The Map of Love

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall.

New York City, February 1997

Oh what a dear, ravishing thing is the beginning of an Amour!

Aphra Behn, c. 1680

Cairo, May 1997

My journal is of no use on such occasions for it would merely encourage the expression of these emotions that threaten me and that I must put aside.

I cannot believe that he is happy.

Cairo, April 1997

An old-fashioned trunk made of brown leather, cracked now and dry, with a vaulted top over which run two straps fastened with brass buckles black with age and neglect.

The American had come to Amal’s house. Her name was Isabel Parkman and the trunk was locked in the boot of the car she had hired. Amal could not pretend she was not wary. Wary and weary in advance: an American woman – a journalist, she had said on the phone. But she said Amal’s brother had told her to call and so Amal agreed to see her. And braced herself: the fundamentalists, the veil, the cold peace, polygamy, women’s status in Islam, female genital mutilation – which would it be?

But Isabel Parkman was not brash or strident; in fact she was rather diffident, almost shy. She had met Amal’s brother in New York. She had told him she was coming to Egypt to do a project on the millennium, and he had given her Amal’s number. Amal said she doubted whether Isabel would come across anyone with grand millennial views or theories. She said that she thought Isabel would find that on the whole everyone was simply worried – worried sick about what would become of Egypt, the Arab countries, ‘le tiers monde’, in the twenty-first century. But she gave her coffee and some names and Isabel went away.

You can buy one today in the Ghuriyya for twenty Egyptian pounds

A story can start from the oddest things: a magic lamp, a conversation overheard, a shadow moving on a wall. For Amal al-Ghamrawi, this story started with a trunk.