by Rasha Adly
“We’ll analyze the hair,” he said. “If it’s human hair, your suspicions will be proved. Then we’ll ask what would bring an artist to do that.” He drained his coffee, put on his spectacles and got up enthusiastically. “Shall we?”
They went into the lab, putting on white coats and gloves. He placed the painting on the easel and looked at it. “Remarkable. What an artist.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately, it’s in a deplorable state. It must have been stored improperly. Moisture alone will do that to a painting, and this one has most probably not been hanging on a wall. I’ll wager it was stored in a cellar somewhere. Thank goodness the rats didn’t get to it.” He turned to Yasmine. “But where did you find it?”
“It came to us from storage at the Gezira Museum.”
“Storage in the Gezira Museum?” He approached and touched the braids. He looked closely at the girl’s face. “Truly beautiful.” Then he straightened. “Now for the moment of truth. We’ll put it under the machine and we shall see what we shall see.”
He took a jar from a shelf and withdrew several drops of some liquid from it. He selected a minuscule corner of the painting and carefully dispensed the drops onto it. The color dissolved instantly, and he immediately withdrew it with a pipette and placed it under the microscope. Then he placed the painting into a large device that took up an entire corner of the room. He pressed the button to activate it and it produced a series of ringing sounds.
Time passed while he was hard at work. It was almost time for her next class. Eventually, he noticed that her eyes were darting from the wall clock to her wristwatch and that she was looking impatient. “The examination will take a while,” he said. “I need to run several tests, including one most important one, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. That will tell us how the artist mixed his colors and the elements that went into creating them. If you have somewhere to be, you can go, and I’ll let you know when the results are ready.”
“Okay. ” She pulled out a business card and gave it to him. “When you find out anything, please give me a call.”
All the way to work, one question was in her mind: what could this man possibly find? Might he find another painting concealed beneath it, like the discovery made recently by art experts restoring Picasso’s The Blue Room? A palimpsest of a man wearing a tie, sitting in a chair, driving everyone into a frenzy of speculation as to the man’s identity?
After class, on her way back home, Sherif called. “Would you like to come to dinner?” he asked. “I’m nearby, at a restaurant in the Marriott.”
Although she was exhausted and preoccupied, it was an invitation she couldn’t refuse. He had outsmarted her, for he knew her weakness for the Marriott. The ancient palace, long ago converted into a hotel, was where she had first discovered the meaning of art. She used to go there on walks with her father, who told her stories about its history. “It was a great palace built by Khedive Ismail to house the guests he had invited to Egypt for the opening of the Suez Canal,” he had said, “especially Empress Eugénie, the woman he was in love with. She stole his heart and mind.” He would show her the life-size portrait of Eugénie, and mention that the largest banquet hall still bore her name, having been converted from the wing originally set aside for her. Yasmine grew attached to the place and its history, and let her imagination roam free: whenever she set foot inside the Marriott, she stepped out of the present and everything in it, and lived once again in the glory of bygone days. She could see Empress Eugénie, decked out in her magnificent clothing, glittering gems decorating her delicate neck, taking part with the khedive in the soirées he held in her honor. This fantasy world she had built for herself as a little girl never faded, not even as an adult. Her postgraduate studies had been on the use of art in khedival architecture, and it had been a positive delight to write about this palace, its style, and its art collection in her doctoral thesis.
She passed through the interior of the hotel to reach the central garden around which the rooms were built, strolling through the mosaic-paved pathways to reach the open-air kebab restaurant in the garden. He was waiting for her, all alone but for the company of his tobacco. He wore a tie that matched the greenery around him. The trees in the garden were centuries old, deep-rooted, ancient, sturdy. They seemed to form part of the foundations of the place, the opulence of the hotel matching the trees’ awe-inspiring nature.
He saw her coming and greeted her with a smile. With a quick glance, he could tell that she had something on her mind. “What’s up?” he asked. “You look like something’s happened. Will you tell me what it is?”
“Have you been learning how to read minds?” she said.
“It’s not mind reading. You just have to know how to read people is all.”
She shrugged, dismissing their exchange. A menu appeared before her, proffered by a Nubian waiter in a traditional embroidered gallabiya and cap, a uniform enforced by the management to give the place an old-world atmosphere. She picked up the menu and glanced through it. “Today I went to a lab to get the painting analyzed, and left it there with the experts.”
The waiter came back and Sherif ordered two mixed grills. “What do you plan to do with what you find out?”
“That depends what we find out,” she sighed.
“Is it going to put an end to your chasing after it?” Sherif chuckled. “ As soon as you get what you want out of a thing, you lose interest and run after the next thing that catches your eye. You were definitely a child who got everything she wanted.”
“Is that really what you think of me?” she rebuked him, uncomfortable and not a little offended. “Do you really think I’m that shallow?”
“Of course not. Who said anything about being shallow?”
“If what you just said doesn’t mean that,” she challenged, “then what do you call it?”
He shook his head. “Being shallow . . . it means being empty. Not chasing after anything. Your curiosity and excitement, those are things that drive you to achieve what you want, to work for it. That’s the surest indication that you have your own goals.”
“Oh.” She sat back, wondering whether he had been hinting at their relationship, namely that as soon as she had been assured of his love, she had lost interest in him and chased after another man. But it had not been all her fault. Their relationship could have survived if he had known how to make her miss him and want him. He had waited too long between phone calls, between dates; he had been too cagey with his feelings, never expressing himself enough. It was only natural, she thought to herself, for their ardor to cool.
She opened her mouth to tell him as much, but her phone rang. It was the art expert. “I’ve made an exciting discovery,” he told her without preamble.
“Really? I’ll be right over.” She gathered her things and pushed her chair back. “Sorry, Sherif, I’ve got to go at once. The expert has something he wants to show me.”
He opened his mouth to suggest they have dinner and then go to the art lab together, but he knew how important it was to her and held his peace. He said goodbye with a regretful smile, and watched her retreating form running out of the restaurant.
He thought again of their conversation when she had told him about her mother, and how their family had been scattered far and wide. Despite her attempts to conceal her pain and pretend to forget it, there was a glimmer of hidden sorrow in her eyes from time to time. How many times had she been laughing at the top of her lungs and paused suddenly, her face filling with grief? Didn’t she always get flustered and lose her concentration whenever she had to speak of her childhood and family? It was so obvious in hindsight, but hard to guess the full extent of the unhappiness she had endured. At the start of their relationship, she had always changed the subject when he had asked her about her family or wanted to meet them. Although she had carefully kept the secret, it had all tumbled out of her in a mad rush in the moment the dam had finally collapsed, bursting forth like water that had been confined.
The music in
the restaurant mingled with the smell of grilling kebabs. The scent which had been so appetizing a while ago now turned his stomach. He paid the bill for his uneaten meal and hurried out.
12
She almost caused several accidents, not because she was driving at speed, but because she was so distracted she could barely see the road, the other cars, or the pedestrians. Dr Khalil was waiting in the lab, eyes all but invisible behind thick-lensed magnifying spectacles. “This was painted in the eighteenth century,” he told her by way of greeting. “It was painted by a professional, as we can tell from his technique of mixing his colors. The colors are blended with sea salt and sand, which makes them exceptionally long-lasting and capable of producing subtle variations in shade. It was painted directly without a preliminary sketch, another indication of a professional.”
She didn’t care about any of that. She was waiting for something more important, staring at his lips as though willing them to move and say something more important. “And the girl? What about the braids?”
“They really are made of human hair,” Dr. Khalil told her, “glued down by the painter after laying down the first layer of color. He then covered them up with another layer of color created by mixing clay with gesso and water to achieve the greatest possible stability, and also to conceal the hair itself, which it did, as you can see. The color never faded, and the painting’s over two hundred years old,” he enthused, “and the hair itself didn’t show until you were scraping off the dirt on the painting to restore it.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Is that all?”
“Yes. That’s all.” He smiled triumphantly. “All the information I managed to glean is in this report,” he tapped a folder, “right here.”
He handed her the report and she leafed through it. On the final page, she found something important he hadn’t mentioned. The back of the painting, the report read, bears an inscription in French: Zeinab. “But,” she looked up, “you didn’t tell me about the name on the back of the painting.”
“Yes, yes,” he nodded. “Forgive me. This painting has me all in a dither. It’s got a name written on the back in Roman script, ‘Zeinab’.”
“So her name is Zeinab,” Yasmine whispered, staring at the painting. “Zeinab,” she repeated, fascinated. “It suits her.”
Cairo: October 1798
“Zeinab? What does it mean?”
Out of all the momentous events that had taken place that night, this was the only one that stuck in her memory, the sound of her name on his lips, and his question about the meaning of her name. That man whose affectionate gaze embraced her, the only one in that place who had cared about her at all. She stood admiring herself in the mirror, wondering: Was he attracted to me as well?
Her mother burst in, looking harried and anxious. “Tell me every detail! Tell me everything that happened from the minute you left the house till the second you came back in!”
“Now?” Zeinab replied. “Tomorrow. I’m tired right now.”
“Right now, this minute!” her mother thundered. “You’re going to tell me everything!”
There was nothing for it, in the face of her mother’s insistence, but to sit on the edge of the bed and tell her about everything she had seen, heard, said, and done from the moment she set foot in the palace until the end of the ball. But she couldn’t speak when she came to the encounter with Napoleon in his room, and so she said nothing at all. Finally, her mother was satisfied that her daughter’s virtue was intact, and left her room.
The next morning, she awoke with the excitement of the party still lingering around her. She liked this life! This French lifestyle, their language, their food, their drink, their music, their dancing, their parties. “Why shouldn’t I be one of them?” she asked herself. “After all, I wore their clothes and I speak their language.”
At noon that day, thick clouds mercifully blocked the sun’s glare and heat, and Zeinab sat in the courtyard in the shade of a lemon tree, enjoying the invigorating summer breeze and reading Courrier de l’Égypte as well as she could, trying to pronounce the words out loud and make sense of the articles. It was a newspaper put out especially by the French Campaign in Egypt. Her brothers crowded around her, listening and laughing, mimicking her as she spoke word after word in this odd, alien tongue.
At the end of Venesi Street, in the home of Citizen Follmard, is a distillery for wines and liquors. Citizens Faure, Naseau & Co. distill all manner of spirits at Berkat al-Feel Square, at reasonable prices.
Tonight the gardens of the Champs-Élysées and Tivoli will come to life in the skies of Cairo. Tonight is the grand opening of Casino & Restaurant Dar Ghivel, an exclusive event for elite society only. Emperor Bonaparte will be the guest of honor. Tomorrow, the restaurant will open its doors to the general public, at 90 baras a ticket.
What would the opening be like? Zeinab wondered. It would no doubt be wonderful. But it was open only to the aristocracy. If only she were one of them, so she could go.
Her elder brother gestured to her, impatient and trying to get her attention. “Are we French now? Acting like they own the place, like Egypt belongs to them!”
She looked up. “What’s gotten you so worked up? You liked the Mamluks so much? They were ignorant boors and cruel as well.” She tossed her head. “Compare now with then. You can see the difference.”
“At the last meeting of Napoleon’s council,” her brother said, “someone announced that Cairo has a population of three hundred thousand. They said they were going to start to settle a lot of French people in Egypt, bring them here to start farms and be merchants and sell stuff.” He folded his arms. “They said it would make Egypt ‘the most attractive and the most useful of all their colonies!’ That’s what they said. Do you know what ‘colony’ even means?” His eyes met hers, challenging. “It means that the riches of this country won’t belong to its people any more. It means the people are just colonized natives with no rights to anything.”
“And since when were we not colonized?” Zeinab retorted. “Do you want to convince me that we weren’t colonized under the Mamluks? At least these colonizers want to change this country for the better!”
He looked at her askance. The light smattering of hair on his upper lip indicated that he was just inching into manhood, but he had a strong personality. “It’s no use talking to you. You’re just like Father; of course that’s what you’d think. You don’t even wear the same clothes as us any more, you wear theirs, and you want to be just like them. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“Not at all.” She laughed out loud. “I feel proud, not ashamed. What I should have been ashamed of was how I looked before.”
He glanced at her with derision and adjusted his turban on his head, preparing to go. “You know what? It’s no use talking to you. It’s just a waste of time.”
A soft knock came at the door, then another, and another after that. The hesitant knocking indicated that whoever was outside was a stranger. Halima went to see who was at the door. Someone spoke very fast in French; she couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but one of the things the man said was “Zeinab al-Bakri,” so Halima realized he wanted Zeinab. Before she could speak to her, though, the man had placed an envelope in her hand and left.
Halima gave the envelope to Zeinab, who tore it open with hands trembling with excitement. It was an invitation to the grand opening she had read about, at seven that evening, near Ezbekiya Lake. A proud smile lit up her face: her wishes were coming true, one after the other! “What shall I wear?” she thought at once. She had to be elegant, beautiful, as befitted elite society. The invitation card in her hand was proof that she was now a member of high society.
As Zeinab rode through the streets of Cairo on her way, the doors were already locked for the night, the oil lamps put out. Night watchmen were asking people for passwords for their neighborhood gates. Meanwhile, Dar Ghivel was brilliantly lit up to welcome its clientele, its music ringing out far and wide, rousing the n
eighboring Egyptians from their sleep. The French proprietor of Ghivel’s, in his search for a place where everyone might find entertainment, had chosen a house with a spacious garden next to Ezbekiya Lake, which had belonged to a Mamluk prince. In point of fact, this house boasted one of the largest and most verdant gardens in all of Cairo. It was planted with lemon trees, Levantine and Indian jasmine, cypress, willow, and every type of fragrant tree and plant. The driver stopped directly in front of the gate. The trees were hung around with lights, and paper decorations were wrapped around their branches, making them glitter and gleam. The place was filled with men and women she had never seen before; in fact, she had never imagined that men and women so attractive and elegant even lived in Cairo.
As soon as she entered the main hall, she stood still, looking around. Most of the tables were already occupied with groups of friends and French Campaign officials. Suddenly, she noticed a lady waving to her. A closer look revealed that it was Madame Angele, the wife of a trader from Malta who was a friend of her father’s, or rather, a man who shared business interests with him. Madame Angele and her husband had visited them many times at home and they had returned the visits at every feast and special occasion. “Madame Angele!” Zeinab greeted her. Angele introduced her to the women at the table with her: ladies from the upper echelons of Egyptian society and the wives and daughters of eminent merchants, consuls, and diplomats living in Egypt. They were looking at her with frank astonishment, unable to believe that she was Sheikh al-Bakri’s daughter; then they burst into a gabble of Greek and Italian so that she would not understand. But then one of them said in French, “I don’t believe it! Is this the daughter of an Azharite imam? How did her father ever allow her to take off her veil?”