Perhaps Kuchuk Hanem required a more straightforward thank you. Gustave gave her a wooden doll he had purchased in a nearby market. She smiled and pecked him lightly on the cheek, as if thanking a good boy. Gustave persisted: ‘In exchange, may I have that beautiful item?’ He gestured at the long golden shawl she had worn during the dance, now discarded on the floor. He bent down to stroke the delicate fabric, imagining how, many years after Esna, it would speak to him of the irretrievable: this room, this air, this corporeal Muse.

It is an old custom, unthreatening for many. Travellers leave traces where they visit and take something home in return. Without souvenirs, the verity of a travel narrative is called into question.

Yet it was a logic of transaction that she refused to adopt.

‘Then may I ask you to sell it to me?’ Gustave cajoled her.

She said no once more, this time more firmly. She was perched on one side of her bed, arms folded and legs unmoving.

Lying beside Kuchuk Hanem, Gustave replayed his memories of nights of worship in Paris. He remembered brothels, faint lamplight, women in low-cut dresses sauntering in the rain. Like any true artist contemplating encounters with whores, Gustave set himself adrift in melancholia. He mused on the ascetic façade that denied carnal pleasure, the mystique of the transient and the profane, et patati et patata. Prostitutes are poetry. Kuchuk Hanem snored loudly.

Gustave and Maxime set out the next morning. A new adventure called. Off to a hunt! Gustave scratched at his back. Kuchuk Hanem’s bedbugs were especially ill-mannered towards foreigners.

By the time his state-sponsored trip to the Orient came to an end, Gustave had gathered all manner of curios. A cornucopia of costumery, gazelle and lizard skins, a small embalmed crocodile from Nubia, hashish from Cairo, silks from Beirut, rosaries from Jerusalem. Maxime, whose interests lay only in the antique and the dead, consoled him: Kuchuk Hanem’s shawl was nothing special. Yet Gustave couldn’t dismiss it so easily, not even when he had reconciled with Louise and his friendship with Maxime had soured. But he also took solace in images and feelings he had recorded in his mind, in all that his senses witnessed. There is no finer archivist than a European man of letters.

—

Kuchuk Hanem sunk into bathwater scattered with flower petals, and afterward reclined on her bed. Mehmet, the aged rabab player, appeared in the doorway. He was a faithful lover, as devoted as a dog. For the past decade, he had gone wherever Kuchuk Hanem led, from the bustle of cosmopolitan Cairo to the village of Esna, where she and other dancing girls, courtesans, and other Egyptians of dubious cultural pedigree had been exiled. Her unruly body may have disgraced the modern Pasha, but not Mehmet.