Flowers in Flames

Chapter 2

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Mikhail wasn’t a young man; by that I mean he was no longer an adolescent who possessed dreams similar to mine, that I could share with him whenever I pleased. I’d made up my mind that he wasn’t even handsome. Although I had studied aesthetics for about a year in Egypt and come back to flaunt it in a city that was (and always would be as far as I was concerned) ignorant of what it was, I had not defined any standards for what made a man handsome – things like nose shape, eye colour, hairstyle, bodily proportions. Even so, Mikhail seemed particularly unattractive, and I decided that girls who did use such criteria would exclude him from any competition he might enter to win a date or partner.

When I was sixteen, my cousin Samra, who lived in another neighbourhood some way from us in the Kaheer district, told me about those exacting standards. She suggested that when picking out men, I give her standards a try, and mentioned that her mother had resorted to them to choose her father, the locksmith. Samra had applied them when choosing her boyfriend, Faris Assad, owner of the best barbers in Sur. He had learned to cut hair from the itinerant Indians who stopped by the city from time to time. Faris was a Muslim, but that proved no obstacle to loving him and spending giddy hours together; that was until the time came to propose. Together they put on quite the dramatic performance. He referred to his longing, she expressed her agreement, and they talked about the obstacle of religion. He could never change his religion, and her family would never agree to her marrying a non-Christian. They wept together, then split up. When she did get married afterwards, to a Copt who worked in a fabric shop in the big market, I didn’t know whether her rules had really classified him as handsome, or just an ordinary man who promised to take her hand and guide her along the long path of life.

I sometimes saw Mikhail passing by on the street, or standing in a shop I’d gone in to browse or buy something. On two occasions, his image left a powerful impression on my mind. Once was when I saw him on the back of a tall black horse. In his left hand he was holding a fan made of red cloth, embossed in gold, which he wafted rhythmically. His hair was long, but neat. His shoes were made of brown leather with laces halfway up his shins. His shirt was slightly open, his black chest hair peeking out.

He looked captivating that day, straight out of a poem of seduction by my favourite Spanish poet, Ramon Rimos:

Juan was half the moon

and half the sun too if I wanted.

He was tall, perhaps taller than history,

and deep, perhaps deeper than tradition.

His eyes resembled a flower,

or so he said, but Nature said: No,

it is the flower that resembles his eyes.

He carried good winds

and tossed me a handful.

He carried old soldiers’ letters to their girlfriends

and gifted me the way to write them.

There was no river near us for him to seize

and lead to me.

There was no desert

to erase from sight.

Yes, he stuck in my mind on that occasion, and I expected it was just another crush, with all the silly giddiness that makes me laugh whenever I remember it. But back then I was striding towards twenty, had come back from Egypt, and possessed an aesthetic world that I tried to instil here. My cheeks were redder, my walk more inflammatory, and my body had a personality of its own. Over my shoulder, I carried a crocodile-skin handbag full of toiletries. I sensed that the warm milk of motherhood lay dormant in my breast, and that without great hardship I could engage in constructive dialogue with ugliness and convince it of the necessity to stop being ugly.

Sur was the capital of a vast and rich region. Situated in the west of the country and surrounded by scattered villages, Sur was, in fact, a sphere of grand disorder. Nobody there had ever known there was a science of beauty, taught far away, whose foundations were the waging of war on ugliness and vulgarity, and exerting control over chaos, even if the ugliness originated from a drunken donkey or a cockerel pursuing a hen.

I tried to tidy up the clothing and hairstyles of a number of disorderly women, and to have them choose makeup using appropriate criteria. I also tried to teach some fools, whom I knew well, how to fight and defeat their foolishness. One day, I spoke to Mr Murtada Gul – a Turk specializing in selling water from artesian wells that the autocratic state dug for him, and who was rumoured to be a relative of Sur’s governor, Dameer. He visited us from time to time on account of his connection with my father. When I noticed his belly bulging in a most unattractive fashion, I said to him, ‘Aesthetics would consider your belly a battleground where two mighty knights are in combat. Victory goes to the one who flattens it completely.’

The Turk was cruel, as was usual for the Turkish ruling class, who deserved to be known as oppressors of the world from the moment they entered it. He did not smile, and did not request any explanation of the proposition from aesthetics – which I was convinced he did not understand – but threw a conveniently placed earthenware cup at me.

The fragile cup hit my nose, causing a cut that bled, and smashed when it hit the floor. My father fell out with me for a while. Yes, my friend, he fell out with me, and although he did not say aloud that he regretted sending me to study aesthetics, I understood from his expression and his looks that’s what he thought.

I’ve mentioned that the image of the rider on the tall horse, described with such fiery imagination in the poem by Rimos, moved me. I must have smiled at the rider, or given him a wave of encouragement, because a bunch of red and violet flowers, seemingly picked from a splendid garden, was sent to me at home three days later. No name was attached to them, and the lad who brought them – a boy from the low-class Kawthar neighbourhood – did not remember why he was bringing them or who had asked him to in the first place.

I smelled the flowers with a passion. Jasmine, carnations, and Damask roses; I smelled them flower by flower, again and again, as though hoping to find the distinctive lingering sweat of their sender. It was though I was expecting to find a cipher. What really perplexed me was that Sur was still in a brash age of backwardness and chaos, and the idea of sending a lovely bunch of brightly coloured flowers to a beautiful girl was quite unfamiliar, and would not have occurred to even the dizziest and most besotted lover in Sur.

I suspect that in ascribing that tasteful present to Mikhail Rajaee, the Coptic tax collector, my thinking went too far because I wanted him to have taste. But I had no idea whether he was really like that. I knew that his father, Rajaee, had been a tax collector too, and retired when he came down with the ‘brain strain’ that stole the present, past, and future of those afflicted. Now he had even been deprived of his simple intimate memories, and I heard he would roam the streets in search of his ring finger. I was acquainted with Mikhail’s mother, Maria Thomas, a delicate, wraith-like woman, who could derive sustenance from a single kind word. She wasn’t really someone who visited us, but we knew her. Sur wasn’t a deep sea or a knotty place, but the Coptic community was tight knit.

The Utopia – the old, aristocratic club – brought together those able to gain admission, Copts among them, either by virtue of their influence and wealth, or because they worked there as clerks, cooks, and waiters. Even the guard, Emir, was a Copt.

The second time I observed Mikhail was also from a distance, but he filled my senses. It was in the big market, and he appeared to be having an area prepared and cleaned for a meeting with the women who sold flour and who, through the minimal taxes they paid, also contributed to the coffers.

Workers were constructing a large sunshade out of wood and palm fronds, under which was sufficient space for every woman in Sur to sit if she decided to sell flour. Mikhail ordered one worker to get a move on, and rebuked another on the verge of falling asleep. From my perspective, supervising workers did not seem part of Mikhail’s job, but I did not examine the point too closely.

His voice was quite loud and had a familiar ring to it. It was the voice of a man who might be deaf or imperious, or whose trade involved shouting. But he wasn’t deaf, and given that his profession relied on thought and action more than a loud voice, he must have been imperious. It seemed he saw me, too. I was wearing a black dress embroidered with red, blue, and gold, which I had designed, made, and embroidered myself with considerable patience following the pattern of aesthetics. It was a wonderful dress, so Mikhail said. He didn’t actually say it aloud – we did not talk to each other and weren’t sufficiently acquainted for him to rhapsodize about its beauty. It was his eyes that spoke, and his nose, which turned red then white then red as a result of the surging hormones battling in his blood.

He suddenly stopped barking instructions at the workers and stood rooted with a threadbare certitude watching me walk by. I had no particular direction, and in Sur there was no destination, big or small, for me to head for.

I stopped at Queens’ goldsmiths, the shop owned by Isaac Musa, a Jewish man destined since birth to work and sell gold, indifferent to the ups and downs of the world. He had a customer, a plump young woman insistent on purchasing bracelets with the new, popular, and expensive ‘red deer’ engraving. Leaning on the counter, she was arguing furiously to convince him to budge on the price, but it was futile, and in the end she took the required amount out of her leather handbag, accepted her bracelets wrapped in green silk, and left.

There were other goldsmiths in the market of course. The caravans plying between Sur and the distant capital city, Egypt and other African countries also provided a lifeline for that trade. Only Isaac, however, was truly and fiercely creative. He had artistic ways of engraving gold no one else knew, and was so good that many believed the story that he worked with the jinn. I remember when I went to Egypt to study aesthetics, I had one of his bracelets on my wrist with the ‘moon pool’ design. Why ‘moon pool’ and not ‘sun pool’ or ‘star pool’, and why ‘pool’ in the first place, I don’t know. Egyptian relations of my father and Italian relations of my mother whom I met in Egypt were dazzled by the bracelet and longed to own one. I told them it was of the ‘moon pool’ design, and they noted down the name to ask after it, but they could only be found with their creator, Isaac.

Isaac was chronically self-important, his nose always in the air, and he only talked to his customers, women or men, with a gilt brown pipe, mostly unlit and stuffed with strong Darbar tobacco balanced between his lips. He had no children, and it was said he’d mourned his wife, Umm Ilya, who had poisoned herself years before for a trivial reason, namely that her husband had admonished her for using too much water when she took her weekly bath. Half his tears were blood – although nobody had proof of that – and none of those who knew him could say for certain that any tears had flowed from his small, bright eyes as they buried his wife, Umm Ilya, at the Chaim Jewish Cemetery.

Of course, Isaac knew me, although there was no particular friendship between him and my father other than being men on the market. It was different with Fandouri, the Greek wine merchant, who was a family friend, and one of my passing crushes during that laughable phase of emotional turbulence. He was seventy at the time and his daughter a friend of mine.

I was looking absently over Isaac’s wares in the glass display table. I felt two pairs of eyes on me, their heat almost melting me: the eyes of the goldsmith, who hoped that the corn merchant’s daughter would buy a new trinket from him; and the eyes of someone else, who might have been Mikhail Rajaee, the tax collector, having left his task and followed me to Isaac’s shop. Or it might have just been one of the tramps that filled Sur, allowing his eyes to enjoy the sight of the back of an elegant girl sheathed in a very elegant dress.

Abruptly, I raised my eyes. Isaac’s gaze was directed onto the glass display case, exactly where I expected, as he watched my own gaze.

In a sudden movement, I turned around and saw the familiar silhouette of a man quickly move away.

Mikhail Rajaee, it seemed, had fallen for my allure, and I felt that I, too, might fall for him, or perhaps I already had without admitting it.

That evening, I was really silly. For no good reason I might have been embarrassed and, at its peak, embarrassment becomes silliness. I lit all five lanterns in my room and sat enumerating what I could remember of the men who had come knocking at the door to ask for my hand in marriage over the months since I had returned from Egypt – men whose names and prospects I had no desire to know. My father had remained friendly and affable, and did not suggest I was a no-good daughter. I thought Mikhail might have been one of my suitors, but I quickly discounted the idea. It was inconceivable that the well-known tax collector would come knocking at my father’s door without him telling me about it. Most likely, those who had come were simply poor and ambitious, or thieves intent on stealing a beautiful flower, and my father had sent them packing.

I spoke to Martha Samuel, an old Coptic lady who came by our house from time to time. She was forever boasting about her children, who had run away from Sur and left her a penniless widow. A few of the city’s Copts helped out with her minimal expenses and she worked as a cook and clothes washer, including at our house. I asked her, ‘Did a man ever fall in love with you, Martha, and you love him back?’

Now, Martha was traditional, and all she knew of men – apart from her sons of course – was that their life stories were littered with so many sins that genuflecting in every church in the world would not be enough to wash them away. Most of all, she knew that Jacob Novo, her husband – who’d died twenty years ago after being kicked in the stomach by an enraged donkey – was loathsome and treacherous, and tried to sell her to the captain of one of the caravans that passed through Sur in search of slaves. Luckily, while Jacob was counting out the price he’d been paid for her, the caravan captain noticed her wedding ring and halted the sale.

Her three sons, whom she had borne in the early years of her marriage, were tainted with strange ideas and used unfamiliar language: phrases like ‘marginalization policy’, ‘distance from the centre’, ‘wealth exploitation’, ‘racial discrimination’, and ‘lagging behind’. One day they vanished – nobody knew where – and Martha was still weeping, but proud that her sons were lions, while other people’s children were sheep.

In answer to my question, she just gave a bald, self-pitying no.

A cup of tea before her, she combed out her red, hennaed hair. I would not let her take a sip while it was still hot, nor did I let her sleep once she had decided to spend the night.

I spent days expecting Mikhail, or his mother, Maria, to visit. I knew that his father would be unable to appear a sound parent if he was dragged on a visit to deepen ties between our two families with a prospective marriage in the air. I also knew that Mikhail’s younger brother, Rizq, wasn’t in Sur at the time because he’d joined the army and was undergoing military training at a barracks outside the city.

A month, perhaps more perhaps less, went by, and I did not come across Mikhail in any of the streets of Sur I intentionally or unintentionally walked, or where taxes were collected in the big market and the cheaper Abi Jahl market, or where milk was distributed and where fodder and other essentials for pack animals like saddles were sold. My infatuation went so far that one day I even approached the red light district, in the hope that the tax collector was on some mission there. I was riding my horse, Shahrazad; my face was covered, but I did not enter. My knees were knocking, and in the distance I spotted wizened men with bent backs standing in queues that would no doubt ultimately lead to the arms of miserable women. I made a quick getaway, afraid I, or my horse, might be recognized, a report reach my father, and I face questioning.

Despite how close we were, now that I had grown up, my father was not expecting me to have any more crushes. His wildest expectation would be that I smile at someone whose face I liked the look of, or that I stretch out a hand to touch his horse. Or that I bathe in perfumed water, languish in the corridors at home, sit for hours sewing elegant clothes to the template of aesthetics, or read philosophy books, obscure novels and the verse of my poet Rimos.

Rimos was mad for sure. What he wrote was terrifyingly like my mood and burning desires. I tried to smell his poems, savour their taste, run my trembling fingers over their erogenous zones, and sense my arousal. I repeated his poem ‘A Coupling and Another’ to myself perhaps twenty times during that period. It was really about a woman in love who waits:

Do you know, Juan?

Do you really want to know

that my memory is no more

your official archive?

My heart no more your well of honey

as you sleep or roam a forest or refine

your taste to become an angel.

From now have I become you

and your memory become your official archive

your heart your well of honey?

Things I have are things you have

and whenever I open my window, your window opens.

My tear fell down your cheek.

What are you waiting for, Juan?

Should I commit suicide? I mean we commit suicide?

Or should I go to your house. . . my house?