by Louisa Young
Nor had I forgotten what I was here for.
That first night I just wanted to go out. I wanted to get the city inside me, soak up some dust, some heat, start to merge. Newness in town is visible. But soon the dust (not fluffy dust, soft flakes of old human skin – we’re talking grains of desert, hard, fine, creeping, insidious and insinuating) settles into your skin and you no longer look shiny and new, and you no longer get the scampy behaviour that tourists find so irritating, or overwhelming, or just odd. People talking to you, that kind of thing. And if you do, you can take it on to another level of playfulness. So we unpacked and showered and fucked and ate felafel sandwiches, then about one in the morning set off under the burnt orange night to the Paradise, on the Pyramids Road. This was where I was first showered with rose petals while I danced, so I have a soft spot for it. The odd visitor who finds it thinks the vases of half dead roses on the tables are a sign of it being a third-rate dump (which it is, in a way, but that’s not why), but that is because they don’t understand. The roses are half dead because they are all going to end up scattered over the dance floor, along with little waxy jasmine flowers pulled from garlands, and cash, of course. And let me tell you it is a glorious feeling when those ten and twenty pound notes flutter over your head and settle momentarily on your shoulders, your damp bare arms, swirling round you like doves at harvest time before the pick-up man dives in to grab them and stuff them in the box to be shared with the musicians after the gig.
I almost cried when we walked in. Same bilious green carpeting on the walls, same star-shaped mirrors and burgundy table cloths, with no doubt the same cigarette burn-holes in them. Same boxes of paper handkerchiefs with the handkerchiefs carefully taken out and folded into triangles and tucked back in in a fan-shape, interleaved with withering rose-buds. Same men in suits doing the high-stepping straight-backed stampy dance, with the arms punching upwards and forwards, rolling kind of like a cowboy with a lasso, the unmistakable and delicious dance of Cairene nightclub man, audience variety. Same long boat-shaped fruit plates, covered in silver foil which tweaked up grandly at each end like Cleopatra’s barge – the barge she sat in was of aluminium foil. Same fug of shisha, same green-jacketed waiters (far too many), same withered parsley under the kofta that we used to swear went round every table in turn and came out again the next night. Same Saudi, sitting on his own, gobbling with his eyes. Same girls in shiny shiny tights and tiny tiny skirts. Same waddling boilers on stage, not even dancing, not even pretending to, just shuffling inelegantly in four-inch heels, malfitting underwear and skin-tight stretch emerald and puce latex velveteen, with matching anklet, with diamante bow. They come free with the male singers – the worse he is, the more of them he feels obliged to lay on.
But they soon went off, and evidently we were just about late enough because the next act was better – a girl in a tight baladi dress seemingly based on Tutankhamun (gold and turquoise, with a lot of cutaways), who had a lot of personality if not much in the way of moves, and four crap boy dancers in high-waisted trousers and pink lurex boleros. I’ve never understood about the boy dancers. Four of them prance about, often enough counting under their breath – wahid, itnein, telata, arbah – and never letting one movement flow into another. They have a kind of facile elegance, but they never stretch, never burn. They should all be sent to see the Sufis at al-Ghouri, then sent home to weep for twenty years.
Then came an excellent band – four tablas, two violins, oudh, ney, quanoun, three tambours of various kinds, saxophone, accordion and no electric keyboard. They played mainly that wild Sudanese rhythm which just kills me – boomboom, boom boom BAH – oh God, it doesn’t translate. But it got me, as it always did. Fuck the leg. I was up there soon enough on stage (this is normal, it’s what happens at Egyptian nightclubs. Everyone gets up and joins in the show. Don’t think I was being really embarrassing). Boomboom, boom boom FLICK, boomboom, boom boom TOSS, boomboom boom boom THWACK. Sa’id, God bless him, was charitable. I think. The audience were – oh lord, an Egyptian audience. As always. Up on stage joining in, calling the singer over for a chat, taking over the mike to sing. A new voice came on while I was dancing, halfway through a song I adore – I never knew who wrote it, but everybody used to sing it, just another haunting love song, habibi this and habibi that, gorgeous. I looked up from my entranced state and saw Sa’id, my own habibi, mike in his long brown hand, eyelids lowered and singing like a fucking angel. His mouth moving round the words of his own language, his other hand, cigarette between his fingers, making the formalised little rolling, beckoning movements that singers in that language so often make. The men. Sa’id doing it. Doing it well. They wouldn’t have let him have the mike if they didn’t know he could. He must be a regular or something. When I used to dance here he was fifteen.
His hands fall from his wrists like lilies. The veins, the strength. If a lily could smoke suggestively, that’s what my baby’s like.
I shimmied over to the table, and took the heads off all our roses, and shredded them, and poured them over his head like love. He laughed through his song and didn’t miss a beat, and later putting down the mike he found his wallet and took out a pile of notes and, standing up beside me now on the stage, flicked them over me. Swiftly, neatly, compactly. Some men throw them on the floor – huzzah! Some hurl them in the air. Some try to stick them down your clothing. He showered them on me like kisses down my spine. They hovered around us a moment, fluttering in slow motion in the shifting shafts of red and yellow light, and the dusty drifting shisha smoke. And we stood there, covered in money and love and roses, just before dawn, under the revolving disco mirror ball, suspended, sacred, blessed, surrounded by whores and fools and musicians, for all of twenty seconds before the pick-up boy swooped in.
Around six we left, under the low burning ball of the risen sun, and slung back into town, picking up some belila (omali with wheat instead of bread – same effect) from the stall on Sharia Faisel, passing the lions that could be cousins to the ones in Trafalgar Square on the Kasr el Nil bridge, humming Sudanese melodies. The boys were already throwing down water against the dust of the new day. Stands were rattling and the wild dogs were running back to the desert. Then he sang ‘Enta ’Omri’ – You are My Life, an Umm Kalthoum song. You are my life; its morning began with your light. Before you my heart saw no joy, no taste in the world but the taste of wounds … I have only now started to love my life, only now started to fear that life will hurry on. In the light of your eyes, each joy my imagination had desired has met my heart and my mind … A song of redemption through love. He knew all the words. The muezzin started up the sobh as we flew up on to the flyover leading down on to Sharia al Azhar and the old city, and the minarets glowed gold in the dawn just for us. And the hillel moon was up and gleaming silver in the west, and it was too fucking perfect for words.
*
I woke at midday to a note saying he’d gone to see about some things; he’d see me at Fishawy’s at four. That was fine, because even without last night’s excesses I wanted to clear my head. This was a crazy idea. Cairo is not a head-clearing city. Reaching a different plane, maybe. But not clearing your head as it is generally understood.
I decided I would go to Ibn Tulun, and I would climb the minaret, and I would walk round and round its stone topknot in my bare feet, smoking cigarettes, until some resolution to my situation emerged. So I did.
Except I didn’t smoke. Because you can’t, really, at a mosque.
First the taxi driver didn’t want to take me, saying I would prefer to go to the Pyramids, Giza, Memphis and Saqqara on a day trip, very good price; then he asked for twenty pounds, then he took me all round the houses, then he wanted to wait for me and take me on to another half-dozen places I didn’t want to go to. Then the young boy in charge of the key to the door that led to the minaret told me he went to Qur’anic school, asked did I want him to sing the call to prayer and the Qur’an to me (What, all of it? I was tempted), told me I shouldn’t wear l
ipstick, asked for one caramella, one face cream from my bag for his sister and then wanted to kiss me, offering various parts of himself: lips, cheek, forehead, chin, hand, nose, and finally neck.
‘Go away,’ I said. ‘This is a holy place.’ He leapt. My respect for the mosque meant his disrespect for me had been much worse. He was embarrassed.
These things used to happen to me in my first week here; not since. And not at a mosque, anyway! Things have changed, evidently. And evidently I was not dusted through, not quite invisible yet. But soon enough the boys crying ‘welcome’ on every street corner would start to cry ‘I know, you live here, don’t want T-shirt’ instead.
So I sent him away, and trod the great external staircase which encircles the minaret like a helter skelter, up to the topknot, where I started my circles up in the sky, sun hot on my back, stone cool beneath my feet in the shade, hot in the glare, pigeons glinting in the cloud-latticed sky just like I knew they would, the dome of the fountain huge and solid at the centre of the great wide courtyard way below me, wide enough for Ibn Tulun to keep his armies in, and the arcades shady and mysterious around the edge. And I walked, and I walked, and I didn’t smoke, and I walked, and I looked across at the great ugly Turkish-looking mosque of Muhammed Ali up on the citadel hill, with the sandy ridges of the desert behind, every ridge echoing the shape and angles of a sphinx’s head, and looked away towards the Cities of the Dead, and over to the domes and minarets of the mosques of Sheiku, and Sultan Hassan, and Ar-Rifa’i and Aqsunqur, and as far as the great gate Bab Zuweila (the Fab Bab, Nadia used to call it). And yes, as Sa’id had told me, some of them were missing. I tried to recall what was then, what was now; to picture this fabulous skyline then. I saw the loss, but the specifics were not with me. My mind addled trying to make it out, and I looked down to soothe myself, down on to the roofs filled with rubbish, satellite dishes, broken ladders, from biblical mud-walled terrace to biblical mud-walled terrace, skinny dust-coloured cats negotiating narrow dust-coloured walls, and way over in the distance I could see the great pyramid at Giza black and mysterious compared to the endless sand-and-dust colours of the city, and beneath my feet I saw the ancient, smooth, cracked and settled, smoothed and worn, earthquake-surviving eleven-hundred-year-old stones, and way off below I saw the crenellations of the wide dusty pink roof of the arcades of Ibn Tulun, like a row of soldiers, of cut-out paper men carved in stone, holding hands eternally all round the playground of the roof. I wasn’t going to go and look at them any closer. Patterns against patterns: you move, the distant objects visible through the ranks of men move, the ranks are still but the patterns shift against each other. That which should be motionless doesn’t seem to be. Everything double, all the time. And down inside the mosque itself, you can sit for days watching how the light falls through the windows, how it shifts, what it casts, how the patterns lie, and creep, and change. You can. People do. The sunlight by day and the moonlight by night. It can make you nervous. This is why today I had chosen the top of the minaret, way above all mysteries, crowning them.
And I circled, and I circled, and I circled, and I saw no solution except killing him. And as I was not going to do that, I was fucked.
So there is no avoiding the next thing. Collecting the money. Which I don’t want to do yet. Because then he will know I am here, and whatever is to happen will start to happen. And I don’t want it to, because I am scared.
So I am still in traction. Not physical traction, not voyage traction. Mental traction. Fear traction.
So get out of it. Get over it. You’re not here on holiday. You’re not going to Aswan to float about in a felucca under mimosa trees. You’re here for this.
*
I met Sa’id at Fishawy’s on the edge of the great market Khan el-Khalili. He was there before me, trying to keep English time for me; I was assuming he’d be running on Egyptian time. He sat in the narrow alley among the wooden screens and ancient freckled mirrors, while the posh end of the bazaar carried on around him. It was still pretty hot and the mediaeval shade of the high walls of the old city’s narrow alleys was welcome. For a moment I wondered whether I should go to any well-known place, any place where Europeans go. Perhaps I should bury myself in … no. I’m here to do it.
I watched him for a while before joining him; just admiring, you know. He was wearing his enormous white scarf, and smoking shisha. His skin had picked up already, as southern skin does on home ground. It was darker, richer. Polished or burnished or something like that. When he turned to look for me and saw me, his pale turquoise eyes appearing from the shadow of dark wood and latticed stone, his curling mouth unsmiling in civilised ancient shadows, his lean back straight among the looping shapes of the shishas, for a moment I was amazed to think this man and I even knew each other. Other. We are other. But then we are all other.
It was just a little shock of how exactly at home he was, and I wasn’t, despite the old days.
We exchanged all the small courtesies required when you try to sit in a space where there are already four long-legged skinny metal tables, four men, three shishas, a waiter, a boy with a ladle of hot charcoal and long tongs, and a huge palm in a brass pot. Malesh, esfa, malesh, shukran, as you step on their feet and knock their drinks over. Patches of afternoon sun fell through the gaps in the awning, the shishas bubbled gently around us, a soft and constant bubbling mingling with the burble of the market, conversations in French and English and Arabic, the sound of the oud and the ney from someone’s radio a little way away. Walking in this city it is impossible not to dance. There’s always a rhythm seeping out from somewhere. This week I kept hearing Khaled, the Algerian who used to be Cheb Khaled, but Cheb means Young Man and he’s not so young any more. The song was ‘Aïcha’, in Arabic and French, a love song to a girl in the street, comparing her to the Queen of Sheba. Reine de Sabaa. A perfect song.
We ordered coffee, thick and black and rich. We both take it ariha: on the smell. Just the scent of sugar. Sweet, but not too sweet.
‘Like you,’ he said. And cracked up laughing.
‘You tourist boy,’ I said. ‘You flirt.’
He curled his tongue up to his upper lip and grinned at me. ‘Why,’ he said. ‘Do you want to visit my shop?’
‘Do you have a shop?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Every Egyptian has a shop. Or a brother with a shop. I can take you to Uncle Sharif’s shop. You know what Sharif means? Noble. So you see we will make you a very nice price.’
‘Nice price for you or nice price for me?’
‘Nice for you is nice for me, you tell your friends and everybody will come to Uncle Sharif’s shop …’
It was very disconcerting to see him play the salesman, the trader trying to call you, to sell you Tutankhamun Tshirts and little models of the sphinx set in clear plastic pyramids. Everybody does it: the men with their trollies of gas canisters, rattling them with sticks; the shoe cleaners, the loofah men. You make your noise to get your business. Rattle your advertising.
He was teasing me, but I didn’t like it.
‘Do you do this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, is this what you do?’
‘No. I have boys to do it for me. But if I am on the street and the girl is beautiful. Sorry, was. Then I would. Of course.’
Suddenly in this context we were something else. ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s making us sound like some … we’re not some pick-up romance. Just because I’m … and you’re …’
‘Elli shuftu abl ma teshoufak enaya,’ he said. What I saw before my eyes saw you. A line from ‘Enta ’Omri’.
Then ‘Do you mind?’ he said.
‘Mind what?’
‘That I am an Arab man and you are an Englishwoman?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I am enchanted by it.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Enchanted.’
‘Yes,’ I said, fully aware of how Europe has always been enchanted by the East, and how it has invented its own East to be enchanted by, and pinned it down, invaded it,
exploited it, colonised it, declared superiority over it, patronised it.
‘Tell me,’ he said, reading my mind again. ‘Have you read Edward Sa’id?’
I knew he was talking about Orientalism.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I thought you would have,’ he murmured.
‘Is that a problem? Do you think I am orientalising you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I just wondered.’
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘You’re English as well.’
He just laughed. ‘No I’m not,’ he said.
The patterns on patterns were closing in around me again. Everything about the man and the city fills me with desire and I am not permitted to touch him. I hated the idea that someone looking at us might think we were anything other than pure and perfect lovers. I who don’t give a shit what other people think of me. Perhaps it was that I didn’t want them thinking it (what?) of him. I didn’t want them thinking he was a street boy who’d struck lucky. Or that he was with some old white sex tourist. (I am older than him.) Or that there was any kind of orientalising going on.
Oh really. Send those thoughts away.
‘Have you seen Hakim?’ I asked. Just to move on. I did realise that I had one great big subject to broach with him. Eddie. I didn’t know what to say to him about it. I didn’t know where to start. I knew I must. Didn’t know how to say it. So I continued to cancel that drama with another.