Shem-el-Nessim

—An inspiration in perfume—

Shem-el-Nessim THE MU’EZZIN OF the Sultan al-Zahir Barquq mosque in the City of the Dead was calling for morning prayers when in one last rattling exhalation the Englishman opposite me expired. As his head fell forward, jangling our coffee cups and startling the clientele, his skin appeared translucent in the dust-dappled light. “Shem-el-Nessim!” were his final words. While the proprietor sent for a doctor from the Coptic Hospital on Ramses Street, I slipped the gold ring from the third finger of Stan Tooprig’s left hand onto my own.

The Cairo of 1926 was the city of Moslem legend, seat of Saracen art, home of the Arabian Nights. But the coffeehouse in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar on Gawhar el-Kaid Street was so far below the domes and minarets that it didn’t even merit a name. Five times a day the Mu’ezzin would summon the faithful, halting the hammerings from the silver smithy next door. But at all other times it was too noisy for us to sit outside with the pipe smokers if we wished to converse, so we were confined to the shadows within.

Most of the coffee drinkers were fantasists. In their daydreams, they would be smuggling whisky, writing novels and returning home wealthy and triumphant. I had met plenty who had never left Cairo; at least not alive. These star-crossed fools drifted here on inauspicious currents and were marooned by ancient history. Stan Tooprig was something else altogether, and I am still not sure what. He had come here from London in search of something, or merely to escape himself. As I had done with all the rest, I struck up a conversation with him over coffee.

The unlikely surname resulted from an unusual ancestry: a Dutch trader who had made his fortune in London around the time of the Great Fire and whose descendants had been there ever since. Tooprig claimed he had always wanted to visit Egypt because his father had once produced a ring of yellow gold engraved with strange foreign symbols, and which he claimed had once belonged to a Pharaoh. He had won it in payment of a debt while on a trip to Venice, he assured the young Stan. After his father died, Stan inherited the ring, along with a considerable fortune. It was many years later before he learned that what was engraved on the ring was a cartouche of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Stan Tooprig I met in Cairo was no longer the well-to-do English gentleman he had once been. Behind everyday reality, there is a deeper reality so cruel that it condemns to death those whose crime is no greater than the pursuit of their own curiosity. I know this to be true because it happened to Stan Tooprig. And, as strange as it may sound, it was piqued by a woman’s perfume.

Tooprig required something of women that was not physical but sensory. Although he claimed to be as partial to blondes as he was to brunettes, he had always favoured the civet cat-like scent of redheads; there was a certain astringency about them he said he found entirely libidinous. Unless she could tantalise his nose, her other charms would be of no consequence, and a fragrant woman invigorated all of his senses, not merely the olfactory.

He lived just off Baker Street, on two floors, with modest living quarters for his valet. One might have described him as a gentleman of leisure; on most days, he took long walks through the city and sometimes, on a whim, would follow a particularly fragrant woman in the hope of a closer encounter. He had cultivated a succession of these, but he was fastidious and discarded his subject if she did not smell “right”. He even classified them by type and aroma: Thyme and Basil (blondes); Sandalwood and Vetivert (brunettes); and Lemon and Petit Grain (redheads). But then came Shem-el-Nessim, the perfume worn by the raven-haired mystery woman. And it was in a London winter that he first crossed paths with the creature that was to be his downfall.