The Convert

  Just as there is now an express train between Alexandria and Cairo, there was a high-speed courier service to and from Fustat in the eleventh century, delivering mail from one city to the other in less than a week. A ceaseless current of travellers moved between the two cities, bringing family members, distant relations, marriage candidates, goldwork, scrolls, spices and gifts. There were even families who took up residence in each other’s homes, the house-swappers of their time.

  The sea is calm and peaceful; the largest waves break against the tongue of land that protects the coast, leaving the basin of water behind it as smooth and unruffled as an inland lake. A man in a caftan walks to and fro, urging women who bare their shoulders, however briefly, to cover them again. Then he says a polite thank-you and moves on. A whole family is camping in a hut on the sand; the girls leap up when they see me and cry photo, photo. I duck into the old streets, a few of which remain unpaved to this day. In some dusty corners of town, I can daydream that maybe not so much has changed in the past thousand years. I return to the railway station in the evening sun and wait with crowds of commuters for the train back to Cairo.

  In the Nile Delta, I had expected to find some remnant of the original landscape. A jungle of slapdash buildings is what it is, an indistinct agglomeration of endless non-cities, half-finished districts already decaying, metropolitan tendrils, vacant concrete skeletons of abandoned projects, each with its scrawny rebar crown stabbing up into the sky – a sign that construction is still in progress and the building is therefore tax-exempt. But whole families live on the lower floors, uncertain what each day will bring.

  In between are scattered fields, some parched, some muddy, thanks to sloppy irrigation. I see grain and rubble, deserted farmland, hundreds of white ibises in a dead tree, crumbling industrial parks. In the suburbs, unemployed young people walk among smouldering trash heaps and grazing buffalo. I see women in the fields, swinging hoes into the fertile soil of the polluted Nile Valley. Then the beauty of orchards veiled in light mist, slender bridges over brackish waters, palms, eucalyptuses and tamarisks, the strange, bulging barrel vaults of ancient cemeteries lost in the sand, a small football pitch by the roadside, thin cows along a pasture’s reedy fringe, goats in a field of clover, a grand house next to a rubbish dump, six horses on a patch of mud drying in the sun, endless silhouettes with unsteady edges.

  8

  There are not many ways for a woman in Hamoutal’s position, with her baby in her arms, to traverse the more than two hundred kilometres from Alexandria to Fustat. Flood waters flowing down the Lower Nile sometimes fill what are known as seasonal canals, creating a number of fast-moving waterways. One such waterway, the Alexandria canal, makes it possible to travel from Alexandria to Fustat in less than a week.

  But Hamoutal learns the canal is not yet navigable; the season runs from August to October. She has heard tales of the dangers awaiting ships that try to enter the river from the open sea through the tumultuous mouth of the Nile’s western branch, the Rosetta estuary. The accumulated sediment from the enormous mass of water forms ever-shifting sandbanks just under the waterline. The north wind whips the seawater into towering waves, which crash and churn against the current. Countless light ships are caught there to sink or be carried away by surges of mud and torn to pieces.

  The tenth-century Arab chronicler Ibn Hawqal described how perilous it was to travel in the northern delta. Documents from the Cairo Genizah also shed light on the risks. The historical record leaves no doubt that navigating the Nile could be a hellish venture. Even in the late seventeenth century, visitors to Cairo preferred to travel by land as far as the southern Nile oases. In 1697, the French cleric Antoine Morison heard Turks claiming that anyone who did not fear the Bogaze, the mouth of the Nile, did not fear God. Day and night, sailors stood watch along the turbulent banks, honking horns to warn reckless skippers of the water’s fickle currents, and many boats waited as long as two weeks for the north wind to die down before daring to sail upstream through the estuary.

  The Nile is like a lotus, the elders say; its stem is the southern Nile Valley, the northern delta its curved flower, and the Faiyum basin sprouts from that large stem like a closed bud. Herodotus called Egypt a gift from the Nile, no less, but this colossal lotus, bringer of life to the country, is also a violent, death-dealing organism. All ships that sail to Cairo must fight the current, because the river’s enormous volumes of water flow from the heights of Ethiopia and southern Sudan out into the Mediterranean. If you make it through the estuary, you might have the wind at your back; the meltemi, the near-constant north wind sometimes felt as far inland as Cairo, might propel you upstream without too much trouble. But on calm days, the feluccas – traditional sailing boats, often unstable – have to be towed. The tow-men toil their way down riverbanks littered with obstacles, or stand in water and mud up to their waists, sweltering against the current and making next to no progress. If the ship runs aground on a sandbank or one of the river’s countless grassy islets, in the reeds or in the weeds, it’s dislodged with bargepoles. When the southern khamsin blows masses of sand from the hot Sahara into the Nile Valley, sailing upstream is hopeless. The wind is too strong for some smaller craft, like the traditional jarms or germes, which keel over; the passengers and crew drown in the waves or under the vessels. The complex conditions on the Nile lead to a constant nervous hubbub in the ports. There is ceaseless discussion of the wind direction, the season, alternative sailing routes, the situation at the Rosetta estuary, the expected delays, and the number of saqs (a unit of measurement then used in the Arabic world, of uncertain length) that the boats hope to travel each day. But there are also fast-moving caravans available from Alexandria, which give travellers the option of going by land. Hamoutal settles on this safer route for the first leg, to the calmer southern stretches of the river. After a few days of fretting and walking back and forth between merchants and mariners who are at constant pains to swindle her, she chooses – for reasons of safety – the Jewish merchant caravans, which travel what is known today as the genizah route. After she presents her letter of recommendation, she is granted special protection and a better deal. The world in which she is now immersed seems to her like a hectic dream. Dust billows in the hot wind, people shout on all sides, the stench is excruciating, the bustle never ends. Along the dusty streets, she sees food sellers who have put out their wares next to piles of camel droppings, dried fish crawling with flies, beef tripe next to dishes of dried dates. She mounts a kneeling camel for the first time, with her child in her arms. She falls straight off the other side; the child rolls through the sand and wails. Onlookers laugh; a man helps her up and points to the end of the street; she can’t understand him. He takes her by the arm and brings her to his wife and daughters, who smile at her and all start shouting at once. She is shown to a dim passageway in the back of an old house and offered a small room with a couch and carpets. They bring her a dish of water and olives. The next morning she is awakened; a man is waiting in front of the house. He speaks to her in Aramaic: her caravan is leaving for Fustat.

  Days of travel through the delta, heat and monotony, the swaying, lumbering gait of the camels, their unsettling, primordial noises, the smell of their droppings, sand in her every pore. A couple of days later, they reach the small oases of the north-west Nile Delta. They are sometimes menaced along the way by predators and snakes, and the diet is nothing like what she’s accustomed to. After just a few days, she is sick to her stomach. She develops colic, diarrhoea, dehydration, fever, crusty eyes. The vomiting racks her body for days on end; she is laid in a large wicker basket on a camel’s back. A plump woman with a perpetual smile nurses the child, who lies staring in silence at the eternal, unchanging sky.

  Kafr El Dawwar, Sidi Ghazi. Desert wind, heat, blinding sand and sunlight; now the child, too, shows signs of dehydration. She is a woman alone, unable to speak Arabic, using the limited Hebrew that David taught her, trying to make herself clear with signs and ges
tures. Now and then she produces a coin, careful not to give the impression that she has any more money with her. Sometimes she finds protection, sometimes courtesy as a prelude to fraud, other times she is threatened, and once she comes close to being raped. Yet thanks to Obadiah’s letter of recommendation, she is usually treated with respect and remains a privileged traveller, despite all her woes. At night she sleeps side by side with the other women, her child in her arms; fire keeps the jackals at bay.

  About halfway through her journey – in the Gharbia region, close to where Kafr El Zayat is today – the caravan comes to a halt by the Nile. Fishing is good there, the riverbanks are fertile, there is fruit in the marketplaces, olive oil, goat’s cheese, vegetables, spicy lamb and delicious flatbread; the travellers can recuperate. They sleep in one of the numerous stations along the river. The next day is a rest day; she bathes her baby and tends to his needs. Summer has reached its height. The heat seems like a permanent hallucination; the odour of camel shit permeates everything. She is tired, so disoriented and drained by the journey that she refuses to travel any further with the caravan. The heat makes her sluggish; sand and sweat sting her eyes and skin. The solitude of the desert landscape is behind them; the vendors at the bustling riverside market shout in a mixture of Arabic, Aramaic, Greek and Turkish. Levantines and Byzantines, Seljuks, Ethiopians and Maghribis mingle there.

  She lies in a kind of stupor all day, in the shade of a canvas canopy, depleted by diarrhoea, with sand in her eyes and a hot wind sweeping over her face. She starts crying again, a heartbreaking sound; the merchants who had agreed to accompany her to Fustat stand around her, uneasy, urging her to pick up her child, stand up, and mount the camel that is kneeling for her. She shakes her head no; her weeping is raw, almost animal. She pulls her dark blue chador tight over her face, sobbing, and curls into a foetal position. The child begins to cry now too. The men confer, give her a little time to collect herself, and ask again half an hour later whether she will join them. Again, she shakes her head no, weeping noisily.

  A larger crowd of men has now gathered around the canopy under which she lies. One of them comes closer; it is Embriachi, the merchant from Palermo who had his eye on her aboard ship. The rabbi who offered to escort her has already moved on. Embriachi kneels beside her and explains that a barge to Fustat will arrive the next day, a vessel called Al-Iskander, that he knows the captain, that she can travel with them if she shows her letter. That way, he continues, she can sleep and recover her strength during the trip. He will wait for her the next day.

  She looks up in surprise, half understanding what the man is saying; then her head slumps back again and she seems to fall asleep. The caravan prepares for departure; the men pile up sacks and packets; the baggage is roped to the kneeling beasts of burden. With much ado, the procession sets off. The camels bellow; the men shout. The women’s cries are shrill and seem unreal. Then the noise fades into the distance, leaving only wind and heat.

  The exhausted woman can vaguely hear the rustling treetops by the banks of the Nile and the voices of boys at play in the shallow water by the fringe of reeds. She falls asleep and dreams of a quiet mountain village where she once picked thyme, her children playing in the cool spring breeze. But the memory is bloodstained, tinged with unfathomable darkness in which she sinks and almost suffocates. Gasping for air, she looks around.

  Two women are squatting beside her; one is cradling Hamoutal’s child in her arms. She shoots upright; the woman pushes her back down with a laugh, stands up, and walks off with the child to a small hut nearby. Hamoutal stumbles after her, but the woman won’t give her the child; she smiles and shakes her head. Hamoutal yanks at the woman’s arm, the baby cries, the women both tug at it, shrieking and shoving. Hamoutal sees the pain and panic in her child’s eyes. She lets go and follows the women.

  They reach the dark hut: the deafening buzz of horseflies, the smell of rotting meat. She wants her child back; the woman shakes her head in refusal. Then she sees the second woman place a bowl of cloudy water in the sand in the middle of the hut. They sprinkle the child and laugh again. Chattering away, they remove the tattered rags, perfume the boy’s body, notice he’s still uncircumcised, giggle and wrap him in light cotton. Then they return the child to her. Hamoutal’s head tips back, and she drops like a stone. She lies unconscious in the sand with foam on her mouth. The women lay the child on a few palm leaves and fan the collapsed woman to cool her.

  When she wakes, night has fallen. Her eyes are crusted shut, her lips split; her throat is burning and her breathing laboured. She has a high fever and is wasted with illness. Her heart races; she is drenched with sweat. It is pitch-dark. Through a small opening, she sees the twinkling heavens like a dream. By the muddy banks of a few pools by the river, frogs are croaking to raise the dead. She has the feeling she’s let go of everything and now is nowhere, in a place between, without a body of her own, without weight; she lies in a soft, soothing glow, a pool of flame that scorches and soothes her mind, a state between sleeping and dying, in which sorrow and mild euphoria can no longer be separated. She’s succumbing to typhus but doesn’t know it.

  She wakes again in the pale morning to the gravelly sound of a heron’s cry. The women are already hard at work, pulling off her clothes, rubbing her with a bitter-smelling blend of wormwood, hemp and fish oil, and making her drink something that’s hard for her to swallow. She is swaddled in sheets; she throws up the elixir; she falls asleep again. More than a week slips past that way; she remains unconscious of time or place, teetering on the brink of life and dream, gliding gently into a dark tunnel. Whenever she stops breathing, the women poke her, slap her cheeks, sprinkle water on her. She drifts over the bottomless pit of her tempting, comforting, enticing, irresistible death; she put everything behind her a long time ago; an unreal calm fills her; she sees David in an alley; he passes her, holding Yaakov’s hand, but then he’s a walking torso without a head; she wakes up and vomits again, goes back to sleep.

  A full month passes before she can rise to her feet and take a few cautious steps. She’s become so thin that she looks like a living skeleton. Her eyes are inflamed; a wound on her left arm is infested with maggots. The women wash her again, still chattering away and as incomprehensible as ever. She gives in to all of it, not even asking about her baby, who is crawling in the sun with skinned knees, following the other children along the riverbank. Her recovery is slow, because she struggles to keep food down, but in time she begins to ask herself some questions. Why are these women nursing her? Why isn’t there a man around?

  It takes her a few days to figure out that the two women work as prostitutes, serving the passing boats on the Nile; they are outcasts, pariahs, trying their luck together in their hut not far from the river, scraping by in their primitive way with whatever they can lay their hands on. They are left alone; they know the customs and the codes, there’s no fooling them. Once Hamoutal is feeling a little better, they take her to the river to bathe. An hour later the next felucca arrives, and the women offer her to one of the boatmen. Hamoutal puts up a struggle, so he hits her on the head, knocking her unconscious. She drops like a stone. The women drag her back inside the hut and leave her there half dead, showering her with curses.

  She wakes that evening in a panic. The sun is low, the hot, humid air is stifling, the insects swarming around her are maddening. Her child is not there; she hears the women’s peals of laughter by the distant riverbank. Where is her letter of recommendation? The rest of her baggage? She sees none of her things in the hut. Where are the few silver pieces she concealed with such care? Where is she, for that matter, where in this maddening world is she, where is she to go? She jumps up. Her lip is split, there’s dried blood on her chin, when she licks her lips the blood starts flowing again. She swallows blood, and her heart almost leaps out of her chest. She totters outside; a few goats mill around her legs. Where are the children?

  She hears children’s voices in the distance and, stumbling
towards them, finds her baby sleeping amid rags and rubbish. A few greasy sheep are wandering by the reeds. She picks up the grubby, underfed child, which seems to feel nothing. Nearby is a vulture with a snake in its beak, whipping it back and forth, slamming its head against the sandy ground until it no longer moves but hangs limp as a rag from the bird’s beak. Then the vulture rips into it, gagging down its repulsive meal. Where is my boy Yaakov now? The question tears through her like a scream.

  She kisses the motionless boy on his hanging head, lays him gently on a few sheets in the hut, searches in a fever for her things, turning over everything she sees, but finds only the pouch with the rolled-up parchment, her letter of recommendation, and David’s tefillin; her silver coins have disappeared. She stuffs the pouch underneath a scrap of fabric that she winds around her waist like a scarf. She grows dizzy and pitches forward, bangs her shoulder into the mud wall, picks up her child, wraps him up in the dirty rags she finds in the tent, and stumbles down to the river. Speechless, she displays the starved child, flies swarming around his head, to a few men sitting on the bank drinking. She stammers something in broken Hebrew; one of the men shouts in the direction of a flat-bottomed boat tied up nearby. A man comes out and asks her what she wants in Aramaic. She falls to her knees, sobs, pulls out the letter, and shows it to the man. He unrolls the parchment, scans the document, gives the woman a distrustful, probing look, and then nods his head towards the galley. She stands, picks up her groggy child with care, stumbles on board, and is shown to a bench, where she lies down, panting with exertion.

  After darkness falls, one of the women comes out of the forecabin and, finding her there, lets out an angry, high-pitched stream of words and kicks her. Embriachi appears from nowhere, pushes the ranting woman off the boat, and beckons Hamoutal to stand up. How did Embriachi get here? She follows him meekly; he leads her to his small cabin; she lies down on the wooden, rag-lined berth and falls into oblivious sleep again. When she wakes up a few hours later, she feels him moving on top of her. He has lifted her skirts, he is already inside her, she is not even startled. A defeated warmth spreads through her body, a desolate glow, something she can’t control. He reeks of hashish and fish; she doesn’t move but feels her wetness and desire and lets him have his way. After a few minutes he comes with a grunt; she feels his calloused hand on her nipples, his unshaven cheek rasping along her throat. He rolls off her and falls straight to sleep. At the first glimmer of dawn, as the ship slowly starts to move, she clings to the man, silent, her eyes shut, and catches herself stroking his shoulder. The boatmen sink their poles deep into the mud by the banks; the old, low sail is unfurled. The felucca glides upstream with the wind at its back, to the middle of the brown and yellow river, seeking out the path of least resistance, the rowers toiling to the rhythm of the drum. She is on her way to Fustat, old Cairo, a hundred kilometres away. The sun is already beating down. The smell of mud and fish, wood and rope, fills the stale air of the cabin. Vapour burbles up out of the water; the world is in motion again. The merchant snores. The child, bundled up in cloths and rags, is no longer breathing.