Al Siqilli Dream

Mansoura Ez-Eldin

As I left the Wehbeh building, I found myself on a dark street that bore no resemblance to Qasr Al Nil, which I knew by heart. It was winding rather than straight as I knew it to be. I walked, and as I did, I saw the street was blocked at its far end; but when I reached what I thought was a wall, I was surprised to find an opening luring me onward. The light was dim on the other side; the buildings had transformed into fortresses that hugged the curves of the road as if they had shape-shifted to fit their surroundings. A dark veil enveloped everything, and I felt I was looking at a film negative.

I continued walking as if in a dream or some filtered reality. The world around me had become a quivering mirage bathed in silence. My very thoughts seemed to turn to smoke, and I was no more than the shadow of a lost being.

I felt like I had stumbled upon a hidden, mythical corner of this city. Just when I started to feel I belonged here, I was reminded of my estrangement. I felt not fear but merely desire to understand, accompanied by a feeling of unease. I was certain this was not a dream. My anxiety strengthened this conviction. Cairo was whispering in my ear, taunting me that I would never know it, that I would live within as a transient, an eternal drunk who never sobers.

People had disappeared from the street as if a storm had blown them away. As if they never were.

“In the beginning, there were stones, and they will remain when all else has ended. The stones alone are the city’s past and its future!”

I almost said this aloud, but I didn’t. In that moment, there was neither sound nor echo, only silence. For a second, I thought even I didn’t exist, that I was merely an idea that had occurred to the road about a woman walking down it as if in a dream. But just then a question popped into my head, and I was solid and real once more: where am I, and how can I find my way back?

I quickened my pace, looking straight ahead until I got to Mostafa Kamel Square, and the city returned to normal, with its nocturnal crowds and noise and all the contradictory feelings it evokes in me. I embraced its image as a tipsy city happy to drink itself to the dregs, indifferent to the transients that tread its streets, their lives fleeting moments in a history that spans thousands of years, lording over every ancient stone and even the dust that gathers on the aging buildings and the exhaust fumes that poison the air.

I dared not look back until I reached the Abdel Moneim Riad station. There, I sat on the dirty pavement, protected by the din of commuters running to catch the microbuses, which filled with passengers as soon as they pulled in. I distracted myself by staring at the Ramses Hilton and counting the number of lit rooms. An agitated guest was throwing burning papers from the window of his room and watching them go out as they fell.

The tumult reassured me as reality regained solidity and cohesion. I left my spot on the curb and stopped the first cab to cross my path. Throughout the ride, I kept staring at the streets out the window to confirm they were as they appeared, all the while replaying in my head the last thing Adam Khalifa had said to me: “This is not a city, but a patient suffering from vertigo!”

Of all the neighborhoods in Cairo, he chose Faisal, where I lived for five years, as an example of the chaos and discord of the city’s architecture. 

I was supposed to interview him for one hour, but the meeting – which started at seven o’clock at night – went on for three, during which time Adam Khalifa did not stop speaking even for a second. I would ask him a question, but the words that rolled nonstop from his tongue had nothing to do with what I had asked. I would try to reformulate the question, and he would tell a story whose significance I could not divine although I was overcome by his proficiency, stemming from his absolute faith in his own words. After a couple of hours, he was more at ease and began speaking of “his own private Cairo,” as he put it. This was closer to what I wanted: the magazine was publishing a series of interviews under a section titled “Their City.” In each issue, a public figure would share his or her vision of Cairo and draw their own map as they had lived it since childhood. I did not put much effort into these interviews. It was just question and answer, according to my editor’s wishes. After publication, I would rewrite each one, again and again, as stories, and store them away in a secret drawer, overflowing with papers that at once resembled and contradicted the city.

As I made my way to Adam Khalifa’s office in the Wehbeh building where I was to interview him, I found myself hoping for an extraordinary journalistic encounter with an architect who had contributed to the planning of several cities. I expected him to present a different vision of Cairo, but he surprised me with a city of hallucinations and doubts. He went on at length about Cairo’s fragile relationship with reality and its solid grounding in superstition. He spoke of what he termed “Holy Muqqatam,” the wisdom of Jawhar Al Siqilli compared to the folly of Khedive Ismail, and the need to restore the city to its original design if we are to correct the mistakes of the North African astrologers who oversaw its construction. 

He told me Cairo was an enchanted city, that almost no one knew of its focal points or the hidden stashes of magical amulets buried at different sites. As he went on, I realized he was only speaking about the city built by Jawhar Al Siqilli, commander of the armies of Moaz Deenallah the Fatimid, and later expanded by Emir Bader Al Jamali. He strictly avoided mention of anything built after the fall of the Fatimids by the Ayyubids, Mamluks, or Ottomans, or the Cairo of Khedive Ismail and the neighborhoods of Masr Al Gadida or Maadi. He insisted that everything built after the Fatimids was a cancerous growth and everything before the Islamic conquest just “castles made of sand.” He said this last part in English, turning away from me.

***

Translated from the Arabic by Meris Lutz

An excerpt of my forthcoming novel "Al Siqilli Dream", to read the rest of it, please order the print edition of Portal 9.

http://www.antoineonline.com/Book_Portal_9_Stories_and_Critical_Writing_about_the__9772305519037.aspx?productCode=0009772305519037&from=504