Love, lies, and twisted metal in Nabil Shawkat 's questionable liaisons with foreign metallurgists and downtown planners Few things can compete with the memory of Prague 68. Few things, all metallic, all menacing, and all likely to emerge at street corners with no prior notice. I can still pick Nina Petrovicova out of any police line-up, out of any diplomatic reception, out of any espionage convention. She could swagger without moving a muscle. She could throw flames from her eyes without beating an eyelash. She could utter profanities without moving her lips. She could crush hearts and steel metal with her bare hands. Nina appeared with the Russian tanks that rolled one August morning into town out of nowhere. Some said she was Georgian. Some said she was half-Polish, half- German. Some said she was a former Nazi. Some said she was a holocaust survivor. Some said she was the illegitimate child of a key politburo member. Nina was always dressed in denims and a black leather jacket, her short blonde hair falling straight around her head and ending abruptly at her chiselled jaw line. She was said to have been outing liberals at the rate of one dozen an hour. She was said to be always present at interrogations of musicians and art students. Her tactic was said to have promised all repenting artists special scholarships in Moscow and Kiev. Two or three months later, Nina disappeared from Prague without trace. No one knew where she went. No one asked. No one dared to ask. I saw Nina the other day. She was coming out of the dark entrance of the secret premises of Cairo Underground Urban Planners' Society (CUUPS). I followed her for a few steps, then a black limousine slowed down, rolled down its tinted windows and picked her up. It was noontime and I was carrying my vegetable bags and didn't feel like giving chase. A few phone calls later, I had gathered bits and pieces of Nina's current endeavours. Nina, a metallurgy specialist and international art dealer, is helping redesign the downtown area. The idea is to give the downtown a rugged, barricade-style look, something rough with a Cold War touch. It is said that the visual concept was initially intended for a Calvin Klein new line of jeans that would evoke the newly-divided world order, the split of Islam and modernity, the numbing agony of young Marines away from home, the pointlessness of peace, but then the idea was too revolutionary to sell in Europe. One of CUUPS members met Petrovicova in Paris a couple of summers ago and commissioned her to work in the redesigning of Ramses Square. The square is now an avant-garde piece of art, with pedestrian passages totally obliterated on the ground and lifted into the sky, where they remain inaccessible from the ground -- an allegory, no doubt, of the futility of communication between earth and heaven. Nina has turned her attention to downtown. She is said to have admired the little sticks that rise angularly from the asphalt when the cars are parked, to keep them safely incarcerated. But she wanted more sticks. She wanted sticks to spring out of the ground like daisies in bloom, around each and every curb. Nina wanted more sticks in front of every parking space, and in the rear, to make parking a real adventure, an exercise in existential angst, not an everyday mundane phenomenon. CUUPS is applying her suggestions in stages. Once they are complete, every car that parks downtown will park forever. In 50 years or so, the place will be an open-air car museum, a Leningrad of vehicles, a testimony to the pointlessness of mobility, a pedestal to matter over mind. The beauty of Petrovicova's work is its exactness. The sticks that come from the ground are 56.4 centimetres high. They are high enough to catch the lowest point of the average 4WD car, but low enough to stay outside the field of drivers' vision. Knowing Nina's propensity for the macabre, I cannot rule out that she used her knowledge of infant mortality by automobiles to determine the stick height. The average age of a child killed by a parent backing up in the driveway is 18-20 months. The average height of an infant that age: 23 inches, or 56.4 centimetres. My sources at CUUPS maintain that the sticks could actually be a blessing in disguise. Drivers who hit the parking sticks repeatedly enough, CUUPS consultants believe, grow more sensitive to objects standing at that height. Therefore, they are less likely to run their children over in the driveway. Two or three weeks before Nina left Prague, she and I became close. I cannot recall exactly why. Perhaps because of the soft spot I've always had, and still do, for metallurgists. Perhaps because Nina was feeling lonely and abandoned in a way. All those she knew were now behind bars -- thanks to her, but that's beside the point. She was at the centre of things, and yet the centre was shifting. Nina was the spit that would keep the Russian empire glued, barely, for two more decades or so. But ultimately, the decay had set in. The wind of Westernisation was irreversible. She knew it. I knew it. And for a night or two, the knowledge brought us close. We sat together, at tables once populated by black T- shirted, chain-smoking intellectuals, and we talked of art and beauty, of steel beams and reinforced columns, of Bulgarian cattle breeders and the steppes of Mongolia. When we split, we said no goodbyes. Months before I had a glimpse of Nina in Cairo, I sensed that a brilliant but cruel artist was loose in town, and I suspected a foreign hand. Not that the locals are not good artists. Not that the locals are not good builders. But the locals are soft-hearted in their approach to design. They would go for classicism, even clownishness, never gestalt. Many of you have seen the Journalists Syndicate on Tharwat Street, downtown. If you haven't, please do. I rest my case. Well, Nina went beyond anything the local builders can possibly think of, beyond the desire to startle or please. Her art is powerful but subtle, esoteric in ways only a handful of our contemporaries can fully grasp. It is not just about form, or function, or material, or proportion. No. Let me tell you this. I will say it only once, and I know I will regret it. I am afraid of counting the tonnes of steel she used in the creation of Ramses pedestrian bridges. Knowing her fondness for numerology, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the number is 666,000, or 911,000, or something as demonic as her mind is. There is mediaeval beauty in her work, and yet it is so futuristic, often prophetic. I try not to understand it sometimes, but I cannot help it. You have to climb atop one of the buildings to the south of Ramses Square to fully appreciate Petrovicova's vision. The arteries of the 6 October Bridge were already there. She could not remove them, but she made them her starting point. The area underneath the bridge and south of it has been dissected into a floral pattern, with petals of green lawn, rimmed with marble tiles, then secluded from pedestrian access by a green-painted mesh of poles and chains. You may appreciate the purity of her art from the ground, but only to a degree. The essence of her scheme has to be admired from air. The flower petal system, I swear, mimics a little known work by Dimitri Poulakis, a radical painter who died inexplicably in a road accident just a few weeks before the Russian invasion. Nina was fascinated by Poulakis work, which we discussed in the few, fleeting hours we spent together many years go. She wasn't just fascinated by it. She was obsessed. Poulakis was not a usual mind. His best work is actually not visual, but lyrical. I once memorised by heart two or three poems he wrote about symmetry and asphyxiation, full of allegories about life and how it only acquires meaning when it focusses totally on the meaningless. It changed my life. Does Nina still remember me? Does she remember those two nights of passionless intimacy in Prague in late 68? Perhaps it was in homage to Poulakis that she revived his vision -- the vision of a man who died on the road, young and unfulfilled -- in her reconstruction of Ramses Square. And yet, who knows? Perhaps this was a secret message to me, her decoded message to the only living person in Cairo who could've guessed at the nature of her art. Do I want to know? Do I want to know?
