Here Salma paused because it was at this stage in the story where she could mention Amir. Usually she didn’t. Even her children didn’t know about him. But now she said to Moni, ‘I was involved with someone else at the time. One of my fellow students in university: Amir. We had even started to talk about getting engaged. My mother had already met him. The three of us went out to a cafeteria together. I remember that day. She came to meet him behind my father’s back. She was tense. Amir spoke well. He said he loved me and that he had spoken to his parents about coming over formally to ask for my hand in marriage. But, he said, it was a bad time for them. His mother had just had a mastectomy and his father was in debt and struggling over the difficult sale of a piece of farmland. My mother listened to all that Amir had to say but she seemed sceptical. She said he should go ahead anyway and speak to my father. He said he wouldn’t do that behind his parents’ back. She said how about sending an aunt or an uncle as a substitute for his parents. He said that he wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that. She started to get annoyed. She felt he wasn’t cooperating enough, wasn’t flexible. She was being generous, she was giving him a chance. He was a student without a penny and after graduation he still had three years of military service to complete. She wanted him to make more of an effort. He, though, felt that she wasn’t being sympathetic. I sat there between them barely getting a word in.’
Moni imagined a younger, hemmed-in version of her friend. It was not easy to do so.
Salma went on, ‘There were rows afterwards between myself and my mother. There were rows between my mother and my father when he found out that she had gone to meet Amir behind his back. “Why should we believe him?” my father said. “All this talk of his mother’s illness and father’s court case could be a lie.” In the middle of this poisonous atmosphere, Uncle Emad stepped in. “I have a fantastic suitor for Salma,” he said.’
This was where Salma chose to pause in her story. It was an odd place to stop because it was a beginning. It was even before meeting David. A day in which she was at her desk trying to study, the atmosphere which she had described as poisonous wafting through the flat. For days, her mother hadn’t spoken to her. It was as if she didn’t exist. Without being told she was forbidden to go out, she had stopped going out. Classes were done for the year and it was study break. Usually she would have gone out to study at a friend’s house (where Amir would also be) or she would have gone to the library. Now, she just stayed at home, staring at her notes. It was, she remembered, unexpectedly hot for that time of year. Her jogging bottoms, which she wore as home clothes, felt heavy. Her long-sleeved T-shirt was irritating. But it was her mother who always supervised the seasonal shift in clothes. A whole ritual in which the winter clothes were folded with naphthalene mothballs and packed away. Then the summer clothes would be brought out and aired before being used. Salma did not dare initiate a conversation with her mother about switching to summer clothes. She sat in her room with the window wide open and longed for a cold climate. Hearing Uncle Emad’s jovial voice outside was an escape.
Moni interrupted Salma’s thoughts. ‘But didn’t they mind that he was a foreigner? Didn’t they think that one day you would leave the country and not be with them again? Wasn’t the cultural difference a problem?’
Salma looked at her friend. She liked Moni’s methodical mind. She had recognised it from early on, buried under the jam that was mother and carer. ‘David’s favourable circumstances drugged them. My parents discussed these things that you just said, they voiced these objections, but they came out muted, through a haze of wonder. He was so different from anyone they had known, so beyond their experience that they couldn’t quiz him or doubt him or joke with him. They suddenly went flat; they put all their trust in Uncle Emad’s endorsement and said that it was up to me. Instead of the poisonous atmosphere, they were suddenly tiptoeing around me, sort of in respect. Later, the cultural differences did become a problem for them. But by then, David’s time in Egypt was coming to an end and we moved here. Funny enough, my parents were shocked. They never expected him to leave, they thought he would be in Egypt for ever. It’s strange that they thought that way. And to answer your question, at first they didn’t mind that he was a foreigner. But afterwards, when my younger sister got married, it was obvious that they were closer to her husband than they were to David. They got along better with him.’
Moni said, ‘I’m surprised. The way you met is more conventional than I thought. I was guessing that you worked together in the same company and then fell in love. Did he accept this kind of courtship?’
‘No, he didn’t accept everything,’ Salma said. ‘For example, he didn’t want to meet my parents until he had met
