“You should have had your baby at home,” Maman announced the day after her arrival, snail tracks of mascara running down her face. “You should have gone to Dr. Amenhotep Ghobrial. Everything would have been fine then.”

By home, of course, she meant Alexandria. Dr. Ghobrial had delivered Célia and me and was therefore the only obstetrician to be trusted. Maman hadn’t said so, but I’d seen it in every tear and wringing hand and headshake. And now this! Look how we’re battered by fate! As if the threat of exile were not enough, another piece of trash had been thrown on the midden of her misfortunes.

Iris said, in good clear schoolgirl French, “Sometimes a baby’s heart simply stops beating. Nobody knows why.”

Maman affected not to understand her. “Quoi?” she said, raising her head as if at a mysterious noise, with a faint, delicate frown. “Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit?” What’s she saying?

“Mais ferme-la, Maman,” cried Célia, marching outside into our small garden and lighting a cigarette. I had never heard anyone tell Maman to shut her gob before. Célia was smoking to keep herself awake, being almost exactly upside down with jet lag, and to stop herself strangling Maman.

“I’m sorry my mother’s so rude,” I said later to Iris. We were clearing up and Iris was drying a crystal glass with a tea towel of Belfast linen.

“She has a lot to contend with,” said Iris, as the glass in her hand threw a rainbow over the wall.

—

Three days later my family left. How could they help me? My father did little but smoke, my mother ran through her tramadols and lost her voice from crying. Iris was right: they were already shaken. Ever since the end of the war, unrest had been swelling: Cairo burning in riots, the army on the streets of Alexandria. Everyone who was too French or Greek or Italian or Lebanese, too Orthodox or Catholic or Jewish to be counted as a proper Egyptian anymore, was packing bags, fearing that if they did not go now, they might be forced to leave everything behind. At the beginning of my pregnancy I had been replying to a letter from Maman when I happened to write Canal Zone (where the British troops, retreating from the country, had garrisoned themselves), and at the same moment I had a gripe of morning sickness that fused with the words, so that henceforward each time I saw Canal Zone written down I tasted sickness shot through with joy for the baby. I couldn’t think of those letters, of the news from Egypt, without remembering that precious sick joy.