The Girl with Braided Hair

by Rasha Adly

  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 se
lected 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.