4

In the hands of his patron Grandfather matured with time into a handsome man. His passion for theater and music abated; he played the oud and sang only as a pastime in his spare moments or when he was alone with Biba. Without hesitation he turned down an offer from his teacher to work as an oud player in a reputable group. He must have loved Biba, and he also loved his new trade—in his hands cloth was transformed into objects that almost breathed when they swathed the bodies of women and girls.

He stayed with her as she advanced in age and gradually lost her looks, like a wilting flower. In the end Mida became her nurse and masseur, and it was she who encouraged him to marry Sakina, the girl who did the embroidery, after she noticed that he talked about her and after she heard him arguing repeatedly with the girl. She helped him rent and furnish the apartment in Abdin and then welcomed their only son, my father Ahmad, like a kindly grandmother. My father had confused memories of his visits to the old lady on feast days and his disgust at kisses from her moist lips, which he wiped away immediately. As she approached the age of ninety her health no longer permitted her to leave the apartment and go downstairs to supervise the workshop, which still bore her name though Mida was now in full control.

When public opinion in Egypt turned against the Jews, angry young men threw firebombs at the workshop window. The damage was slight and the fires were put out as soon as they started. Grandfather suggested she wind up her business and migrate to some other country, as many Jews had done, or that she move in with some of her own people who had stayed. “What do you mean, my people?” she replied bitterly. “You’re the only one I have, Mida. I have one niece, who’s like a scorpion waiting impatiently for me to die.”

To ward off evil, they merely changed the name of the place to Atelier Mida, on her insistence, and at the time Grandfather didn’t know he had become the real owner in the official documents, even before they put up the new sign. At least that’s what he claimed. A few months later she passed away in her sleep. The night before, he had been sitting with her and singing an old ditty that she loved:

 

We died for love of you, light of our eyes, and survived.

As if, full moon, we’d really done nothing at all.

 

He stopped when he felt she had fallen asleep and heard her snoring gently. He looked at her smile, twisted at the side of her mouth, then lightly kissed her smooth, waxy forehead.

After Biba died, everyone was surprised to find she had left the workshop to Grandfather. He was surprised too, or at least he pretended to be, but no one believed him, least of all Biba’s niece. The niece sent her lawyer, who put Grandfather through hell before admitting that the contract was valid. Did Mida still feel ill at ease despite his joy? Or is that how I like to portray him, not as my father or grandmother depicted him, in a version that’s different from this gentle love story? They had a less romantic version that can be summarized thus: the shrewd and handsome young man tricked the childish old woman and won her over with sweet words and a laugh, then with a wink and one song after another in his fine voice. Then the door opened that led to a garden of pleasures, and in the middle of the garden he came across a well, and the young man had a long and skillful tongue and he started licking and licking until the water in the well trembled and overflowed. The woman who owned the garden gasped, and muttered in a stifled voice, “I’m all yours, Mida. Do with me what you will.”

And so she wrote out the contract handing over ownership of the workshop to him, at a time when she was in raptures in another realm. I don’t imagine it that way, maybe because I came to know him after time had rounded off his edges and shaken the last feather off the peacock he had been. I also didn’t have much confidence in my father’s and grandmother’s accounts of him because of their constant disagreements with him.

I have distinct memories of him that I didn’t borrow from anyone else. He used to take me with him to the workshop, before he raised the white flag of surrender to arthritis and left everything in my father’s hands. I was five or six years old at the time, and looked like one of those dolls that they put in shop windows or in commercials for toys or dairy products. My mother worried about me, and she hung a charm in the shape of a blue glass eye around my neck and stuffed an amulet under my clothes that hurt me like a large pebble. But none of this could fend off assault by the evil eye: I fell ill and had fevers, and then she would burn incense, cut out paper dolls, and stick a needle into them as she named possibly malevolent people one after another. In the meantime I was under the covers and the cold sweat felt lovely on my skin, and I imagined all those people hating me for some reason, maybe because I was a boy or because I was pretty. I felt there was something wrong with me that made those around me want me to suffer, to fall ill and die.

The fever would pass every time and I would get up hungry. I would go back to being a shiny china doll, with masses of soft black hair that fell over my forehead and shoulders, and again I would cling to Grandfather when he went out so that he would take me with him, indifferent to my mother’s opposition, my grandmother’s orders, and their anxiety for my sake. In the workshop I went back to playing with the scraps of colored cloth, looking through fashion magazines, and delighting in the smell and sound of the steam iron. I daydreamed as I played with little mannequins, headless or standing on one leg like a stick, imagining them as bewitched women from the stories my mother told me. Sometimes I imitated Grandfather, holding the tape to take the measurements of beautiful women as far as I could reach up their bodies when I stood on my tiptoes. Some of them would suddenly notice the little angel running between their feet, his head hardly reaching their bare knees. Some of them were well-known stars. Once one of them bent down, picked me up, looked at me with a surprised smile, gave me a hug, smothered me in kisses, and said, “What a pretty boy! And what’s your name?”

“Hannoun,” I said.

She was the actress Madiha Kamel, in the prime of her youth. Her laugh was slightly husky and her eyes sparkled. I went home that day laden with a small fortune in chocolate and told them I was going to marry Madiha Kamel. When they asked me why, I said because her face was like an apple and she smelled nice.