Husbands & Lovers

by Beatriz Williams

Who filled an old jam jar with fireflies the night before he left for camp and told me he figured the lights came from all your ancestors in heaven, keeping watch over you.

You sometimes had the feeling that the ordinary Egyptians themselves were only spectators to all this, the throbbing civic life of Cairo and of Egypt itself—their own country. Like me, Hannah thought, as she crossed the bridge into downtown Cairo. A spectator to my own life.

“You men,” she said. “You’re so quick to judge a woman who marries for money. But men are the same. A different kind of treasure, that’s all.”

“Men fall over themselves for a beautiful woman, women fall over themselves for a rich man. So who’s the more greedy? At least money is useful. And it doesn’t fade with time.”

“I chose to marry Alistair. I knew the bargain I made.” “Love is not a bargain, Hannah.” “Of course it is. Every exchange between human beings is a bargain of some kind. Actual treasure or moral treasure, it’s all the same. You agree on your price and make the transaction.”

“Then you’ve given yourself away much too cheap. You’re worth a hundred of him. A thousand.” “My God, listen to you. You and your pretty words.”

What else could she do? She couldn’t speak. To speak you had to harbor some hope, and she had none. Either she went on existing like a stone pyramid, a monument to fidelity, or she returned to life in mortal sin.

“I can’t bring you back to life, Hannah,” he said. “You can choose to live again, or not. But I can make you remember what it was like to be alive.”

Love hadn’t seemed like the right word, the right idea. You loved your parents, you loved your dog, you loved the sun on your shoulders, you loved the taste of chocolate and the smell of rain. This was something else. A sense of sacrament. Her love for him, her absolute confidence in that love, where had it come from? It was faith, that’s all. Visceral, stupid. The instinct that you shared some essential element of your composition with this person, whom you had only just met, spent only a few hours in conversation. Yet there it was.

suppose, when your parents fail you, you either go to pieces or you become the grown-up you require.

I remember thinking how strange it was to feel sad in the middle of so much happiness, how you couldn’t just experience joy all by itself without feeling as if you had somehow stolen it from somewhere else. That there was only so much joy in the world.

A man is seldom lucky enough to fight for what he believes in. He just fights to stay alive.”

“It’s important to know where you came from,” she says. “It’s a part of you. But it doesn’t have to define you. They give you the paper and ink, but you write the story yourself.”

“My dear,” he says, in a heavy Slavic accent, “I promised your grandmother I would find you. My name is Károly. Count Vécsey.”