by Louisa Young
A group of us were in her sitting room, hanging out, watching dance videos, drinking tea. I danced for them, and they danced for me, and half-way through her dance she picked up a tiny glass of rose-water and carefully, delicately, put it to her mouth so that she was holding it between her two rows of teeth. Then she really danced: flinging her hips this way and that, rotating, grinding, rippling, isolating, really a very energetic dance. And her head? Motionless. She spilt not a drop. Excellent control. Then as she finished she flicked the glass with her tongue so that the liquid seemed to pour down her throat, and let the glass drop CRASH to the floor. She looked me straight in the eye, and then laughed as she sprayed the rose-water out in my face. The other women watching began the zagareet, the ululating cry of joy that used to terrify me before I realized it was complimentary.
Was I shocked? Yes, I was. I made her teach me. She told me about the dancers at the Casino Opera in Cairo in the 1920s, who would dance with golden candelabra on their heads, all the candles lit. ‘Not so different from the poor people carrying their waterpots on their heads,’ she said. ‘Watch any Bedouin woman walk.’ And about the girls who could hold two wine glasses on their bellies, one full and one empty, and empty the wine from one into the other, just by contracting their muscles. I saw a girl do it once, at Sahara City, a cabaret in a tent at Giza, just by the pyramids. Most things I saw I tried to learn; that one I passed by.
I did the rose-water trick to Houmous-face. He was outraged, and left. Even now, I don’t know if I perhaps did something unforgivable then – like before I realized that I must not let the soles of my shoes show …
I got into an argument with an Egyptian about it that same night. He could not conceive that a blonde could do it, physically or culturally. I was used to that from my travels, when people often couldn’t actually believe that I knew their dance at all, so I used my usual line: that the Egyptian word for dancer, ghaziya, comes from the root meaning outsider, foreigner, invader. I pointed out that the Turkish, cengi, comes from the same root as cingene, gypsy. Outsiders all. As he seemed interested, I tried out on him the theory that belly dancing was the current manifestation of ancient female religious dancing, which thrived among those people (outsiders, gypsies) who escaped the restrictions of the new male religions – Islam, Christianity, Judaism. It was squeezed out of proper society, yet necessary to it – that sort of thing. Why else, I asked him, did Egyptians always have dancing girls – whores, effectively, girls who would never otherwise be welcome in a respectable house – at weddings? Because, he said, stealing my thunder and my heart, their dance was originally, and in a way still is, a fertility dance, necessary to bless the union of the couple. I tried out the notion of sympathetic magic on him: that the dance imitates sex and childbirth, and in that way invites the gods to bring sex and childbirth to the happy couple. He said I was an almeh, not a ghaziya at all. That’s a compliment. There was a time when women were kept so out of the world that they knew nothing of it at all, and only the awalim – the singers, poets and musicians – were educated. The ghawazee were itinerant whores, most of them. It was a class thing, a money thing, an education thing. Like most things. If you did very well, had a rich patron, and were clever, you could get to be an almeh.
I’m not proud. I know that I was part almeh and part ghaziya. I didn’t fuck the audience and I know the history, but I danced in cafes for the money they gave me, just like innumerable women since the dawn of time who wore their fortune in their anklets and their coins sewn on to their veils. Every sequin on my tacky outfits is a homage to the Yakshi, the ancient Indian temple dancers who raised money for their goddess by dancing, by arching over backwards to allow a stranger to stick a coin to their sweaty forehead as their breasts came into view; and by shagging any passing stranger who threw a coin at them. They danced with their backs to the men; it wasn’t for them, it was for the goddess. The dance would open up a channel to the divine and, by fucking the dancers, the men could make contact with it, could access the sacred force. At the same time in Cyprus, at the temple of Mylitta, girls would sell themselves to strangers, then park the money at the temple of Aphrodite until they needed it for their dowry. They were in charge of the whole thing. A good ghaziya could end up with a mask of little gold piastres plastered to her face, stuck with spit or sweat. And then there were the Santons – holy men in Egypt who were allowed to fuck any woman they wanted, any time, anywhere. The other women would cover the coupling with their veils. Flaubert heard of a Frenchman who pretended to be one. Or perhaps he made it up.
A respectable man will tuck his tip under your strap, without touching your flesh. A louche one will cop as much of a feel as he can get away with. I made seventy quid in tips the night I spat rose-water, sympathy money tucked into my beaded bra, plus an extra fifty from the host of Houmous-face’s party, in apology. And that was a while ago.
I decided to tell the airline passengers about the time when 400 ghawazee were beheaded and thrown into the Nile, because they caused such unrest in the French barracks; and about how they were banished from Cairo, in 1834, threatened with fifty lashes or hard labour if they returned. The Pashas were forever banning women, because women are chaotic, they won’t keep their mouths shut, they promote chaos among men. Dancers are even more chaotic. They won’t stay home, they intrude on male environments, disturbing the men, drawing attention to themselves and to their sexuality … imminent Fitna. Chaotic. And if there’s one thing that terrifies a traditional man it is chaos.
Do you know about Flaubert and Kutchuk Hanem? Of course you don’t.
Kutchuk Hanem – the Little Princess – was the mistress of the ruler Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Abbas Pasha; a ghaziya with a protector, very lucky, very rare. She stuck around in Cairo frolicking with her sugar daddy when everyone else had been banished. But she was young then, and a fool. She took some jewellery he had given her down to the bazaar and sold it to a dealer. Now why should she do that? Why did she need the money, at her age? That jewellery should have been her pension, and she was hardly twenty. Anyway, Abbas Pasha found out, and gave her fifty lashes on his own account, for her cheek, and sent her up the Nile.
In the 1850s an American called Curtis found her. This is how she danced for him:
The sharp surges of sound swept around the room, dashing in regular measure around her movelessness, until suddenly the whole surface of her frame quivered in measure with the music. Her hands were raised, clapping the castanets, and she slowly turned upon herself, her right leg the pivot, marvellously convulsing all the muscles of her body. She advanced slowly, all the muscles jerking in time to the music. The rest was most voluptuous motion – not the lithe wooing of languid passion, but the soul of passion starting through every sense, and quivering in every limb. It was the very intensity of motion, concentrated and constant … Suddenly stooping, still muscularly moving, Kutchuk fell upon her knees and writhed, with body, arms and head upon the floor, still in measure – still clanking the castanets, and arose in the same manner … still she retreated, until the constantly down-slipping shawl seemed only just clinging to her hips and making the same circuit upon herself, and after this violent and extravagant exertion was marbly cold.
Words don’t work. I’ve tried to re-create routines from written descriptions, even to do what I’ve been told, but unless you see it and feel it you cannot do it. That is the single reason why I took to it so when I was sixteen. I wanted something in which my body was in charge and my brain was utterly irrelevant. Sex can do it sometimes, and Janie told me pregnancy did it too. Sod off brain, you can just stop thinking and analysing for a bit, because all the blood and energy is going elsewhere, thank you.
Flaubert did manage to describe the effect of it in his description of Salome in Herodias:
She twisted from side to side like a flower shaken by the wind. The jewels in her ears sung in the air, the silk on her back shimmered in the light, and invisible sparks shot out from her arms, her feet and her cloth
es, setting the men on fire. A harp sang out, and the crowd answered it with cheers. Without bending her knees, she opened her legs and leant over so low that her chin touched the floor. And the nomads, hardened to abstinence, the Roman soldiers adept at debauchery, the greedy publicans and the old priest soured by controversy all sat with their nostrils distended, quivering with desire.
Flaubert spent a night with Kutchuk Hanem at Esna in 1850: ‘Such a night as one seldom spends in a lifetime, and I enjoyed it to the full.’ He recorded her as an ornithologist might: the blue tassels of her tarboosh spread against her shoulder like a fan; the patch of decay on one of her teeth; the contractions of her hands and thighs while she slept; the singular blend of smells around her; her own dripping sandalwood oil and the nauseating aroma of bedbugs.
Awake, she fucked him and his companions, then sent away the boatmen, covered the eyes of her musicians and danced for him; a mythical dance, a lost dance: the Bee. The Queen of Sheba tempted St Anthony with it. It’s a simple idea: a bee has entered into your clothing, you squeal, and wriggle, and divest yourself waft by waft of your garments until you’re naked, surprised, vulnerable, standing on your beautiful carpet, in your cabin, on your boat, on the Nile, at sunset, with your musicians blindfolded and a white man, the great author, besotted at your feet.
She had nothing but contempt for the westerners who wanted her to dance naked. She wore scarlet nipple caps beneath her gauze tunic for Abbas Pasha, but in the main, since then, she had been careless, lazy, self-possessed. She didn’t care that Nubian Aziza said that she didn’t know how to dance. She didn’t care when Flaubert’s man Joseph said he had seen the Bee danced better by a man. She didn’t care that boys impersonated her; that trained monkeys imitated her dances at the mouled, the saints’ festivals. She’s been mocked worse than any of them could ever hope to now.
She slept with her head on Flaubert’s arm, and before dawn rose to huddle over her brazier for an hour. ‘How flattering it would be,’ he wrote, ‘to one’s pride, if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, that she would think of you more than of the others who have been there, that you would remain in her heart.’ God, how easy a romantic finds it to love out of context, out of place, with a mid-nineteenth-century American Express card and a return ticket. It’s somewhere else, it doesn’t count. She’s foreign, it doesn’t count. She’s a whore, it doesn’t count. She’s different, it doesn’t count. It’s not far to she’s female, it doesn’t count. And that justification is still alive and breathing.
His mistress Louise Colet travelled that way in 1864. She wrote that Kutchuk Hanem was ‘still living – a living mummy’. There’s no point being jealous of the exotic, any more than of the dead.
The phone went, but I was way up the Nile and didn’t answer it. Ben Cooper’s voice came over the answering machine. ‘Hope you’re out being sociable, Angie!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Speak to you soon, OK? Byee!’ For all he sounded like a holiday rep, the message was clear.
I shook off my oriental miasma and rang Harry. Would he be around tomorrow at the showroom because I was going to be in the neighbourhood. How convenient! It was easy actually: Zeinab lives round the corner and I needed to see her anyway to go over some designs. It didn’t seem odd to be covering myself. When I was a child I used to raid the fridge and wonder whether cold chickens carried fingerprints, and what my mother would do when she found out that it was I who had had the piece of drumstick. Janie and I thought we might have identical fingerprints because we looked a lot like each other. People who didn’t know us well sometimes mistook us for each other. When we were small we wished we were twins because we longed to play tricks.
*
I had a dream that night. I was dancing in my green and gold, one of my first costumes. I was on the floor, arching back and giving the little Turkish cymbals a fair rattling with my arms undulating way up above my head. I was an arc, my arms and hair reaching almost to the floor, almost into a crab, perfectly balanced, a semi-circle of moving shimmering green and gold light, tinkling. Then I was on the table (I never do that move on the table, my hair is too long, it goes in the food). Then I was surrounded by flame, a ring of fire and beyond it a ring of faces, flushed and having fun. Then I rose into the air like a piece of burning paper, floating up and up, as light as light. And then I woke up.
I’ve dreamt it before and I will again. I knew what it was about. One night a man had poured a bottle of brandy on the table while I was dancing and had set fire to it. For what? To see me jump? To frighten a woman? To destroy a performance? To impress his friends?
I had hated it not just for the obvious reasons, but also because he had broken the territory. I was performing; I was dream woman, I was out of bounds. He had tried to give me a clutch of banknotes afterwards; I had refused them. He should not have even spoken to me. No one should. Ahmed and the musicians accepted, which was only fair, because we shared the tips, but then not fair at all, because it wasn’t them he’d tried to incinerate. He had given five hundred pounds. He was an Englishman. I’d been surprised. He never came to the restaurant again, for which I was glad, because he was a psychopath. I think Ali banned him.
It was my basic fear and worry dream. I went in to look at my basic reassurance and comfort and found her sleeping sound and sweet. I brought her into bed with me. Well, there’s never anyone else in there. She woke up to tell me she’d like a loo paper roll hanging on the wall by her bed so she didn’t have to get out of bed and wake me and get me to go and get loo paper when she wanted to wipe her nose, then she fell straight back to sleep, and kicked me most of the night.
*
Harry’s showroom was in the back-of-beyond beyond Ealing, but God it was flash. Expanses of window, gigantic yucca plants and bijou little open-plan office area, and acres of indoor parking. He showed me his catalogue of bikers: fat Harleys with fat riders, available for Hell’s Angels movies and building society adverts, browse through and pick the ones you like. He had at least forty cars, mostly American but with a little gaggle of 1950s and ’60s English cars in a corner: Anglias and Morris Minors and the mock-Tudor ones.
I had a sudden flashback to my parents’ street off Ladbroke Grove when I was small: the butcher, the greengrocer, the electrics shop, the sweetshop (sherbet lemons and Lucky Bags), the post office, the off-licence, the hairdresser with the Marcel-waved plaster heads in the window, gold hair and mauve eyeshadow; the chemist with the gloopy fat green and red bottles, where a dragon lived, or so my dad told me; and the baker that we never went to where the cat sat on the doughnuts in the window, and once I saw the Hungarian lady who ran it wiping some oozing cream off a cake and licking her finger. But that’s not why we didn’t go there. We didn’t go there because once they accused Janie of nicking a bar of chocolate. Which she didn’t. I know because I was there. My five-year-old fury at the injustice to my innocent younger sister was ballistic.
That street now has two estate agents (short-term company lets and service flats), a car hire, three kebab shops, three late-night grocery stores (one Lebanese, one Turkish and one Pakistani), a Swedish cafe. Only the post office and the offie remain. Oh and the Greek restaurant, which was always there, run by Costas who we were at primary school with, and with whom my Dad over the years has discussed all these bloody newcomers spoiling the neighbourhood. Costas has a turquoise Rolls-Royce now. The cars on the street back then were now the ones in Harry’s showroom.
‘They take me right back,’ I said to him, stroking the sweet little chrome lid on an Anglia’s headlamp.
‘Well here’s one that will,’ he said, and led me round the back of the American section where lounged, in all its louche glory, my Pontiac. It looked nice: gleaming dark madonna blue, cream leatherette, chrome that looked loved. In the days when it had lived outside my squat in Clerkenwell it had had mould growing on its whitewall tyres, icicles inside in winter and in summer nasty little insects breeding in its rotted upholstery. I had used it
for storage in the end: my bike tools had lived under the hood where the engine had been. Someone had done a lot of work on it. It was not difficult for me to gasp convincingly.
‘Is that my car!’ I whooped.
Harry misunderstood me. ‘Um, no – I mean … it’s not the one I had in mind for …
‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. I mean, is that the old crock that lived on my doorstep? I thought it got squashed –’ Damn. I hadn’t meant to mention that. I covered quickly. ‘God, isn’t it lovely. Do you know, I saw one just like this – well, there can’t be another one like this, must have been this one. It was only a few weeks ago, in South Ken somewhere, that’s right, I was trying to park in Pelham Crescent, I was going shopping …’ I burbled on.
‘Very likely, I use it as my runabout,’ he said, but nothing more. Perhaps I shouldn’t lead. A telephone warbled and Harry fished it out of his pocket. Oh Lord, Harry was a yuppy, ten years after everyone else. Well, good for him.
‘Yeah, hi … mm … what, now? … no it’s just I’ve got someone with me … no, just an old girlfriend … well excuse me … yeah … OK …’ He covered the receiver and said to me, ‘Got to go and meet my boss – come along and then we’ll go and get lunch.’ But of course. Just an old girlfriend indeed. He winked at me while being talked to. ‘OK. Half an hour,’ he said.
We went in the Pontiac. Vrroom vroom, and comfortable. ‘Do you remember,’ we both started at the same time. ‘You go,’ he said.
‘Trying to work out mathematically whether the likelihood of arguments due to the penury caused by the expense of running an eighteen-miles-to-the-gallon motor was adequately compensated for by personal space guaranteed by the width of the front seat in the case of such argument erupting?’ I said.
‘I remember you half a mile away from me over by the door sulking, that’s for sure.’
Then I remembered very clearly lying almost full-length on my front along that seat trying to give him a blowjob while he was driving, and him having to pull over not out of overwhelming desire but because he was laughing so much, and …