“Take my camel, dear,” said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
- opening line of The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
My cousin Sissy Schotten, married to a sporting guns dealer and former spy and prisoner of Israel, lived in Maadi, Cairo and spoke not a word of Arabic but looked like an Egyptian grande dame- black haired pulled back tight in a bun, dark eyed both in iris and upper lid, round faced and well powdered, and quite rotund.
She drove a compact car and when pulled over by the traffic police- no doubt fishing for rishwa- would flutter her tongue in a high pitched trill and drive off in a cloud of dust. No point in discussing a bribe without sharing a common language. Sisi means pony in Arabic, not milk cow.
I was in Cairo that year studying Arabic and I went to Sissy’s apartment once or twice as a way to be nice to a family cousin- don’t ask me how we were related- from St.Louis. Sometimes she took me to the Shooting Club overlooking the Nile for lunch, which I liked more than eating at her place.
I never saw her husband Ahmad Osman on those days but once I walked in to his gun shop in Giza to say hello. He knew who I was and greeted me fondly. I always wondered if the shop was a front for something else, and I was right to wonder, because later I read a book about Egypt’s espionage war against Israel, and how he was kidnapped by Mossad from Europe and put in a Tel Aviv prison until released in a spy swap. He was nicknamed “the Professor” because he taught other Arab prisoners how to read.
Sissy later told me the story of how they had met. She was in Seville with her mother and father to study flamenco guitar, her voice certainly deep enough to sing cante jondo. Ahmad was sitting at the next cafe table and asked her father’s permission to speak with her. Sissy had been long unmarried and was very agreeable. They spoke amiably and exchanged addresses. Ahmad then disappeared.
Months later letters started to arrive in St. Louis with European stamps. They were from Ahmad, he said he was not able to be specific about his whereabouts but asked that they become pen pals. They did, at first avidly, then quite loyally, and at last romantically. A year later, Ahmad came to St. Louis to ask for her hand and took her home to Cairo.
Sissy was the centerpiece of a social hub of American expats and visitors. She went to the Maadi Catholic church and knew the Khan al-Khalili tourist souk very well. At Christmas a year later when I was back from Cairo and she was in St.Louis to visit her aged mother, she left a present for me at my house. A brass door plate with my name etched in English, Arabic, and Egyptian Hieratic.
I did not stay in touch with Sissy. I heard later that Ahmad and she had moved to Budapest, so he could be closer to suppliers for his sporting gun business, which surely sounded suspicious to me. Maybe he was still a spy. And this was before the fall of Communism. My mother had her new address, and when another cousin visited Budapest one winter she looked her up and reported that she lived in an unheated Soviet era concrete apartment block far from the city center. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I still have the brass name plate on my front door, and I think of her most times I see it, which is almost daily.
