13

 

Cairo: Winter 2012

She left the lab with a handful of information. The mysterious girl had given Yasmine her name as a calling card. “Zeinab, Zeinab, who are you?” she murmured, as she went down the stairs. She had made up her mind: every ounce of the art historian she was, every particle of her energy, every piece of information she possessed, and every research tool in her arsenal would be devoted to finding out the identity of the unknown Zeinab.

Back home, she sat at her laptop, a giant art history reference book open on the table next to her. ‘The key to art history research,’ it had been drilled into her, ‘is the date it was painted.’ This would open every door to her, and without it she would find out nothing. According to the report, the portrait was painted in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century—the date of the French Campaign in Egypt. This was the first spark of light to illuminate the dark tunnel, so far, of her research.

The information she had to go on was that the artist was a professional and not an amateur, and his technique of mixing color confirmed it. She entered several search queries on blending colors with sand and sea salt and waited for the results. Finding several specialized sites, she finally ascertained that this method of painting was only used by a limited number of French painters in the mid-eighteenth century. She rearranged her query and repeated her search: the painter she was searching for must have been in Egypt during the French Campaign. A professional painter, who might have been part of the Campaign itself.

This was as much information as she could come up with, after searching and cross-referencing several search engines. She woke up exhausted the next day. Her only consolation was that with the information on the French Campaign, she had caught the first thread of the answer.

This piece of information so intrigued her that she went to her former art history professor, the mentor under whom she had studied. She knocked on the door to his office. His dry, distinctive voice invited her to enter.

He welcomed her with his usual smile. Since she had been a student, he had taken note of her love of art history and her enthusiasm for research: she was one of the few who had come to the department out of a genuine passion for the subject, as opposed to the many who only joined it because it was the only option available to them due to poor grades. He ordered them two coffees and she told him everything she had found so far. “Why don’t you look in the location where the painting was sitting all this time?” he suggested. “Provenance, and the storage of a work of art, can be an important tool in our field.”

“All I know,” Yasmine said, “is that it was in storage at the Gezira Museum.”

His thick brows furrowed in puzzlement. “The Gezira Museum? It was only built recently. This was one of its acquisitions? I doubt it. Where did it come from originally? That is, where did the museum get it?”

How stupid could she be? If she had gone to the Gezira Museum in the first place, she could have saved a great deal of effort. She drained her coffee all at once, then put down her cup and took her leave. “I’m going straight there. I need to get there before it closes at two.”

“Good luck,” he smiled. If she had come to him with a story like this in years gone by, he might have accompanied her to the Gezira Museum and helped her look for the history of the mysterious painting. Where, he wondered, had all his enthusiasm gone? He remembered his own youth when, as a postgraduate student in Italy, he had been fascinated by the works of da Vinci and Michelangelo, and researched day and night, from museum to conservation lab and back.

The museum was not too far from her own house, on the grounds of the Opera House on Gezira Island, which also held her neighborhood of Zamalek. The museum was rectangular in shape, the doors to all the different rooms opening onto the spacious central hall. There was a room at the side with screens and electronic remote control equipment. “Is the director in?” she asked the receptionist. After a phone call, he asked her to follow him to the top floor, where the administrative section was. He paused and knocked at a door with a brass plaque bearing the words museum director.

The director, a friendly faced man in his fifties, greeted her politely at first, then warmed to her and greeted her effusively when she introduced herself with her title. “I do conservation and restoration,” she explained. “Currently I’m working on some paintings that came from storage in your museum, and I’m doing research into the history of a particular piece I’m conserving right now. I was hoping you could give me some information about it.”

His eyes shone with curiosity. “Which piece?”

She opened up her iPad and showed it to him. “This one.”

Several expressions flitted across the man’s face: deep thought and finally perplexity. “But this painting. . . .” he looked at it again carefully, “isn’t part of our collection.”

“Really?”

“Hold on,” he told her, “and we can make certain.”

He picked up the phone and asked the collections manager to come to his office. The man appeared almost at once: he had sensed from his boss’ tone that it was important. He burst in, looking as though he expected a catastrophe or something of that sort: “Has something happened? ”

The director showed him the painting and he looked at it, slowly catching his breath and mopping his sweaty brow. The tension in his expression dissipated and he relaxed. “Yes, yes!” he cried. “You’re right. This painting isn’t one of the museum’s acquisitions. It was transferred here as part of the Egyptian Scientific Institute’s collection after the fire.”

“The Scientific Institute?” Yasmine repeated in astonishment.

The director dismissed the collections manager, thanking him, but apparently overcome with curiosity, the manager refused to leave. “But is there something wrong?” he asked. “Has the painting been stolen?”

“No,” the director said firmly, clearly irritated by his intrusive questions. “Nothing’s happened. Thank you once again. Go back to what you were doing.”

Miffed, the manager stalked out, while the director kept looking at Yasmine. “When the Institute caught fire on Friday, December 16, 2011, we received several of its acquisitions that had been burned or otherwise damaged. This painting was one of them.”

“I wasn’t aware that there were paintings in the Institute,” Yasmine said slowly. “I thought there were only books, manuscripts, and rare documents there.” She looked up at the director. “Even when the painting came to us, there was no indication or anything saying that it was part of the Institute’s collection.”

The director launched into a lecture: “Napoleon founded the Egyptian Scientific Institute, originally called the Institut d’Égypte, in 1798, so that the scientists and artists he had brought with him to Egypt could have a base from which to work and make their discoveries, culminating in the Description de l’Égypte as its crowning glory, a comprehensive study of Egypt of the time, along with numerous other books and documents. As for paintings in the Institute, I do not have enough information to confirm or deny that. You can ask the secretary-general of the Institute: he’s the only one who can help you with that inquiry.”

She thanked him politely and left, filled with renewed hope: although nothing was definite, the information she had gleaned so far was an indication that she was on the right track. She had already ascertained that the portrait had been painted at the time of the French Campaign in Egypt, and that the painter must have been one of the artists who came to Egypt with the Campaign; its presence at the Egyptian Scientific Institute confirmed it. The odd thing was why the painting had remained in the Institute’s building all this time; why had it not been moved to a museum to be displayed? Why had the artist abandoned his painting so easily, leaving it behind in Egypt when the Campaign left, an artist who had used such a unique technique?

The questions rattled around in her head; she was jolted out of her reverie by the ringing of her phone. She was delighted to see Sherif’s picture on the screen—the photograph he had sent her on his last trip to Prague. The temperature had been below freezing there, so he looked at the camera from beneath the hood of a thick parka, a scarf wrapped around his neck, snow carpeting the ground around him. She loved that picture: he looked like some sort of snow god, so she saved it with his phone number, and enjoyed the way he flashed on her screen with a winning smile each time he called, and his gaze that seemed, effortlessly, to see straight through her. “Still alive?” she said cheerfully into the receiver.

“I only came back to life when you answered,” he said. “I live only to hear your voice.”

The faintest tremor went through her. How strange! He had never said anything romantic to her, not since the day they parted; he had always been careful to be strictly friendly, despite his loving glances. Why was his voice touching her this way once more?

“Where did you go?” he asked.

She shook herself. “I’m right here.”

“Still chasing after that girl?”

“You mean Zeinab?”

“Who’s Zeinab?”

“The girl in the painting.”

He burst out laughing. “Did she tell you her name?”

“Yes.”

“What happened? Did she come to you in a dream and tell it to you?”

“Didn’t I tell you,” Yasmine said calmly, “that she came to me because she wanted someone to find out her secret? I’m a detective now. I follow her footprints everywhere.”

“I think this calls for a coffee and a catch-up.”

“It’s half-past three now . . . how does five o’clock sound?”

“Okay. The usual place.”