Chapter Twenty-one Lucien
January 1952
The highway outside Cairo, Egypt
The dust billowed from the Fiat’s tires. He glanced at the speedometer—eighty, and his foot was flat on the accelerator. He should have borrowed the damn Mercedes. He should have done a lot of things. He should have made Hannah come with him.
Now the damn ship was steaming for Tel Aviv without him. “Some unfinished business,” he told his mother. He gave her an envelope containing money and a list of names. She was philosophical. “On ne badine pas avec l’amour,” she said. “Find her, if you must.”
He checked his watch. Half past noon, and he was still twenty minutes from the outskirts of Cairo. Along the horizon, he could see not a sign of rising smoke. Yet.
He had already changed his mind by the time the message reached him in Alexandria. A man brushed past him on the dock; the note, tucked into his palm, only added to his urgency.
He should not have left Hannah behind in Cairo. What was he thinking? You did not leave your arm behind, your liver or your ribs or lungs; you could not exist without these vital parts. He was going to turn back anyway. He had already decided he was going to find Hannah, to fall on his knees and pledge his life to her; he would find some respectable position in a bank or an import-export firm; he would go anywhere, do anything in order to live by her side, to sleep in her bed each night, to hold their child in his arms. To protect her from any further evil, the rest of her life.
Now he had to hurry.
But where to find her?
According to the message, the crowd was already on its way from Fuad University to the parliament buildings downtown. But this was almost two hours ago. Once downtown, there was nothing to stop them from starting the riots that Lucien’s sources had predicted for weeks now. Last night, Lillian said she had taken down a telephone message for her husband from the airport, that the workers there were refusing to service the BOAC planes. She’d said the army was going to intervene. She was almost hysterical with fear; he’d had to comfort her, in the usual way—the kind of thing he used to regard as simply a part of his job and now filled him with self-loathing.
Maybe that was why he hadn’t pressed Hannah in the hotel this morning. You’re not cut out for fatherhood, she’d told him, and the words were like a knife in his gut. In that moment, he could have taken her in his arms and loved her into compliance, the way he’d loved Lillian into compliance a couple of hours earlier. When he drew her coat away from her beautiful shoulder and kissed it, he could have then taken off the coat altogether, could have taken off that green dress she was wearing that made him want to devour her whole, could have taken her out of her mind with pleasure so she would have followed him anywhere.
And what had he done, like an idiot? Put the coat back on her damn shoulder.
Instead, he should have been ruthless.
Now, a few miles outside of Cairo, he saw the first thin line of black smoke threading its way from the center of town.
Before getting back into his car, he had telephoned Shepheard’s and dictated a short sentence of a note to Tarek, a man he trusted—Stay in the room until I return for you.
Push the note under the door and knock twice, he’d told Tarek, and Tarek had assured him the note would be delivered.
But what if she disobeyed him? What if she had already left?
You’re not cut out for fatherhood, she’d said. It’s best for both of us. You know it is.
Because Gezira lay on his route to downtown Cairo, he drove there first, to the apartment building where Hannah lived with her husband. He looked for the porter Salah, but Salah was nowhere to be seen, so he ran up the stairs—elevators were a waste of time, and anyway he had energy to burn right now, he wanted action—and pounded on the door of the Ainsworths’ apartment. The door swung open. Hannah’s husband stood unsteadily in his shirtsleeves, his tie loose around his neck.
“Where’s Hannah? Is she home?” asked Lucien.
“None of your bloody business.”
Lucien seized him by the shirt. “Listen to me. There is a fucking riot taking place downtown, do you know that? I need to know where she is.”
“Let go of me, you damned Jew.”
Lucien drew back his fist and connected to Ainsworth’s jaw with a satisfactory crunch. The bastard gave him a stunned look and dropped to the floor. Lucien stepped over him and raced around the apartment, calling Hannah’s name.
No answer.
Back in the drawing room, he lifted the receiver of the telephone and asked to be connected to the switchboard at Shepheard’s Hotel. The operator connected him. The switchboard rang and rang; there was no answer.
He slammed down the receiver and stepped over Ainsworth’s body again, on his way to the stairs.
He had hardly crossed the bridge when he had to abandon the Fiat and continue on foot. The streets swarmed with shouting men; the air reeked of smoke, of anger. He saw no policemen. He stopped a man on the sidewalk, an Egyptian, hurrying in the other direction, and asked what was going on.
“The opera house is in flames,” the man said, in a shocked voice. “They’re going to burn everything, all the foreign buildings, all the British shops.”
“Shepheard’s, what about Shepheard’s?” Lucien demanded.
“I saw with my own eyes, the shawish on duty, he let the rioters right in!”
“You mean it’s on fire?”
“I don’t know! But I wouldn’t go there if I were you!”
The man tore away from Lucien’s grip and disappeared into the crowd.
Lucien broke into a run.
Had she stayed in the room, then? She’d been up all night, she was strung on her last nerve. Had she gone to sleep? Had she seen the note pushed under the door? Had she started for home anyway and been caught up in the mob?
If there was no answer at the Shepheard’s switchboard, what did that mean? Was it already on fire?
As he ran down Fuad el Awal, the air filled with smoke. Without breaking stride, he lifted the collar of his jacket over his face. In his pocket he held a small pistol. Not much use in a crowd, but it was something. He elbowed his way along the street. To his right someone swung a café chair through a window. Between the buildings on Sharia Aly Pasha he saw the Turf Club, where Ainsworth and his colleagues liked to get away from their wives. Smoke poured from the window; he heard shouts, yelling. The bang of a gunshot. A lorry full of policemen drove by without stopping. He ran up Sharia el-Kamel, pushing past men, left and right. Someone tried to grab his arm; he shrugged it violently off. Smoke everywhere. Ahead of him on the left, where Shepheard’s Hotel stood, had stood for decades, he saw a lick of orange fire amid the billows of charcoal smoke. Fear seized his throat. A crowd had gathered on the street, just outside the reach of the flames. The porch collapsed; a cheer went up.
Hannah, he thought. The child.
He fought his way between the men, threw his jacket over his head, and ran inside.
He had been sitting right here at Shepheard’s, in fact, ordering a fourth whiskey and soda at the Long Bar when he spotted an old friend from his days in the desert, blowing up German staff cars. By then, the war had been over for a year and he was trying to pretend interest in his job as the Egyptian agent of an import-export firm owned by one of his Swiss cousins, without much success. He started most of his evenings here at Shepheard’s, followed by the Auberge, followed by some woman’s bedroom, followed by his own, until the hot sun poked around the blinds and his day began over again. He was in a bad mood, a destructive mood. The sight of his old friend Shiloah perked him up. They ordered some more drinks, talked about this and that. The subject of Palestine came up.
“It’s going to happen, you know,” Shiloah said, lighting a cigarette. “We have assurances from the British, the Americans.”
“What’s going to happen?” Lucien asked, though he was pretty sure he knew already. Shiloah had been born in Jerusalem, the son of a rabbi; he was a Zionist, as he had made clear to Lucien over a bottle of Scotch after the euphoria of El-Alamein.
Shiloah looked him in the eye. “Statehood.”
“All right,” said Lucien, “but how are you going to keep this state once you’ve got it? You know how the Arabs feel about Jews. It’s the one damn thing they agree on, other than turfing out the British.”
“In the first place, we’re going to need some eyes and ears on the ground,” said Shiloah, and long story short Lucien wound up with his job as an assistant manager at Shepheard’s Hotel, eyes and ears on the ground, at the bar, in the dining room, in the beds of the wives of British diplomats. What were the British going to do, what were the Egyptians going to do. In the heady days of 1948, when the Long Bar became the unofficial headquarters of a certain group of diplomats and army officers subverting official British policy to encourage Farouk’s involvement in the Arab League, Ben-Gurion had learned every shift and nuance in time for his morning coffee. Now it was this revolution, as inevitable as the summoning to prayer. How much longer could Farouk hold on? Who would replace him? How hard might the British fight for the canal zone? Noiselessly he extracted all these pellets of information and spirited them to Shiloah. It was a job that suited him far better than the import-export firm, at least until Hannah Ainsworth had sat down to tea with some ladies in the Moorish salon and shattered his equilibrium with a glance.
But at least his years here had not gone to waste. He knew every rug of Shepheard’s, every corner and crevice, every groove in every palmiform column, even though they were falling down around him in smoke and flame and rubble and ash. He pounded down the length of the lobby to the Arab Hall. The glazing in the dome had shattered; glass crunched under his shoes. He could scarcely see through the billowing smoke. He could scarcely breathe. The wool jacket covered his mouth and nose, the smoke stung his eyes. In his ears was the roar of the fire, the debris crashing to the ground. The heat was so intense, his skin seemed to be splitting like the skin of a ripe plum.
He burst free from the Arab Hall to the garden and pulled down the jacket from his face. With all the air he could muster, he shouted Hannah’s name. The noise vanished into the din.
Don’t be stupid, he thought. She’s not here, she’s gone. If she’s here, she’s already dead.
But his legs moved forward anyway.
The fire hadn’t fully engulfed the annex building yet. A door stood open; he ran through it, down the hall to the stairs, up the stairs, flight by flight. The smoke grew thicker. He stopped counting the floors; he couldn’t look up to see the numbers. When he got to the top floor, he staggered along the hall to his room, his old room, where he had taken a parade of women during the course of the past five years, women of all kinds, and made love to them in all ways, and finally Hannah. Since Hannah had first come to his bed with her request that staggered him, he had brought no other woman back to these rooms. He was faithful in that respect, anyway.
Had God taken note?
He reached the door and kicked it open.
The room was empty.
He checked the bed, the bathroom. No sign of her. He allowed himself an instant to sag in relief, one hand on the back of the chair. Thank God, he thought. Thank God.
She was safe. She’d escaped. She would live.
The child. His child would live.
He turned and ran down the hall, back down the stairs. The flames had reached the annex now, licking over the roof and walls. The heat came in gusts, like when you opened an oven. He held his breath down the long flights of steps until he reached the bottom and dashed across the vestibule to the open door.
He couldn’t say what made him turn back one last time to look across the smoke to the staircase. There was nothing to see, nothing to make out through the soot. He couldn’t even say what he noticed in the small alcove where the stairs met the wall—a sense of movement, maybe? A feeling in his gut, such as he had been trained never to ignore?
He found himself plunging back to the stairs, to the space between stair and wall. He reached out and felt something warm, soft. He heard his name groaned softly.
Hannah, he shouted. Hannah.
She lifted her head. Go, go! My leg.
He didn’t bother to ask what had happened. Fallen down the stairs, stumbled, overcome by smoke? It didn’t matter. He bent and lifted her in his arms. She screamed with pain. Tried to pull away.
Go! she yelled. You can’t carry me, you’ll die!
He ignored the fist that struck his collarbone and carried her across the vestibule and out the door, into the garden.
The pavilion was alight, the pavilion where he had flung the cobra from Hannah’s arm. Fire everywhere, all around them. To the right, where the long wing of guest rooms should have stood, there was only orange light, rubble, smoke, except for a single mansard window engulfed in flame.
He stood for a second or two, mesmerized by the tongues that licked the roof tiles, the explosion of glass from the window. He heard the crash an instant later. Then the whole structure toppled in a slow, graceful crumbling, like a sand castle felled by a wave. Whatever piece of debris struck him, he never knew. Just a blow to the head, a white streak that blinded him.
He came to when a pair of arms shook him violently awake. A voice screamed in his ear.
“Lucien, get up! Get up!”
Hannah.
He tried to speak, but his throat was stripped. Her fist slammed again against his chest; he managed to prop his knees underneath him, to suck in a searing lungful of breath. Pain, everything was pain. The whole world was built of it.
“Go!” she yelled. “Run! Get out of here!”
She lay on her stomach, covered in white dust and streaks of dark blood. Somehow he got his arms under her. She tried to wriggle out, to push him away, but she was like a kitten now, a new kitten, there was no strength in her. He forced his feet into place and heaved them both upward. Hannah made a noise of agony and went limp. He staggered forward. Ahead, the only thing standing, the only recognizable structure, was the Arab Hall. He fixed it with his eyes, his mind, and his legs followed. The waves of hot air, the crunch of glass. He faltered. Too much. No breath. Pain like a fire inside his marrow.
Memories billowed in front of him. Like mirages. Like ghosts. Now he’s seated next to Hannah on the pyramid, talking about opera, sand and sun, sweat. He wants to kiss her. Full, warm lips. He’s driving a car into the sunset, Hannah beside him. He’s in bed with her the first time, she writhes and calls his name, he can’t hold back, he’s going to come. Ecstasy and anguish, he can’t tell the difference, shattering his nerves, both at once.
Was he dying? Was this what death was like?
A fist gathered the fabric of his shirt. She writhed; she called his name.
Hannah. The child.
They barreled through the smoke, the falling walls. To breathe was to swallow hot ash. They were in the lobby now, what was left of it. Ahead was the open street. Only yards to go. The floor burned through his shoes. Still she pulled his shirt, she yelled in his ear. His legs, his stupid legs, keep them moving. If he stopped she would die. They would burn together, he and Hannah and the child. So he had to go on. They reached the doorway that used to be, the porch where everybody used to sip a gin and tonic, smoke a cigarette. He plunged with her through the inferno, across the street, debris raining around them, men running, the curb, collapse.
When Lucien was thirteen and a bit of a hellion, his mother—at her wit’s end—had shipped him to Switzerland to spend the summer near his father.
Of course, even in an open-minded European country such as Switzerland, you couldn’t just flaunt your bastard son in front of everybody. So Lucien had gone to work at a farm in the mountains outside Salzburg, owned by some friends of Beck. The work was hard and dirty, exactly what Lucien needed, and when his father came to visit they would go climbing in the nearby mountains and eat their sandwiches on the summit of some peak, sometimes talking and sometimes not. As they lay in the grass, staring at the immaculate blue sky, listening to the burr and rustle of insects, Lucien often fell asleep from mountain air and sheer exhaustion.
When he opened his eyes again, there was always a moment of disorientation, of amnesia almost—a feeling that he had just been reborn in a new body after a spell in the heavens. His amused father would say something like, Ah, returned to earth at last, which only heightened the sense of otherworldliness.
Eventually they would descend to the valley and Beck would deposit him back in the sweat and routine of the farm. But sometimes when the sky was clear, Lucien would pause in his work and contemplate the distant mountainside against this field of immaculate, eternal blue, and for that instant the feeling shimmered back, that he had died and come to life in a new body, inside a fresh new skin, to try his luck again.
Together they lay on the sidewalk. The noise, the chaos receded to the outer limits of the universe. Here with Hannah, there was peace. He stared at a patch of blue sky that appeared and vanished between the clouds of smoke and thought of the blue sky at Giza, the first touch of her mouth. In Switzerland, the sky would be blue. He would take her there, to the top of some mountain, touching the heavens. Lie with his head in her lap, her hand in his hair, the cool, fresh air cradling his skin. She would say she loved him. Over and over, he heard her gentle voice. Lucien, I love you. The curve of her belly on his cheek, the child they had made together.
The pain was gone now, he realized. Maybe he wasn’t hurt so badly as he thought. Maybe he would live, after all. Maybe he would live to lie with Hannah on a mountaintop, to hold his child in his arms.
He had to tell her something. He moved his lips.
I will build you a throne next to the sun.
Her voice, from a distance. “We’re safe now, darling. Nothing will part us.”