21 - 27 June 2001
Issue No.539
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 June 2001 Issue No.539 |
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A tad threadbare
They can be fitted, or hung on the wall, turned into cushions, woven and knotted. Often they are hung over balconies, to be beaten. Next to oil, they are Iran's biggest export. Size, shape, colour, pattern, plain: anything, everything goes. They are versatile things, carpets.
And they crop up in the oddest of places. Red, of course, makes them absolutely perfect for visiting dignitaries, their rolling out far more welcome than even that of the barrel. Not as much fun, perhaps, but more dignified. Miles of them, plush and thick, over which the well-heeled and wonderfully connected have navigated their way around official engagements for as long as anyone can remember. Popes, royalty, and a vast array of excellencies: the red carpet is the ultimate leveller in the democracy of the great and good.
One of Cairo's odder sights is the occasional appearance of a carpet in the middle of the street. It lies in the road, placed there for goodness knows what purpose. Cars drive over it. And then it is gone, as mysteriously as it arrived.
A cleaning technique, perhaps? Does the passing traffic dislodge the dust harboured in the pile? The phenomenon is most common in busy shopping streets. The proprietors of shops seldom have balconies over which to hang their carpets. So is this a substitute? Perhaps one will never discover the true purpose of this practice.
If carpeting the street looks odd, it is not quite as strange a sight as the one often encountered at the intersection of Ramsis Street and 26th of July, two of Cairo's major arteries. It is a busy intersection, almost invariably clogged with traffic. It retains, nonetheless, a sense of civic space, not least because it is home to the high court.
To today's eyes the remorseless façade of the court house may well appear a little too self-assured, a little too authoritarian. It shares, with a great many civic buildings of the same period, more than a hint of bombast. It is a strain of modernism that was eventually, and perhaps most famously, employed by Albert Speer in Nuremberg, an unfortunate association, to say the least. It never quite regained respectability, and certainly not within a civic context.
Immediately behind the main court house building is the Registry Office. It is part of the same complex, though architecturally it appears to seek at least some continuity with the headquarters of the Egyptian Entomological Society on the opposite side of Ramsis Street, and so avoids the most vainglorious of its closest neighbour's traits. Yet it remains an impressive building, even if the more obviously Fascistic aspects of the court house have been softened by the employment of a neo-classical idiom. The nadir of this variant of the style would occur in Italy, rather than Germany, though at exactly the same time.
It is from the ground floor loggia of this building, over the balustrades that run both sides of the impressively porticoed entrance, that carpets are regularly to be found. They are not impressive things. There are none of the bright, pristine colours one might associate with the bazaar, or even the Oriental Weavers showroom just a little bit further down the street. Tattered, threadbare, at least one of the half dozen carpets that make a regular appearance is almost completely rotted away. They flap in the wind, like outsized pendants, to the left of the scales of justice that adorn the doorway. And they do nothing, nothing at all, for the dignity of the law.
I mentioned this sight in passing to a colleague. She had never noticed. She is a native Cairene, I am not. That I should register these tatty hangings as a subversion of the architectural intent of the building while she registered nothing at all, then, is most probably a result of my colleague being overly familiar with the presence of carpets in what to me appear the most unlikely places.
Or perhaps it is simply that the odd juxtaposition fails to register because on the other side of this intersection, emblazoned across the neo-Pharaonic façade of an equally impressive, though this time residential building, is the legend Carpet City. Not noticing the carpets hanging from the façade of one building becomes a sub-conscious, a subliminal function of having noticed the lettering on the façade of another.
Pass beneath the triumphal arches that lead to the covered alleyways that dissect this apartment building and carpets are everywhere, enormous rolls of the stuff, spanking new and shiny, blocking the pathway. This is the kind of stuff you fit. And it does not do to run your hand across the pile in a distracted attempt to examine the texture. It is far from threadbare, certainly, but it is equally far away from a sheep. For Carpet City is really synthetic heaven. Hardwearing, may be, and certainly cheaper than its woolen equivalents.
Strangely, here in the self-proclaimed heart of the city's woven topography, there is not a hint of red. A seasonal fashion, possibly, but at the moment there is no plush, no flash of crimson and no famous feet to be navigated round.
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