“ ‘You are much changed,’ she murmured again to her husband, as they lay, naked lovers, beneath the leaves of the trees. ‘You are much changed.’
“At this the jinn made to speak, but at once she interrupted him. ‘It is said that the innocents will find their path to paradise. I know of no crimes of which I am guilty, but if I am to stay shriven, surely my best safety lies in innocence. Were a spirit of the deep to abuse me, why then I am abused. But were I to revel in that debasement, why I am a harlot and a witch, and should be branded for the same. Is it not so?’
“Hearing this, the jinn wisely did not speak, for he knew my grandmother’s meaning. Instead, silent a long time they lay beneath the breath of the river’s breeze, until at last he said, ‘To love whom one loves, to be whom one would be, this does not seem against the will of the Creator. For he made you to love, and made you to life, and to deny this is to deny the will of Allah.’
“My grandmother shot the jinn a look of ivory arrows, piercing straight through his soul to the truth of his heart, so much that he almost leaped from the skin he was inhabiting; then she smiled and said, ‘And if Allah made others to mischief?’
‘ “Then clearly,’ he replied, ‘there is a purpose.’
“For ten years the jinn remained by my grandmother’s side, loving her as she loved him, and never did they speak of the alteration in her husband or question how it had come to pass but, as innocents do, accepted everything of each other, and were truly the loveliest couple in creation.
“Then war came to the land, and the soldiers came for the husband, who had in his former time committed some deep indiscretion against the rulers of Cairo. And as the soldiers took hold of the husband’s arms, the jinn, incensed with anger and confused with terror, fled the body he had worn for ten years and vanished spinning into the night. Seeing this, the soldiers cried out against all sorcery and at once beheaded the husband where he stood, throwing his corpse to the crocodiles. My grandmother fell weeping by the crimson waters, but the soldiers called her a witch and took her to the jail, where first a judge, then a sacred wise man called her blasphemer. They threw her into the deepest dungeon in Cairo, where foul men practised against her evil acts, and every night she cried out for her jinn, for her husband, for her lost lover and protector, but he did not come, for jinn are as changeable as the moon, as fearful as the sea, and her cries were lost far beneath the stones.
“Her torment only ceased when the men who were her tormentors saw that she was with child. At this, many wanted her cast to the bottom of a pit, but one took pity on her and smuggled her out into the foggy night. Desperate and bleeding, she staggered through the streets, collapsing at last at the doors of a madrasa, where the kind imam took pity and nurtured her back to health.
“Yet the dungeon had wounded my grandmother deeper than flesh, and when the childbirth came, it was tormented, foul and bloody, for the child she was giving birth to was that of the jinn, and a creature as much fire as it was mortal. As it was born it burned my mother from the inside, its magical essence too much for her womb to bear, and seeing this infant as it fell mewling into the world, the imam was taken with a great confusion as to what he was to do. He turned to give the babe to his mother, but his mother was dead.
“Alone with the screaming child and the woman’s corpse, the imam prayed to Allah for guidance, and as he did, it came to him that he became as a jinn himself, for his mind seemed to slip into that of the child’s own, and within that little body he felt the terror, the pain, the grief, but above all the love that the child’s father had felt for my dead grandmother, brighter than the flames that had destroyed her. Returning to his senses, he knew then that he could not kill the child, created though it was in a union of obscenity, for it was also a child of the purest love. So he raised the child, and in time that child became a man, and the man lay with women, and the women became my grandmothers, each gifted with a little of the jinn’s blood, the desert’s fire and the love of an immortal soul.”
Nour Sayegh finished speaking, and as the half-attentive café beneath the Paris streets applauded her tale, I sat dumb in my corner and stared into the eyes of this child, who had come from the flesh of Ayesha bint Kamal and Abdul al-Mu’allim al-Ninowy; but also from my soul.
Chapter 60
Paris.
What may I say of Paris?
That the French never take no for an answer.
Wars, riots and rebellions, governments formed and overthrown, regular as winter flu; crushing poverty and great wealth. Through all of this Paris has stayed Paris, crown of France, city of boulevards, chic and red wine.
In romantic movies Paris is the Seine and sentimental understandings beneath the burgundy awnings of the local café, where waiters in crisp white aprons serve tiny croissants on silver plates and whisper philosophical truths about love.
In American thrillers Paris is corruption, its grimy Metro hiding beady-eyed strangers chewing unknown herbs in the corners of their mouths, who spit on the track and snigger at young women and chase each other down the cobbles of Montmartre.
To children Paris is the double-decker train and the Eiffel Tower; to wealthy adults it’s the sound of champagne popping on the top-floor restaurant beside Notre-Dame. To nationalists it’s the tricolour flying by the Arc de Triomphe, and to historians it’s the same, though perhaps the historians look upon the red, white and blue with a little more circumspection.
To me Paris is a beautiful place to spend May, June and September, hideous in August, drab in February and at its most magical when the drains are opened to wash away yesterday’s dirt, turning the city streets into a roaring fountain.
To Aquarius Paris was the last known location of the entity known as Janus.
I ditched Salome at the arrivals lounge of Charles de Gaulle airport and walked to the taxi rank in the security guard who’d been about to search me. There I caught a taxi driver by the arm, but was so repulsed by the stench of booze on my breath and the migraine pounding against the side of my skull that I went instead to my neighbour driver and slipped into him, easing cautiously out of the taxi rank with my hire sign off.
Roadworks on the Autoroute du Nord left me fuming, fingers drumming while the radio played bad Europop. When the traffic report kicked in, overriding the singer’s expression of the notion that his lover was his light, his breath, his joy, his food, his buttered toast, it declared that the tailback ran all the way to the Périphérique, and with a hiss of frustration I pulled off the autoroute and went looking for a station.
At Drancy I caught the RER and a young woman with dyed blonde hair and, alone in the scratched corner of my carriage, rifled through my purse in search of who I was. I was Monique Darriet, and I was carrying fifty euros in notes and coins, a door key to location unknown, a tube of lipstick, a mobile phone, two condoms and an insulin kit. Pulling up my sleeve, a bracelet revealed me to be diabetic and asked that you dial for emergency assistance immediately.
I shuffled into an old man with a pencil moustache at Stade de France. He wasn’t as handsome nor indeed as comfortable as Monique, but I wasn’t in the mood to manage my blood sugars.