spreading I pretended to study the book in his hand.
He had not accommodated himself to the frailties imposed by his age, working around the clock to prove he was up to it. More than anything, he loathed his faculties being called into question, as though he were some pitiable pensioner. I had made a mistake. I should have told him straight that my habit of speaking to myself had slipped out of my control; then he would have smiled, wheeling out that brand of empathy with which he maintained a distance between himself and others. The point being that he would have been reassured no defects had been detected in any of his faculties, for that would signal that the breakdown had begun.
He set the book on a stack of lowbrow crime novels, the ones he had refused to trade in when they first became popular, hating the idea of them, the way they were written, even their covers—then weakening when confronted with the lure of their profits. He concealed the title of the book he held from me, determined to spin out the game of enticement that he played so well.
“Cryptography is like magic. It first requires you to believe that reality does not exist. A fundamental requirement, this: without it you will see only signs and symbols.”
He fell silent to catch his breath, preparing for the next sentence which was to be considerably longer. It would incorporate, perhaps, the difference between cryptography, a science, and magic, a supernatural force on which one should never be so rash as to rely entirely. How could one combine the two?
Then the conclusion: “Thus all innovation throughout history.”
This was Dmitri’s motto, which he would shape and shunt into any topic, even food. I often thought to myself that he existed in a room only he was allowed to enter. He would invent things to accommodate this theory of his, but I was unable to guess at the nature of the mutually incompatible elements he was combining—nor, I believe, could anyone else. For Dmitri was a living, breathing dictionary, with effrontery enough to learn everything about everything by reading a book about it. And yet, because he who excels in speech finds it difficult to act, things never panned out for his theory as they should. Ever since our relationship had become properly established, I would hear him talk of it—maybe as my father had before me. We exist in a mesh of unchanging sentences, then seek out new ones, fleeing the tedium of repetition and uniformity. Take the strategy adopted by a close friend of mine, Lotfi Zadeh: unable to bear his father’s oft-repeated line on freedom, he had voluntarily joined the ranks of a group that regarded such things as heresy.
Behind me, the sound of panpipes trilled. One of the constants in my life. As a child, I would go ahead of my father to shove the door, which would knock the machine mounted behind it and make it play a tune. Many times, I’d leave the pair of them and go back out into the street, then return to push the door and hear the music once again. My father would tell me off, tell me to mind my manners, and Dmitri would cry, “No, no, parakalo, please, parakalo, let the boy have fun.”
With uncertain steps, accompanied by the tune, a young woman came in. Her dress was covered with flowers, and her hair so thick that I was quite entranced and didn’t even glance at her face. She looked about, then stood there, a few paces off, her head bowed and as still as though turned to stone by Medusa. This is what Dmitri looked for—all his customers were different in some way, somehow dreamy and disoriented; summoned by the sad sound of his panpipes, they never regained themselves thereafter.
Seeing him distracted with the girl, I made to leave. He wasn’t so insistent that I stay.
“We must finish our conversation. . . .”
“I’ve got an important appointment.”
Out I went, hugging the book—Enigma—to my chest and hoping it would help me find my way to a starting line. Mustafa’s confessions were a web of riddles. He quoted from books, quotes that were sometimes quite beside the point. Among his words lay a message of some kind, perhaps one that transcended reality—but not, as Dmitri would put it, to the extent of negating it.
No one who knew my good-hearted Greek friend would subject the views he expressed to intense scrutiny, nor blame themselves for seeking to escape the chatter of a lonely old man, devoted to his customers, who wanted nothing more than someone to listen to him for a while.
From home to the bookshop was fifteen minutes on foot, more or less the same distance that separated the bookshop from the café—a full quarter of an hour which, until that moment, I’d never before considered how to spend. (But considering late is better than never at all). I stood outside Sappho, the bookstore whose golden anniversary we’d shortly be celebrating, its signage over my head. Beside it stood Golden Shoe Footwear, then Koshari Delight. This was not as incongruous as it might seem, quite the opposite: when the sun begins to set, Sappho steps out to don her golden shoe, singing to the pipes of Dmitri’s door as she goes to meet her students.
This was not the Shubra Street laid out by Muhammad Ali, the ruler who forged the modern state. We were now on Lesbos, land of love and beauty. Structures of similar heights and styles harmoniously coexisting with their inhabitants, who contentedly live out an undisrupted and orderly life, spoilt by nothing—nothing save one of the newer buildings, which towered over the rest: the Pharaoh Building, so-called by its neighbors. This was their redress for the arrogance of its wealthy owner—who lived with his family on the first four floors—and that of its other residents, its high priesthood (some of whom owned famous stores in the district, others returnees from the Gulf), bound together by wealth and shared pride in inhabiting the highest and most luxurious building in the neighborhood.
I marked it as my primary target for when I put my planned mutiny into action. Years from now, a young man would come seeking the reason for my transformation from the ranks of the powers-that-be into a bold thief.
I was gathering information that most likely was useless. Was I determined enough to walk in the footsteps of Mustafa Ismail?
The girl emerged from the bookshop, surprised to see me. Ah, how I love these undisguised reactions. Did she think that I was waiting for her? Rest easy now, my thick-haired friend, there is a covenant between myself and Sappho: that I shall never visit harm on her possessions. But at least allow me a sight of that surprised and childlike face.
I watched her walk away with quick, resolute steps, more like a boy trying to act the man, taller than was womanly. She didn’t sway when she walked like other women—that severe body had it in it to rebel against her—and so she had let her hair grow thick, and cultivated flowers on her dress: signs by which she hinted at a hidden softness. The scant breeze plastered the fabric to her body, molding to the lines of her small, rounded buttocks. Every inch of her frame suggested a man somehow possessed by a female spirit—I would only discover how once I’d visited her village and seen the place where she’d been raised.
At the end of Khulousi Street, she stood in a daze, looking left and right. I scampered across to the other side, keen she not catch sight of me a third time. I turned right down Bulaq Canal Street toward the café, fighting the urge to look back and see if my suspicion was correct: that our roles were reversed and she was now scrutinizing me. How did my buttocks look to her? The very thought made them hang heavier. I came to a halt, flustered, making a pantomime of lighting a cigarette, and trying to get a fix on her out of the corner of my eye. At that angle, she was nowhere to be seen. Bolder, I looked around, but she had vanished. I walked on to the café, luxuriating in daydreams that had me a king who cared less for his subjects than for stockpiling women. This girl would be the latest addition to a collection which already included Lotfi’s girlfriend Manal, and Huda, made my girlfriend by some witch’s curse. Taking a scientific approach, setting lust aside, I compared the bodies of all three.
The mission I’d left home specifically to perform had been a failure. I had collected very little information. Who guarded the Pharaoh Building? When was he absent? How to get upstairs without arousing suspicion? And, most importantly, which apartment was currently free of its occupants?
I would have to wait years before I understood what Mustafa’s experiment meant. Young as I was, I’d listened spellbound to what I took to be an adventure story, and because I was learning