The Girl with Braided Hair

Madame Pauline Fauré, Yasmine read, had been an attractive Italian woman, the wife of Lt. Fauré, with blue eyes and blond hair, who had disguised herself in her husband’s military attire so as to come with him to Egypt: there were no women allowed on Napoleon’s campaign ships, except for a few seamstresses and cooks. This was depicted in a painting entitled “The Scientists of the Expedition” of a number of men, Napoleon in the center of their little group, and a woman among them. Was the artist in this painting, she wondered? She had found no trace of this artist, not even a self-portrait. She searched the names of the Campaign artists who had visited Egypt, but the long list of names held no Alton Germain among them. She found this unsettling: was he really one of the Campaign artists? His paintings documenting the French Campaign, its battles, and the Egyptian street did not constitute incontrovertible evidence that he had come to Egypt with the Campaign; there were many Orientalists and indeed artists who had created paintings of the Orient without ever having visited there. But then again, the painting of Zeinab and the date it had been created strongly suggested the artist’s presence in Egypt at that time.

Before shutting down, she scanned her email: the only thing of note was an invitation to a conference held by the Association for Art History in France. I’ll have to email them back and tell them I’m too busy, she thought.

As she was driving to work, a sudden impulse took hold of her. She turned in the opposite direction, heading for the headquarters of the French Campaign, Beit al-Sinnari, the place where Alton had lived when he was in Egypt. The secretary-general of the Institute had told her in her last visit that the painting had not been among the items damaged in the ﬁre; indeed, it had not even been in the Institute, and the storehouse keeper had told her the same thing. The documents she had perused the day before had told her that the painting had come to the Conservation Department with the paintings damaged in the ﬁre at the Institute, even though the damage to the painting had not been caused by the ﬁre, but by improper storage. All the information led to a new theory: the painting had never left Beit al-Sinnari. It had been painted there and then hidden in a place where no one could ﬁnd it. When the collection had been moved to the Institute’s new location, it had remained in its hiding place, and when the Institute had caught ﬁre, the collection had found its way back to Beit al-Sinnari, and somehow, at that point, the painting had been found, making everyone think that it was part of the Institute’s collection. They had then sent it to be conserved.

“Welcome back,” said the security guard who had ﬁrst met her at Beit al-Sinnari a few days ago.

“I’d like to meet the curator of Beit al-Sinnari’s collection,” she said.

The man led her to a long corridor ending in an ofﬁce. After several knocks on the door, a weak voice quavered from behind the solid wood, “Come in!”

Although the sun was shining brilliantly outdoors, the place was dark and damp. “Good morning,” the man cheerily greeted her. His face was so lined and wrinkled that she could not properly tell his age. He was sitting at a desk surrounded by a huge collection of large, ancient volumes, and peered at her from behind thick spectacles. “Welcome, I’m sure. Are you from a newspaper?”

“No, I’m not. I’m conserving a portrait that was damaged in the ﬁre at the Scientiﬁc Institute, and was moved here with the Institute’s collection, then was sent to my university’s conservation department—that’s where I come in—but what was strange about it was that the director of the Institute said it wasn’t part of their collection, and in fact no one seems to have ever seen it before.” She went on, “So, I suspect that this work may never have left this location, not since it was occupied by the scientists of the French
Campaign.”

“Well,” he said, “this house was, indeed, their base of operations. I’ve been in charge here for a long time, and I know pretty much everything about it. Which painting are you talking about?”

“It’s a painting of a girl in a striped gallabiya, with her hair in two braids.” His eyes narrowed and he appeared lost in thought. “Wait,” she said, “I’ll show it to you.” She held out her iPad so that he could see it clearly.

He peered at it for a time, then shook his head. “No. I don’t remember seeing it.”

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “it was in storage and just wasn’t noticed.”

He shrugged. “It’s very possible. There’s something strange about this house. The spirits of everyone who has lived here before inhabit it.”

“How so?”

The man reached under the wooden desk at which he sat, taking out a tray with coffee-making paraphernalia on it: a small butane stove, a jar of coffee, and another of sugar. He began to prepare coffee slowly and carefully, as though everything in the outside world had ceased to matter as long as he was making coffee. “I’ll make us coffee,” he said, “and we can talk.” Without asking her how she took her coffee, he spooned it in and stirred it slowly and patiently with a long gilt-handled spoon. It was only seconds before the delicious aroma of coffee spread through the room, clearly ﬁring up his memory and preparing him to tell his tale.

“This house,” he explained, “was built by Ibrahim Katkhudha, whom they called Ibrahim al-Sinnari, in a reference to his home town of Sinnar in the region of Dunqula in Sudan. He was a Berber who left his city and came to Cairo after ﬁrst living in Mansura. He had worked as a night watchman in that city, and learned how to read and write. He read a great many books of magic and astrology, until he became quite the authority and acquired a bit of fame. He went to Upper Egypt after that, and worked with Mustafa Bey al-Kabir. By then, he had learned Turkish and was famous and rich as well. After that, he came to Cairo and built this house. They say it was one of the most attractive houses of the era. To tell the truth, it is still worthy of that reputation today. They say that he went to Alexandria to attend an important meeting held by an Ottoman prince called Hussein Pasha and a group of the most important Mamluks, on the seventeenth of the Islamic month of Jamadi al-Akhar, in 1801, and they were all murdered.”

“So what you’re saying,” she said, “is that he was murdered in 1801, after the French Campaign left Egypt.” She rubbed her chin. “How did it come about that the Campaign took his house as a base of operations?”

“It is said,” he replied, “that he was thrown out of his house by order of the French, who took it over; there are rumors that he escaped to Upper Egypt with the other Mamluks.” He took a deep draft of his coffee. “What do you expect of a historic house whose owner used to be an astrologer and a fortune teller, and carried out his experiments here?” He smiled. “I promise you, when I’m in here I ﬁnd myself living in another world, a different one—the world of the Unseen. I often see Ibrahim al-Sinnari, who owned the house, a man with black skin and broad shoulders, in his white gallabiya and his turban upon his head, with a long string of ninety-nine prayer beads, wearing yellow slippers curled up at the toes, walking slowly around the house, looking left and right as though he’s checking up on the place and making sure it’s all right, or looking for something. Sometimes he ignores me, and other times he smiles at me and keeps right on going.” He shook his head. “I also see the members of the French Campaign walking around, in their foreign suits and chattering in French. One of them has one leg and walks with a crutch. There’s a blue-eyed, blond woman with them, her hair down her back, wearing clothing so diaphanous that it makes me feel ashamed—I have to look down and say ‘Cover yourself, woman!’ and all she does is give me a coy laugh and then she goes on her way.”

By now, Yasmine was all but staring, in open-mouthed surprise, which he noticed.

“That’s not all. Often I will hear noises: music and singing, giggles and laughter, and champagne corks popping and the clinking of glasses. I go out to see what’s going on, but I can’t see anything, and the sounds stop as if they’d never been there—but when I go back to my desk, it starts up again.” He shook his head. “It’s not only the spirits of the French folk that haunt this place: there are Mamluks and Ethiopian slaves, servants, and guards of the house. I see everyone in their different clothes, and I hear them chattering in different languages.”

“Ah,” she nodded sagely, thinking to herself that this man was deﬁnitely losing his marbles. He was certainly old enough. But then, what about Caffarelli and Pauline, whom he had described with great accuracy? “What of the spirit of this girl in the painting?” she found herself asking. “Haven’t you seen her pass by as well?”

The man seemed to sense the hint of disbelief in her tone. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you,” he said calmly. It was not a question. “I swear to you that this house is inhabited by the spirits and shades of everyone who once lived here, as if there’s something about it that makes them reluctant to leave it.”

“Can I visit the storage room?” she blurted out.

“Yes,” he nodded, “of course.”

He opened a drawer and took out a round keychain with a disc hanging from it, crammed with brass keys. “I can’t believe it,” Yasmine couldn’t help saying. “This is your security system? In this day and age?”

“And why not?” he replied calmly, rising and starting to head out of the room. His back was bowed and he shufﬂed slowly on his way, feeling his way with each step so as not to slip.

Yasmine followed. “There are newer ways of keeping things safe: self-closing doors with programmed keys and passcodes or ﬁngerprint locks.” He chuckled to himself, walking a few steps ahead of her. At the end of the corridor was a door to the left; it opened onto a passageway that ended in a spiral staircase. She followed him down to another old wooden door, which creaked in a series of staccato bursts when he pushed it open.

The storage room took up the entire cellar of the house, equal in area to the size of the structure above it. She noticed immediately that it felt cold, damp, and musty, with no ventilation or sunlight: this could be the source of the damage that had befallen the painting, especially if it had been stored in here all this time. The smell of the canvas that the portrait had been painted on was saturated with the smell of this place, already familiar to Yasmine.

“No ventilation at all down here?” she asked.

“This is the cellar or the shelter,” he said, “designed to be used in times of danger. The scientists of the Campaign used it to safeguard their secrets and important discoveries, especially after the Revolt of Cairo in 1798, when the people stormed the homes of the French and attacked them and burned them to the ground, destroying what was inside.”

Yasmine nodded thoughtfully. “What about the damaged pieces in the Institute’s collection? Were they put in here as well?”

“Yes, they were kept here temporarily under great secrecy, but now they’ve been sent away to the labs to be conserved.”

Everything the man said indicated that the artist had used this shelter to hide his painting away to keep it safe from theft or damage. Yasmine paced slowly around, taking the place in, now looking at it as a researcher, now as a detective, which was, after all, what she had become since she had found the painting. Several closets and cubby holes, she noticed, lined the walls, perhaps built to store papers and tools. The warping and creases in the canvas in her possession indicated that it had been folded up. The artist must have shoved it into one of these, perhaps hiding it under a table or similar, and it had only come to light when the storage shelter was combed meticulously to move the damaged works to a restoration center. “Everything indicates,” she whispered to herself with a new certainty, “the painting never left this room since he painted it.”

She left, happy in her new discovery; she was convinced now that the artist who had painted the portrait was indeed part of the French Campaign and that he had lived and worked here. And if he was one of the Campaign artists, the other works she had tracked down would have been painted while he was stationed in Egypt.

She arrived home ﬁlled with energy from her discoveries. “Hello, Grandma!” she sang out.

Her grandmother did not return her enthusiastic greeting.

“What’s wrong, Grandma?” Her grandmother often took to childishly pouting when something upset her. Yasmine was aware of why she was upset. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just very busy with something these days. There are . . . problems I need to solve. But don’t worry, I’m nearly done with them and I’ll be free to spend time with you again.”

“I don’t want you to be free to spend time with me. You hardly talk to me. I sit alone all the time with nothing but the walls for company.”

“How can you say that, Grandma? What happened to all your relatives, your family, your friends you talk to for hours?”

The woman looked away. “They’re busy too.”

She knew she wasn’t spending enough time with her grandmother, the old woman who was as dependent on her as a small child. What would she do about her, she wondered, if she married?

Married? She rolled the word around in her head. Why had she not been preoccupied with marriage like every other girl she knew? She had never felt the ticking clock or nagging thought of marriage, although she was past thirty. Had she devoted herself to her studies and research without noticing her life slipping past? She knew that her mother’s suicide had made her despise the social construct known as marriage: it was a cheating husband that had driven her to kill herself. This was at least part of the reason why she had commitment issues with Sherif, running away the minute she got close. She had never daydreamed of her wedding day, or thought what her wedding gown might look like; she had never looked at bedroom sets or children’s rooms in stores and thought of them one day being hers. And when she went to a wedding, she had never jostled with the other girls to catch the bride’s bouquet.

She unclipped her hair, put on her pajamas, and ﬂung herself, exhausted, onto the bed. She suddenly thought of the man she had met today and what he had said about ghosts and spirits in Beit al-Sinnari. She smiled, then fell into a deep sleep.

Cairo: November 1798

On my way home, I carefully carried the bag she left in my care before leaving the garden with entreaties to take good care of it. I am now certain of her feelings for me: she sacriﬁced her crowning glory so that it might not be touched by another man. This young girl possesses enviable courage. She did it without fear of Bonaparte, the man feared by the strongest men. I shall never abandon Zeinab.

Gaspard Monge, the head of the artists, spied me straight upon my entrance through the door. He instructed me to draw the house in which we live. It is to be documented in the great volume being completed by the scientists of the Expedition, to be entitled The Description
of Egypt.

The house is designed in a style which displays these people’s uniqueness in their Islamic architecture. Despite the ubiquitous ignorance and poverty, there are clear glimmerings of their keen intelligence and artistic sensibility, although this intelligence, sadly, lies fallow, without proper direction.

I sat down to draw the plot, some 1150 square meters in size, with 810 of those occupied by buildings, in addition to a garden some 345 square meters in area. This is the house where I roam freely, seeing splendor to rival the palaces of Paris, but with a unique Oriental aura. It is composed of a ground ﬂoor and two upper stories; it may be divided into ﬁve main parts. First, there is the entrance; then there is the part devoted to movement and communications; there is a service area; there is an area devoted to the reception of guests; and ﬁnally, a women’s quarters. The house has one façade, which is the north side, looking onto the north. There are three courtyards in the house: one for the entrance, one private for the womenfolk, and an internal courtyard annexed to the service areas.

What inspires sorrow is that this house was forcibly rid of its inhabitants that they might be replaced by the Sciences and Arts Committee. Although this permitted me the luxury of inhabiting this splendid place, I cannot but grieve for them. It is certain that whoever constructed a place of such beauty to live in would be stricken to be expelled from it and for others to be brought in to take their place. This is more true for the fact that we have changed some features of the house: we have taken over the women’s quarters as our painting studio, and the storehouse for foodstuffs and clothing has become the place where we store our equipment. This is not the only structure that we have documented in The Description of Egypt: we have documented a goodly number of buildings, including Beit Hassan al-Kashef and Beit al-Alﬁ, Bonaparte’s headquarters. Of all these, though, Beit al-Sinnari is by far the loveliest.

Day after day, meetings and celebrations are held at the seat of Bonaparte’s reign for the leaders and scientists of his campaign, but I make my excuses and refrain from attending. I take more pleasure in going out and walking around this place, looking at faces and learning about the different trades. These smiling, content faces that make haste to assist you, I say, for I frequently take a wrong turn on my return journey due to the narrowness of the alleyways and passages and the fact that they looked all similar, but no sooner do I ask for directions than I have a volunteer to convey me to my destination, despite the fact that my language and my features indicate that I am a Frenchman, and they hate with a passion all that is French. Still, this never impedes them from assisting me, and this odd nature of people has enamored me of them. I admired their determination to defend their homeland, for all Bonaparte’s efforts to ingratiate himself. He knows full well in what high esteem they hold their faith, and his speeches glorify their religion, its prophet, and its rituals. Even Zeinab, an innocent girl, was not taken in by him; she was not enamored of his uniform, his medals, or his illustrious name, a name that shines like a sword in the sunlight. His feigned tenderness and softness with her did not fool her, nor did his patience in undoing her braids one by one. She cut them off and sought to free herself of him.