I arrived in Cairo, trembling inwardly as I queued at the passport office. Who knows, maybe my name was on a list, and I’d be interrogated because of my relationship with Yusuf, or I’d become an undesirable person since I’d criticised the regime and described the current leader as ‘rubbish’ in one of my radio interviews in London.
I took a taxi from the airport to Fayyoum where Yusuf was waiting for me. He had suggested we meet in the house where we had first made love. The grey jungles of Cairo were swallowed up in my longing to get to Fayyoum, still two hours away, and I felt no sorrow or guilt at the thought that I wasn’t going to visit my mother till the end of my trip, even though I could picture her on her own in the sitting room listening to the news.
I texted him telling him I’d arrived and was on my way to Fayyoum.
‘I can’t believe it! Welcome, welcome! I can’t believe I’m going to see you and hold you in my arms, dearest creature. I feel my spirit reviving after years of drought.’
My God, he remembers all the things he used to say to me before … no, he actually feels them. Our separation has fired up our emotions rather than subduing them.
I caught the driver glancing at me in his mirror from time to time, and I was suddenly afraid of him as we sat immersed in silence, for I felt myself opening up to the world, just as I did when Yusuf and I used to race to Fayyoum, because at last we were going to be together for two whole days, rather than a few stolen hours like our meetings in Cairo.
The moment we started driving through the town, my fear of the driver evaporated as I remembered wandering from shop to shop with Yusuf to buy tampons after my period had arrived unexpectedly; how, when he noticed the pain written all over my face, he’d insisted on taking me to the local pharmacy, unabashedly picking up the painkillers and the packet of tampons too, to the astonishment of the sales girl, who whispered to me, ‘You’re so lucky. He treats you like a princess.’
The lake appeared in the distance like a giant’s blue eye, then his house, pink with blue window frames. The car sped towards the house, which appeared silent, with no visible signs of life. Its front door remained closed despite the scrunch of the wheels as we came to a halt. I slammed the door of the car firmly behind me, but the house remained shuttered and barred. I knocked gently and sighed in exasperation when nothing happened. Yusuf had always stuck to our arrangements in a way that used to fill me with awe.
I press the bell this time, take a deep breath, and press again.
Slow footsteps, moving quietly. An unhurried hand opens the door. I prepare to throw myself at him, for years of absence to be erased as soon as our bodies touch.
I freeze. A middle-aged woman smiles at me, takes my bag, greeting me: ‘Hello. Welcome. Glad you got here safely. Welcome. Come in. Tea or coffee, or lemonade?’
Had I gone to the wrong house? I see all the fossils hanging on the walls, petrified wood and other kinds, and a small whale’s jawbone.
‘Is Mr Yusuf in?’
‘Yes. Do come in, please.’
I wonder if he’s having a siesta. She puts my bag down and goes off down the corridor leading to the bedroom.
I didn’t follow her. I was at a loss, utterly confused and angry, unable to believe he wasn’t waiting for me at the front door. Was it the presence of this maid or cook that prevented him from coming to greet me? Maybe he was in the process of divorcing his wife and didn’t want to look as if he had a relationship with another woman. When the maid – or cook – reached the bedroom door she turned back to me and said, ‘Please madam, he’s here.’
Before she could knock on the door, I stormed in past her and saw him sitting facing the window with his back to me. My heart leaped, and I rushed to embrace his head from behind, noticing the grey in his black hair. Was he asleep?
‘Yusuf, Yusuf, I’m here.’
He turned round slowly, but not before I’d called his name again: ‘Yusuf, Yusuf. I’m here, darling.’
When I saw his face, I gasped and the world spun around me. It was him and not him, as if someone had blown him up with a pair of bellows; his eyes had glazed into two circles of broken glass, their honey colour turned waxen, his nose was still the same, but his lips had become a thin line etched hard into his face, yet trembling unaccountably.
He turned back to the window. I rushed to him, taking hold of his hands that were swollen, but still Yusuf’s hands. I rubbed my face in them, kissing them and weeping. He looked right at me for a moment in complete bewilderment, then turned to face the window again. I gulped tearfully, mournfully. ‘What’s happened to you, my love? Yusuf, what happened?’
When his gaze remained fixed on the window, I brought my face close to his, in case my longing for him, my breath, my perfume, might rouse him, turn him back into Yusuf, but he moved his face away from mine and raised his hand to protect himself from me before focusing all of his attention on the lake once more.
‘What can you see, Yusuf? Tell me, darling, what can you see?’
The horizon, violet, blue, with a line of green, and the lake itself, dusky with birds big and small, pink, white, black, brown, and the colour of the desert sand. I hear the moaning of the breeze, or is it the sound of my own breathing? I kneel down in front of him. He has put on weight. His feet are swollen. I look directly at him. Panic-stricken, he tries to move away from me, and when I don’t let him he emits a terrified scream that makes my mouth go dry, but I take hold of his hand again, a hand that for sure didn’t write that letter or exchange emails with me yesterday, or dial my number. He pulls his hand away, as if he’s had an electric shock, covering it with his other hand and continuing to stare out of the window.
The woman hurries up to comfort him. ‘What’s the matter, Mr Yusuf? This lady is the new nurse. Don’t be afraid of her.’ Then she sighs in my direction and returns carrying a tray on which is a teapot, teacup, biscuits, and a glass of water. With a movement of my head I gesture towards him: ‘How long?’
‘Two years. God help him, and madam. Please help yourself. It’s mint tea. Would you like something to eat?’
I thank her, shaking my head. ‘Come, I’ll take you to your room so you can rest for a while. The nurse before you has gone on holiday, and Madam Mervet left you this book.’
She went up to a table where there were a pile of books, a phone and a lamp, and brought a book over to me. The moment I saw it I pounced on it and opened it and saw my own handwriting: ‘Happy Birthday to my love, today and always, my darling Yusuf.’
The book was Wuthering Heights, translated into Arabic, which I’d given Yusuf as a birthday present after we’d been together for two years. I stared at the inscription that had been so full of optimism and love at the time, with no thoughts of separation or illness or death.
I ask the book what has happened to my beloved, and take it to show Yusuf, whom now I know and don’t know. ‘Do you remember, do you remember this book, my love? Do you remember Heathcliff, Catherine?’
I turn the pages and notice a yellow sticker marking one of the pages and see the hearts that were red as roses when I drew them faded now, but still marking the following passage where I’d crossed out the name Heathcliff and substituted it with Yusuf: ‘My love for Heathcliff Yusuf resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff Yusuf! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable …’
Then the woman hands me a note that says: ‘Welcome Ms Amal. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to Fayyoum. Think of this as your home. Anyway, you’re no stranger here, you know the house very well. Please don’t forget to take your folder. You’ll find it on the table.’
And sure enough I find a big folder with my name on it, and when I look inside it, I see my letters to him and his letters that I returned to him before I left for London. His wife has highlighted certain passages in blue so she
could use them when she was talking to me yesterday as if she were Yusuf. I put them all back inside the folder and returned it to its place.
‘Did the book tell you what sir likes to eat and drink?’ asks the woman. ‘Since madam left yesterday he hasn’t let a morsel of food or a drop of water pass his lips.’
‘When will madam return?’
‘I’ve no idea. A week or ten days. God only knows!’
I find myself catching my breath, trying in vain to return it to my chest. Finally, I manage to sit down next to Yusuf, staring at the lake like him. But instead of wondering at the birds circling and alighting there, I’m like a cork twisting and turning around myself.
THE CORD
* * *
ALISON CASE
HE REACHED THE CRAG just as the clouds finished blotting out the moon, plunging him into perfect darkness. No rain, as yet, but a distant flash and crack of thunder told him it would come soon. Blinded, he dropped to his hands and knees, feeling for the edge of the stone and then the path that ran down along the far side of it. He crawled slowly down, backwards so that he faced up the hill, checking always that the stone was on his left, until he came to the bottom edge of the crag. Then he turned right. There was barely a path here; it was a matter of keeping level, moving neither up nor down the hillside, feeling for the slight gaps in the weeds, and checking what he felt against the map of his memory. It had been years since they were last here together, but before the old master died they had come often. Feeling in the darkness, he plunged his hand straight into a patch of nettles, and drew it back with a curse. But it reassured him – he remembered those nettles, or thought he did. It was hard to judge distance, crawling slowly where he was used to scrambling with confidence, but if he was right, he was halfway to his goal. The sting of the nettles was good, too. It kept him in the present, kept him sharp, and he needed that, because the thunder was getting closer and the first drops were falling. He could not let the storm find him on this open hillside. He moved a little faster, then stopped, suddenly confused. Had he gone too far? Did the path, if it was a path he was on, lead straight to the cave, or pass underneath it? He could not remember.
Another flash of lightning came to his rescue. It showed him the cave, directly uphill, further up than he had thought. Quickly, while the image remained burned on his eyes, he scrambled up towards it, until he felt the bare earth that floored it, and then knocked his head on the low overhang of rock above it. The heavens opened then. By the time he had worked himself into the back of the cave, away from the rain, he was wet, but not soaked through. Good enough, he thought. It would be a grim night, but that was nothing new. He curled himself into a tight ball and shivered. There was nothing to do but wait: for the rain to pass, for his body’s warmth to dry his clothes, if it could, for daytime. One thing he could be sure of – there would be no sleep for him, not at this distance from Cathy, and certainly not with his blood still racing at her words.
He had drifted off into a light sleep in the warmth of the kitchen, hidden from view behind the settle where Joseph was unlikely to spot him. He had woken to the sound of her voice, which never failed to rouse him from even the soundest slumber. His first impulse was to raise his head and claim her attention, turned from him during Edgar’s long visit that afternoon, but then the words registered their meaning:
Today, Edgar Linton has asked me to marry him, and I’ve given him an answer.
His breath had stopped, his whole body frozen in place. She wouldn’t tell Nelly her answer right away, wanting her advice, she said, and so for a while he had remained unbreathing, like a rabbit that hopes, if he just stays still enough, the fox will pass him by. She had said no, surely. But the teeth found him.
I accepted him, Nelly.
His blood ran cold. He had never known before how literal that was: ice water washed down his veins, to the ends of his fingers. He could not have moved or spoken if he tried. They were still talking. Nelly’s voice was mere noise, but he could not escape Cathy’s, each word a new twist wringing his heart tighter and tighter into a hard knot, like a sheet in the wash.
I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says. I love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely and altogether.
He had known that Edgar wanted her – who would not want her? But for all his jealousy of the time stolen from him, he had never really thought that she – that she— Why was she still talking? Why keep grinding your thumb when the fly is already crushed beneath it? He pressed his hands over his ears and tried to shut out her words. She didn’t know he was there. He had to get out before she discovered him, before she realised what he had heard and tried to make it right with him. Because she would succeed, he knew that. Once she turned on that – what was it? charm? glamour? – that force she had, all he would know was the Cathyness of her, and the impossibility of leaving. Quietly he rolled himself into a crouch, being careful to keep his head below the settle, but in so doing he took his hands off his ears again, and now he heard:
It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.
That was enough. He crept to the door. Nelly stirred the fire with the poker, and under cover of the noise he lifted the latch and slipped out. Once outside, he ran out of the yard, leaving the gate swinging behind him, and headed to the emptiest part of the moors, toward Penistone Crag. The twilight was fading fast, darkened by a pall of thunderclouds drawing itself over the sky, and in the dark he stumbled often, but it barely slowed him. The pain in his chest had to be lessened somehow, and wild exertion was the only relief. Another stumble, and he fell onto his knees with a curse. The terrain was rougher here, and the darkness had thickened. It was dangerous to run. A brief image came to him of himself broken, lying dead on the moors, and Cathy weeping over him, inconsolable. Perhaps that would be best: then she could marry Edgar, and he could haunt them both. Oh, how easily he could reduce that milk-pudding of a boy to a bundle of quivering nerves, starting at every shadow! And Cathy would see then what a poor excuse for a man she had chosen. Her love for Edgar would die, and she would grieve for Heathcliff, and long only to join him in death. A fitting end. But if he didn’t die? He already had a lifetime of bitter experience in how much hunger, cold, and beatings he could endure and still live. What if he were discovered days from now, injured and ill, and dragged back to the Heights, weak and pitiable, to be nursed by her in mere charity, while Edgar came daily to offer her cheer and relief from the sad duty? That would be worst of all.
And so he slowed to a more careful walk, until the storm found him at the Crag, and now here he was, holed up like a badger in his sett, trying to think what Cathy’s words meant for him, for them.
At this distance from her, the ache in his chest was intense. He had never before gone so far from her voluntarily. He had been in agony during the weeks she was at Thrushcross Grange. The invisible cord that bound him to her had been near its limit, stretched taut all day, twanging with pain while he was kept pent away from her at the Heights. Every night, as soon as everyone else was asleep, he would grab his blanket and sneak out toward the Grange, taking up a position on a hill that offered a view over the park wall to the house. He dared not scale the wall to get closer – the dogs were set loose to roam the park at night, and if they caught him without Cathy at his side this time, he had no doubt that the Lintons would let them tear him to shreds. But the hillside was near enough for the cord to slacken and give him some ease. The windows stayed lighted up in the Grange long after Wuthering Heights was asleep, illuminated with tier upon tier of expensive wax candles, and he could see the silhouettes of figures moving before them. Cathy’s he always knew by the leap of his heart. She was so alive! The others’ moved like pasteboard cut-outs, but hers flickered and danced like a flame. He would send his longing down the cord to her then, and often she would come to the window facing him and stare out into the darkness as if trying to see him, and he would be sure his longing
had reached her and that it was her own for him that he felt flooding back. Then one of the Lintons would come and lead her away, and the lights would be extinguished but for a lone candle here and there lighting the inhabitants to their beds. When the last candle was put out, he would curl up in the blanket for a few hours’ sleep.
He had been sure, then, that the cord was as deeply rooted in her heart as in his, that she could no more be at ease so far apart than he could. They had talked of it often, this bond between them, proud of its strangeness and its power, which seemed to set them apart from ordinary people. When they were touching, it seemed that they could enter each other’s body at will, seeing and hearing and feeling in the other’s skin. Apart, even with the whole of the yard between them, their emotions travelled down the cord from one to the other like raindrops on a string, and they would reunite to exclaim over what each had known the other was feeling when they were apart. Over a mile apart, flashes of strong feeling still came through.
Once only, he had tried to break it. It was after she returned from Thrushcross Grange, when she was full of the Lintons – their charms, their manners, and their orderly, cleanly ways – and she reproached him for abandoning his studies, and for not bathing every day (how could he study when he was kept at hard labour from dawn to dusk, and what was the use of bathing when he had only the one filthy set of clothes to put on after?). Then he had stormed off. Driven by rage and resentment, he had ignored the pain that began a little distance from Wuthering Heights and grew the further he walked. But at two miles he was gasping with it, and before he reached three, the cord had dragged him to an agonised halt, quivering with nausea and pain. He could not do it. He had turned back. When he returned, Cathy had stormed at him and sobbed, saying that he was tearing her heart out and making her ill, and he had heard in her words the echo of his own experience. Whatever he suffered then, from the hard labour without pay, Hindley’s beatings, the loss of all his schooling – yes, even from her, with her reproaches, her new finicking ways, and all the time stolen from him to entertain the Lintons while he hovered fuming in the yard – all of it had been worth enduring, because the alternative would be to rip out her heart along with his own, and that was unthinkable.