by Rasha Adly
“And you believe that this artist may be one of those who were expunged?”
“Definitely,” he nodded. “Try to look at his paintings again—not with the eye of an artist, but with the eye of a layperson—and you shall see something in common in all of his work.” He surged up from his chair. “Come on.”
He led them to the exhibition hall. On one wall was a giant screen. He took a moment to connect her device to the screen, projecting a brilliantly clear and detailed image of the paintings. He clicked through to the first. “Let’s look at the paintings,” he said. “This one . . . and this one. . . .” He only left them on the screen for a few moments, using the remote to zoom in on certain parts of the scenes, punctuated with his cries: “Look. Look at this . . . look at that . . . and this part here. Do you see that?”
After several minutes of this, Stefan broke the silence. “It’s very clear,” he said thoughtfully, “that that artist did not employ his art in the service of the emperor.” He explained, “I mean that he did not show Napoleon’s conquests in a favorable light, nor depict the man himself as a god, as he preferred to appear.” He looked at the director for confirmation. “This would be, then, the explanation for his works and his name being expunged from The Description of Egypt?”
“Yes,” the director confirmed. “That is abundantly clear.” He clicked back to the first painting, one of the Battle of the Pyramids. “Look how he has depicted this battle. The Egyptians here are battling the French face to face, and clearly fighting them with great strength and vigor.” He pointed to Napoleon on his horse. “Here, while Napoleon is sitting on his horse, he is being faced down by an Arab man without any of the trappings of glory, yet he has dignity, strength, and courage, still fighting with only the sword in his hand. Meanwhile, if we look at the face of Bonaparte, we can glimpse fear and awe in his expression.” He unplugged the device. “There’s another painting by the same artist that confirms what I’m saying. It’s not on the website, but I’ll show it to you. Just a moment.” Crossing over to the room’s bookshelf, he took out a CD and put it into the computer connected to the projection device. Rushing through dozens of paintings, he stopped at one.
It was a depiction of the return of Napoleon’s army from their conquest of the Levant. “Look here.” He gestured. “This painting doesn’t show Napoleon fighting another army: the enemy was nature. Nature proved to be Napoleon’s most destructive, most powerful enemy.” He went on, “The endless expanse of desert; the burning sun; thirst; the plague that decimated his soldiers; this painting shows the suffering and pain endured by the soldiers in that ill-considered campaign. Napoleon’s greed and his thirst for power and control drove him to force his soldiers to their death, nothing more.”
“The faces of the soldiers,” said Professor Stefan, “are full of misery. They’re suffering, you can see it. They can barely walk, and it’s true, there are so many bodies around them—soldiers dead from fatigue, not wounded in any battle.”
“After these paintings appeared in the first edition of The Description of Egypt, they were immediately expunged from all future editions, as they displeased Napoleon. To him, he possessed the greatest army in the world, and his warriors were supermen immune to fatigue, illness, and death. He gave orders to Monsieur Denon, who oversaw the publication and later became director of the Louvre, that these paintings be removed from all future editions.”
“But who is Alton Germain?” Yasmine burst out, giving voice to her most burning question.
“The fact is,” said the director, “the books make no mention of him, not even in passing; but his name is mentioned once in the circular that used to be published in Cairo and distributed in France, and that covered the news of the soldiers and the Campaign and its various achievements. One of his paintings was published in it, and the news item said that it depicted the Egyptians’ celebration of the Feast of the Flooding of the Nile, and mentioned the name of the artist, Alton Germain.”
“But you say that his works were in the first edition of The Description of Egypt!” Yasmine protested. “There must be some information about him there!”
“The first edition of the Description is lost to history. It disappeared after it sold out. There were very few copies to start with, and most of them were handed out as gifts to military leaders and important personages in French society. It was so important, and the pictures it contained so beautiful, that a few artists copied works from it, thus producing new artwork.”
They followed him back to his office. Yasmine’s shoulders slumped, her hopes extinguished: the artist had disappeared, taking all traces of his presence with him, as if he had never existed at all, despite the significance of the wonderful paintings he had produced. His paintings should have taken pride of place in the foremost museums of the world. But with a word from a resentful emperor, they had all vanished.
The man felt bad for her: she had come all this way for assistance in her research, but her hopes of finding out more about the artist had come to nothing. Trying to dispel the despair that was clear on her face, he said, “In any case, the conference of the Association for Art History tomorrow has invited several members of the Association for Military History. I’ll introduce you to a military historian whose specialty is this period in history. He has a lot of information on the French Campaign in Egypt, both military and artistic.” He smiled. “I’m sure he’ll be able to give you some information about that artist. Be careful, though,” he cautioned, “some of this is classified, even all these years later. Military historians are like deep wells full of secrets. So my advice to you, so you can get all the information you need out of him, is to try not to make him suspicious. I suggest you tell him that you are researching the artists of the French Campaign in general—I know it seems odd, but don’t ask him specifically about Alton Germain at first. Bring the conversation around to it later.”
She thanked the director, and later thanked Professor Stefan, refusing his offer of lunch in favor of a shower and a nap. They said their goodbyes and he went back to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Outside, the rain had let up, but there were still strong gusts of wind. She opted to walk, needing to feel surrounded by people, walking in their hurried footsteps taking them here and there. Her phone rang. It was him. “Welcome to Paris.”
She could hardly hear him for the wind, and all he could hear was blustery gusts into her speaker. “I can’t hear you out here,” she said. “I’ll get to the hotel and call you back.”
Cairo: March 1799
Bonaparte’s presence in Egypt has led his hopes to grow more grandiose day after day; he has gone to Suez to study a planned canal to link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean: with such a canal, France will have control of the greatest trade passage in the world. Glittering delusions have captured the fancy of our leader, trickling down to his leaders, his companions, his scientists, and his soldiers. They have started work on several agricultural and industrial projects, and conducted careful studies for a modern method of running the country and fortifying it to allow him to remain there indefinitely. They are all laboring under the delusion that they are now masters of the shores of the Nile. But fate is not always favorable: the agents of Great Britain are conspiring with the Mamluks and the Bedouin against us. Rumors are afoot that the Ottoman Empire is making ready to expel the French from Egypt, and Gazzar Pasha of the Levant is making ready to confront our forces, assembling a mighty army to face them.
We have received instructions to head to al-Arish and thence to Syria to do battle with Gazzar Pasha. We set forth in haste with our equipment and supplies, which were soon exhausted. I was one of the few artists chosen to accompany the campaign. Instead of a weapon, I carried my brushes and palette to depict the army and paint its victories. But what was I to paint? The soldiers were exhausted from marching in the merciless burning heat of the desert sun; their food was eaten and their water almost all drunk. We waited impatiently for night to fall, that we might fling
down our exhausted bodies upon the sand and watch the moon lighting up the beautiful cloudless sky above us. It seems so close that I could reach out and touch it. We needed no fire for light: the moon was enough. We merely lit a few sticks to keep the wolves at bay.
When I looked around me at the sleeping bodies scattered around the desert sands, I found that many of them were not sleeping at all, but lost in deep thought, preoccupied by a single question: are we ever going home? Some occupied themselves by playing cards, or sitting in circles and making bawdy jokes, or passing around a glass of wine, given to them by some officer, with barely a sip in it.
I met Lautrec there. He came to watch me drawing the exhausted soldiers lying on the sand. With a weak, reedy voice, he said, “I can draw, too.”
I espied a young man about twenty years of age, with soft features and a sparse mustache. “Good,” I said. “You must nurture this talent.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “I have not the time. The woman my father married after my mother died sent me to military school. I was not yet eleven years of age, and my nature was as far from that of a soldier as it is possible for you to imagine. But I was too young to object. During the holidays, I felt like an unwanted guest at home. But for Jeannette, I would have found any pretext to spend the holidays at school.”
“And who is Jeannette?”
With a dry twig, he drew a heart in the sand and wrote her name in it. “Jeannette,” he sighed, full of tenderness and longing. “She lives next door. I fell in love with her when we were children. We grew and so did our love. She said goodbye with tears in her eyes. She cut off a lock of her blond hair and gave it to me.” He put a hand in his jacket pocket and took out a small tin box. From this, he took the lock of hair and handed it to me. “Look. It is like silken thread.”
The lock of hair took me far away, to Zeinab’s thick black hair. My heart trembled. I remembered how she had grieved for her hair that day. I wished I could burst into Bonaparte’s tent and scream at him, “What do you want with Zeinab?” and punch and strike him, and tell him how little she liked him, that she cut off her crowning glory so that his dirty hands stained with the blood of innocents would never touch it again!
The young man noticed that my mien had changed. “I beg your pardon if I have caused you pain,” he said.
“No, not at all,” I said, handing him back the lock of hair. “Go on.”
“When she asked me that day where I was going, I could find no answer,” he said, “for I did not know. But I sent her a message with a friend on the frigate that left for France a few days ago.”
“What did you write to her?”
The question surprised him as it did me, for what would a young man in the very jaws of death write to his beloved? Would he promise her to return and entreat her to wait for him as I had done with Zeinab, a few days before my departure?
“I only wrote one thing,” he said, “‘I love you.’”
It was enough. those three little words that held the meaning of all words ever spoken.
Day after day, my friendship with Lautrec flourished. He was a gentle and kind fellow. We penetrated deeper into the desert around al-Arish, suffering always from the burning sun, the lack of food, and the scarcity of water. To these was added a new and greater peril, that of the sand dunes. These lethal traps were composed of soft sand that swallowed up the unwary man who set one foot in it. After a long and arduous journey, we saw fields, trees, lotus blossoms, and the blue waters of Gaza and Jaffa on the horizon, embracing lush groves of olive trees that stretched as far as the eye could see. Confronted with this beauty, we forgot all the privations we had endured: we ran to the waters and leapt in, in an instant turning into children splashing one another, laughing and calling out, building castles in the sand that we knew full well we would never inhabit and which would soon collapse.
The goal of the campaign in the Levant was to take Acre, an essential position for the defense of Egypt. In the beginning, there were many victories, which boded well; but failures followed on their heels, one after another. Acre was larger and better fortified than we expected; the British battleships were anchored in her bay, and managed to capture the flotilla of gunboats, which held the artillery and had been sent from Egypt. This was the first step in our descent toward abject failure.
We resumed fighting, and Bonaparte managed to take Jaffa. A brief battle ensued in which Bonaparte, his soldiers, and his officers committed crimes that went beyond the boundaries of decency and honor in wartime, indeed that went against every principle of the fledgling French Republic. He and his soldiers became rabid beasts, committing atrocities, massacring, sacking the city and looting, leaving it littered with bloody shields, spears clotted with human flesh, dismembered horses, and in the night, shrieks to chill the blood, and the moans and groans of the victims’ last breaths.
This man’s baseness and wickedness became clear to me when three thousand Ottoman soldiers, including four hundred led by Omar Makram, declared their surrender to the French and threw down their arms, asking Bonaparte to be treated as prisoners of war. Initially, he acceded to their request, and received their arms, which they gave to him willingly: then he commanded them to stand in one long line on the seashore for inspection, to ensure, or so he said, that they were free from the plague. They stood in single file, shoulder to shoulder, facing the sea, their eyes skyward in supplication. The wind blew cold; the clouds were thick and the waves high. The gulls circled overhead, crying out and beating the air with their wings. Bonaparte gestured to his soldiers, who stood behind the prisoners of war, weapons trained on their backs, to pull the trigger. A sudden hail of bullets ensued, the men’s heads dropped to their chests, and they fell down dead. Some of the bodies were swept out by the tide, while others made a good meal for the birds.
Bonaparte had violated every agreement and protocol of war by murdering soldiers who had surrendered. He justified his deed with an excuse almost worse than the offense, namely that he had done away with them because he did not have the resources to feed or guard them. It was a rank untruth; he had done it to take his revenge upon the Ottoman sultan for daring to fight him and allying himself with the British against him. The evidence for this was that he had spared the Egyptian soldiers and their leader Omar Makram, and instead had them returned to Egypt on board a special ship. He did this not, it was certain, out of love for Egypt, but out of fear that her people might turn against him once more.
We stumbled upon the corpses of innocents, which piled up in every street and alley of that fair city, and all the length of her seashore. Days later, the stench of rotting flesh, disease, and death filled the air. Plague spread through every corner of that luckless city. The people barricaded themselves behind the doors of their homes, and ceased to venture outside, thinking thus to avoid the reach of the pestilence; but the disease was borne on the air, the water, and the sand. The corpses were washed with vinegar and lime, then transported on ox-drawn carts, these carts whose bells and squeaking wheels never stopped sounding as they clattered over the stones of the street, both day and night. The bodies piled up; they were buried with no washing and no shrouds in graveyards that grew too small to contain them, with no gravestone to proclaim their name, as though they had come in error into the world.
The fair city that we had entered, its sweet perfume reaching us several kilometers before our entry, was now a ghost town marred by the stench and smoke of corpses rotting and being burnt, in accordance with the general’s edict. The sky grew black with swarms of flies and carrion-eating birds that flew over our heads: we had, after all, provided them with the tasty meals of these dead.
What did Bonaparte leave behind in every city he visited but grieving mothers, orphaned children, maimed men, and destruction and ruin? The cities whose doors had stood open with joy and pleasure now locked their gates to keep in their sorrow, the sounds of crying and wailing creeping out from behind them. Mon Dieu! What devastation was this? What manner of ma
n was he?
24
She arrived at the hotel and turned through the revolving door, just as she had been going in circles since she had set eyes on that painting. The receptionist greeted her with a broad smile. In the glass elevator that gave her a view of the entire hotel, La vie en rose was playing. Was life truly as rose-colored as the great chanteuse made it out to be, she wondered? And if it was, why had her mother so hated it that she had bought a one-way ticket to the next life? Could she have been persuaded to change her mind if she had heard Edith Piaf sing, with all the passion and power in her voice, ringing out to proclaim that life was beautiful? Could Edith have convinced a woman with depression that whatever happened, life was still worth living, and that something might be waiting for her that could turn her life around—something that might be closer than she thought? She might have stumbled across that something on a street corner someday, or perhaps received it in the mail, or on the wind, borne on the wings of fate, in the rain or on the breeze.
Her mother had been a beautiful woman, energetic and full of joy. She used to start her day at six o’clock, opening the windows of her life and her house to the light, watering her plants and feeding her cats. From the kitchen, the smell of her coffee would waft out; she always made a joyous little ritual of drinking it, listening to Fairuz, her favorite singer. Afterward, she would start making breakfast: she baked little pastries stuffed with cheese and vegetables and made omelets. She would always wave Yasmine and her sister Shaza goodbye until the school bus was out of sight. But in the long hours between when they left the house and came home from school . . . what had her mother done then?
She unclipped her earrings with a jerk and placed them on the dressing table. Yasmine looked at herself in the mirror. She moved closer and looked at her reflection as though seeing herself for the first time. “How many times,” she thought to herself, “will I go over and over these memories?” Yes, it had been years, and time had changed her: the years she had lived showed on her skin. There were fine lines around her eyes and on her forehead. She scrubbed at her face with a wipe to get her makeup off, rubbing as if she also sought to erase the traces of time.