Past Amalfi, off the coast of Salerno, the ship makes a sharp turn to the west. The sea is choppy, and the wind sends high waves over the bow, spattering white foam on deck; she feels seasick. The woodwork creaks; the prow sometimes plummets several metres from the crest of a wave, and the paupers emerge from the dark bowels of the ship to throw up in the sunlight. The oarsmen have to go back to work; the sails are lowered. From below deck comes a muffled drumming as if the old ship has a heartbeat. The next night, the sea calms. From a distance, they see Stromboli’s hellfire raging in the darkness. Some of the more devout passengers are struck with terror and call it the Gates of Hell or the Devil’s island. They kneel on the deck and pray. A man pounds his chest, long and hard, until he collapses in exhaustion and bursts into tears. Hamoutal joins the feverish prayer. Her baby is too young to have any idea what’s going on in his mother’s heart.
Malfa, Lipari, and then the Sicilian coast heaves into view: Capo d’Orlando in Messina, Norman territory in her day. Where could her brothers be now?
6
Palermo
Looking out over present-day Palermo from Monte Pellegrino, you cannot imagine how the harbour must have looked then. Of course, the mountains on the far side of the bay must seem just as dark and impassive on early mornings, outlined against the piercing blue of the sky, and if Hamoutal ever climbed this hill, she must have felt the sea wind full in her face, just as tourists do today. But the harbour could not have been more different: instead of a long, crowded wharf lined with tall cranes, it was a sandy shore with a few inlets crawling with merchants, sailors, traders, horsecarts and depots for the mountains of goods arriving from the Orient, which were shipped on from here to places further north. No rows of high-rises back then; small, primitive houses still stood shoulder to shoulder around the harbour, and behind them rose the mansions of the wealthy shipowners and citizens. In those days, Palermo was already a major city with more than 350,000 inhabitants. The mixture of Arab and Romanesque architectural styles made the city an impressive place. Visitors never failed to express their admiration for its pleasant, healthful atmosphere. A century after Hamoutal’s passage, the Arab geographer Ibn Jubayr praised the city’s mosques, fountains and grand squares, likening its splendour to Córdoba’s. Yet for many years there was also friction between the Byzantine Christians and the Arab rulers, who jockeyed for power over both Christians and Arabs. Hamoutal’s stop in Palermo may have been the most foolish risk she ran in all her travels. She put herself in serious danger of being spotted, captured, interrogated or otherwise harassed by someone who knew her from her childhood; she saw Norman knights literally at every street corner, shouting orders.
When I think of the city of Palermo, I will always remember how impressed I was by the catacombs of the Capuchin monks.
The Catacombe dei Cappuccini are in the centre of town, in the Piazza Cappuccini, near the order’s monastery. In Via Cappuccini, the vegetable and fruit vendors sit amicably side by side in the shade of the old trees. Vespas vroom by, weaving around each other. Exhaust fumes blow past two dead olive shrubs in cracked pots. The husky voice of Gianna Nannini blares from a window: Meravigliosa creatura! One detail strikes me: a long, ugly concrete wall along Via Cipressi, spray-painted with the word YAHWEH, twice, in large capital letters.
Against a backdrop of stolid residential blocks, the bizarre tombs resemble an unrelentingly dark fairy tale from bygone days. Next to the endless rows of posed corpses in the crypt, an ageing guard stares into space in the cool shade of the entrance. The wordless parade of costumed mummies on display here is enough to strike you dumb. It’s like descending into a burlesque of Dante’s Hell and finding a chorus line of skeletons wired together: a showy prelate, a bishop in his mitre, an old peasant couple, a fifteen-year-old boy, a disintegrating patriarch. There are children’s bodies in almost perfect condition, decked out in frilly lace and dusty silk, and a woman who died young, her surprise still apparent in the hollows where her eyes once were. Some empty sockets seem to glare at you darkly as the musty odour addles your brain. Under the pale, whitewashed archways, they form a vast showcase of death, a shameless peepshow. Children’s dolled-up corpses, skeletons pointing cynical fingers, an elderly couple leaning towards each other as if death had done nothing to stop them quarrelling. A skull on a wire that has almost rusted away, dangling over a mouldering jacket. Four skeletons positioned so dramatically that they call to mind an excited crowd or Rodin’s bronze burghers of Calais. Sometimes they’re on shelves high in the wall; sometimes they stare at you from behind iron bars. When their jaws have dropped open, they seem to be emitting silent screams or cackling with pleasure at the idiocy of the living. There are Roman arches composed of skulls with three dead Capuchin monks in front of them; an entrance gate on one wall, a trompe-l’oeil effect with frivolous patterns of joint, arm and finger bones; row upon row of shoulder blades stuck to the ceiling in baroque motifs. A half-decayed face seems to give you a cynical wink, but it’s just the warping skin, which will soon tear, revealing the skull beneath it and making room for its broad grin. A monstrous monk with a thick rope around his neck tips forward slightly, as if ready to pounce at any moment. His name is Fra Domenico, and he died in the August of a long-gone summer. Four open mouths, filled with dust, appear to sing some holy song, their heads cocked so theatrically that you imagine them aiming for different pitches. An aged mother grimaces maliciously, her hands tied together with wire; a cardinal lies with folded bones on his own tomb, his mitre still pinching his skull but his mouth wide open as if he can’t help laughing at himself. The obscene show never ends. When you return to the noise and heat of the outside world, it’s as though you’ve arrived from a different plane of existence, an ancient past waiting with a grin to gather in all the people on the streets. The darkness clings to me as I down an espresso at a lively outdoor cafe, and I’m still a bit dazed as I walk on to the Zisa, the Norman castle attesting to the presence of the kinfolk of Vigdis Adelaïs, who cautiously shuffles past me in the form of a Jewish woman, her dark shawl tight around her head. In the square where the cathedral now stands, a few dry palm trees wave in the balmy sea wind. Tourists take selfies; nothing can shake them; everything speaks for itself.
The ferry to Cairo, signore? No such thing! And she laughs, the girl with green eyes and yellow nail polish. Who wants to travel to Cairo by sea? You can hop a plane if you want, the airlines offer direct flights. What were you thinking?
Yes, what was I thinking? That I’d discover some vestige here of the ancient maritime route? I’d scoured the websites of shipping companies and found only tedious cruises that went nowhere near the path I had in mind. I’d searched for freighters, but they never seemed to follow Hamoutal’s route either. Imagining I would re-enact her voyage as accurately as possible, I’d overlooked how completely the world has changed. Yet that illusion was the thread I continued to follow as I walked along the harbour, realising the only way to come closer to Hamoutal was by forgetting everything I saw around me – except maybe that dressed-up woman’s skeleton in the catacombs which reminded me of her and which, like the sculpture in the church in Bourges, gave me the feeling it could have been her, that this was the spark to light my imagination and make her reappear before me, a mummy come to life, flesh on those bones, muscles and veins, alive again and none too comfortable in her skin, toting that whimpering baby on her arm, on her way to Yerushalayim, the mythical city she will never reach. What could she have been thinking?
Here in Palermo, Hamoutal decided to board a ship bound for Fustat-Misr, as Cairo’s predecessor was called in the eleventh century. The shipping line would have offered quick passage to Alexandria and, upon request, a connecting boat up the Nile. The vast collection of ancient Hebrew documents found in the Cairo Genizah includes numerous business letters and ships’ papers that show how heavy the direct traffic between Palermo and Alexandria was in those days. The trade route between Egypt and the western Mediterranean was controll
ed mainly by Jewish merchants. With Hamoutal’s letter of recommendation, she must soon have found a captain willing to help her, and with one of the silver pieces from the shipowner in Massilia, she could pay him handsomely. So she didn’t have to spend the voyage on deck, among passengers packed together like sardines, but had her own private cabin where she could care for her child and lay him down in a bed of his own. Thanks to the sailors’ familiarity with sea routes, winds and currents, 90 per cent of those eleventh-century vessels reached their destinations unscathed.
Yet the voyage was rough, and even though Hamoutal had a few privileges, conditions on board would have been hard. Fresh water supplies were often contaminated. The provisions were salted meat, flatbread made with musty flour, the occasional fish when the seas were calm, a great mound of root vegetables, hard dried fruit and nuts. With this inadequate diet, malnutrition stole over the passengers, regardless of class. Dysentery, diarrhoea and stomach complaints were widespread. When the summer winds were favourable and the ship was quick to find the current around the Mediterranean, the crossing went faster. A powerful flow ran west to east from around the Pillars of Hercules, passing not far from Sicily’s southern coast and leading all the way to the shores of Egypt. When the wind was fair, the rowers could rest and life on board was quiet.
The days go by in wave-rocked waiting and rumination, in nightmares and memories of all those places: Rouen, Orléans, Narbonne, Moniou, Marseilles, Genoa, Palermo. It all whirls together in her dreams; sometimes she sees her distant, impossible love at the gate of the Rouen yeshiva, and hearing the cries of the large terns over the water, she thinks of the small black-headed gulls from the harbour where the snekkjas lay, or of the short, peaceful days in sunny Narbonne. The old ship reeks of life and of the goods it carries. The men turn to the bottle to ward off homesickness and boredom; a few women sport with them for food or drink. They creep out of sight under bales of wool, giggling, their mouths toothless at the age of twenty-five, but their legs outspread in the shadows; the men thrust and twitch their way to a hurried release and a minute later are spitting over the taffrail in contempt. Above them a heavy sail flaps with slow, dull thuds; straight ahead a school of flying fish are leaping. Tales are told of demonic beings that flit back and forth under the bow and keel. Sometimes a strange creature is caught in the nets, with a hideous, toothy face, wild eyes, and fins like devils’ feathers. The few children on board shriek, the women cross themselves and rattle off prayers, and the men look on as the monster fish writhes in the net on deck, gasping for air, a sight to see as it perishes, look at that, it comes from Satan’s caccabus, the infernal cauldron de profundis, the Devil shouts in forty tongues but no one understands them. As the fish drums its tail savagely on the wooden deck and its eyes cloud over, the men shout Vade retro Satana! and roar with laughter.
The stars are brighter than any Hamoutal has ever seen. The dark vault of the sky seems to sway without cease to the monotonous surge of water around the bow. Are the stars pinholes, letting through light from a heaven above the black dome of their mortal night? She’s sometimes seasick but lies flat on her belly until it passes. Her child is ill again and sleeps in a fever, oblivious. One day she wakes up and sees that the whole ship has turned blood red in the night. Warm wind from North African shores has brought red sand far out to sea, along with a light rain. Later that day, the sailors seize the occasion to sand the deck. The red seeps its way into the smallest cracks and crannies.
A few days later, they see another ship in the distance. Agitation, fear of being boarded. It sails closer, a light Arab vessel; they can make out people on deck. Shouting, back and forth. Then the ship vanishes like a dream, trimming its sails and sinking below the horizon. The bobbing goes on forever. Luckily, there’s no storm; the sea is calm this time of year. When the rowers go to work, she can hear their muted voices far below, their rhythmic, droning song, the supervisor’s cries, the splashing of the great oars in the rocking sea. Other days, there is nothing but the flapping of thick sailcloth, the voice of the man on the mast, the smell of wood, rope and salt. She settles into a state between dream and waking.
After many uncounted days, the lookout on the starboard mast points out a sandy, forsaken coastline in the distance. They must have already passed Benghazi. Alexandria is calling. There they will change to a smaller vessel. A few men become gravely ill. There’s no end to their puking; the whole crew fears infection. They are dragged off, wrapped in sheets – limp and docile after two days’ illness – and laid on the stern between a few improvised bulkheads and the rope. Their faded eyes track the movements around them in mortal fear. Others have already closed their crusted eyes and are no longer there. The next morning they’ve disappeared. Food for the devils from the watery hell, the merchant Embriachi says to Hamoutal with a grin. He’s been leering at her for days. Sometimes when he sees her, he grabs the blue broadcloth of his crotch and makes faces like a dog on heat. She shuts herself in her small cabin, mumbling indistinct words as her child looks on in silence, sucking his thumb. There’s a rabbi on board; she takes him into her confidence. He reads the letter of recommendation in her cabin, says nothing, and after long pondering tells her he will accompany her to Fustat. This brings her some relief, a sense of not being on her own.
The sea is purple and immense; above their tiny heads, one sky seems to slide through another, a colossal shift. Nothing remains of her, nothing remains of them all, that swarm of insects bobbing on a nutshell, a nothing in a greater nothing. But they advance. Each day, they advance. They are already well south of Crete; the wood of the ship creaks and bends in the strong current. They sail along the bare white coastline for days; heat pulses above them. Everyone is exhausted. Their supplies are almost gone; another man dies of dysentery. The rest of them starve out the days that separate them from Alexandria. Sometimes they catch fish; the sailors eat them raw, and the ship’s cook throws the remains into boiling water. Small cups of watery fish soup are handed out to the passengers. After another two days, they dock by the ancient lighthouse, blinded by sunlight, their split lips encrusted with salt, their clothes threadbare from sliding back and forth on hard benches, their hands dry and skin papery, their souls leached and wasted. Even in those days it was a white city, a Fata Morgana, a dream of hot, ancient stones, Alexander’s city.
7
Alexandria
‘The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind … the city which used us as its flora … beloved Alexandria!’ Thus begins the first book of Lawrence Durrell’s spellbinding Alexandria Quartet. ‘What is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind’s eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today.’
I was consumed with curiosity about this mythical place, and I imagine that Hamoutal, likewise, squinted tensely at the shoreline as her ship neared the city. In her time, you could see the famous lighthouse, the Pharos, on its small spit of land projecting from the coast. More than 125 metres high and a thousand years old, it was deemed a wonder of the world. According to Euripides, Menelaus was shipwrecked here with a strange phantom of Helen of Troy; Cleopatra committed suicide a few steps from the site where today the post-colonial Cecil Hotel still gazes out over the sea in old-fashioned grandeur. Two obelisks from her palace, known as Cleopatra’s Needles, stood here in Hamoutal’s day; here the poet Cavafy wrote of the queen’s lover Mark Antony abandoning the city as the city abandoned him. Durrell describes the mythical Justine, like Cleopatra reborn, drinking coffee in elegant gloves in the hotel lounge as she looks out over the flickering of the sea.
I have come here by train from Cairo. I get off at the central station and am plunged into thrilling chaos; in the streets around the square, a large market bustles; hundreds of vendors shout through small, tinny megaphones over the deafening roar of traffic. This city was once known as the great wine-press of love, overflowing with ephebes and Oriental maidens, with fortune-hunters, passionat
e lovers with fiery blood, wealthy recluses, and potentates obsessed with the perfection of young bodies; with secret lovers, slowed by wine and hashish, lying tangled for hours in their lovemaking, to the sound of the crashing waves and the wind snuffling like a dog at the tops of the plane trees.
That is the exotic image, the Orientalist dream, which according to Edward Said was about a make-believe world invented by the colonial cultural elite.
How different it all was in Hamoutal’s day. In the eleventh century, Alexandria was going through a period about which little is known, regarded by some historians as a time of stagnation and decay. Yet Amr ibn al-As wrote in the seventh century that ‘it is impossible for me to enumerate the variety of its riches and beauty; I shall content myself with observing that it contains 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theatres or places of amusement, 12,000 fruit shops, and 40,000 tributary Jews’. The city was brought back to life by the comings and goings of the crusades, the international connections, the arrival of intellectuals and adventurers, beautiful boys, wealthy women and jealous lovers.
But even all the way back in the eleventh century, the fabled library of antiquity was long gone. I walk the whole length of the Corniche, the waterfront promenade – first from right to left, starting in the middle and ending at the Fort of Qaitbay, where young boys sell candyfloss in inflated plastic bags, which they hang from rods as if flying transparent fish from a cord. Then I walk back, past the central Saad Zaghloul Square, all the way to Alexandria’s new library. Under the high, slanted ceiling of the spectacular reading room, I see two girls in niqabs huddled over a book; their kohl-lined eyes fly over the pages of a Michel Houellebecq novel as they giggle and elbow each other.
The Convert Page 16