The Map of Love

In what seems to be another diary entry labeled “Cairo, April 1997,” the narration moves into the first person: Amal is now speaking to us (10). She recounts a dream of her grandparents’ beautiful house, and of meeting an uncle whom she never met in life. This house, she says, is now a museum to which she took her son some years ago when he was small. She wonders what her life would have been like if her family had kept this house.

However, she says, this is not her story, but the story of the contents of the trunk introduced to us in the previous chapter—of Isabel, who brought her the trunk, and of Isabel’s great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne, an Englishwoman of the late Victorian era. Amal takes a special interest in Anna’s journal, and has, she says, read it many times. Passages of the journal are here quoted at length.

Anna’s journal describes her unhappy marriage. She respects her husband, Edward, but does not feel close to him; her hopes that their relationship would deepen after marriage have been disappointed. She’s also grieving her mother and father, whom she remembers with great affection.

She describes a dinner party at which the guests discuss colonialism, debating whether “savage nations” have a right to exist (13). Privately, Anna dislikes the jingoism displayed by many of the guests. When her father-in-law, Sir Charles, gets angry at the partygoers’ xenophobia and describes how he intends to send his son traveling so that he’ll have a clearer idea of the world, Anna wishes that she could go.

Anna also describes her upset when her husband comes to sleep with her: she must develop strategies to distract herself so that she doesn’t get overwhelmed with tears after his visits. She feels that her misery is due to some female weakness and tries to master herself—but she feels that her husband must privately be equally unhappy.

Amal’s diary moves forward a month into May 1997. Isabel is recounting the story of how she met Amal’s brother, and Amal narrates this meeting in the past tense under the heading of a different date: February 1997. Isabel meets Amal’s brother Omar at an elegant party in Manhattan. Isabel is a researcher developing a project about the coming millennium; her theory is that America, as a young country, is reacting to the prospect of the new millennium differently than an older country would. She’s curious to do research in Egypt, as it’s the country with the longest continuous stretch of recorded history. Omar, who is a famous (if controversial) pianist and conductor, seems taken with her and gives her his phone number so they can discuss her idea further. The party’s hostess notes that Omar is old enough to be Isabel’s father, but Isabel isn’t troubled by this.

At home in her own apartment, Isabel reflects on how free she feels since her divorce from her former husband, Irving. She takes a bath and drifts into memories of her own brother, who died when he was fourteen—and wonders whether tomorrow would be too soon to give Omar a call.

Back in Cairo in May 1997, Amal dips into Anna Winterbourne’s journal again. She begins to do research to fill in the gaps in Anna’s account and begins to piece together a story. Moving back in time, she opens a new heading, “London, October 1898 to March 1899,” and begins to tell Anna’s story in the present tense, just as she told Isabel’s, but weaves excerpts from the journal into her narrative (26).

Edward, Anna’s husband, has recently returned from travels in “the Soudan,” where he has been involved in colonial warfare, and he seems unwell. He’s become nervous, agitated, intolerant, and reclusive (27). Anna worries that he’s sick; his strange behavior continues for weeks. Anna is racked with guilt over her inability to do anything to help her husband. To console herself, she visits the South Kensington Museum (the museum we now call the V&A) and looks at the Frederick Lewis paintings of Egypt that are on display there.

Sir Charles, Edward’s father, is worried enough about his son that he has the shot removed from all the guns in the house. He’s also outraged over the behavior of the British Empire in the Soudan and writes an angry letter to the Times about his country’s deviance and irresponsibility. Anna records the stories he tells her of English war crimes in the Soudan, including the grotesque beheading of a holy man. The English papers publish news of terrible massacres in which the English and Egyptian forces killed thousands.

At last, Edward wastes away and dies. Anna believes that he was so horror-struck by his participation in the Soudanese massacres that he died, at least in part, of shame at his betrayal of his own principles.

Amal tells the story of Anna’s grief. After Edward’s death, Anna is numb for months, writing incessantly in her diary of her wish that she could have somehow gotten through to Edward. At this point, Isabel interjects: Anna is blaming herself for something that wasn’t her fault. We get a glimpse of Isabel’s visit to Amal. They’re sitting in Amal’s apartment, chatting about the journal. There’s a hint that Amal may have already known a little bit about Isabel’s history: we learn that Amal’s father told her the story of Isabel’s mother, Jasmine (Anna’s granddaughter). Isabel confides to Amal that Jasmine is now in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s. Amal is startled and upset both by the dearth of mourning rituals in Anna’s stories and Isabel’s not-especially-close relationship with her ailing mother.

We return to Anna’s story and learn how she finally broke her numbness: listening to a concert in Italy, she is suddenly moved by grief and collapses. For many months she is ill; she can get out of bed only in the spring of the next year, when she records being delighted to find one single cluster of blossoms left on the beech tree in her garden. She returns, as well, to the South Kensington Museum, but finds that her enjoyment of her old favorite paintings is now tempered with doubts: does the calm, beautiful world the Lewis pictures portray really exist?

We return to March 1997, picking up the story of Isabel in New York again. She has her information-gathering lunch with Omar and then arranges to see him again; she feels she is already deeply in love with him and marvels at how quickly this feeling has come over her. (Amal, narrating, notes that many women have fallen for Omar’s good looks and charisma before.)

Then Isabel goes to visit her ailing mother, Jasmine, at her nursing home. Jasmine is faded and a little sad; the nursing home staff have cut her hair, of which she was always proud in her younger days. Isabel wants to tell her about Omar, but Jasmine can only talk about the past and reminisces about Isabel’s father, Jonathan, and her dead brother, Valentine. She also drops a hint that she had an affair but doesn’t say with whom and ends the conversation before Isabel can get any more details out of her.

The next chapter opens with a passage from Anna’s letters, written in September 1900. She writes to a friend, Caroline, of her arrival in Alexandria on the day that a new Greek Orthodox Patriarch is being installed there. She observes the ceremony and explains to her maidservant Emily the strange political situation: Egypt won independence from the Ottoman Sultan some sixty years ago, though it is still called part of the Ottoman Empire and is actually being ruled by the British—so, counting the Patriarch, the country has three leaders. She also observes that, while she often brings up a Mr. James Barrington who has been sent to escort her, Caroline shouldn’t get her hopes up: Mr. Barrington is far too young for her.

Amal picks up the narrative again, commenting that Anna’s letter seems self-conscious, as if she were preparing it for a book of impressions of Egypt—but also that she’s happy that Anna gave up the journal in which she had recorded her grief. She wishes that she were there to show Anna around, then checks herself: “Show her around? I, who have placed myself more or less under house arrest, moving from my living room to my bedroom to the kitchen—avoiding my children’s rooms” (59).

Amal returns to a letter from Anna to Sir Charles, in which she describes the surprisingly friendly reception she meets in Egypt (despite the not-so-distant English atrocities there) and reflects on the two Cleopatra’s Needles (ancient monumental obelisks) that Egypt gave to Britain and the US—her guide, Mr. Barrington, notes that if Egypt didn’t give them away, the English and the Americans might just have taken them.

The chapter ends with an entry in a second, new journal, in which Anna records her thoughts of her dead husband, who sailed into the same port, and wonders: if they had travelled together, would some of the distance in their marriage have broken down?

Amal recounts a conversation with Isabel about how one might make a movie of Anna’s life. Isabel is eager to imagine this, but Amal is resistant: she feels possessive of Anna and doesn’t wish to imagine some actress playing her. Amal’s own imagination of Anna is clear and vivid: she describes how she sees Anna sitting at a window wearing a peignoir, and how she sees the color of that peignoir as the color of a paint chip she keeps on her desk. The paint’s name is “Drifter,” and Amal wanders into a fantasia about paint chips, discussing the way they reveal that while it’s easy to tell apart blue and green, it’s not so easy to say exactly where one turns into the other.

We return, then, to Anna’s letters. Anna writes to Sir Charles about having traveled from Alexandria to Cairo, where she has heard that an anti-occupation newspaper has been started. She also describes the overwhelming sensory experience of visiting the Bazaar, with its spice sellers and its tiny hole-in-the-wall shops.

Amal breaks in to wonder about Emily, the maidservant who accompanies Anna through all these adventures, noting that Anna portrays her as a typical lady’s maid. What was her history, and what were her hopes and desires? Amal can’t tell from what Anna writes.

In another letter, this time to Caroline, Anna records a dinner at which her colonial companions condescendingly discuss the visit of the Egyptian leader, the Khedive, to England. The same dinner companions speak rudely of the anti-colonial beliefs of Sir Charles, though indirectly: while respectful toward Anna’s father-in-law, they are dismissive of other people who share his principles.

Anna also records meeting with Lord Cromer, who is the head of the English presence in Egypt and speaks no Arabic himself. Amal reflects how strange it would be to try to control a country of which one has no understanding.

We return to Amal in 1997 Cairo as she waits for Isabel to arrive. Amal surveys the table where she’s collected all of Anna’s letters and journals, reflecting that she’s tried not to read ahead in the journals to see how they end—even though she already knows how Anna’s story ends (though she withholds this information from the reader). She looks out the window and sees a neighbor hanging her family’s laundry, and she reflects on the emptiness of her own home: “What do I wish? That I was still with my husband? That my children lived next door?” (75)

The doorbell rings; Amal expects Isabel, but instead it’s her friend Tahiyya (the wife of the apartment building’s doorman) and her little son, whose leg is in a cast. Tahiyya brings news: she’s pregnant again, though she and her husband had planned to have no more children after their first four. Tahiyya describes her exhaustion and her diabetic husband’s unhelpfulness with their four kids, and Amal wonders if her immediate judgmental thought—that his diabetes didn’t stop him from getting her pregnant again—is her own or inflected by Isabel’s way of thinking.

We return to Amal in 1997 Cairo as she waits for Isabel to arrive. Amal surveys the table where she’s collected all of Anna’s letters and journals, reflecting that she’s tried not to read ahead in the journals to see how they end—even though she already knows how Anna’s story ends (though she withholds this information from the reader). She looks out the window and sees a neighbor hanging her family’s laundry, and she reflects on the emptiness of her own home: “What do I wish? That I was still with my husband? That my children lived next door?” (75)

The doorbell rings; Amal expects Isabel, but instead it’s her friend Tahiyya (the wife of the apartment building’s doorman) and her little son, whose leg is in a cast. Tahiyya brings news: she’s pregnant again, though she and her husband had planned to have no more children after their first four. Tahiyya describes her exhaustion and her diabetic husband’s unhelpfulness with their four kids, and Amal wonders if her immediate judgmental thought—that his diabetes didn’t stop him from getting her pregnant again—is her own or inflected by Isabel’s way of thinking.

Isabel arrives and cajoles Amal into going out to dinner, though Amal would rather stay home. Over dinner, Isabel tries to persuade Amal to come to New York, and Amal resists, saying to herself that if she went to New York she would stop in London and see her husband. This dinner also reminds her of him: they used to eat here together.

Isabel and Amal discuss the difficulties in Isabel’s millennium project: Egyptian people are unwilling to be totally open with an American, and Isabel doesn’t understand why. Amal reflects on the parallels between herself and Isabel: both have dead or absent brothers, both are orphans, and both have broken marriages. Isabel is young, however, and Amal feels that she is coming to the end of her life.

They discuss how to learn Arabic. Amal tells Isabel that words in Arabic often stem from one root, with added sounds changing the meaning: so the word “qalb,” meaning “heart,” can transform into “qalab,” which means “to overturn.” The conversation turns to Anna’s diaries, and Amal teases Isabel a little bit: Anna’s diaries contain a lot of Orientalist clichés (like the visit to the Bazaar) that would look right at home in an American’s movie about the “mysterious East.”

In a letter to Sir Charles in January 1901, Anna reflects on the death of Queen Victoria, which (aside from lowered flags) doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in Egypt. She recounts a visit to an Orthodox church that contains an icon of the Virgin Mary whose eyes follow you; she doesn’t find this to be the case. (Amal notes that she went on a field trip to that same church as a child and conducted the identical experiment, with identical results.)

Anna’s letters in this chapter reflect on religion in Egypt. She notes the touching faith of her guide to the Church (who insists that this very churchyard’s tree is the one the Virgin rested under during the flight into Egypt), the misguided goodwill of a zealous Christian missionary who wants to convert Muslims, and the peace she finds in an ancient temple.

In a letter to Caroline, she describes the Khedive’s Ball, a huge formal occasion at which she spots a strange Egyptian man whom she feels she’s seen before—and who reminds her of her feelings at the concert she attended with Caroline, where the beautiful music provoked her grief-stricken collapse. She believes she first saw him at that very concert.

She further describes a visit to the Great Pyramid; she paints a picture of her companions as they have a picnic lunch. They discuss the revolutionary newspaper, dismissing it as the work of the “talking classes” and unreflective of the common Egyptian’s feelings about the British occupation. They also discuss the Egyptian national character; one, a blowhard, suggests that it is “degraded,” and that there are few people who can lay claim to true Egyptian heritage among the “Arabs” (98). Another says that the English will have to leave Egypt at some time, willingly or not.

Amal breaks in to discuss the unrest all around her in the contemporary Middle East, and the desperate Egyptian belief that Egypt itself will be preserved from the worst of this.

Here, Amal believes that Anna’s diary contains a gap of some months. Then she realizes that a small blue book she’d put aside, thinking it was a prayer book, might contain this missing period—and indeed it does. It is locked, but she finds its key in a locket containing a portrait of Anna’s mother. She also reveals that she and Isabel are cousins: “Lady Anna had a daughter who had married a Frenchman named Chirol [...] when Anna died and when Layla, my grandmother, died, the two branches of our family were severed. I had not even known that Isabel existed” (104).

It turns out that this segment of the diary tells the story of Anna’s abduction: two young Egyptian men of the higher “talking class” kidnap her and her guide Sabir as they go on an expedition to visit some tombs. They imprison Anna and Sabir in a mysterious grand house. One of them, who speaks French, tells her that she’s perfectly safe but has been abducted as a hostage for political purposes.

It transpires that Anna has been dressed as a man to go for this expedition, accompanied only by Sabir. Sabir informs their captors that she’s a woman, hoping to get her some gentler treatment; the kidnappers only seem agitated and lock them in for the night. Amal is surprised at how calmly Anna describes these events and sympathizes with Sabir, who would have known he was in a lot of trouble for taking Anna out in the first place. Anna also sympathizes with the kidnappers, who have found themselves in a much more politically tricky position than they’d intended.

The narrative switches into the voice of Amal’s grandmother (whom we will later learn is called Layla). The trunk contained 64 pages of her writing in Arabic, which Amal is translating for Isabel. This passage recounts a conversation between Sabir and Layla. Layla finds Anna and Sabir imprisoned; Sabir tells her of his charge to protect Anna and his frustration at her foolish choice to go out alone in disguise. Layla sees that they’re all in trouble and hopes that her brother will return to advise them all soon; aside from the calamity of the kidnapped Englishwoman, Layla’s husband, Husni, has been put in jail.

The narrative returns to the night in 1997 when Amal and Isabel have been out for dinner. Amal returns to her house and finds she can’t sleep. Instead, she lies in bed thinking of her family history, tracing the line down from her grandmother, whose writing we have just read, through her father, who fought in Palestine after WWII, to the birth of her brother Omar. Her parents sent Omar away to New York to study music as a young man and felt some regret that his life was so firmly established in America.

Her mother was Palestinian and often homesick. Amal came to understand this after her mother died, when she went traveling and became homesick for Cairo. When she returned, she found her home not as she’d left it, with familiar old buildings replaced by ugly new ones.

In the present day, she tells of how she takes Isabel for an outing to see “my Cairo,” visiting the church with the staring icon of the Virgin Mary and familiar shops (120). The next morning, ‘Am Abu el-Ma’ati comes to visit. He is a dignified old man whose father worked for Amal’s father on his farm. He has visited Amal regularly since her return, bringing big baskets of food. He tells Amal that the school in Tawasi, his village—a school that Amal’s great-grandfather established and that her family has supported ever since—has been closed by the government. Amal is shocked, but ‘Am Abu el-Ma’ati tells her that there’s been a lot of conflict between the villagers and the government; the government shut the school down because it believed the teachers were fomenting terrorism. He also describes his worry at new land laws, which will remove a long-time policy of rent freezes on farmland and anger the farmers.

‘Am Abu el-Ma’ati encourages Amal to come visit the village to help calm the villagers, who are upset in the wake of the school’s closing, and to gather information that she can take to the government to argue against the new policies. Amal doesn’t feel she could have any effect on the government. She is reminded of a friend of hers, Mansur, a carpark attendant at a government building who was killed by a terrorist bomb meant for a government official.

‘Am Abu el-Ma’ati persuades her; they’ll go together to speak to the authorities after she’s visited. After ‘Am Abu el-Ma’ati leaves, Amal sits with Tahiyya and divides up the food he’s brought to distribute it to the neighborhood. Amal persuades Tahiyya and her children to accompany her on the trip to Tawasi. It also occurs to her that she could bring Isabel if she calls her Omar’s fiancée.

In July 1997, Amal and her party set out for Tawasi. She starts telling Isabel of how Anna and her grandmother met after Anna’s abduction, and Isabel notes that she likes telling stories. This reminds Amal of a conversation she had with Omar about the trunk; she believes that one of the items in it, a Pharaonic weaving, matches one that Omar has—a family heirloom.

The rest of the chapter tells the story of Anna and Amal’s grandmother Layla getting acquainted through their parallel records. The two found they could speak easily in French and became friends despite the serious political strife between their countries. Layla describes her surprise at Anna’s calm; Anna describes her happiness at feeling that she has finally found her way into one of the Lewis paintings she so admires.

Anna learns that her abductors are Radicals who wish to avenge the jailing of Layla’s husband, Husni; Layla disapproves of the abduction. As it turns out, so does Layla’s brother Sharif, who returns and chastises the two young abductors: an abduction, in its illegality, is an aggressive protest to make against a legal arrest (however unfair). Anna’s delight and enchantment looks a little naïve next to Layla’s family’s political concerns: her brother fears that the British will find justification for their stereotypes about fanatical Egyptians in the abduction.

In another coincidence, Layla’s brother, Sharif, is the man Anna felt she recognized at the Khedive’s Ball. Together, they work out a plan to return Anna to her friends. Sharif will accompany her to keep her safe. It finally occurs to Anna that Sharif is putting himself to a lot of trouble and danger for her sake. He provides her with fresh clothing and a delicious dinner; she wonders if he recognizes her from before.

Layla’s sewing in the house’s courtyard, watching Anna play with her baby, when her own husband returns, released from prison on Sharif’s assurance. He says he’s looking forward to his trial to publicize the complaints of the Egyptians. He describes Anna’s arrival as “hasal kheir”—a thing that started poorly but ended well (149).

Indeed, Layla has quickly become fond of Anna, relating to her sense that she hasn’t really “touched” Egypt—a feeling Layla had during her own travels in France. Layla also wonders if Sharif may have taken a shine to Anna; this possibility surprises her, as she’s used to thinking of Sharif as a confirmed bachelor, very set in his ways, refusing to remarry after he scandalously returned his first bride to her family after six months. We learn that he made this choice because he felt he could not really communicate with his new wife about the important matters of the day, and that he returned her in as honorable a way as possible with gifts of money to her family.

The narrative jumps ahead to imagine Anna and Sharif discussing how they fell in love—as, of course, they have. Sharif remembers first feeling Anna’s beauty as she plays with the baby in the courtyard.

Then we return to the courtyard where the two make plans for Anna’s return. She’ll be disguised as a boy again, this time a Frenchman; they’ll say that she’s the son of a friend of Sharif’s. Anna names herself after the hero of the opera that moved her, the first place that she saw Sharif.

Jumping forward again, we hear Sharif asking Anna if she’s sorry she had to give up her old world; Anna doesn’t regret it. They discuss how they must speak in French. Sharif likes it, feeling it’s good that he should have to meet her halfway somehow.

The chapter ends with a letter to Sir Charles in which Anna describes her new friendships (leaving out the abduction). She tells Sir Charles that she’s learned that the “talking classes” are not just asking for the expulsion of the British but parliamentary representation.