Chapter Seventeen Hannah
January 1952
Cairo, Egypt
The day János came back from the dead, seven or eight weeks after the defeat at Stalingrad, Hannah had gone out hunting. It was the end of March and she hadn’t expected to find anything worth eating, but eventually she spotted a skinny brown rabbit bounding across a meadow of wet snow and raised the rifle János had left for her. The shot rang out; the rabbit fell. She carried it back to the house in the dying light. The snow had begun to freeze and her boots crunched into it as she trudged along. The seams had split long ago, so she had tied the leather together with pieces of string. Her feet squished inside the sodden wool socks.
Numb and exhausted, she didn’t notice the scent of woodsmoke until she reached the kitchen door. She stopped and tasted the air. She’d let the fire go out in the cookstove before she left, so as not to waste fuel, yet here was this tang of smoke. At her feet, she saw the prints of a pair of large men’s boots on the half-frozen slush.
Hannah set the rabbit by the doorstep and raised the rifle. Carefully she turned the handle and kicked open the door. A man stood up from the chair next to the stove. He had draped his clothes over the hot metal to dry and wrapped a blanket around his cadaverous body. Some dirty bandages covered his right arm and shoulder. His boots tumbled in a pool of melted snow on the stone hearth. His eyes met hers—a glassy, febrile brown.
She did not quite recognize him at first. In her mind, she had laid him to rest in the mud of the Volga riverbank. Nothing had been heard from him since November, when the Hungarian Second Army was dug in to the north of Stalingrad, shredded to pieces by Soviet artillery. Now here was this ghost in her kitchen, this cadaver from whose feverish skull gleamed János’s eyes.
“Hannah,” it said. “Hannah, wife, don’t you know me?”
Friday night at the Mena House. Somebody’s birthday; the usual crowd. Hannah and Alistair sat with the Beverleys at a table in the corner of the ballroom. The air was full of cigarette smoke and dance music from an orchestra at the other end. The men leaned close and spoke in hushed voices about an attack on the Egyptian police barracks in Ismailia. As the embassy’s military attaché, Beverley had the latest news.
“Exham assures me they’ve surrendered,” he said. “Forty or fifty dead.”
Alistair swore. “Stubborn bastards.”
“Brought it on themselves.” Beverley rattled the ice in his empty glass. “Do you know, the bloody Egyptians just sat on their hands while the fedayeen harassed our soldiers, harassed the legitimate shipping—”
Alistair’s fist hit the table. “We’ve got a right to defend the bloody treaty, by God, to uphold the rule of law. They signed the damn thing, didn’t they? If a sovereign nation can simply walk away from its legal contracts…look here!” He gestured with his empty glass to a passing waiter. “Another one of these. Bertie? You? Yes? Make it two. Scotch.”
Lillian Beverley looked at Hannah. “You’re looking so well, darling. That lovely frock you’re wearing.”
Hannah wore the dress she had bought from Circurel the week before, made of crepe the color of palm leaves, draped around her waist to disguise the way her belly had begun to round out from her hip bones. Her breasts strained against the low bodice, suspended by a pair of precarious jeweled straps. Not a dress to hide in. She tapped some ash from her cigarette. “This old thing? Thanks.”
“No, really. Simply ravishing. I do wish I had your figure.”
The orchestra swung into a waltz. Lillian lifted the martini glass at her elbow. A sip caught her the wrong way; she began to cough, waved Hannah away, sipped again. Her husband turned to her and lifted an eyebrow. She waved him off too, and he returned to his conversation with Alistair. What that ass Farouk should have done, what he ought to do now.
“This awful business at the barracks,” Hannah said.
“Jolly awful. It’s been building for weeks. It’s all Bertie will talk about.”
Hannah leaned forward. “You don’t think it has anything to do with…?”
“Do you? It’s so long ago. October, wasn’t it?” Lillian reached for her cigarette in the ashtray. Her movements were quick, nervous. She sent a glance around the room and sucked on the cigarette. “Bertie thinks something’s brewing.”
“Something’s always brewing.”
“I mean trouble here. In Cairo.”
“What kind of trouble?” Hannah asked.
Lillian fiddled with the olive at the bottom of her empty glass. “I can’t say any more. He made me promise.”
“Why, we’re not in danger, are we?”
Lillian glanced at her husband, leaned toward Hannah, lowered her voice. “They want to burn it all down, you know. To make us leave.”
“Who does?”
“The Free Officers, I suppose.” Lillian shrugged. “The nationalists. You know. It’s all very…it’s all so…oh, what’s the world coming to? Everything’s falling apart, isn’t it? It’s all so jolly awful.”
Across the room, on the other side of the orchestra, a man came into view near the tall french doors, dressed in a tuxedo, hair combed into sleek dark waves. He caught Hannah’s eye and slipped outside to the terrace.
Hannah stubbed out her cigarette and rose. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get a breath of air.”
The Mena House was famous for its gardens—its luxurious lawns and exotic plantings, its paths and fountains and benches. Over the past few months, Hannah and Lucien had often taken advantage of the way you could find some private space among the various features, the pyramids to one side and the magnificent hotel to the other. She caught up with him now under the shadow of a stand of palm trees. The air was cool and dry; the breeze came off the desert and smelled of dust. Lucien’s kiss was short and hard.
“You’re well?” he asked.
“Well? You’ve been gone for a week, not a word.”
“Business.”
She grabbed his elbows. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. You have something for me, I understand?”
Hannah exhaled a long breath. The smell of him made her giddy with relief. “The police barracks in Ismailia. They’ve surrendered. Forty or fifty dead, Alistair said.”
“Bloody idiots,” he said in English.
“Lillian thinks there’ll be trouble here in Cairo. Something her husband told her.”
“Lillian?”
“Beverley. Her husband’s a military attaché, remember?”
“I remember.”
He grazed her cheek with his hand. Hannah closed her eyes and leaned into his palm.
“Listen to me, Hannah,” he said gently. “You must leave.”
She opened her eyes. “Leave the hotel?”
“Leave Cairo. Leave Egypt.”
Beyond the palm trees, Hannah glimpsed the three large pyramids on the Giza plain, soaked in moonlight. The smaller ones clustered nearby. She felt a movement in her chest, like her heart was shriveling. She pushed his hand away from her cheek.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t simply leave the country. Not unless my husband’s ordered out.”
“It’s not safe for you.”
“It was never safe, Lucien. But if you want to end things, I quite understand. You’ve had what you needed from me, haven’t you? And I’ve had what I needed from you.”
He glanced briefly downward. “I was wondering if you meant to tell me.”
Hannah folded her arms and thought about the last time they met, a week ago—the hurried, furtive coupling in his office at Shepheard’s, straightening her dress, touching up her lipstick in the reflection from her compact mirror. When she’d looked up, she’d caught him gazing at her middle. She’d clicked the compact shut.
“Let me fix your tie,” she’d said. She had taken the knot of his necktie and tenderly straightened it for him. Had laid her forearms against his chest and kissed him. He had returned the kiss, of course. But she remembered thinking his lips held something back from her. She remembered thinking his eyes didn’t quite touch hers, that they seemed to have caught on something in the distance, like János’s eyes when he’d returned from Stalingrad.
“Well, now you know for certain,” Hannah said.
She turned to leave. He caught her elbow.
“Hannah. Wait a moment.”
At the back, Hannah’s gown swooped irresistibly low, almost to her bottom. A slope of spotless, luxurious flesh. János had always worshipped the shape of her back—like the curve of a violin, he said once, kissing his way down her spine. She heard Lucien’s breath catch. She closed her eyes and waited for him to speak. A hoarse whisper.
“I’ll find you again, Hannah. When this is over. I promise you.”
His lips touched her throat, her shoulder. His hand brushed the bare skin of her back, the way a child can’t help running his finger through the cream inside of an éclair.
The electric lights blazed through the ballroom windows. A peal of laughter rang above the lilting orchestra, the pitch of conversation. Everybody having such a jolly time.
“About the child—” he began.
Hannah shrugged off his hand from her arm.
“It’s getting chilly,” she said. “I’m going indoors.”
She found Alistair near the bar, ordering another drink.
“I want to dance,” she said.
Obediently he took her hand and led her to the ballroom floor, where everybody was drunk and dancing. Between the lurching bodies Hannah glimpsed the birthday boy, whatever his name was, wearing a paper crown. Lipstick on both cheeks. Blotto, she thought. The English had so many expressive words for the concept of drunkenness.
Alistair was an experienced, graceful dancer. Sometimes Hannah wondered how a man could dance so beautifully and yet fuck you like a marionette. The orchestra played a foxtrot that kept the two of them busy and breathless, so they didn’t have to talk. Then the foxtrot ended and a waltz picked up.
“Darling,” said Alistair, “I’ve been thinking perhaps we ought to return home to England. Egypt’s turned rather hot, if you’ve noticed.”
“But it’s only January,” she said.
“I mean the social situation, darling.”
“I was only joking. I know what you meant.”
Alistair frowned and executed an elegant turn.
“Where have the Beverleys gone?” asked Hannah. “You and Bertie have been thick as thieves tonight.”
“Beverley’s been called back to the office, I’m afraid. This damned situation in Ismailia.”
“Darling,” said Hannah, “I’ve been meaning to ask. I don’t know if I ought. You don’t think—what happened in October—”
“Good God. Of course not.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Then don’t open your silly mouth. You don’t know a bloody thing about it. Keep to your bloody gossip and frocks and—”
“Alistair, please. People are staring.”
“They’re staring because of that bloody indecent frock you’re wearing. Tits spilling out. Arse spilling out. Only a—”
Hannah pulled out of his arms. “I think you’ve had quite enough to drink tonight, Alistair. I’ll get my coat.”
But she did not get her coat. She stalked out of the ballroom and through the french doors to the terrace. To the stand of palms, where she could stare at the moonlit pyramids and fall to pieces. She leaned against a slender trunk and slid downward, inch by careful inch, until she was sitting on the damp grass, trying to get a decent breath to sob with. This silly frock. What had she been thinking? To entice Lucien, of course. Stupid. When men were getting massacred in Ismailia. Well, the dew would ruin the crepe, so that was that.
Lucien’s voice echoed in her ear—About the child.
She laid her hand on her belly. She had that, anyway. She was not alone. Nobody could take this child from her, at least; she had what she came for. I want a child, she had told Lucien, right at the start, and he had given her that, without question, so who was she to want more?
I’ll find you again, Hannah. I promise you.
The words a man said to the lover he was discarding. The toll he paid to his own conscience.
Hannah closed her eyes and listened to the small, delicate noises around her. Wouldn’t it be funny, she thought, if an Egyptian cobra happened to slither up just now. Would Lucien appear again like a djinn to save her?
Or was she on her own again, no one to save her except herself?
A hiccup escaped her. Her head weighed so much. She leaned it against the palm and closed her eyes.
A fine May morning in the ancient kitchen of János’s grandmother. A morning for miracles.
Hannah had been scraping the last speck of dough out of the bowl and into the pan when she heard a noise behind her.
János! she gasped.
I’m feeling a little better today, he said. I thought I might get out of bed.
Since arriving home, János had lain ill with some combination of influenza and the infection in his wounded arm, and in his emaciated state he had hovered on the brink of death for weeks. Hannah had spent most nights in the armchair in the living room—she had brought down a mattress for János to sleep on, because there was no fuel to heat the bedrooms upstairs—and had lived each day in the expectation that it would be his last on earth, that he had returned home like this simply to die in her arms.
Then about a week ago, the fever had receded. The wound had begun to heal at last. He ate some bread with his broth, a little cheese from the wheel that Hannah had so carefully husbanded in the larder.
Now he stood like a skeleton in her kitchen. A gust of breeze through the window might blow him over. Hannah had rushed to settle him in a chair inside a patch of fragile sunlight, to heat some broth and brew some feeble coffee from the few beans remaining, mixed with acorns she had roasted and ground in the mill.
When she’d handed him the cup, he had closed his fingers around her fingers. The steam curled between his gaunt face and hers. Even today, she remembered the smell of the ersatz coffee, of woodsmoke, of promising spring air rushing through the window. She remembered the way the sun pitied his cheek and the anguished stare with which he regarded her. The way he lifted his hand and touched the ends of her hair, which had grown out a few inches and stood around her head like the hair of a shaggy dog.
“The children,” he said.
She sank to her knees between his legs and laid her head in his lap. “Sometimes I think, if I had only found more to eat. They would have been stronger, they would have survived it.”
For some time, he stroked her hair. “I nearly gave up. Every minute I wanted to lie down in the mud and go to sleep. So fucking cold, so hungry. My wounds wouldn’t heal. I thought, I should just die.”
“I thought you were dead. That’s what people were saying. Everybody said the entire army was dead or captured. When I saw you in the kitchen I thought you were a ghost. I thought I was dreaming.”
“I looked up and saw you standing there in my old coat. Muddy boots held together with string. Your hair all short.”
“Because of the fever.”
“And I knew why I had kept walking through the snow and the mud, when I wanted to lie down and sleep. When I wanted to die.”
Hannah lifted her head. His face was streaked with tears. The ersatz coffee cooled in the cup he had rested on the arm of the chair.
“It wasn’t your fault, Hannah,” he said. “You tried to save them.”
She shook her head. He took her face between his hands.
“You did all you could. It was typhoid.”
“I survived it.”
“That was God’s will. He took away everything else. But he left you. He spared us both.”
“God didn’t spare us,” she said. “We survived, that’s all.”
“Yes, because you willed it. You willed me back to life.”
“Then why has God spared us, János?” she asked him. “Tell me.”
He stared at her with his eyes that seemed to rest beyond her, on some distant object. His thumbs felt along the ridge of her cheekbones. She slid her fingers to the fastening on his trousers and his hand moved to stop her.
“Hannah, wait.” His face filled with shame.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
She rose to her feet and unbuttoned her shirt, unbuckled her belt and let her trousers fall to the floor. One leg she swung over his lap, then the other. His hands reached for her waist. He sank his face between her soft breasts. The groan he made when she settled him inside her, it was like all the misery in the world, released from his chest into the delicate spring air.
Hannah must have dozed off for a minute or two, because she came alert to some noise in the foliage to her right.
An animal, she thought. Don’t move.
She forced herself to hold still. Her heart felt as if it were beating from her skin.
A voice. A human voice. Another one—female. Pleading.
Softly Hannah rose to her feet, holding the palm trunk to steady herself. On the damp grass, she made no noise. The heels of her slippers sank into the turf. The man and the woman spoke in low tones, urgent ones, packed with meaning. The woman a little louder than the man, as if she couldn’t help herself. She made a little groan of pain or pleasure, and it was funny that this noise—not the words preceding them—identified her to Hannah as Lillian Beverley.
The pair of them could not be more than a few yards away, just inside the rim of foliage. By now, Hannah’s eyes had tuned to the darkness. She stared at the fronds until the moonlight picked out some movement. Lillian’s dress flashed into view—strapless, the color of apricots, not especially flattering. The man wore a black tuxedo, as most did, so she couldn’t see him clearly. He had his arms around Lillian. He was murmuring to her. The scene was so intimate, Hannah wanted to flee. But she did not. She remained planted in the grass by the heels of her shoes, until she was absolutely certain the man—as he bent his face toward Lillian’s—was Lucien Beck.