Spells. 2003. October.

Cairo. Nabil was singing inside the flat. Leila smiled, shifted a generous bouquet of tuberoses in crackling cellophane to her left hand and pressed the polished brass doorbell with her manicured index finger. Nabil was off key. It was one of the heart-wrenchingly poetic songs of Oum Kalthoum. Humming, tall dark Mina opened the door.  Both of the women froze. “Just perfect!” Mina mumbled. With a tight smile and a curt nod of appreciation, she relieved Leila of the bouquet. “Sherif is on his way,” she whispered, buried her straight nose and smooth brow in the flowers and hurried back into the kitchen.

Did she wipe her away a tear with the hem of her apron? Leila slid off her red high heeled sandals, placed the side by side, checked her makeup in a round mirror on the wall and walked along the corridor. Before she entered the hall, she smoothed her straight black hair with a quick hand and took a deep breath. From the smell of white wine steamed fish, Leila knew that she was busy preparing one her famous specialities to be served in the evening, when they all returned after sunset drinks on the river.

“Nabil?” Leila’s voice dissipated in the lofty rooms.

Nabil’s grand Art Deco flat was exactly as it had been when he was a child. Not a single door handle, bathroom tile, or kitchen cabinet had been changed, and most of the furniture had found their place before Nabil was born into his wealthy family on the island of Zamalek in the middle of Cairo. He used to say that his Ottoman grandfather had bought the flat in 1921, before the fine-looking building had been completed. If anyone asked him if his grandfather had been a Greek redhead, he nimbly changed the topic.

In the magnificent drawing room behind the hall, she found Nabil wearing cracked tortoiseshell sunglasses. He was singing along to an old record on the gramophone.  Not yet changed out of his father’s threadbare blue striped flannel pyjamas, he was perched on the top of a lacquered step stool. He was reaching up, straining to mount a triangular constellation of antique chrome bicycle lights and brightly coloured plastic mouthpieces from water pipes under an opulent crystal chandelier tinkling nervously in the middle of the room. His hair was in need of a comb.

“Happy birthday.”

“Lele!” he exclaimed when he spotted Leila in the doorway, “Mina is the DJ today!”

“Yes, you could have warned me…” Leila looked down, “and her.”

“Oh, Nabil slapped his forehead theatrically, “I only found out this morning… you know how Noura is.”

“Yeah… no I just had a bad night…,” Leila muttered, “I had a dream about Yousra again.”

“I can’t believe it’s been a year.” Nabil said softly,

“18 month…“ Leila looked up at Nabil with moist eyes.

Despite his baby skin that gave the impression he was much younger than his age, he was not young anymore. With the passing of time, his graceful airiness had almost turned into transparency. Leila was aware that the purity she saw in him was far from Nabil’s experience of himself. For him, it was a weakness from which he was always struggling to distance himself. That struggle kept ensnaring him in the outcome of poor decisions, and one of those outcomes had been their wrecked marriage.

She still vividly remembered the first time she saw him, many years ago on a bridge on a snowy winter’s evening in Istanbul. Nabil’s freckled, olive skin and dark red, tightly curled hair led many to assume that he was Syrian. Sometimes he told people that his lineage was Mameluke, which, in a way, meant that he was Turkish.

Leila sighed, “you won’t get your gift until tonight.”

“Yess! Is it from the gallery?”

Leila shook her head.

Thinking that he sensed her hesitation to walk further into the flat, Nabil pointed firmly towards a spot on the floor below the chandelier. “Lele, come over here. Help me align the point of the triangle with the glass pyramid on the mantelpiece.”

Leila took three strong, elegant strides towards him, positioned herself upright below the chandelier, turned and fixed her honey-coloured gaze on a clear glass pyramid positioned on a black, circular slab of basalt, which accurately circumscribed its square base.

“Still chasing Pi?”

“What else do you think I would do with the exact proportions of the Cheops pyramid?” Nabil laughed, “It took me a week to have it moulded by a glassworker outside the Bab El Nasr city gate. Tenth generation. Adorable.” he said and pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. “And the glass hails from the discharged windows of the Al Azhar Mosque, built by my Berber forefathers.” His eyes sparkled.

“Ohh… ,”Leila smiled, “now you are Berber?”

“Yes, why not?” he chuckled, “nothing is an accident!”

Walking into Nabil’s home was like surrendering to an intricate narrative. In his world, every object was an important prop conveying a clue to a story that could never be contained or traced. Leila loved it. She used to say that had he not possessed an Egyptian passport, his smug academic generalisations and his hopelessly romantic love for Egypt would have landed him in the same category as the prejudiced colonial anthropologists of the past. She was of the opinion that he could, like them, derogatorily be called an ‘orientalist’. To this he would reply “No, I am an auto-orientalist.” The term auto-orientalist had been coined by one of his friends as a reproach of Nabil’s idealised vision of his motherland. Nabil had embraced the term but most of the time he preferred to call himself an apolitical patriot.

“City life suits me! Right?” he said as he made a sweeping gesture that seemed to indicate he was asking about the entire flat, or just the swirls of smoke from church incense he had brought back the previous month from a road trip to Damascus.

Leila turned slowly in a circle.

The well-waxed parquet floors reflected new vermillion red linen curtains that Uncle Girgis, the tailor had worked all week to finish. The glass tops protecting tables, dressers and sideboards were newly polished. The shiny silverware had been taken out for use and fresh flowers had been arranged in the many unusual objects that Nabil called vases. Among them was an elegant, discarded glass siphon bottle originating from a Nile steamer, the chrome top of a 50’s vacuum cleaner, a rough, unglazed amphora from his country house, clear glass vats inserted into the shiny riding boots that had belonged to his father, and chipped enamel bedpans from the nearby Anglo-Egyptian hospital.

“Perhaps my peed in one of them… ” He had said when he had just found them, “when she gave birth to me.”

Everything in the flat was either inherited and then customised to fit Nabil’s designs based on sacred geometry, or had been purchased from one of the many antique dealers, estate auctions or flea markets in the city. If, when he was younger, you had asked him, he would have declared without hesitating that the driving force in his life was the search for truth and freedom. Now he invested more time and money in aesthetics and beauty, which, for a while, he had believed held the code for understanding the divine. Over time, he also dropped the idea of divinity. He became a collector obsessed with the magic of objects.

“Yes, it will great in the article,” hunting for sword, Leila placed a Bordeaux nail on her perfect lips. ”Eclectic bohemian elegance?”

“Bohemian?” Nabil rolled his eyes and let go of the triangular constellation.

Leila chuckled, “Oh, I pity journalist who will try to describe you.”

Nabil’s flat was as complicated as his mind.

While he appreciated the charm of beauty bound by convention, it was the unpredictable exquisiteness in the interplay between random objects that especially held his attention. This could be the wordless field of meaning oscillating (that was the word he used) between the propeller of a black table fan and a tarred, African figure with a disc-shaped head standing side by side on a small, square donations tin with the symbol of the Red Crescent painted on its lid. Nabil passed many sleepless nights moving objects around, assessing various combinations, angles and distances in an attempt to achieve the perfect, spellbinding constellation. For him it was like a board game without rules.

“Nabil, one day you must let me show your tableaus,”

Nabil shook his head, “Even you can’t sell the invisible.”

“Beauty is not invisible.”

“Beauty is, like the relationship between form and colour, pure metaphysics.” Nabil pointed to the glass pyramid, “True beauty generates an energetic field that lands the observer in a state of checkmate.” Descending the steps, he winked at Leila, “A refined person will notice it immediately.” He folded his sunglasses and placed them with a trembling hand in the front pocket of his flannel pyjamas. “Elegance is a sign of wisdom and true wisdom is harmony with the universe—and the universe is always well dressed, and!-” he dramatically pointed his index finger to the heavens, ”To quote Pythagoras,” Nabil stepped onto the floor with his chin lifted and his eyebrows raised, “I am ready for my close-up!” Laughing he bowed deeply to an imagined audience.

Leila clapped her hands softly, “I can hear, you are prepared for your interview.”

He and Leila exchanged kisses. For a brief moment, she saw them as two painted figures crowning the top of a cake. She was striking and proud. His clothes were crumpled. His shoulders were tense and fragile. When she kissed his cheek, she saw behind him the immaculate flat and was, as always, perplexed by his shabby appearance. Everything around him was arranged in interrelated tableaus that were invocations, small altars dedicated to unnamed gods. Some displays were surreal humorous juxtapositions, some were tender groupings of junk, objets d’art and kitsch, while others were numerological and geometrical constellations made of found or manufactured pieces of metal, glass, and ceramic. Often when you came to visit, Nabil would, before you had taken off your shoes, ask if you had noticed the changes he had made, what your opinion and interpretation of them was. It could be the placement of a flattened aluminium teaspoon he had found on the road and put between a black piano key and a mummified baby crocodile. Or it might be the bohemian lead-crystal prism he had recently found in a box of junk in the bazaar and hung with palm fibres at a particular angle to a lit candle that was inside a carriage lantern he had fastened onto a music stand so that it would project a spot of light between the eyes of a Jain alabaster Buddha at the other end of the room. A part of the foundation of their ongoing friendship was that she was able to immediately spot the changes and appreciate them.

In the bedroom things were less complicated; Nabil cultivated an ‘enlightened colloquial exoticism’. “What you mean to say is that you are a sexual nationalist,” Leila had once said, half jestingly. But today was his birthday and she had promised to spare him her sharp wit.

“Did Samira come?” she asked.

“She is already here. She went to have a look at the bathroom—the light falls perfectly there in the afternoon. It always reminds me of the old ferries that went to Athens and Istanbul …” Nabil lifted an eyebrow and whispered, “Do you remember our honeymoon?” As he headed for the balcony to move the chairs around, he yelled to Leila, who was walking towards the door to the hallway. “For God’s sake, don’t let her photograph the bedroom for the article!”

Leila nodded her head and tried to sniff out which dishes would be served that evening.

“Country life wears me down. Everyone knows who you are, and no one has read a book,” Nabil had said to Leila with one of his sweeping judgments, the previous week when he, after months of silence, had called to tell her he would celebrate his birthday in his place in town. He had inherited the flat through a disgraceful transaction with his father. His marriage to Leila had been part of the transaction. They were still married—on paper. That the bond connecting Leila and Nabil did not spring from an intimate recognition of each other’s essence, neither of them was aware. Most of all, Nabil appreciated what he called her solid beauty and her unfaltering sense of style untouched by the passing years. To Leila, Nabil’s personality had merged with the charm of his flat, and what she experienced as their lasting connection was the intimate relationship she had with the amalgamation of Nabil and his possessions.

Nabil lived here alone now and had passed many cold winter evenings and hot summer nights in the bathtub listening to film music, preferably Morricone. When there was a servant trustworthy enough to turn records and wind the spring on the heavy mahogany gramophone sitting in the drawing room, he would listen to his father’s vintage vinyl records of Arabic songs. The bone-white porcelain bathtub with its web of cracks, its Verdigris lion’s feet and brass taps had witnessed the bath and toilette habits of three generations of the family. So, also, had the cracked porcelain tiles with the mint green Art Deco lotus frieze and the peeling full size, oval, crystal mirror in its broken brass frame.
In winter, an antique gas heater’s hissing, gentian blue flame heated the bathwater that would rush, sputtering and steaming, out of the calcified tap. The sight was as familiar to him as looking at his own pale toes and their ever surprising and strange sea anemone-like appearance at the end of his legs, distorted by the refraction of the water. As a child, he would keep looking at his white toes and repeat: “This is me.” But no matter how much he repeated this, he was never able to expand his sense of ‘me’ to encompass all of his body, for he looked different to his friends, his parents and people on the street.

The chessboard tiles on the floor would momentarily be flooded when the stopper was pulled out of the full bathtub and the water spilled out through the exquisite, geometric pattern of the grill that covered the floor drain. When he married Leila, he could easily have renovated the bathroom—money was not an issue. It was certainly also not out of love for childhood memories that he had left things untouched.

“No one can do this kind of work today!” he often said while shaking his head, lamenting the general state of the country. Sitting on the terrace late one night that spring, hours after the candles had burned down, the embers in the brazier had turned to ashes and nothing but a faint ring from the wind chime broke the silence now and then, Nabil inhaled and let a deep sigh fall into the gloom. He then explained to his old friend and protégé, Sherif, that the flat and his country house by the pyramids were rocks in a raging river—points of stability in the flood of change that flashed through the world, and that he was the custodian who guarded the roots of civilisation. “The Christians burned the Great Library of Alexandria, and the wisdom of the ancients was lost. We have to be prepared that it might happen again.”

Out of habit, Leila paused on the way to the bathroom by the passport size photo of a very young Sherif surrounded by towering date palms at Nabil’s country house. She straightened the silver frame and wondered about the period before Sherif was married and before his wife had died. She hoped that, one day, she would arrive at an understanding of Sherif and not just be attracted to his chaotic talent. As she passed by the kitchen door, she heard Mina singing along to the Oum Kalthoum record. Both women knew the heartrending song word for word.

At the end of the long hallway was the bathroom. The afternoon sun entered the spacious, white room through the circular window and reflected from every surface. Breaking through the semi-darkness of the hallway, the light was blinding, almost otherworldly. A voice echoed off the tiles, absentmindedly humming along to the record. A young woman stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame, facing into the bathroom. Her long arms hung loosely beside her body with palms facing out. Her neck curved gracefully so that her head, with its short, black curls, rested against the door frame. She was humming the sorrowful passion of the song into the light and echo of the bathroom. The overpowering back light elongated her silhouette.

 She looks like a Giacometti sculpture.

A camera lay on the chessboard floor tiles, framed by the supple curves of its strap. Unaware of Leila in the darkness behind her, the girl stood alone in the afternoon sun, in a strange city, humming along with words she did not understand. There was something so tenderly vulnerable and trusting about her that Leila neither had the heart to speak nor to move. To remain standing there quietly also seemed wrong. She felt like a wolf that, hidden in the shadows, was eyeing a grazing doe in a clearing. Fixing her gaze on Samira’s silhouette, she slowly, step by step, tiptoed backwards over the tiles while her hands slid along the smooth surface of the wall until she, by the smell and the song, knew she had arrived at the kitchen door where she stepped soundlessly into the stuffy warmth by Mina. Leila sat quietly down on a stool at the kitchen table.

Mina turned to her with a smile and said, “Open up” as she inserted a stuffed vine leaf impaled on a fork into Leila’s mouth. “What do you think? Mr. Nabil is going to have a great birthday!” Mina’s voice was too high and obviously tense. Sour juice seeped from the vine leaf into Leila’s mouth when she bit into it; the sweeter stuffing of rice, tender onion and herbs followed.

“It’s delicious” Leila lowered her voice, “Mina…don’t tell anyone… but I need advice,”

Mina gave Leila a blank stare.

Leila sighed, “I need to talk to your mother.”

“There is no phone in the village,” Mina replied in an irritated whisper, “but she receives every day, except Fridays.”

“So… I have to go all the way there?”

Mina nodded, “We all have to…”

Samira knocked on the doorframe, and smiled a lovely, sad smile. Her large eyes were luminous from crying.  Mina quickly turned her back, feigning to be occupied with something on the empty cutting board. “That bathroom … this flat is so … full of atmosphere,” said Samira in her characteristic, slow-searching English. Then she panned her camera over the two women.

Leila had the impression that Samira, just like Mina, spoke to fill the curious silence.

“Wow!” Leila reached for Samira’s hand “Octagonal. Where did you get it?” She bent her head over Samira’s antique gold ring, crowned by a ruby and decorated with a fleur-de-lis on each side.  It was not the first time Leila had seen the ring, but she too was attempting to remove the tense silence in the room with words.

Samira hesitated and mumbled, “It comes from … B …” She was about to say Baku, but caught herself and blurted, “… birthday gift from my great grandmother.” At the ring of the doorbell, she took back her hand, her eyes flitted nervously sideways, and at Nabil’s loud, thrilled exclamations coming from the front door, she smiled again, even wider this time. Sherif had arrived. Nabil and Sherif had not seen each other in months. “You should really go up to check out the view from the roof,” Mina said. Samira smiled nervously at Leila and left the flat through the back door, which Mina had pre-emptively swung open. Puzzled, Leila remained standing there for a moment before crossing the hallway and walking into the drawing room—but Sherif had vanished.

“He forgot something,” Nabil said and shook his head causing his curls to bob around his ears like joyful streamers.

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