Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 October 1999 Issue No. 451
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The broken thread

By Yasmine El-Rashidi

Kamel Mohamed is no big shot -- by conventional standards, he's a nobody. But when he does what he does, he's a bit of a miracle worker.

"We can mend anything," he says, peering out through his thin-rimmed gold spectacles. "Anything at all."

It's no joke -- he really can.

Sitting in the corner of his one-by-one metre shop, in the same corner where he has sat every day for over 50 years, 75-year-old 'Amm Kamel the raffa (mender) sifts through the pile of T-shirts, skirts, trousers and blazers in front of him.

"See this?" he says, picking up an emerald-green scarf with a rip in it. "We can fix it. See that?" he points to a beige jacket. "We can fix it. Anything -- we can fix it."

'Fix it' means skillfully mending ripped or worn woven items -- clothes, scarves, carpets or couches -- mending them so the tear or the cigarette burn don't show. No, really, they don't. You can hold the item up to the light, turn it this way and that: the mend is invisible. Infinitesimal threads are woven together again, or a tiny patch of cloth is extracted from an unobtrusive spot: voilà. No magic wand could do better.

So when 'Amm Kamel says "we can fix it", he means it. 'We', incidentally, means Kamel Mohamed and sons -- 22-year-old Ahmed and 40-year-old Galal. In reality, though, it is the latter part of the 'we' who do the mending -- 'Amm Kamel's eye-sight has failed him once too often.

"It's a tough job," he says. "You need your eye-sight and your health. When one goes, so does the job."

In his case, half a century and five eye operations have done it. He is no pater familias, lending his expertise only for the toughest of jobs -- like Queen Nazlis.

Queen Nazli?

"She ripped her dress," he says, flicking his palms open in horror. "She was going up the steps to their villa, and her dress got caught and torn. So they came for me."

Came for him they did. In ceremonial style, the royal driver pulled up in the queen's crimson car in front of the tiny stall on Hassan Sabri Street.

"Come with me: the queen's dress is torn," the Sudanese driver commanded.

They made their way to the villa at 15 Mar'ashli Street (owned by the queen's father) and drove up the driveway. 'Amm Kamel was escorted in, up the grandiose garden steps, up the wood staircase, and up into the private sitting area, where not a single item was out of place.

"First the queen's mother met me and showed me the dress," he says. "Then the queen came out."

photos: Khaled El-Fiqi

It was a dress of incomparable elegance and craftsmanship: a dress exquisitely embroidered and beaded by Paris's most skilled seamstresses. And as he sat in the upstairs sitting room, cautiously toiling away at the royal piece of evening wear, Queen Nazli-type repairs were born.

"Some things need extra care and work," he says. "Like that dress."

At the time, the "extras" came with extras of their own.

"When I was leaving after finishing the dress," he says, smiling, "I bumped into the king!"

He did not stumble, stutter or panic: he simply stood there, stunned. "The king asked: 'Who is this?'," he recalls. "So I told him who I was."

In return, the king put his hand in his pocket and extracted "a present": LE15, besides the equivalent present the queen had just given him.

"Thirty pounds in a day," he muses. "Not bad at all."

In general, those times weren't bad at all. Not bad, because the trade was thriving; not bad, because life was simpler, safer and cheaper; and not bad, because people were more refined, more honest, more trusting. And of course, not bad because his eyes had not yet betrayed him.

But then, maybe it's best not to see what happened to the country -- best not to upset oneself by comparing to the past.

"What's better now?" he demands contemptuously. "Nothing, of course! Even the customers were better in the old days."

In the old days -- back in 1942, when he first opened his Zamalek workplace -- Mohamed could see for miles ahead as he sat on his little chair. Only the endless stacks of clothes surrounding him interrupted the view; no bridge, no tall buildings, and no gaudy storefronts.

"Just looking around was peaceful," he remembers. "Everything was purer."

This purity was reflected not only in the street, but also in the clothes he mended and the cloths that passed through his needle-calloused hands. It was a time of quality: no such things as viscose and nylon, no synthetic fabric or thread. And no jeans, of course. It was all 100 per cent: cotton, wool or silk. And yes, even his surroundings were 100 per cent: glass, wood or stone.

"There was none of this marble stuff," he says in disgust. "None of these coloured signs and neon lights that give me a headache."

Vazilakis the grocer, that pillar of Zamalek life, is gone now; 'Amm Kamel's next-door friend, Ali Awad, also a grocer, is gone too, as is his neighbour after that, Ibrahim El-Hindi. Now, the view across the street is no longer empty and peaceful.

But then, those were different times.

"I used to have five employees," he says. "Five! And they were real gentlemen -- pashas. Now no one will do this job."

It's not that hard to understand why.

No one is willing to sit in the same place, in the same position, for 12 hours a day -- twice as long as regular working hours, for not much pay. And of course, no one is willing to enter a dying trade, one that requires so much skill for so little in return.

For every 100 raffa shops that once existed, he says sadly, only four or five have survived. And for every LE3 earned then, one gets five or 10 today. "Before, employees were satisfied with 10 piastres," he says, his blue eyes reflecting his grave tone. "A bariza [10 piastres] made a moulid!"

His smartly dressed employees, he insists, could organise a feast with their bariza. He would take his 15 piastres -- the boss's due -- and indulge in a little mountain of kebab and rice and salad and tea, with change left over for a shisha, of course.

Today, the only change he sees is that surrounding him. His rent, once LE3.5, now stands at LE42; the roll of bread from the corner bakery, which once cost half a piastre, now costs 20 times that much.

But those steaming rolls came from a bakery with its own character -- red-brick ovens and a wood-framed storefront. Today's revamped version is in another league: a fancy marble facade, a hi-tech interior. Even the 10-piastre loaf of white bread seems to be part of the steamroller of progress.

In fact, the evolution of the entire street, while heartbreaking, has seemed somehow natural to 'Amm Kamel. Once one store succumbed to the lure of marble, all the others had to follow suit. Each change brought another, in atmosphere, class and price.

"Zamalek used to be a very exclusive place," he says. "Any outsiders who tried to cross Abul-Ela Bridge would be stopped. Every single resident or employee of the island was known." If a stranger happened to be walking down Hassan Sabri Street, in fact, all heads would turn, all eyes would watch. Everyone knew everyone else. "Up there was Mustafa Zaghlul," he says, pointing to the building above his store. "Here was Kamal El-Mallakh, from Al-Ahram. Across the street was the British judge and the three British intelligence officers. And there, the Syrian, Youssef Farghali."

And of course, there was a handful of Egyptians: Badrawi Ashour's son, Sidqi Pasha, Moheb Pasha and Hussein El-Shawarbi, besides Prince Mohamed Ali and Omar Tussun.

Clad in perfectly pressed suits, wine-red fezzes firmly in place, and ivory-inlaid walking sticks swinging from impeccably manicured fingertips, the prince and Tussun would proceed down Hassan Sabri Street, bowing to fellow islanders. Every day except Friday, the duo would start their routine walk at 5.00pm sharp. And should the king drive by during their evening stroll, they would simply continue along their dignified way. "The king used to drive by as if he was a normal person," 'Amm Kamel says. "If you knew him, you knew him. If not, so what?"

'Amm Kamel knew everyone, and everyone knew him, from the royal family and its entourage to today's ministers and ambassadors. He is in with the "in crowd".

But just like the pashas of bygone days, he is now part of a fading picture. "The trade is almost dead, and the Cairo of the old days is almost gone," he says. "These are the last days."

The days are numbered by his eldest son's eyesight -- now declining too. Once Galal decides to pack up and go, that will be the end of the family trade. Gone, too, will be the memories of Zamalek in the "good old days".

It was a process that started in the early '60s. It started off suddenly, then slowed down, then surged forward again. In no time, down came the hand-painted wooden signs. In their stead, marble and tiles, high-rise buildings and bright, gaudy lights.

Instead of Vazilakis, there is now a vast, glittering shoe shop; where Ali Awad once was, there is a front of green marble and gold lettering, also a shoe shop. And across the road, where once was empty space, there is a red and white store front -- yes, yet another shoe shop.

But it is really the bakery that makes 'Amm Kamel the saddest. Holding out against the marble invasion, the furn had not followed the changing times until two years ago, when the father died, the son took over, and the marble came rolling in.

The street is now punctuated by shoes and shawerma stands, uneven pavements and a cloud of exhaust fumes, trapped by 26 of July Bridge. It's fine for the people of today, who have seen nothing else and know no better. But for 'Amm Kamel, for the people of way back when, the old days were in a class of their own.

He says he has held out long enough, and his time will come soon. "This time is not for me," he says, shaking his head. "No quality or individuality. Before, everyone expected the best. Now they don't care, as long as it's cheap." They want to dress in Western fashions -- but cheaply. Do up shops and boutiques in marble -- cheaply. And they want to work -- but not like they used to.

So now, Kamel Mohamed father and sons mend piles of casual clothes in synthetic fabrics. They deal with customers who want more for less, they deal with fewer people. And there are fewer and fewer menders left.

"There are only five or six good raffas in Cairo now," 'Amm Kamel says. "But they won't last. The profession improved in the '50s, but now things are bad -- 100 per cent worse."

Today, his eldest son has had enough, and the younger one has dreams of greater things -- like the rest of his generation, weaned on fast food and loud music, on dreams of hundreds and thousands. The invisible stitches, it seems, are almost extinct.

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