The Girl with Braided Hair

She passed by a bakery famous for its French pastries to buy her grandmother’s favorite chocolate cake. She had decided that they would spend the evening together to make up for the days she had neglected her in favor of the painting. The strange thing was that there was no one but her to keep her grandmother company: her other grandchildren were all over the globe, and only called her on the telephone on feast days and special occasions. Other than that, there was no one: everyone she had known in her life was no longer in the land of the living, friends, family, and neighbors all. It is a painful thing to have to live on without everyone with whom we have grown up and lived our lives while we await our own death, like a person packed for a journey that will start soon, very soon, although we do not know when exactly.

She put the cake on the table and made two cups of tea, her grandmother sitting and smiling like a happy little girl. Her hands shook so much when she took the plate of cake from Yasmine that she asked, “Haven’t you been taking your nerve medicine?”

“I have,” she said, “but what can medicines do for these old nerves? My nerves are shot and no amount of medicine can ﬁx them.”

She watched her grandmother ﬁght the tremors in her hand to cut up the cake with her fork, not trying to help her, as she knew that would make her feel patronized and feeble. “I used to make a chocolate cake every Thursday,” her grandmother reminisced, “and invite our family, friends, and neighbors over. My home was always full of guests. I liked them and they loved being there with me. Funny, they stopped visiting me and calling. The telephone hardly
ever rings.”

Yasmine let her be: why tell her? Tell her that they were all dead, and she was the only one left.

Her grandmother kept reminiscing. “On my high school graduation—it was a girls’ school, and it had the best class of girls in Cairo—we learned embroidery and crochet and sewing and dressmaking and home decoration and ﬂower arrangement and cooking and all the arts to prepare a girl to be a homemaker of the best and smartest class.” She took a bite of her cake. “On my high school graduation,” she resumed, “I made a white lace gown, and embroidered it with ﬂowers, with little pearls in the center.” She smiled. “Everyone was wild about it. The teachers adored it, and the girls went crazy over it. I was the top of my class, and the girls offered me huge sums for it. But I refused. I kept it just as it was. I never even dreamed of wearing it!”

“But why not?” Yasmine asked, caught up in the tale.

“I don’t know,” her grandmother shrugged. “I was afraid of it getting dirty or torn, I think. I wanted to keep it pristine, untouched by anyone’s hand and without anyone wearing it.”

Yasmine leaned forward. “What use is it, then?” she asked. “What use is a piece of art if nobody can see it or have a chance to admire it?”

“I don’t know. It was like a precious jewel. I wanted to protect it from everything, even from people looking at it.” Her grandmother’s eyes shone. “Let me give it to you for your wedding dress.”

“Me?” Yasmine said, stunned. “Me wear it?”

“Yes. It’s just your size.”

“Do you know how long it’s been in the closet?” Yasmine cried out. “The fabric must have rotted away by now. It’ll be all yellow . . . not to mention it’ll be out of style.”

“No, no!” her grandmother shook her head hard as if denying some accusation. “It’s as fresh and new as the day I made it. I put it in plastic to stop it fading. As I was ﬂipping through the channels on the TV yesterday, there was a fashion show by a famous French designer, and one of the models was wearing a dress just like it.”

Seeing nothing for it, Yasmine said meekly, “Yes, Grandma.”

“But when are you and he announcing your wedding?”

She made a vague positive response to please her grandmother and save herself the trouble of a fruitless and pointless conversation. “Soon.”

Later, she thought about her grandmother’s words, and of the man who she assumed was her granddaughter’s future husband. She thought about how he had changed since that new girl had come into his life. He had not called her in a while. He gave her less attention. With the intuition that every woman possesses, she could feel that something was the matter. But she could not blame him, in any case.

She went into her room to resume her research on the other man who had come into her life all of a sudden. She found a new painting by him entitled “The Revolt of Cairo.” The painting depicted two sides locked in ﬁerce combat: the French in their military costume, their horses so lifelike you could practically hear their loud neighing, and the common people of Egypt who had come out to confront Napoleon and his army. Looking at the painting, you could see the power evoked by the military uniforms, representing training and knowledge of the arts of battle, in the face of men ﬁlled with honor and dignity standing unarmed in defense of their land with all the courage, valor, and chivalry they possessed—quite unlike the other, more famous historical painting of the same subject, which depicted Egyptians as a weak, powerless rabble crushed beneath the hooves of the French ﬁghters’ horses.

All the paintings of the Campaign had depicted Napoleon as almost a god, perched high atop his horse while everyone clustered like slaves around and beneath him. But this work showed a battle of equals, the Egyptian confronting the Frenchman, the artist seemingly wishing to depict a truth that many ignored.

Day by day, the picture had grown clearer: it was all based on assumptions, true, with nothing certain as yet, but all the threads of her investigation were leading her somewhere. The one stumbling block to her theory was the absence of Alton Germain’s name from the list of the French Campaign artists.

She woke the next morning with one thought in her mind: she must go to France to attend the conference. This would help her with her search for this man, in the place he was from. The emails she had sent to the website asking for more information and whether he was an artist of the Campaign had gone unanswered. She rang up the airline and booked her ticket.

At noon, Sherif called. “How’s Zeinab?”

“She’s ﬁne.”

“Anything new?”

“You care about her more than me. You didn’t even ask about me, just about her,” she joked.

“Haven’t you noticed recently that she’s all you care about?”

“Yes. And haven’t you noticed recently that all you care about is that girl whose name I don’t remember?”

She had been expecting him to respond that he only cared about her, and to ask what girl she was talking about. Instead, there was a moment of silence on the other end, after which he changed the subject. “So, have you found anything?”

“I’ve found a lot, but nothing for sure. I’m going to go to Paris to see for myself.”

“Paris?” She could hear him blowing out smoke. “You didn’t say anything about leaving the country.”

“I only decided a few hours ago,” she explained. “I was invited to the annual conference of the Association for Art History, and I wasn’t going, but now I think it’s a good chance to do more research there.”

“I hope to see you before you go. If you have time, that is.”

“Of course, we’ll meet before I go.”

His voice held a gentle reproof, the source of which she could not guess.

Cairo: October 1798

We were graced with calm in the country for some time. Those of lesser intelligence imagined that the Egyptians had accepted matters as they were. I knew that it was the calm before the storm.

I woke this morning to the sound of pot lids clanging against one another. It was a terrible racket, growing louder and louder until it drowned out all other sound, deafening. I did not know what this could mean: why were they doing this? When I saw the masses of humanity in the street, it dawned upon me that this had been the signal to congregate. Men—old men, young men, boys, and even children of every stripe and manner—poured out into the squares and gathered on every street corner and in every passage and alleyway and in the mosques and churches and synagogues. They spilled out into the streets, rage on their faces, bearing all manner of impromptu arms such as sticks, staffs, knives, and daggers. Some went directly to the houses of French people to exact their vengeance. When General Dupuy, the commander of Cairo, heard the news, he took a contingent of men out to ﬁght, and went straight to the home of the Turkish judge, Ibrahim Adham Effendi. The Egyptians were gathered outside the house of the judge, complaining loudly of the injustice they suffered, and calling for justice for Sheikh Muhammad Karim, whom Bonaparte had ordered to be executed by ﬁring squad in Alexandria. Moments after General Dupuy arrived, his head was cleaved from his body.

It was as if the cry of demons had reverberated throughout every corner of this calm city. In every place, at the same time, there was robbery, looting, and murder of Frenchmen. At the moment when Dupuy was murdered, the army bakers were being slaughtered at the hands of the people of Bulaq, and General Caffarelli’s house was robbed and looted, and his architectural equipment and personal equipment destroyed. An attempt was made on his life, but he escaped death by a providential miracle. Not only that, but they scattered the heads and other body parts of the dead in the streets and alleyways. It was an extremely painful and repulsive sight.

The people of Cairo had neglected to take over the rooftops; the French positioned themselves there, aiming their weapons and cannons onto the heads of the populace. French ﬁre erupted from the Citadel into the city; it was aimed at al-Azhar Mosque, the coal market, the Ghuri market, and the Carpenters’ Alley. The neighborhood of Bulaq was completely destroyed. The French continued their barrage on al-Azhar. Not only that, but they galloped into the heart of the mosque on horseback, and burned and ruined its religious books and valuable manuscripts and documents. Flames leapt up from within al-Azhar, and the horses urinated and defecated inside that holy place. This incident in particular incited redoubled hatred for all Frenchmen within the hearts of the Egyptians: al-Azhar was not only a mosque or a square to them, but a symbol of Islam, of faith and piety. Al-Azhar is also a university to which students come from every land throughout the world, known as ‘Qiblat al-Nour’ and ‘Qubbat al-Iman,’ the Mecca of Light and the Dome of Faith.

Our soldiers destroyed everything in their wake. Both sides had run amok, unfettered, and the vanquished Egyptians had fought bravely: Egypt’s poor, its peasants, its itinerant salesmen, and its craftsmen, those who knew nothing of ﬁghting and battle and whose only weapon had been their love for their country. The loud reverberations of their hate for us rang out to equal the neighing of the leaders’ horses whose hooves pounded the streets, their turbans upon their heads their only shields against swords and lances.

By nightfall, all was calm. All at once, the streets and alleyways were void of the throngs that had crowded them earlier, although they were ﬁlled with dismembered corpses. Dogs came out and howled, and noxious odors pervaded the atmosphere. The cries of night owls and ravens echoed through the air.

The next morning, the ﬁghting raged anew, but considerably less ﬁercely than the previous day. A delegation of imams, led by Sheikh al-Bakri, went to Bonaparte, asking him to call off his soldiers, in return for which they would call upon the people of Cairo to return to their homes. Bonaparte imposed a condition for this cessation, namely a list of names of the men who had organized this revolt. In the face of Bonaparte’s unbending insistence, they provided him with a list of the imams who had organized and incited the revolt, whereupon he ceded to their request and commanded the immediate cessation of ﬁghting. Concurrently, the imams went out asking the people to give up and return home. Then, Bonaparte issued the order to have the imams who had incited the revolt executed, their heads mounted on the wall of the Citadel, and their bodies thrown over its walls. The execution was carried out, which only fueled the people’s hatred for us. They had only to see one of us in the street for their anger to be unleashed, cursing at us and pelting us with dirt and refuse. The situation had become untenable; any return to the relative calm of before was now unthinkable.

The members of the Campaign were saddened at the death of one of their senior architects in the Cairo Revolt. Testifout had been a kind and keenly intelligent man, and his name had been foremost on the list of assassinations because he had been planning a new layout for Cairo, which meant the demolition of old houses and mausoleums, and the ﬁrst thing he had done away with were the gates to the neighborhoods that were locked at night and without which Egyptians did not feel secure. These gates had meant security and privacy to them, and that man had come and demolished them, so they had not only killed him but mutilated his corpse, beheading him and mounting his head on one of the gates he had ordered to be destroyed. On the same list were the names of the surgeons who dissected human corpses; this was a violation of the sanctity of the body under Islam, which states that a body must be buried intact. But what I found truly incomprehensible, and was a great blow to me, was the murder of Dupré, an artist whose only concern since we arrived here has been to draw the architecture of the houses, streets, and mosques of this fair city.

One thing I admired and found odd in equal measure was that our neighbors and the inhabitants of the neighborhoods occupied by the scientists of the Campaign, around the palace of Hassan al-Kashef Bey or Beit al-Sinnari, and other far-ﬂung quarters, protected us from being murdered. A number of men had gathered and formed a protective barrier all around the house and prevented it from being looted. This is the Egyptian people: a people to perplex and astonish. Why had they done this? Did they know the value of what we were accomplishing in their country, what works we would leave to history, although they knew not what we were executing or what work we were doing?

I was grateful for the attitudes of the water carrier and the man who sold the licorice drink. They had not forgotten that I had once painted their portraits, and that my only weapons were my brush and palette, so they stayed close to my house with several of their friends to protect me. It was a wonderful way to return the favor: this is a people that does not forget, and can distinguish between those who seek to harm them and those who seek to do them good.

Cairo: October 1798

It had been a strange day from the start. The sun did not rise as usual, obscured by a great dark cloud. Rain began to fall. Was it truly rain, or the tears of the sky lamenting what was to happen on this day?

Ravens had been cawing on the walls of houses, at the gates of alleyways, and on the tops of palm trees, a cry of ill omen, since early on. Zeinab woke to the sound of brass saucepan lids clanging together. Everyone in the house ran to gather in the central courtyard. “Heavens!” Zeinab cried, hands clapped to her ears. “What’s that sound?”

Her mother rushed out, muttering garbled prayers under her breath, the verse of the Qur’an that says, Allah is the best guardian, and He is the most merciful of the merciful.

Sheikh al-Bakri was not immune to the fear that swept the household: he hurried out with his head bare of the great turban he usually wore, forgetting even to put on his caftan over his house clothes. “They’ve done it! They’ve carried out their plot!” he cried, wringing his hands.

“What plot?” Zeinab’s mother asked.

“Yesterday,” he said, “some of the imams from the council addressed the matter of exorbitant taxes, the breaking down of the alley gates, the ransacking of houses, and the conﬁscation of horses, cows, bulls, and weapons, and demanded that Napoleon cease and desist, but he refused. Several of them plotted a revolt!” He shook his head. “It’s the head of the serpent, Sheikh Abdel-Wahab al-Shabrawi! And al-Jawsaqi, the head of Ta’ifat al-Imyan, the order of blind imams!”

“That makes you mad, does it?” she sneered at him. “Don’t they have the right to plan a revolt? Or are you the one who’s blind to the injustice of the French?”

“You don’t think we’ve a chance of winning against them, do you?” he moaned. “We’ll get nothing out of it but that we’ll anger the general, and killing and ruin as well!”

Sheikh al-Bakri tried to keep his son Ahmad from going out and taking part in the revolt; but Ahmad, with the impetuous courage of youth, refused. For the ﬁrst time ever, his eyes held disdain and resentment toward his father. “Shame on you to keep me from it! And shame on you for not taking part!”

Sheikh al-Bakri vacillated between bouts of rage and spells of silence. His wife kept on muttering Qur’an verses under her breath. Zeinab felt a strange combination of fear and worry for Alton on the one hand, and pride and a sense of challenge that they were standing up to the French, on the other. She wondered what would happen to Alton if the revolt succeeded. Would he be killed? Would they throw him into prison, there to be tortured to death?

Sheikh al-Bakri closed the doors to the house and bolted the courtyard gates, then hid in his bedroom, refusing to eat or drink. The sounds that came to his ears from outside told him and his family the story of what was happening. After a time, the weeping and wailing of women came to their ears, and the cries of battle rang out, echoing throughout the city. The next day, the sound of cannon ﬁre was deafening, and smoke belched into the sky from the ﬁres everywhere. Houses were demolished, their walls falling in upon the heads of those living there, and thousands died under the rubble. Everyone within the house was weeping and crying in terror.

There was a knock at the door. At the ﬁrst it was a regular knock, gradually increasing in force and speed, indicating that some disaster had struck. Fatima’s heart trembled in fear for her son. Had something happened to him? She ran to the door to open it, praying to God that she was wrong. “God have mercy!” she cried, working the bolt and ﬂinging the door open.

At the door was a great delegation of Azhar students and imams, asking to see Sheikh al-Bakri. Sheikh al-Bakri, who had sequestered himself in his room for a day and a night, thinking of the black fate that awaited him if the revolt succeeded, enjoyed a renewed surge in conﬁdence. He put on his turban, donned his fur caftan, and stood puffed up like a peacock listening to the entreaties and pleas of the delegation, who knew all too well how close he was to the general. They begged him to go to Bonaparte and ask him to cease bombarding the city.

“Of course,” he told them, head raised with his usual arrogance, “I could easily convince Bonaparte to cease ﬁring, but it is no easy matter to get him to forgive those who plotted the revolt. I expect a severe punishment to fall upon their heads.”

The man’s response to the entreaties of the delegation betrayed the pride and arrogance that ran in his blood. This was conﬁrmed to Zeinab, who was watching the entire scene from behind the wooden barrier.

Napoleon agreed to cease ﬁring, on condition that they give him the names of those who had plotted the revolt. The delegation fell silent, suddenly struck dumb. Napoleon threatened to resume ﬁring. Sheikh al-Bakri looked at the delegation, and in a threatening, menacing tone, said, “Perhaps we must sacriﬁce a few men for the sake of the lives of the people . . . or else there will be no end to the ﬁghting.” He went on, “With one look at what is happening outside, at the severed heads rolling in the streets, the burned bodies, and the people expiring beneath the rubble of demolished homes, we know the fate that we are heading toward.”

The men murmured loudly among themselves, consulting with one another. Sheikh al-Bakri added in order to convince them, “Be assured that with every moment that passes, more of our children and wives are dying.”

At last, they agreed to give the names of the men. One of the imams took on this distasteful duty, grating the names out through a tight throat. He spoke a great many names, foremost among which were Sheikh Abdel-Wahab al-Shabrawi and al-Jawsaqi. Napoleon was pacing back and forth, and as was his habit when preoccupied, had one hand folded behind his back and stamped his feet loudly, while his secretary took down the names and made out an arrest warrant.

The men left Napoleon’s seat weighed down with guilt and shame. None of them could say a word. Silence reigned over them. A few days later, the heads of the imams were mounted on the Citadel walls.

Cairo: October 1798

I was in my studio painting The First Cairo Revolt. The scenes I had witnessed bent my brush to their will; I could draw nothing but this. It was injustice incarnate. I did not obey the commands of our power-mad general by immortalizing him in a painting exalting his courage and strength. I cannot but depict the bravery of this people who came out in defense of their land, bearing whatever makeshift weapons they could lay their hands on—stones, kitchen tools—and took to the streets to resist with these primitive implements in the face of cannons and artillery.

Monge watched me as I painted. When the painting was done, he expressed displeasure. He did not approve of the manner in which I had depicted the Egyptians’ valor in facing down their enemy. I gave his comments all the attention they merited, that is to say, none at all. In art, it is your brush that leads you, and I heeded mine. It is the brush that paints, and not the artist.

After the First Cairo Revolt, something changed about the Egyptians’ attitude toward the Campaign and its leader. This great hatred was a thing that permeated every heart and mind, expelled with the very air they exhaled, until the atmosphere was laden with it. None had forgotten the scene when al-Azhar had been violated, when they had galloped in on their horses and blasted it with cannons, burning and deﬁling copies of the Qur’an. None had forgotten the sight of the corpses that had ﬁlled the streets and the screams of men, young and old, and even of women, being arrested from their homes in dead of night, their bloated corpses bobbing up on the opposite bank of the Nile days later. None had forgotten the heads of the imams mounted next to one another, their mouths stuffed with straw, on the Citadel wall, a choice meal for the worms and ravens.

The populace grieved. Those who had previously been generous with us merely cast us a look of derision. The tradesmen and the bakers, the butchers and the water carriers, would no longer have dealings with us. In the face of this great hatred that surely heralded dire consequences and would doubtless put paid to Bonaparte’s plans to win over the people, the emperor must do something.

The way into Egyptians’ hearts, in his view, was through their religion: but the Azhar incident had destroyed everything he had worked toward. Therefore, when he held a meeting with the leaders and senior scientists of the Campaign, we found him crying out, pounding the table with his ﬁst, “What if an invader stormed the sanctuary of Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, and wrought such havoc? Would our own people have taken it lying down? Indeed not! What occurred was a mistake and a grave one at that.” This time it was even worse, for what well laid plan could he possibly have made to make these resentful masses forget what had happened?

But he was a genius when it came to strategy, and was not without a plan for long.

It was a little past midnight when one of Napoleon’s men knocked at the door of Sheikh al-Bakri, who was deep in slumber. Not giving him the time to adjust his clothing or properly settle his turban upon his head, the messenger took him off straightaway. Al-Bakri wondered what on earth was going on, stroking his long beard and asking himself what he could want with him at this hour of the night. Would his fate be the same as that of the imams who had been executed? He shook his head vigorously, rejecting the idea. He had, after all, done nothing: on the contrary, he was Napoleon’s faithful man in Cairo. But no one could know the general’s intentions, or what he had in mind. He tried to coax the servant who had come to get him into conversation, hoping to glean something, but he received no answer.

Sheikh al-Bakri went into the meeting room, rumpled and his turban askew, with a heart that trembled in terror. But his fears were allayed when Napoleon greeted him with a broad smile, “Sheikh al-Bakri!”

The door closed on the pair of them: they did not come out until three hours later, when Sheikh al-Bakri and Napoleon had ﬁnished penning a convincing speech to erase all that had taken place from the memories of the Egyptian people. Lines were written, erased, written and erased again, to be replaced with other, more convincing phrases. Finally, Bonaparte was satisﬁed with the speech and went out to give it to the populace at large.

The Lord God has commanded me to be merciful and forgiving to the populace, and so I have been. I am disappointed by your revolt, which has deprived me for two months of my customary meeting with your Diwan. But today I return to you, clerics, descendants of the prophets, religious scholars, and imams of mosques. I would have you declare that he who sets himself against me in enmity will have no safe place to escape to in this world nor the next. Is there a person who can deny that it is fate that guides all my campaigns? I could judge each person for the slightest emotion they hold within their hearts, for I know everything that is in your hearts, even that which you have told no one.

It was a rousing, religiously inspired speech, where he informed them that he was fated to lead them, and that they must follow. He thus appealed to the fatalistic nature of the Egyptian populace, who fell under the spell of his speech thanks to that very fatalism. It was so convincing that there were rumors that the general would soon convert to Islam and trade in his tricorne for a turban and have himself circumcised. As for Napoleon’s generals and the scientists of the Campaign, they were provoked by that speech, all asking as one man, “What does Napoleon hope to achieve by speaking so?” He became the butt of jokes for some, and the target of disapproval and astonishment for others. A third, smaller, contingent believed that this was the best way to guarantee the safety of the Campaign and achieve its ends.

That was not all. Napoleon paced back and forth in his ofﬁce in his military boots, thinking of different ways to win back the trust of the Egyptian people. To this end, he enlisted the help of a number of trusted Egyptians and Frenchmen. Day after day, circulars were printed in Arabic and French, and pasted up in the largest squares. Some of these justiﬁed what the Campaign had done to Egyptians during the revolt, while others attempted to convince the people of Napoleon’s good intentions and that he had only set foot in their land to save them from the Mamluks. Although these gambits did succeed in convincing some, they never managed to completely erase the resentment in the hearts of others toward the French Campaign and its men.

Cairo: November 1798

Zeinab’s mother gasped. Her daughter’s hair had been so long she could sit on it, and now it barely covered her neck! “Good Lord! What have you done to yourself?” she gasped. “How could you? It was your best feature!”

She ﬂung herself into her mother’s embrace and sobbed bitterly, brokenly. Gently, her mother moved her away and looked her in the eye. “What did he do?” she asked. “Did he do anything to you? Did he hurt you?”

“No, Mother, it’s okay. He didn’t do anything. All he did was undo my braids, slowly, patiently. That’s why I got rid of my hair. It’s so he won’t ask to see me again.”

“What a strange man he is!” Fatima shook her head. Ever since the fortune-teller had told Fatima of the ill-luck that was in store for them, she had been preoccupied and unhappy, repeating, “God protect us from him, his followers, his soldiers, and all his men” over and over. Although she believed her daughter was truthful when she said that nothing had transpired between her and Napoleon, Fatima could tell that there was something else on her daughter’s mind, something she could not explain. There was a lost look in her eyes: she appeared defeated, broken. Zeinab had always been proud of herself, vain even, strutting around as though the world and everything in it belonged to her. She had not been fond of this arrogance in her daughter, but to see her crushed grieved her.

“Come on,” she said, “let’s go to the baths. The change will do you good.” She called the slave girl and asked her to prepare the reed basket in which they put their bathing paraphernalia. “Make some henna so I can dye my hair. It’s all full of white hairs. And put the sheep’s-wool loofah in there and the ambergris perfume, and the pastries I baked this morning.”

The slave girl put the basket on her head; Fatima put on her abaya and Zeinab covered her face; she and her mother got on two mules while the slave girl walked behind them. The bathhouse was in a narrow alleyway a few streets away. Zeinab knocked on the brass door knocker mounted on the heavy wooden door. The owner of the bathhouse opened the door, but she was lackluster in her welcome, unusually for her, for she was always garrulous and never stopped asking for the news of family and friends. “Morning,” she said curtly, and handed each of them a towel without looking at them.

A large marble basin occupied the center of the place: several women were bathing in it, others sitting at the edge, chattering and smoking water pipes and eating sweets. As soon as she came in, Zeinab put on a pair of the high clogs provided by the bathhouse: they were wood and ensured that she would not slip. In one of the side chambers they undressed, and Zeinab sat before an Ethiopian grooming woman with a glass bead dangling from her nose. She was used to coming to this lady in particular to scrub and wash her. “Wait,” said the woman, and came back with a bar of soap. In a whisper, so that no one would hear, she said, “This soap is made of olive oil. It comes especially from merchants from the city of Nablus in Palestine. The owner only uses it for her friends who come here. Let me wash your hair with it; it’s worth it.”

But the moment she saw Zeinab’s hair, she cried out, “Good heavens! What have you done to your hair?”

Zeinab sadly lifted a hand to her hair, only to ﬁnd that it wasn’t there. She remembered when the woman used to tease her, ‘It’ll take me a whole day to wash and style it!’ Her mother jumped in to her rescue. “She got sick and it was falling out. The spice expert who deals with such things advised us to cut it off.”

“It must have been the Evil Eye,” the woman volunteered, scrubbing Zeinab’s body with the rough woolen loofah. “What a shame. It was her best feature.”

Zeinab sat alone in a corner of the room while the grooming woman worked on her mother. It was impossible to see for the steam that came in through openings in the stone walls, but there was a face that kept appearing before her: Alton, with his hazel eyes, and the lock of hair that kept falling into his face, and his pencil mustache. Suddenly, it was as though his strong arms were wrapped around her and holding her close. The grooming woman ﬁnished scrubbing her mother with the loofah, then began to apply henna to her hair. Now, all that remained was for them to take a dip in the central basin.

Zeinab unwrapped the towel and ﬂung herself into the tub, whereupon every other woman in the water reacted as though the Devil himself had jumped into it. They hurried out, looking back with glances of derision and scorn. A fat woman cried as she heaved herself up out of the bath, “Get out, girls! This water’s been polluted.”

“We need pure water to bathe in!” another cried.

In the face of the ﬂood of insults heaped upon them by the women, Zeinab and Fatima could not even raise their eyes to them: they dressed in haste and hurried away. All the way home, Fatima could not stop crying, the words ringing in her ears, “This water’s been polluted”; “We need pure water to bathe in!” Both of them knew perfectly well what those words meant: the story of Zeinab and Napoleon was known to everyone in Egypt. Truly life is changeable. Before the French came to the country, the women had received Zeinab’s mother with warm greetings and kisses on both cheeks, vying with one another to offer her sweets they had made: she was the wife of Sheikh Khalil al-Bakri, and that in itself was enough to confer an aura of aristocracy and respectability upon her.

At last they were home. Fatima collapsed on the wooden couch, while Zeinab undid her veil. “It’s like I committed some act of debauchery,” Zeinab shook her head.

“You did,” her mother responded. “It’s enough that you took off your face veil and wore the revealing clothes of the Franks. If your father wasn’t a favorite of Napoleon’s, they would have beaten us up and kicked us out. But it’s not your fault, it’s your father’s.”

Zeinab shuddered. She knew the fate of a girl from a good family who was considered sullied or debauched: she was paraded through the town, riding backward on a scabied mule with bells around its neck, while the doorway to her house was stained with tar and red wax. She brought shame not only on her family but on her neighbors and friends and anyone who knew her. If she were not killed, she would probably never show her face again in the same neighborhood.

That night, Fatima raised her voice to her husband for the ﬁrst time. “Our daughter’s reputation is ruined,” she said, “and so is her future. Who will marry her now that her affair with Napoleon is common knowledge in the whole town?”

“Lower your voice, woman. You’ll always be like that, understanding nothing. Your daughter will marry Bonaparte. He is in love with her. She will be the empress of all the Orient.”

“Marry Bonaparte?” Fatima beat her breast in shock. “You would marry your daughter to a killer, not to mention that he’s a Christian?”

“Bonaparte will convert to Islam soon, be sure of it, like General Menou. He’s a French general who converted and became known as Abdullah Menou, and married Zubayda, a girl from Egypt.”

Cairo: December 1798

Other than General Menou, I had no dealings with the Army, neither generals nor soldiers: we were two things apart. The scientiﬁc campaign had its own motives and ends: namely, the advancement of science, and we were here to build and establish things, while the military campaign had only resulted, so far, in ruin and destruction.

I have been friends with Menou, now General Menou, since childhood: we grew up in the same quarter. Although he has converted to Islam and married a Muslim woman, it has not affected his standing in the army; quite the reverse. He is one of its highest-ranking generals and an indispensable cornerstone of Bonaparte’s forces. One day I met him in a small tavern run by a Greek fellow. He was in the company of several other generals and enlisted men, all enjoying themselves. Everyone was drinking wine, but he was having chilled water. There was some discomfort in the group due to Menou’s conversion to Islam, his having changed his name, and his evident infatuation with Egypt. He had been trying to lead his comrades by example and reason, not by harshness or cruelty. “How can we be true Frenchmen,” he was saying, “yet be dealing with these people in a manner devoid of all civilization?” He explained, “A great many liberties are taken by some of our soldiers at the expense of the Egyptians. We must act with nobility, respect the elderly, and respect women.” He took a sip of his water. “Tell me, what glory can you get from injuring a man who trembles at the mere sight of you? This is our role as leaders. We must always repeat this to our men.”

Some of the generals around him were clearly disgruntled by his words: they approved neither of his vision nor of his means of enacting it. They believed that the Egyptian people were a horde of barbarians who must be quelled with harshness and force, and had no qualms about saying so, entering into a heated debate that almost came to blows but for Menou’s restraint.

Over time, I became even closer to Menou, who was a more intimate friend to me than the other artists. Remarkably, this military man possessed a more compassionate heart and a more open mind than even them. One day he invited me to dine at an Oriental restaurant. I confessed to him that I was enamored of an Egyptian girl.

“But do you truly love her,” he interrogated me, “or are you merely enraptured by her Eastern beauty? Will you grow used to her, nay, tired of her, with time, and know that it was not love at all?”

I took his questions to heart. I could feel my features changing as I mulled it over. He comforted me, seeing that he had upset me: “If your love for her is genuine, then let nothing stand in your way.”

I laughed loudly. His face darkened and he ﬂushed, thinking I was making fun of him. “Do you know,” I quickly said, “what might stand in my way? Merely a little matter called Napoleon Bonaparte.”

“Bonaparte? What has he to do with your amour?” He shook his head. “I don’t think he would see ﬁt to intervene in such matters. When I told him I was going to convert and marry an Egyptian woman, he did not object, but congratulated me.” He nodded. “In fact, to him it was a trump card, something to help him win over the people and gain more of their trust.”

I felt the words fall from my lips, bitterly, “He is my rival.”

He repeated the words slowly, then said, “I had not known that Bonaparte loved a girl from this country.”

“It is Zeinab,” I said, “the daughter of Sheikh al-Bakri. He saw her at some event or other, and she caught his fancy.”

“Ah.” He stroked his chin. “But what of her? Does she love him?”

“She is a girl of sixteen. She is the living embodiment of every kind of innocence. It never went beyond some pride at being chosen over all the other girls of Egypt.”

“Beware,” said Menou. “Napoleon is unyielding when it comes to land or women. If he has taken the girl to his bed, she is his.”

“No! She has never shared his bed. And that,” I continued, “is what I ﬁnd so strange. Although he is clearly attracted to her and has chosen her out of all the women and girls of Egypt, he has not touched her.”

“He is a professional huntsman,” said Menou. “To fall upon his prey all at once spoils the pleasure of the hunt. Thus he lays his traps, step by careful step.”

The man’s words inspired fear and worry in me. Was this man truly grooming Zeinab to be his bedmate? Teaching her the arts of seduction step by step? He had undone her braids one day, unlaced her dress the next. What did he intend to take off the next time? What did he intend to do to her? I burned to think of it: only then was I certain that I loved this girl with a mad passion.

The licorice-drink seller encountered me on the way home. I asked him to pour me a cup to quench the ﬂames burning in my breast. Frequently, this man with his clothing and his tools had given me cause to stop and gaze at him, especially the magical way in which he poured the beverage in a curving stream from a spout in the brass urn upon his back into cups of metal, calling out, “Life and health is licorice!” As soon as I went into the studio, I began to paint him. I painted him just as he was: his interesting garb, the brass urn on his shoulder, and his bare feet. I was deeply engrossed in painting the portrait when I found several Campaign men all around me, insisting that I accompany them to a house of ill repute. I refused, whereupon they began to mock me for being a saint, or else, they hinted, there must be something wrong with my manhood, and in an instant, made me the butt of their jokes. I was so incensed by their jibes that I agreed to go with them, and with no little curiosity to see a new side of this world, something that might later be a subject for a painting.

Rostom, Bonaparte’s personal slave, was waiting for us in a smart carriage drawn by two horses. Bonaparte had given him the task of seeing to the needs of the scientists and artists of the Campaign, thanks to his vast knowledge of the secrets and hidden aspects of the city. He knew the best places to take the scientists, oftentimes telling us of historical sites worthy of our visits. Today, though, was different. As he said, we needed some entertainment and diversion, especially after the events that had recently transpired.

Rostom was garbed in colorful clothing, wearing a cap on his head that was tied in an eye-catching manner. His shining sword lay dormant in its scabbard, his features betraying that he was from a far-off land. He did not resemble the Egyptians. Although he wished to appear stern, as beﬁtted Bonaparte’s personal slave, there was a certain kindliness that shone from his childlike eyes.

No sooner were we settled in our seats than he tapped the side of the carriage and we were off. It rattled all along the way, scraping against the sides of the older houses in the narrow alleyways we drove through. Street after street and narrow path after narrow path, we left behind quarter after quarter, now ﬁlled with poorer houses, now opulent mansions. It was a refreshing winter night, with a wash of pleasantly chilly air. There was no sound but the cry of a night bird or the meowing of a hungry cat, and the barking of stray dogs in the distance. From time to time, cooking smells would waft over us, mixed with the smells of people, and sometimes fragrant ﬂowers.

At last, the carriage stopped outside a tight passage into which it could not ﬁt. We alighted and followed Rostom, who held a lantern aloft to guide us, although it gave off barely enough light to see where we were putting our feet. We arrived at the end of the alley. Outside a small house directly on the riverbank, Rostom stopped and knocked repeatedly at the door. I was overcome with a sudden distaste for stepping into that darkened house, but it was too late. A strong arm whose owner had glimpsed my hesitancy to come in took hold of me and forcibly propelled me inside.

Behind the door was a lovely woman in a tulle gown, almost completely transparent, wearing a great deal of makeup and powder. She took us inside. The lighting was dim and came from brass candelabras scattered around. The ﬂoor was scattered with cushions of red velvet, a large tray in the center laden with all manner of fruits and sweetmeats. There were also water pipes standing around here and there. The place was clearly familiar to Rostom, who ﬂung himself down between two lovelies, both paragons of beauty, who began to play upon musical instruments. We started to hum along with them as they raised their voices in song. One of them stood and began to sway to the music, soon joined by another, and another. They were well-formed, their features charming, and most importantly, they were perfumed with musk and ambergris. What a difference between these and the prostitutes of the common road and the café! It was clear that they had been carefully selected to provide their services to a better class of gentleman.

The serving girl went around with a large tray bearing pastries topped with sugar, and others stuffed with nuts. Jugs of a spicy liquor called arak were placed before us. The music continued, and the girls took turns dancing. One of the girls wore a face veil, teasingly transparent like the morning mist. She would not take her eyes off me. She was not the loveliest among them, but there was something different about her, unlike the others. She had an angelic gaze, ﬁlled with innocence—an innocence far removed from this place and these women, as though she found herself there by mistake. When I began to return her glances, I felt as though I were in a different place—wider, more luminous. When we looked away from each other, it was like waking up from a sweet dream to the shock of bitter reality. But did this girl truly possess such charm, or was it the cheap liquor that had me imagining things?

One member of our group, now thoroughly drunk, went upstairs with the girl who had been sitting next to him. Minutes later, another couple went upstairs. I looked around for Rostom, but did not ﬁnd him; he, too, had disappeared. Only I was left. I leaned back on the cushion and gave the girl a ﬂirtatious glance. She lifted the veil off her face: she shone like the moon at its fullest. She poured me a glass and drew near to me; she took my shoes off and massaged my feet. Then she came around behind me and began massaging my shoulders. She undid her hair and it fell like a waterfall to cover her face. She drew nearer and kissed me. Kiss followed kiss until I surrendered to her completely. Her kisses were unusual: sweet, yet spicy.

Upstairs, her bedclothes were rose-colored. The burning candles ﬁlled the air with the scent of the clove oil they were made of. It was the scent of Zeinab. The smell possessed me, consumed me. I found her standing before me, in the ﬂesh. I pulled her to me and drank my ﬁll of her lips. I lifted her dress and the fabric rustled: the jingle of her ﬁnery reverberated in my ears. Her earrings; her anklets; her bracelets. We kissed deeply again, a kiss that was only extinguished when our bodies moved together.