
She stared at the streak of moonlight on his black hair as he bent over her hand, smoothing her glove with his thumbs. He was dressed splendidly in an inky jacket with satin lapels and a shirtfront so stiff it might have stood on its own pleats. He had undone the bow tie but the buttons remained correctly in their buttonholes. When she didn’t reply, he looked up and smiled at her, and at that point Hannah’s knees gave way. He grabbed her elbows to hold her steady.
“In that case,” he said, “I shall wake up this judge who’s a friend of mine.”
“Just like that?” asked Lucien, incredulous. “You didn’t need a license or anything?”
Hannah shrugged. “Apparently not. The judge was an old family friend. He had his wife and butler act as witnesses and married us in his drawing room at four in the morning. By dinnertime we were on our honeymoon in Portofino.”
“This can’t be true.”
“I assure you, it was. János could do anything.”
“He must have wanted you very badly.”
Again Hannah shrugged.
“Does your husband know about all this?” Lucien asked.
“No. He doesn’t even know János’s name.”
“But he knows you were married before.”
“Maybe. I think so, yes.”
“You mean to say he never asked?”
“The English don’t ask awkward questions, Lucien. It’s not good form.”
Hannah sat with one hand on each knee, back straight. Lucien slumped a little, so they regarded each other from the same level. He took one of her hands in each of his.
Hannah looked down at her hands tucked into his palms. “Where do you live, Lucien? When you’re not in the hotel.”
“My dear, that is where I live. I keep a few rooms on the top floor of the annex.”
“By yourself?”
He laughed softly. “Yes, my dear. By myself.”
“What about your mother?”
“There’s not much to tell. She lives quietly by the sea. I visit her when I can. I’m all she has left. My older brother was killed in the war, running messages for the Allies. My sister got married and moved away.”
“Aren’t you a little old to be living in a few rooms at the top of a hotel?”
“It suits me, that’s all.” He rubbed her knuckles with his thumbs.
Hannah’s heart thumped so violently, it made her voice shake. “You should probably see a doctor.”
“Doctors ask questions, Hannah. Anyway, I’ve had worse, believe me.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“For now? Nothing.”
“You’re not going to report what happened?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “What is the point of that? To start a revolution?”
“But I thought you wanted revolution. I thought you were a nationalist.”
“What makes you think that? Because my mother is Egyptian?”
“Don’t you want this country for yourself?”
Lucien let go of her hands and rose to his feet. She watched him walk across the room to the armchair where he had slung his jacket. His shoes made not a sound on the marble tiles. She wanted to weep at his graceful stride, the symmetry of his shoulders. From a pocket he drew a cigarette case. He made a gesture to her; she shook her head. He took one for himself, lit it, drew in a lungful of smoke so that the end of the cigarette flared like a meteor. Then he exhaled and returned to her. He perched on the edge of the sofa, eyes bright and earnest.
“What about you?” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You are from Hungary, no? Don’t you want the Soviets out of your country?”
“I don’t think about it. It’s in the past. I’m English now.”
“Are you, though?”
She stood up. “I don’t give a damn about politics. I only care about people. You want to liberate your country from the exploitation of imperialists? Egypt for the Egyptians? Fine, Lucien. Take the country back, I don’t care. Just don’t get yourself killed, that’s all. Don’t do anything stupid.”
He smiled. “What is this, some kind of love declaration?”
“Don’t be flippant,” she snapped.
Lucien took a long drag from the cigarette and turned his head to look out the window at the glittering city beyond the glass. The light washed the bruise on his jaw. A pulse beat beneath the skin of his neck. “Hannah,” he said, “I do whatever you want. I meet you whenever you ask, on whatever terms. I’ll protect this stupid husband of yours from his own idiocy. But don’t think for one moment I do these things because of some fucking respectful, bloodless, spiritual regard for you. I’m in love with you. This is the truth. This is all I think about. How I want to kiss you. How I want to take you to bed until we’re both dead together in each other’s arms. Is that serious enough for you?”
Through the wall came Alistair’s parched drone, like the engine of an airplane in need of repair. Hannah’s heart beat in loud, slow thuds. “Perfectly,” she whispered.
Lucien turned his face back to her. His eyes became tender.
“I can’t bring you back to life, Hannah,” he said. “You can choose to live again, or not. But I can make you remember what it was like to be alive.”
By the time Hannah and János reached Portofino, the promise of summer had warmed the air and turned the shadows gold. Her bridegroom stopped the car outside a grand hotel, rich with sunset, and woke her up.
The staff seemed to know him already. At any rate, some obsequious people led them to a suite and brought food under silver domes. Hannah wandered to the balcony and stared in amazement at the sun setting beneath a blue sea. János came up behind her and touched his lips to the spot where her neck met her shoulder.
“Is something the matter?” he said. “You have regrets, maybe? Second thoughts?”
Hannah thought about the long drive over the mountains, the conversations, the sound of his laugh, the shape of his jaw when she looked at him, his hair, his smile.
“No,” she said. “The way I loved you yesterday, it’s nothing compared to this.”
“You’re taken aback by all this finery, then?” he said, kissing her cheek, her temple, the soft place behind her ear. “You’re wondering what other secrets I’m harboring?”
By now, Hannah was having trouble thinking straight. Up until this moment, they had hardly even kissed, except when the judge in his dressing gown had pronounced them husband and wife, a brief and almost chaste meeting of the lips, and here János’s mouth seemed to be setting her skin on fire, licking her alive.
“Well, yes. But I’m looking forward to the surprises, to be honest.”
He pulled his lips from her skin and cupped his hands around her face. “Then what is it, Hannah? What’s troubling you?”
The last sliver of sun dipped into the sea. Twilight turned the air blue.
János’s eyes warmed with understanding.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “It’s only me.”
After Lucien left, Hannah went to the bathroom and turned on the taps in the tub. She took off her dressing gown and her underclothes, slid gingerly into the tub, and stared at the water puddling around her belly.
This was not the belly János first uncovered in the hotel suite in Portofino, young and almost concave. It was both skinnier and rounder—less nourished, but more worldly. She traced the curve with her finger, the silver threads that meandered from her pubic hair to her navel. She remembered János’s mouth warming the skin of this same belly, his exclamations of wonder and discovery. How this belly had once stuck to the belly of János as they lay joined to each other some hour or so later, trying to comprehend what had occurred, to encompass this emotion that saturated the atmosphere around them. Love hadn’t seemed like the right word, the right idea. You loved your parents, you loved your dog, you loved the sun on your shoulders, you loved the taste of chocolate and the smell of rain. This was something else. A sense of sacrament.
Her love for him, her absolute confidence in that love, where had it come from? It was faith, that’s all. Visceral, stupid. The instinct that you shared some essential element of your composition with this person, whom you had only just met, spent only a few hours in conversation. Yet there it was.
And, of course, he was handsome. He was so handsome she couldn’t even quite picture him anymore, like looking into fire, his dark hair and mischievous eyes, the slope of his shoulders, the line of his jaw, the way he could look both rakish (the bow tie undone around his neck) and trustworthy (the buttons perfectly fastened) so your skin melted under the radiance of him.
Now he was dust.
For the past eight years, she had forced the memory of János out of her head. For eight years she had hardly whispered the word János, even to herself.
Now here he was again, hovering in front of her, so real she thought she could touch him. She reached into the clouds of steam and cried out in anguish because the air was empty, János was dust, the children were dust, everything was just dust.
By now, Hannah knew the bones of Shepheard’s Hotel. She walked straight through the lobby to the Arab Hall, praying she wouldn’t see anybody she knew. That everybody was too drunk or too busy to notice this plain, pale woman flit across the gardens to the annex at the back of the grounds.
Before he left the apartment, dropping a warm, slow kiss on her mouth, Lucien had told her where to find the couple of rooms where he lived. In case you change your mind, he’d said. She climbed the stairs, floor by floor. The stairwell was dark, lit only by a single bulb at each floor and a skylight at the top that exposed a square of night sky. At the final landing, bathed in starlight, she found a door. She pushed it open. A short, cramped hallway—some doors. They were labeled. lavatory, advised one. electrics, said another. At the end of the hall, she found the one she was looking for.
hotel manager.
She lifted her hand and knocked.
The door opened almost at once. Lucien stood in his shirtsleeves, collar undone, hair falling onto his forehead, bruise more livid than ever. He held a lowball glass filled with ice against his jaw. Before she could say a word, he pulled her into the room and closed the door. He set down the glass on the lamp table and reached for her waist. Unlike her, he hadn’t yet bathed, hadn’t undressed. The air was thick with smoke, though the window was open. His body sang with heat. When he bent his head to kiss her, she laid a hand against his chest.
“I have to tell you what I’m here for,” she said.
“Hannah.”
“I want the truth with you. So I have to say this now, before we begin.”
He drew back his head a few inches, so he could look her in the eye. His hands were heavy on her waist, so it was hard to think. Hard to get the words out. But it was better to say them, right? So he didn’t misunderstand her. She made herself look right back, into the heart of his eyes. She made herself speak.
“I want a child,” she said.