The Last Thursday

Chapter One: The Cairo Train

The train came into Alexandria an hour late, and Laila Nassar spent that hour learning to be a widow.

She practised in the window glass. Eyes lowered but not frightened. Mouth soft. A widow from Damanhur would be tired in a way that had nothing to hide in it. A widow would let her hands lie still in her lap instead of pressing them flat against her ribs, where a seam of coarse thread held ninety pounds in place against the wool.

Across the compartment a woman with two sleeping children looked at her black scarf and then at her face, and said, "God have mercy on him."

"Thank you," said Laila, and it came out steady. That was the first time she said it out loud, and no one struck her, and no one laughed, and the train went on rocking north through the cotton country with the flat green fields sliding past and the canals flashing like knife blades in the late sun.

Her whole marriage was seven years old. She had been seventeen when her father, who dealt in dried beans and owed money on the shop, married her to Hamza Nassar, who dealt in cloth and owed nothing to anyone. Hamza was thirty-one then and had a good reputation, which is a thing men keep in the street and not in the house. The first time he broke her wrist she had told the bonesetter she fell against the cistern. The second time she had told him nothing at all, and he had wrapped it and looked at the wall over her shoulder and said that the cistern in her house was a dangerous thing.

On the fourth of September she had taken the key to the cash box from the pocket of Hamza's second galabia while he slept with his mouth open, and she had opened the box on the floor of the storeroom by the light of the street, and she had not counted. She had simply taken it all, every note, the Egyptian pounds and the six English fives he kept folded in a chemist's envelope against bad years. She had stitched them into her coat with the coat over her knees and her teeth aching from being clenched. Then she had sat until first light with the case packed, because a woman alone on the road before dawn is a woman someone stops.

Ninety pounds and four piastres. She knew the figure now. She had counted it twice in a locked lavatory at the Cairo station, where she had gone first because Hamza would look for her at her mother's house in Damanhur, and where she had stayed eleven days in a room above a laundry, sleeping badly, until she understood that Cairo was too large to hide in and too full of people from home.

Alexandria smelled different before she could even see it. The air came through the half-open window with salt in it, and coal smoke, and something green and rotting from the canal, and then the city itself arrived in pieces — a wall of ochre houses with their washing out, a cemetery, a tram swinging past with men hanging off the back of it, minarets, a dome, palms with their fronds torn. The station roof closed over the train like a hand.

She took her cardboard case down herself. It weighed almost nothing, which frightened her more than anything else that day. A woman with a light case has nowhere she is expected.

The clerk at the left-luggage counter had a cousin who had a room, but the cousin's room was in a house with four sons in it and Laila said no thank you. A woman selling roasted seeds outside the station told her to try the streets behind Attarine, where the Greeks let rooms. She walked. It took her an hour and a half and she got lost twice, and once she came out unexpectedly at the end of a street and saw, at the bottom of it, between two buildings, a slab of sea so blue it looked like a mistake. She stood and looked at it until a porter with a handcart swore at her to move.

Rue Tewfik was three streets back from the water, narrow and loud, with a tram line one street over and balconies that nearly touched overhead. At the corner stood an Italianate building four storeys high, sagging at the middle like an old mattress, its plaster the colour of weak tea, with an arcade of shops at street level: a shoemaker, a tailor with a hand-painted sign, and a grocery whose door stood wedged open with a stone.

The grocery smelled of coffee, kerosene, cheese and olives in brine. A man of about thirty-five was weighing rice behind the counter, sleeves rolled, forearms brown, a pencil behind his ear. He had a face that looked as if it had been happy for most of its life and was cautious about saying so.

"Excuse me," Laila said. "I am looking for a room. Someone told me the Greeks let rooms here."

He put down the scoop. He did not look at her case, or her scarf, or her left hand, all of which she was braced for.

"Upstairs," he said. "Pension Christou. Top two floors. Kyria Eleni has one bed left, but I warn you, she will say she hasn't." He wiped his palm on his apron and pointed with two fingers at the ceiling. "Tell her Nikos sent you. She'll be worse to you for a minute and then better."

"Why worse?"

"Because she doesn't like being helped." He smiled then, quickly, and went back to the rice.

The entrance was beside the grocery: a doorway, a hall floored in cracked marble, a light-well like a chimney with a stair winding up it. The stair smelled of stone, dust, frying onion, and jasmine from somewhere above. Laila climbed past the first floor (a dentist's plate, a bell with no wire), past the second (a shipping office, closed, a smell of paper), and on the third landing she found a door standing open and a woman in it, waiting, as though she had been told.

Eleni Christou was sixty or thereabouts, broad and short, with iron-coloured hair pinned up hard and a face that had given up on charm somewhere around the war. She wore black, and a cardigan the colour of a plum, and carpet slippers.

"No rooms," she said.

"Nikos downstairs says there is one bed."

"Nikos downstairs sells lentils. Nikos downstairs is not a landlady." Eleni's eyes went over her, not unkindly, the way a woman inspects a melon. "Where from?"

"Damanhur."

"Family?"

"My husband died in June." It came out with the smallest catch in it, and Laila let the catch stand, because it sounded true.

"June," Eleni repeated, and did not say God have mercy. "References?"

"No."

"Work?"

"I will have work by Friday."

"Everyone will have work by Friday. Friday is a very rich day." Eleni leaned on the door frame. "I have a house full of women, thanks be to God, and every one of them owes me something, and not one of them owes me rent on the day. The room is two pounds a month, paid Monday, and you eat at my table for another one pound ten, and if you don't eat at my table you'll eat at a stall and get typhoid, and then I'll have to nurse you. What do you do besides look tired?"

"I keep books," said Laila. "I kept my husband's books for seven years. I can add."

Something shifted in the old woman's face, a flicker of appetite. "Come."

The flat inside was dim and cool, a corridor with six doors, a smell of coffee and camphor. In the kitchen a heavy woman in a flowered gown was pounding garlic and salt in a brass mortar, and did not stop pounding, only looked. Eleni pulled a ledger from a shelf, slapped it open on the oilcloth, and pushed it across.

"The column. Read it to me."

It was a bad ledger, kept in a mixture of Greek numerals and Arabic, with items crossed out and squeezed in above. Laila set her finger at the top and went down it. Eleni's lips moved, following, three lines behind. Before the old woman was a third of the way down, Laila said: "Twenty-two pounds, sixty-five. And there's a mistake on the eighth line — the soap is entered twice. So twenty-two pounds, twenty."

The pounding in the mortar had stopped.

Eleni looked at the page for a while. Then she closed the ledger.

"The bed I have," she said, "is not in a room. It is in the ironing room. There is a window the size of a tray. There is a shelf. In the winter it is cold and in the summer you will want to die. One pound fifty, and you eat with us, and you don't touch my iron."

"I'll take it."

"You haven't seen it."

"I'll take it," Laila said again.

The woman with the mortar spoke for the first time, without turning round. "She's taken it, Eleni. Let the girl sit down."

"This is Fatma," said Eleni. "She cooks. She is the government here and I am only the police." She held out a flat hand, palm up. "Two weeks in advance."

In the ironing room, with the door shut, Laila sat on the bed — it was narrow and the mattress smelled of scorched cotton — and got her little knife out of the case and picked three stitches in her coat and drew out four pound notes, folded small and warm as skin. She put the knife away. Her hands were shaking now that there was nobody to see them.

The window was the size of a tray, exactly. Through it she could see the light-well, a strip of white sky, and a coil of jasmine coming down from the roof, with three flowers on it, already browning at the edges.

She was twenty-four years old and nobody in this city knew her name, and the name she had given was still her own, which was a risk, but she had found she could not make herself answer to another one.

"Laila Nassar," she said to the strip of sky, trying it as a widow's name. "Laila Nassar, from Damanhur."

Downstairs a tram went by, and somebody in the building began, badly, to sing.