that Milou was both, her father watched her constantly and lived in terror of the swashbuckler who would lure her away and ruin her father’s patched-up life for the second and final time. For a swashbuckler it would have to be. You only had to look at thegirl—the long, strong legs; the lean waist; the straight back; the broad forehead, wide-set eyes, and brilliant hair—to see the swarthy, muscled, sweating, tobacco-spitting son of a bitch who would claim her. Khawaga Vasilakis’s paunch trembled with apprehension and distaste and he chewed on his mustache.
But Milou saw Philippe amid the incense and the burning candles in the Greek Orthodox cathedral and thought he looked like an angel: the boy—he could hardly be called a man—was so fair and so still. He sat at the far end of the pew on the other side of the aisle, the bridegroom’s side. He was so separate that he appeared to belong more to the shining Byzantine icons on the walls than to the mass of breathing, moving people around him. Milou could see only his head in a three-quarter profile. His face was pale and fine-featured. Gleaming black hair rose smoothly from a white brow. His nose was chiseled; his mouth wide, his lips narrow and ascetic. She could not make out the color of his unmoving eyes. But it was a quality of serenity, a combination of his utter stillness and the way his head shone like an illumination in the dim cathedral, that so captured Milou.
Having no mother to do this work for her, Milou managed to find out who he was and—despite her dismay at confirming that he was indeed only seventeen and still at school with the Jesuits, the Frères—she contrived an introduction. Milou found that Philippe stood a few centimeters taller than her. She found that his eyes were green-gray and that his voice was mellow. His French was chic, more chic than herown, and his Arabic more broken. She found that even close up, his skin kept its luminous quality. She imagined that there was something extraordinary—extramortal, almost—about him, and longed to reach out and touch his face just on that fragile, contoured cheekbone and rest her fingertips in the shallow dips at the outer corners of his black-fringed eyes. She found out that he was the son of Yanni Panayotis, the grocer, and therefore that he was a neighbor of one of her father’s oldest friends: Ismail Morsi, who owned a furniture shop in the market in Ataba Square.
Philippe bowed his head slightly, as though the better to hear anything she might say. He smiled, and his eyes said that something amazing had happened. Milou surprised herself; she had never before felt this rushing frailty, this tremulous energy, and it never occurred to her to wonder whether he had felt it too.
The year was 1946 and the victorious Allied soldiers were everywhere in the city. Khawaga Vasilakis thought his daughter showed remarkable acumen when she announced that since their business was doing well, it was foolish to go on buying provisions piecemeal from the neighboring shops. From now on, she declared, she would buy what they needed once a week, wholesale, from the market.
Yanni Panayotis’s grocery was on the very outer fringe of the market—almost, in fact, in Shari el-Khaleeg, that wide road which until so recently would turn into a river in the season of the flood. Milou had never been that far from rue Sarwat before, and the first time she went, Faheema, whoknew all the roads and the alleys of the city, went with her. They walked down King Fouad Street and stared in the windows of the grands magasins, then crossed Opera Square, through the very tip of the notorious Azbakiyyah District, across the busy swirl of Ataba Square and into the teeming, narrow Mouski. Faheema started to point out grocers’ shops in the alleys along the way, but Milou would have none of them. It had to be Yanni Panayotis’s store they went to, and his was the farthest one of all. Faheema, who was neither young nor green and
But Milou saw Philippe amid the incense and the burning candles in the Greek Orthodox cathedral and thought he looked like an angel: the boy—he could hardly be called a man—was so fair and so still. He sat at the far end of the pew on the other side of the aisle, the bridegroom’s side. He was so separate that he appeared to belong more to the shining Byzantine icons on the walls than to the mass of breathing, moving people around him. Milou could see only his head in a three-quarter profile. His face was pale and fine-featured. Gleaming black hair rose smoothly from a white brow. His nose was chiseled; his mouth wide, his lips narrow and ascetic. She could not make out the color of his unmoving eyes. But it was a quality of serenity, a combination of his utter stillness and the way his head shone like an illumination in the dim cathedral, that so captured Milou.
Having no mother to do this work for her, Milou managed to find out who he was and—despite her dismay at confirming that he was indeed only seventeen and still at school with the Jesuits, the Frères—she contrived an introduction. Milou found that Philippe stood a few centimeters taller than her. She found that his eyes were green-gray and that his voice was mellow. His French was chic, more chic than herown, and his Arabic more broken. She found that even close up, his skin kept its luminous quality. She imagined that there was something extraordinary—extramortal, almost—about him, and longed to reach out and touch his face just on that fragile, contoured cheekbone and rest her fingertips in the shallow dips at the outer corners of his black-fringed eyes. She found out that he was the son of Yanni Panayotis, the grocer, and therefore that he was a neighbor of one of her father’s oldest friends: Ismail Morsi, who owned a furniture shop in the market in Ataba Square.
Philippe bowed his head slightly, as though the better to hear anything she might say. He smiled, and his eyes said that something amazing had happened. Milou surprised herself; she had never before felt this rushing frailty, this tremulous energy, and it never occurred to her to wonder whether he had felt it too.
The year was 1946 and the victorious Allied soldiers were everywhere in the city. Khawaga Vasilakis thought his daughter showed remarkable acumen when she announced that since their business was doing well, it was foolish to go on buying provisions piecemeal from the neighboring shops. From now on, she declared, she would buy what they needed once a week, wholesale, from the market.
Yanni Panayotis’s grocery was on the very outer fringe of the market—almost, in fact, in Shari el-Khaleeg, that wide road which until so recently would turn into a river in the season of the flood. Milou had never been that far from rue Sarwat before, and the first time she went, Faheema, whoknew all the roads and the alleys of the city, went with her. They walked down King Fouad Street and stared in the windows of the grands magasins, then crossed Opera Square, through the very tip of the notorious Azbakiyyah District, across the busy swirl of Ataba Square and into the teeming, narrow Mouski. Faheema started to point out grocers’ shops in the alleys along the way, but Milou would have none of them. It had to be Yanni Panayotis’s store they went to, and his was the farthest one of all. Faheema, who was neither young nor green and
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