Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

There was no door. We stepped, in the calm sunlight — the courtyard preserved still its old function of creating a space of quiet between the dwelling and the street — over fallen stone and wood. A stairway led nowhere; it seemed terribly light inside; a fat, pleasant-faced, middle-aged Arab in shirt and trousers called out a greeting to Wally and came over to us. We were introduced to Hassan, and I saw one or two fine feathers of wood-shaving, curled on his clothes and hair. Slightly awkwardly, with an air, if no words of apology (he spoke little English) he drew Wally away to consult with him in Arabic. They argued, considered, explained in the manner of men who are in business together. My husband and I saw that we were in a great, floorless room — perhaps two or three rooms from which the intervening walls had been taken or had fallen down. Planks of new wood rested crazily against the old walls, sawdust was mixed with rubble underfoot, and, at the far end, there was a workman’s bench, a lathe and other carpenter’s tools. The walls were very high. Higher still, there was the sky. There was no roof.

Picking my way, I went through a beautiful arched doorway and found myself in another room. Where the floor had been there were piles of what at first glance appeared to be litter and rubbish, but which, when I looked again, I guessed must be Wally’s stores. Four broken Greco-Roman columns were stacked next to a porcelain toilet pan bearing the name of a firm of English plumbers. A huge carved door, half-destroyed by dry rot, lay on its side. A neat pile of pinkish stone blocks, numbered in chalk, stood near where I had entered. While I looked, there was a stir behind the columns, and a white duck came flatly towards me, blinking her quick eyes and shaking at a piece of rotting vegetable peel that she held in her beak.

This shell was a place of elegant proportion; even now, with the strange assortment of objects, and the duck, scavenger of the mud, in possession, it was the sort of place in which you must stand still a moment, as you enter, and feel how pleasingly you are enclosed. Half the ceiling remained intact above the ruin; the walls curved in to meet it, and this curved cornice and the ceiling itself were painted in a close, delicate, formal design of red and blue and gold. The colours were still perfectly clear but the ceiling ended jaggedly, halfway across the span of the room. In the gaping space of sky, kites wheeled slowly, as they did over the Ibn Tulun mosque. It was splendid.

Wally came in behind me, saying ‘shoo’ to the duck, who knew him and took no notice.

‘What was this?’ I said. My face must have shown my astonishment, awe, almost, the strain of the impact of a world that had flourished and rotted before I had come, alien and impudent as the duck, to look upon it.

‘Early eighteenth-century palace. Must have belonged to some prince. This was the salon.’ He stood with his hands on his skinny hips, admiring the ceiling.

‘But to whom does it belong?’

‘Nobody.’

‘How nobody?’

‘These palaces were family seats. Passed from father to son. But they lost power, money. Years ago, the descendants got too poor to keep up such places. Three or four or five families lived in them together. They fell to bits. Nobody ever restores anything, here. Everything decays, is lost. In the end the inheritance is divided among so many, nobody owns it. Nobody can live in it, nobody can afford to keep it — what is the word — habitable. But come on, you haven’t seen what I brought you here for. Don’t you want to see the mimbar for Washington?’

The duck ran once or twice before us like someone hurrying against the stream on a crowded sidewalk. ‘Get,’ said Wally, or maybe it was some Arabic word that sounded the same. The duck dived out of the way.

When Wally and I came back through the arched doorway, Hassan and my husband were talking in French beside the carpenter’s bench. Hassan wiped some small object in his hand with the palm of the other, and smiled at me with his head wrinkling his fat neck to one side, like one of those pictures of foreign children one is tempted to take on quaysides, recording an attitude at once shy and yet amusedly tolerant. Wally called out something to him in Arabic, and he disappeared for a moment behind a pile of planks and carved timber. From the wood powder that covered the bench I picked up the spool-shaped piece of wood, about an inch and a half long, that he had dropped there. I turned it over and saw that there was a slot cut across the back of it. My husband leaned over my shoulder and put into my hand a thin slat of wood, a little longer than the spool. It fitted smoothly into place.

Hassan came back with a handful of such slats and little carved wooden shapes — some were spools, like the one I held, but most of them looked like segments cut from a narrow picture frame. Some were of black wood, some nut-coloured, some rosy mahogany. There were two or three very small diamond-shaped pieces which were made of yellowed ivory. Not quickly, but with the calm rhythm of fingers that are doing work to which they have long been accustomed, Hassan fitted together shapes, slats and ivory. The picture frame segments formed diamonds, the ivory diamond shapes fitted within the black wooden ones, and a spool united each of the four angles of each wooden diamond to an angle of another. Grooves in the pieces themselves, and the thin wooden slats that slid in behind, held the whole pattern rigidly and sweetly in place without a single nail. Later Wally was to show me huge screens made this way, and the balconies which, in old Arab houses, cover the windows and have a tiny peep-hole window out of which the veiled women are allowed to observe the street, and, most beautiful of all, a centuries-old mimbar in an ancient Cairo mosque, from which not the smallest fragment of wood had worked loose. Hassan went away again and brought back with him a cardboard box in which his wooden confetti lay thick.

‘So!’ he said, assembling another pattern.

‘That’s partly very old stuff.’ Wally interpreted for the carpenter, ‘I brought him a screen — beautiful, very fine work,’ he picked up a tiny triangle, ‘but in bad repair, half destroyed. Now he’s making new pieces to replace those which have been lost.’

The jagged square mosaic Hassan handed to me had a uniform patina. ‘How is it that you can’t tell the old from the new?’ I asked.

‘He cleans and emery-papers the old pieces, and his replacements are identical with them,’ said Wally.

‘Patient work!’ I said.

Wally shrugged. ‘He is the last,’ he said, ‘it’s a dying art. Even in Egypt, there is no time, any more.’

Hassan went off with his easy, shambling walk and came back carrying a large section of wooden mosaic. He laid it before us on the bench, clearing a space for it with his forearm. It was part of the mimbar , the pulpit for the mosque in Washington.

‘There you are!’ said Wally.

Hassan pulled a few segments free, fitted them on to the pattern again. He pressed two pieces into my hand, motioned me to try. It was harder than I thought, because the pieces were made to fit so snugly. Hassan watched me proudly, as if I were a pupil.

‘He’s making every piece for the Washington pulpit here, himself?’ I asked Wally.

‘His son helps,’ said Wally.

I looked round at the ruined palace, open to the sky. ‘And when it’s finished,’ I said. ‘When it goes from here to — there. Will it be shipped complete? It’ll be such a huge thing.’

‘We’ll probably take it all to pieces for shipping,’ said Wally. ‘Hassan may go along to Washington to assemble it again, piece by piece. That’s prefabricating.’

‘Hassan in America,’ I said.