A Cairo artisan’s stitches in time

He was a boy when a Greek taught him the intricacies of the sewing machine.

What was his name, that Greek?

Yani Defarkas. Nice man, steady hands.

That long time ago is mentioned the way a gray-haired man recalls how the job he took in his youth gradually became who he was. Kind of like thread, spooling, raveling. One day you’re a kid with pricked fingers, the next you’re an old guy with tweezers and a magnifying glass tinkering with the gadgetry of progress.

Samir Milad fixes sewing machines; he’s done it since he was 11, since Defarkas sent him hustling with bobbins and needles through Cairo’s alleys, past plumes of wool and cotton, past nut sellers and upholsterers, past the bygone bordellos near the stock exchange. He’s repaired thousands of Singers, Brothers, Pegasuses, and an Egyptian model named after Nefertiti.

You can tell the story of a man, the story of his country, through the sewing machine. But first you have to wait until Milad gets settled in his wooden chair, the one with fading lacquer, the one that creaks when he leans back and puts his hands behind his head and raises his eyebrows, which are darker than his bristly hair.

It is then you hear of seamstresses, foot pedals, the piston rhythm of the needle, clothes made and mended by mothers and daughters, every home a miniature factory of snipping scissors, falling threads and tied-off knots. And how it all changed, not just sewing, but the whole world went high-tech, making the young more concerned with amassing fortunes than seeking a trade.

“The job today is less attractive,” he says. “The young generation is greedy. They want money quickly. When I was younger, we were passionate about the skill of repairing. But the young today don’t want to learn a craft.”

His hands are smooth. They are a laborer’s hands, softened by years of sewing machine oil. They glisten. Amber. They seem delicate when he brings them from behind his head and moves them over the laptop in a second-floor office decorated with Christian icons. The room doesn’t feel lived-in; it is the office of a man who spends his time downstairs in a shop crowded with Allen wrenches and coiled silver shavings spilling from a drill.

--

The son of a carpenter, Milad quit school in 1955 and started work with a sewing machine repairman in the neighborhood. A year later, Defarkas took him in, paying him 20 piasters a week -- about 60 cents at the time. Greek and Italian craftsmen migrated to Cairo back then. Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser, a socialist-nationalist, made bonds with like-minded nations such as communist Hungary and Poland, which during the Cold War shipped over legions of sewing machines.

“I spent three years with the Greek,” Milad says. “He taught me this skill. I left him. I didn’t have a shop, but I had a reputation, people knew me and I made house calls. I had to support two sisters and two brothers. My father was getting too old.”

He made house calls for a decade. In 1969, he leased a storefront and quickly expanded across the rear of the building and up the stairs. The 1973 war between Egypt and Israel was followed by waves of inflation, government corruption, higher taxes and globalization. Sewing habits changed too. Textile and clothing factories moved in, and you could buy blouses, veils and pants, stacked in rumpled mountains in souks and markets, cheaper than you could make them at home.

Even sewing machine companies started to look different. Singer was bought by a private equity firm, the Japanese began outsourcing production, and the sea of tin and metal spare parts that once repaired Egypt’s sewing machines was replaced by computer grids and sophisticated foot pedals. Milad changed too; he had a wife and four children, and less patience for at-home seamstresses with their busted hand wheels and wheezing motors.

“I don’t have the time or the labor force to fix the old machines anymore, and besides, people are turning them into antiques,” says Milad, 63, who these days repairs and sells modern machines and parts to the factories of the clothing industry.

“Every era, I suppose, has its own feel. Fewer girls went to school in the past, so they stayed in the house and made clothes. Now we have girls in college. One of my daughters graduated from a fine arts school, the other is a pharmacist.”

They know Milad in the alley. The men with smaller shops, some of them no bigger than pantries, who still fix the sewing machines of grandmothers and new brides, point out his store. He’s there on the right; inside a woman stands over a glass case, taking orders for needles and screws beneath rows of wooden drawers stretching toward the ceiling.

Through a door, tools are scattered, a fan hums, a man with glasses sliding down his nose fixes a machine under a white light as Milad’s sons, both engineers, stand ready to help. Sewing machines are everywhere, on the floor, on the workbench; lined and stacked, cannibalized and broken, a dusty army of spindles and metal.

--

A man who begins his craft when he’s 11 gathers much, learns the secrets of mechanisms. He has time to polish and think, to wonder about his place in life and how to keep it. Why do taxes keep rising? Why does bread get more expensive? Why doesn’t Egypt work better? Such questions go through a man’s mind when he’s threading a needle. But he shouldn’t linger.

Milad, dressed in jeans and an untucked button-down shirt, stays busy with the broken machines before him rather than waxing too long about the fixed ones from the past. If he were a boy today he’d be studying electronics, figuring out how things got so, what’s the word? Interconnected.

“I get hurt every day,” he says. “The job is hardest on the eyes. The concentration exhausts the eyes. When you work on a machine for four hours it’s like studying hard over one big book. But it’s not so difficult. All sewing machines have the same logic, just like languages all have alphabets. The trick is how you write your alphabet.”

--

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Noha El-Hennawy of The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.