Shifting Homes

My fifth short story in 503 words


   Out of the blues, she came out, accompanied with all the fanfare of an expatriate engineer and the glamor of a lady from the good old days. I didn't know her before although she was from the same class of my graduation year. Thanks to the Internet, I have recognized one very cultured woman who challenged me and provoked my deep reservoir of knowledge to pop out. She had an unusual story of being a strong female more caring of her mind than her body. I have noticed later when I met her that she had fed both, giving a very rich intellect and a fat heavy built. Originating from a well to do Turkish-Egyptian background, where the father was working in wood trade and a mother working as an executive in a paper company, she had mingled in her childhood with the last remaining Jews, Greeks, Italians, Armenians and other nationalities that had connections with her family, when Alexandria was still reminiscent of a vanishing cosmopolitanism. The 1952 coup d'état had heavy financial consequences on her family assets and business, so came the firm antipathy that she holds up till now to the post Royal regimes. She obtained a fine education in Catholic language schools. Her parents managed to live one way or another under two regimes till the assassination of Sadat, which was the year of her admission to the faculty of engineering. After he secured her planned marriage as he did to her two sisters, her father died of a stroke.
  Finishing her university studies with excellence, getting pregnant and becoming embroiled in mundane details of daily living, she began to ask herself big questions about life, religion, the real contemporary history of Egypt and the future ahead.  She threw herself into reading intensively and deeply. She began to have contradictory opinions with her mother from one side and with her husband, who was a surgeon, from the other side. Getting a contract into a wealthy Gulf state came through relations with some authorities, and that was a temporary solution for her. She went to this hot burgeoning state, to work in a ministry with all sorts of personnel, mainly coming from the Indian subcontinent. She had been exposed to different customs, cultures, ideas, beliefs and styles of life. Her three children grew up, so too was her ambition, her mind, her personality, her bank account and a secret separation will. She accrue along those tumultuous years, a hate to anything related to Arabs, so she was plotting, without the awareness of her rival husband, a way to immigrate to Britain. Bit by bit, she increased the dose of animosity to her partner, to the degree of scandalous violent attitude. She accused him of many flaws, but to keep her children till reaching her newly adopting country, she passed her days with him, to use him later as a cover and a bridge. Eventually, she obtained both a post and an immigration visa for the whole family to the UK.