Arabesques

He was already an old man when I met him, a man who could stare eternity down; I had the intolerance of youth and thought romance attended violence in faraway places. Though he never strutted or clowned on the world’s stage, I regarded him a hero who deserved a place in memory. And though no one now will know that he relished the mysteries of the arabesque, angular line and looping tendril meeting at infinity; that he stood before me, thrice tapping his ebony cane on the stone floor of an excavated church; or why it was his body floated below a bridge in Geneva—I, Kadr Hakim, still want to do justice to all the shadowed ambiguities of Uncle Selim. “The vanished are just,” a poet said; I only know that the name Selim filled my childhood and haunts my old age.

Once they had addressed him as Selim Bey, later as plain Selim. Then he fled Egypt. In Switzerland, he became known among some wits as the Sage of Geneva, fingernails longer than a hermit’s but impeccably groomed. People came to his table at a café on the Rue du Marché and sought his counsel about matters familiar or strange. As they left, they tried to slip an envelope under his cup; gently, he pushed it back. His pocket chess set, folded like a morocco pouch, with tiny pawns red and white, seemed always within his reach. At odd moments, his fingers would move deftly across the open board, perfecting the wild Traxler Variation.

When the police found him one raw November dawn floating in the churning waters below the Pont de la Machine, they remarked the dark line across his throat. “It’s his past,” some said; “He was out of step with the times,” others rejoined with a shrug. A few intimated suicide. The fact was that no one knew much about Selim. After his wife died, when he was not chatting at the café, people would see him strolling the quays or sitting in the Promenade des Bastions, facing the solemn statues along the wall. Always alone.

In another age, they might have built a statue for Selim in his native Mansura. Lithe and lean as a young man, mildly pigeon-toed, he spoke English with an Oxbridge accent, pursing his lips. His judgment of events—the crash and tumble of civilizations—seemed clairvoyant to his associates; his judgment in marriage—they tsked and tutted behind his back—appeared to them bizarre. But Selim knew that, incongruous as it might seem, his marriage would outlast its critics.

His wife—a gawky Yorkshire girl called Grace, with gray eyes and rosy cheeks marked with angel-hair veins—never found the Egyptian climate suitable. Why, then, the natives asked, did she ever marry him and settle here? For less than that they would have found reason to dislike an Englishwoman. But they had not reckoned on the intricacies of love, which disregards the claims of nationalism—and they did not know Selim.

When Grace was a nurse in Durham, still longing to see the world beyond the local moors—a cheerless, wintry landscape, overgrown with sedge and gorse—the orderlies wheeled a young man with a fractured tibia into her ward. He had jumped over an icy puddle, landing on cobblestones, limbs bent like a doll’s. The youth had clear brown eyes, a faint, alluring fragrance, and a faraway name.

At the University Hospital, Grace took charge. Selim seemed to her a rare bird of passage, streaking across a dull horizon—that’s what she had told Ruby, her fellow nurse, blushing. He would be in Durham only a few months, researching medieval taxation in libraries and archives before returning to Cairo. But something in that odd bird caught Grace’s wonder even as he hopped and hobbled about in the ward.

At first, Ruby had rolled her eyes:

Don’t be ridiculous, Grace, he’s younger than you are. And what do you know about Egypt?

Grace flushed again—with anger this time—and went sullenly about her work. At last, Ruby said:

You could...