11

 

Cairo: Winter 2012

With great care, she placed the painting into the trunk of the car, and drove to the Cairo suburb of Maadi. On the way, she thought of what had taken place with Sherif yesterday. The oddest feeling had come over her since he had held her: she could still feel his embrace, feel his strong arms encircling her and the tenderness he had offered. Because of it, she had gone to bed happy that night. Now she felt stronger than before, no longer a feather in the wind.

She parked outside the address on the business card, remembering what Dr. Khalil had said about this man: “He’s an expert on painting, a graduate of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. He’s been a voracious learner ever since he graduated, always reading about the newest ways to examine a painting. He worked at the National Institute for Fine Arts here in Egypt, and oversaw the conservation of a lot of paintings in state-owned museums.”

The place was a two-story building in a quiet street, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and tall trees that blocked the view inside. The owner had built it especially for the conservation of privately-owned artwork that would otherwise have been discarded, or at the very least permanently removed from display. She pressed the intercom button. A scratchy, electronically distorted male voice grated, “Who is it?”

“It’s Yasmine Ghaleb.”

“Come in.” The door buzzed. She entered, carrying the painting that had preoccupied her since the moment she had laid eyes on it. The entrance was marble, the stairway flanked with two marble statues of lions. The wooden door stood open, revealing a reception hall beyond it, furnished with leather chairs, and a blond secretary behind the counter who welcomed her with a smile. She asked one of the assistants to take the painting from Yasmine and she and the assistant took the elevator up to the second floor.

The expert welcomed her with a smile and shook her hand warmly. “Good to meet you.” He was middle-aged, somehow managing to look both conservative and bohemian at once. He wore a black wool jacket with a partly unbuttoned white shirt underneath, and black dress shoes. His hair was in a ponytail, and he had leather braided bracelets on his wrist. She liked him at once: he did not seem rigid or pedantic, as was typical for those who worked in research and conservation, nor disorganized and chaotic, which seemed to be the rule for artists. “How do you like your coffee?” he asked, which was a prelude to an interesting conversation about painting. “Do you know,” he said, “I have found that people’s relationships with their artwork has little or no relation to its value. Most of the paintings I’ve restored are neither signed nor dated, nor even by any artist of note. On the contrary, most were by amateurs, and many were copies of famous masterpieces. But in every instance, there is a relationship between a painting and its owner. It’s that which makes people keep the same painting on the same wall for years, and look at it from time to time as if they’re seeing it for the first time. When they move, it’s the first thing they think of taking with them, and they’re careful to re-hang it in a prominent place.”

Eventually, the conversation turned to her painting, and Yasmine told him of the information she had managed to acquire in her research into it, with her experience as a professor of art history. He listened attentively and did not seem surprised by her attachment to the painting, clearly used to it from his clients. What did surprise him was when she told him about the locks of human hair in the girl’s braids.

“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.