Shem-el-Nessim: An inspiration in perfume
PART ONE
Tooprig had always been a womaniser and he made no bones about that, but he was far from indiscriminate in his choices. Although he claimed to be as partial to blondes as he was to brunettes, he had always fancied that he favoured the civet cat-like scent of redheads; there was a certain astringency about them, a muskiness he said he found entirely libidinous. For, while he lusted after long legs, slender necks and the curve of the feminine collarbone, he required something of all women that was not physical but sensory. His Muse, his motivation and his driving force had to be enticingly aromatic. Unless she could tantalise his nose, her other charms would be of no consequence. A fragrant woman invigorated all of his senses, not merely the olfactory.
He lived at 22 York Street, just off Baker Street, in two floors at the top of the house and with modest living quarters for his valet. One might have described him as a gentleman of leisure; he had time to kill, and so he had to find ways of entertaining himself. Exercise helped and, on most days, he took long walks through the city and its environs. Sometimes, on a whim, he would follow a particularly fragrant woman in the hope of a closer encounter. He would usually be rewarded, and when not it was by his own choice, for he would give up the chase if he lost her scent or tired of it.
Tooprig had cultivated a succession of encounters with beautiful young Englishwomen, but he was fastidious and discarded them if to him they did not smell “right”. He even classified them, informally, 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.
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 almost translucent in the dust-dappled light. “Shem-el-Nessim!” were his final words.
In the commotion, as the coffeehouse proprietor sent one of his tobacco boys to fetch 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. I felt confident he would not have objected to me retaining a keepsake and, by now, this ring with its scarab cartouche of the sun-god Kheperi was practically all the man had of value.
The Cairo of 1926 was steeped in Pharaonic history. It was the city of Moslem song and story, seat of Saracen art, home of the Arabian Nights. But so far below the ornate domes and grand minarets of its illustrious skyline was the coffeehouse in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar on Gawhar el-Kaid Street that it didn’t even warrant a name. There were rumours that the Khan was a place where sorcerers mixed potions and poisons, went into trances and cast spells. Certainly, there were medicine men selling medicinal powders, elixirs, and crystals from the anatomical charts they spread on the ground of their shadowy stores. It was an appropriate setting for Stan Tooprig’s outlandish confession.
Five times a day the Mu’ezzin summoned the faithful, halting the muted hammerings from the silver smithy next door, but at all other times it was too noisy for us to sit outside among the pipe smokers if we wished to converse. So we were confined to the cool shadows within, away from the shimmering heat. Tooprig’s words were muffled by the Shiraz carpet on the raised plinth where we sat obscured by latticework, at a squat table high above the industry of coffee making. Occasionally a smoker would call out for another ball of tobacco, but it was generally a tranquil place in which to while away the hours.
The place had its denizens: Arabs and Englishmen; liars and gun-runners; homosexuals and black marketers; thieves and spies; expatriates and transients; junkies and alcoholics. Most of the coffee drinkers though, were fantasists; in their daydreams, they would be smuggling whisky, writing a bestseller, and returning home wealthy and triumphant. I knew their schemes to be fantasies, for I’d met plenty who had never left Cairo; at least not alive. These star-crossed fools drifted here on inauspicious currents and were left stranded in Time, 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 someone or something; or merely to escape himself. As I had done with all the rest, I struck up a conversation with him over coffee. There was a kind of desperate elegance about him, and I was intrigued by his frayed charms as much as I pitied him.
The unlikely surname resulted from an unusual ancestry: a Dutch tobacco trader who had moved to London around the time of the Great Fire and whose descendants had been there ever since. He claimed he had always wanted to visit the Egyptian capital city because his father had once produced, from a box of trinkets, a ring of antique 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 gambling debt while on a business trip to Venice, he assured the young Stan. After his father died of throat cancer at the age of 47, Tooprig 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, although a few traces of that internationally envied trait still remained. Otherwise, he looked profoundly troubled and not entirely connected with the common consciousness.
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. Without at the time knowing it, a man can seal his own Fate through a mere dalliance with a destructive stranger. I know this to be true because it happened to Stan Tooprig. And, as strange as it may sound, his curiosity had been piqued by a woman’s perfume.
In the commotion, as the coffeehouse proprietor sent one of his tobacco boys to fetch 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. I felt confident he would not have objected to me retaining a keepsake and, by now, this ring with its scarab cartouche of the sun-god Kheperi was practically all the man had of value.
The Cairo of 1926 was steeped in Pharaonic history. It was the city of Moslem song and story, seat of Saracen art, home of the Arabian Nights. But so far below the ornate domes and grand minarets of its illustrious skyline was the coffeehouse in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar on Gawhar el-Kaid Street that it didn’t even warrant a name. There were rumours that the Khan was a place where sorcerers mixed potions and poisons, went into trances and cast spells. Certainly, there were medicine men selling medicinal powders, elixirs, and crystals from the anatomical charts they spread on the ground of their shadowy stores. It was an appropriate setting for Stan Tooprig’s outlandish confession.
Five times a day the Mu’ezzin summoned the faithful, halting the muted hammerings from the silver smithy next door, but at all other times it was too noisy for us to sit outside among the pipe smokers if we wished to converse. So we were confined to the cool shadows within, away from the shimmering heat. Tooprig’s words were muffled by the Shiraz carpet on the raised plinth where we sat obscured by latticework, at a squat table high above the industry of coffee making. Occasionally a smoker would call out for another ball of tobacco, but it was generally a tranquil place in which to while away the hours.
The place had its denizens: Arabs and Englishmen; liars and gun-runners; homosexuals and black marketers; thieves and spies; expatriates and transients; junkies and alcoholics. Most of the coffee drinkers though, were fantasists; in their daydreams, they would be smuggling whisky, writing a bestseller, and returning home wealthy and triumphant. I knew their schemes to be fantasies, for I’d met plenty who had never left Cairo; at least not alive. These star-crossed fools drifted here on inauspicious currents and were left stranded in Time, 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 someone or something; or merely to escape himself. As I had done with all the rest, I struck up a conversation with him over coffee. There was a kind of desperate elegance about him, and I was intrigued by his frayed charms as much as I pitied him.
The unlikely surname resulted from an unusual ancestry: a Dutch tobacco trader who had moved to London around the time of the Great Fire and whose descendants had been there ever since. He claimed he had always wanted to visit the Egyptian capital city because his father had once produced, from a box of trinkets, a ring of antique 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 gambling debt while on a business trip to Venice, he assured the young Stan. After his father died of throat cancer at the age of 47, Tooprig 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, although a few traces of that internationally envied trait still remained. Otherwise, he looked profoundly troubled and not entirely connected with the common consciousness.
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. Without at the time knowing it, a man can seal his own Fate through a mere dalliance with a destructive stranger. I know this to be true because it happened to Stan Tooprig. And, as strange as it may sound, his curiosity had been piqued by a woman’s perfume.
*
Have you ever noticed that while some people may love a certain scent, others will find it too sweet, too strong or too heady? Some have such an innate affinity for a fragrance that it becomes almost a part of their body’s chemistry. For others, the search to recapture that scent becomes an obsession.
I understand that a leading Austrian perfume-maker put forward the theory that the type of scent to which a human is attracted correlates directly with the colour of his or her hair. Unlikely as it might sound, this relationship between the sense of smell and of sight does exist, and I offer Stan Tooprig’s testimony as evidence.Tooprig had always been a womaniser and he made no bones about that, but he was far from indiscriminate in his choices. Although he claimed to be as partial to blondes as he was to brunettes, he had always fancied that he favoured the civet cat-like scent of redheads; there was a certain astringency about them, a muskiness he said he found entirely libidinous. For, while he lusted after long legs, slender necks and the curve of the feminine collarbone, he required something of all women that was not physical but sensory. His Muse, his motivation and his driving force had to be enticingly aromatic. Unless she could tantalise his nose, her other charms would be of no consequence. A fragrant woman invigorated all of his senses, not merely the olfactory.
He lived at 22 York Street, just off Baker Street, in two floors at the top of the house and with modest living quarters for his valet. One might have described him as a gentleman of leisure; he had time to kill, and so he had to find ways of entertaining himself. Exercise helped and, on most days, he took long walks through the city and its environs. Sometimes, on a whim, he would follow a particularly fragrant woman in the hope of a closer encounter. He would usually be rewarded, and when not it was by his own choice, for he would give up the chase if he lost her scent or tired of it.
Tooprig had cultivated a succession of encounters with beautiful young Englishwomen, but he was fastidious and discarded them if to him they did not smell “right”. He even classified them, informally, 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.
—END OF PART ONE—
Come back to NZBC on Thursday 12 January to read Part Two of Shem-el-Nessim.
To request a PDF of the complete short story, send an email with the subject header Shem-el-Nessim to this address. Order more of Chris Bell’s fiction here. And if you’d like to read some more of his short stories, you’ll find a selection of them here.
To request a PDF of the complete short story, send an email with the subject header Shem-el-Nessim to this address. Order more of Chris Bell’s fiction here. And if you’d like to read some more of his short stories, you’ll find a selection of them here.
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