I was born in Greece, to an English mother and Greek father of Egyptian origin,
forty-three years ago; four years after my sister and a month too soon. My childhood
was a happy one, though I never really felt Athens was my home, as our family had
no real roots there. Still, ever adaptable on the surface and brought up to believe
that being different was a good thing, I never found it difficult to fit in and
adopted my “difference” as part of my identity, which to a great extent
it was. Part of me, however, was always elsewhere; my mother’s relatives were
scattered all over the UK and my father’s were all in Egypt, having refused
to leave when Nasser re-claimed the dusty land of the pharaohs in the ’50s.
Perhaps because Egypt was closer than England, perhaps because it was warmer, I
always summered there.
::
Throughout the year, my mind would wander to Egypt and I would patiently wait for
the school holidays when, at last, I would be able to return again and spend time
with people who really knew me, people to whom I did not need to explain my various
peculiarities because they were of the same stock: my family had its own language,
a mixture of Greek, French, English, and Arabic, which nobody else seemed to understand;
they ate the orange peel and made marmalade out of the fruit, discussed their digestive
system at length and in detail regardless of whether we had guests because it was
“the most natural thing in the world”; they talked about the topic of
the hour, whether it was money, sex, or death regardless of the age or sensitivities
of those present. It was the ideal setting for me: I had an insatiable imagination
and the stories I read in children’s books were nowhere near as thrilling
as the ones recounted by my female relatives in Egypt.
::
From the age of six, as soon as schools closed for the summer—and in Greece
they close for three full months—I would be packed off to Cairo to spend the
summer with the Petridou sisters: my grandmother Layla and my two great aunts Roxanne
and Nonni. And I loved it, every second of it. From the moment of arrival, when
the airplane doors opened and my face was almost suffocated by Cairo’s humid
air, I felt I was returning home. I cannot explain it, for I wasn’t even born
there, but something about the sounds and smells of Egypt has always filled me with
a sense of security and comfort. Now, to anyone who has been to Cairo airport this
may be surprising, for, if anything, it is bizarre, frightening even; it is an overpowering
assault on the senses. Wandering cats, swaying women clad in black with heels spilling
over sandal soles, jaded-looking soldiers in whom heat and routine have turned the
excitement of circumstantial power into boredom and an air of stale authority. As
though designed to stun travelers into a state of submissiveness, Cairo airport
sucks you in like a hot, intoxicating vortex, from which you emerge, a few hours
later, having finally obtained the obligatory visa, breathless but exhilarated.
::
Overwhelming though they may at times be, those first few hours spent in Cairo airport
are a rite of passage of sorts, an initiation. Whereas in other countries it may
take you a few days to adjust to a different pace, in Cairo you are forced into
it. By the time you have walked down the last stretch of airport, glass panes on
either side with hundreds of amused faces staring at you, you are ready for it;
at least I always was. The sounds, the smells, the colours and that tremendous,
thundering pulse of a city which has been bleeding into the desert from the banks
of the Nile like dye on cloth for thousands of years.
I never knew who would be collecting me, but it was always someone I knew well.
Sometimes it was my grandmother, sometimes a family friend, other times a whole
group of people would turn up. A few dusty, sticky hugs later we would set off through
the mad traffic and head home to the lovely Zamalek, my family’s neighbourhood,
and the magic would really begin.
::
My days were either spent wandering around Zamalek with Saad, my father’s
adopted brother, who never seemed to have any real work to do, or with Frank, Roxanne’s
best friend. When I was really little, Saad would put me on his shoulders and we
would cycle through the market on a battered old blue bike that had no brakes. Sometimes,
as we approached a fruit stall belonging to someone he knew, he would call out “banana
ya, Angie!” and I would stretch out my arm and grab a bunch as we cycled past.
The most exciting thing that could and often did happen on those wonderful rides
through Zamalek, was to collide with a flying cockroach and end up with it tangled
up in my impossibly long hair; they were the color of dates, they were enormous,
and they flew at great speed, making the experience all the more frightening and
exciting. These collisions left me unruffled, and I would often bear the awesome
perpetrators around like a special, albeit bizarre trophy, while quite happily eating
bananas or prickly pears and drinking sugarcane juice in musty cafes.
::
The days I spent with Frank were more sophisticated and our outings continued long
after my mad bike-rides with Saad had come to an end. Frank was the first man I
ever fell in love with; when I first met him he was fifty-five and I was six and
instantly and irreversibly smitten. He lived in the flat above my Aunt Roxanne’s
and often left her gatherings early to go and read, write, or listen to music. We
hadn’t spent any time alone together that first summer until one evening,
after he left to go upstairs, I decided that I had had enough of the noise and chatter
and, without telling anyone where I was going, left the flat quietly, climbed the
warn, marble stairs and knocked on his heavy door.
The door receded and Frank appeared. The corridor was dark, the light in his apartment
a soft yellow and, as he stood framed by the casing looking down at me, almost smiling,
I thought he looked like he was made of rubber letters: an O balanced on an S balanced
on a topsy-turvy Y. I had asked my aunt why he always seemed to lean this way or
that, and she had said something about a skiing accident, but all I could see, standing
in the doorway, looking up at him, was an impish face with round watery eyes and
a body that looked magically bendy.
“Can I sit with you?” I asked. “It’s very noisy downstairs.”
“Isn’t it? I thought so too,” said Frank, not looking at all surprised,
and invited me in.
I did not know at the time that he almost never had people over. He showed me in
as though my being there was the most natural thing in the world and poured me a
cup of mint tea. He sat down next to me and, picking up the book on Nubia he had
been looking at when I knocked on his door, began to show me portraits and landscapes
of a culture I had only heard about and asked me what I thought of them. That is
how our friendship began.
::
Throughout the years, he would come round to collect me from my grandmother’s
flat in the mornings and together we would walk along the banks of the Nile. He
would talk to me about books and music, Raymond Roussel and Zinca Milanov, his favourite
opera singer, how when he had met her, he had wanted to touch her, feel her pulse,
for surely, she could not be human, her voice was ethereal. On wonderfully magical
sprees of decadence we would go to the Metro cinema in the early afternoon
and, after wading through layers of discarded pumpkinseed shells, would sit in the
tired-looking red velvet seats and watch old classics, The Barefoot Contessa,
Suddenly Last Summer, often staying for a second showing. We would emerge from
the darkness hours later like sleepwalkers, and blinded by the indefatigable Egyptian
sun, would walk to Groppi, one of Cairo’s oldest and smokiest coffee
shops, to drink sweet black tea and eat palmiers and almond cakes flavored
with rose water. We would talk until dusk, and then, encouraged by the coolness
of the evening, would make our way back home.
::
When I say “home”, I use the term quite loosely. There were two homes
to which I could go. The first was my grandmother’s which, like her, was quite
normal and conventional. I usually only went there to sleep. The second home, the
one where I spent most of my evenings, was that of my great aunt’s, Roxanne.
Of the three sisters, Roxanne was the most eccentric. Disowned by my rich great-grandfather
for eloping with a man who was to become the leader of the communist party of Egypt,
Roxanne enjoyed a life of intellectual and social abundance. Her infamous marriage
left her burdened with tragedy but surrounded by love and respect: her husband,
Shuhdi, was tortured to death in a Cairo prison in 1960, leaving her widowed with
a two-year-old daughter, but surrounded by a circle of adoring friends. These
people—political activists, poets, writers, artists, and leftover Europeans—were
always in Roxanne’s beautiful flat on the banks of the Nile, a flat whose door
was always open and whose smoke-filled rooms were alive with discussions, arguments,
and the mesmerizing music of Om Kalthoum, Verdi and Mahler.
::
Most evenings, I would walk up the stairs towards the enormous wooden door, heady
with the intoxicating romance of it all. Drawn by the familiar sound of voices and
laughter floating out of the flat through the humid air, I would leave the city
behind for a few hours and enter a world alive with incredible stories of days past,
stories that took place in homes long abandoned in an Egypt that was exciting, terrible,
but always beautiful.
::
It was to this Egypt that I returned ten years ago to bid farewell to Frank and
to the country I had known and loved so well. The Petridou sisters and their brilliant
entourage had all long departed. In a way it was quite fitting that it should be
Frank who would be waiting for me; he had always said he would be the last one to
leave, one way or another. On the surface the city was quite altered, of course,
and Frank and I much older. But sitting in his room in the American Hospital, with
its duck-egg walls and dusty harem light, it was as if only one more winter had
passed. We had sweet black tea with rose water almond cakes and talked about books
and music. When Frank drifted off for a while, I closed my eyes and, listening through
the silence, I realized the past had gently joined us, conjured by our words and
memories that lingered in the air; I heard the laughter of people I had thought
had been silenced forever and saw faces that for years had been blurred. When Frank
woke up, he thought I was Zinca Milanov and touched me to feel my heart beat.
::
Walking away from that hospital room is the hardest thing I have ever done; for
years I had been busy living what I thought of as “real life” and had
failed to realize that year by year, my other life had been slipping irretrievably
out of reach. Leaving Frank’s side for the last time I felt bare, stripped
of context. I had walked into that room as the child that had left Egypt not knowing
it would be too late when I finally returned, and was walking out a shattered adult,
crushed by the sense of loss I had brought upon myself. He made it easier, of course.
When the time came for me to leave, he gave me paper and pen and made me write a
list of all the things he wanted me to bring when I returned: Darjeeling First Flush,
Shortbread biscuits, Beethoven’s String Quartets and Rilke’s Notebook
of Malte Laurids Brigge. He knew I didn’t want to say goodbye and spoke
of things I wanted to hear.
::
I remembered a time years earlier, when I was around nine years old. Frank and I
were sitting on the roof of the old house in Athens. It was the only summer he would
spend in Greece and I cannot remember why I wasn’t in Cairo. It was evening,
and, though the air was cool, the tiles were still emanating heat. We were laughing
because we kept having to move our bottoms around because we were getting too hot,
but we liked the quiet, the distance, and didn’t want to leave.
“If you were younger and I was older, if it was another time, would you have
fallen in love with me?” I asked him.
“Oh yes, definitely,” he said emphatically and I loved him, there and
then, for being brave enough to say, so simply, what I wanted to hear.
::
Many years have passed since then, but there are moments when I feel the sense of
loss as acutely as ever. It’s triggered by the simplest things: a tin of
Darjeeling First Flush, the scent of rose water, smoke-filled rooms. But I learned
to cherish the generosity and love of people much older than me, and am privileged
to have met many more, who have shared their stories and their memories, have let
me see the light in their eyes as they have remembered their past, teaching me,
unwittingly, that what has been loved can never be lost, so long as it is shared.
hails from Greece, England, and Egypt. She attended Greek school and has a BA in
English Literature & Politics (University of York) and an MA in Life Writing
(University of East Anglia). Ms. Athanassiades writes creative nonfiction about
people, nature, and time, how its passage affects perception and the material
and notional nature of things. She is currently writing essays on belonging
and displacement, and on women from ancient Greek mythology and drama.
One of her short works received a favourable review in TLS: The Times Literary
Supplement. In addition, KYSO Flash published in its debut issue in October
2014 two of her essays, and nominated one of them for a Pushcart Prize.