The Convert

  Now I’m trying to reconstruct Hamoutal’s route from her landing place along the Nile to the synagogue, although I’m walking in the opposite direction. I pass straight through the Mar Girgis metro station and find myself in a breathtaking slum. The run-down blocks of flats seem on the verge of collapse but are full of life and energy; the balconies are bathed in the intimate glow of the lamplight through the windows; here and there I see eyes glittering in the shadows. The streets are unpaved, covered in dust and improbably dirty; camels lie in the sand as they must have a thousand years ago. Chickens cross the streets, cackling; dark, open houses prove to be small shops; everything smells like burning charcoal, excitement, the allure of a dream. I know I have to pass straight through this district to reach the legendary Nilometer, so I stop now and then to ask the way. Many eyes are levelled at me from the dim interiors; it seems no tourists ever come here. The smell, the balmy air that barely moves, the intimacy of this unconcealed reality – it catches me unawares. In the smoke of the smouldering incinerators, I smell incense and myrrh, the primeval conflagration of the world. I feel a strange urge to linger here, enter a house, sit down and not get up again; then I realise I’m being indiscreet and should walk on. But the few hundred metres through this ancient district will remain branded into me, a short, intense trip through time, during which I smelled, sensed and experienced something that flung me straight into the heart of the story I’ve been pursuing for so long.

  The transition is brusque, like everything else in this city; when I reach the end of the district, I am plunged back into Cairo’s frenzied traffic, four lanes thick, a continuous, ear-splitting riot of honking in a haze of exhaust. The other side of the road – which you can reach only by slaloming, contemptuous of death, between cars that never brake – runs along a thinner arm of the Nile. The banks are covered with litter, chickens are scratching around the reeds, a pale yellow dog is chasing them. A picturesque footbridge takes me to the island of Roda, home of the Nilometer. It’s a well three floors deep with a floodgate where the ancient Egyptians could measure the level of the Nile. That enabled them to predict whether the flood waters would leave the riversides fertile, reduce them to mud, or stay too low to irrigate the fields. In that last case, they could expect a summer of drought and scarcity. All you can see of this underground structure from the outside is a small pointed tower. Now the deep cellar is dry, and swarming with self-declared tour guides begging for alms. By 1097 it had already been there for centuries. I take a long look at the slender column in the captivating depths, the floodgate at the bottom where the water could be let in, the marks in the sandstone, the inscriptions, the timeless ingenuity that went into measuring the water’s rise and fall, the ancient theology that permeated the design. If Hamoutal did come here and even lived here, she may at some point have seen this. To reach the synagogue, she had to pass through the dusty streets I’ve just left behind me.

  On a nearby embankment over the flickering water, my wife is waiting for me, her eyes filled with light and enchantment. As I take her in my arms, I feel we’ve completed one leg of this journey together. The play of the shimmering water entrances us for hours.

  I have found Hamoutal.

  3

  The rabbi shakes Hamoutal awake, scoops a handful of water from the well bucket, and sprinkles it over her face. She opens her eyes and looks around, befuddled. He helps her up, noticing how light she is. Supporting her weight, he walks her over to a step where she can sit. There she rummages mindlessly under her clothes and hands him her leather pouch. As she sags to one side, dozing off again, the elderly scholar reads the imploring letter, written by his fellow rabbi Joshuah Obadiah in a mountain village far to the north. He reads the letter twice, his lips moving. He rolls up the parchment again and finds the small tefillin at the bottom of the pouch, rolled up and coated with dust: the phylacteries that David Todros used in prayer. He ties the pouch to his belt, helps the woman to her feet, and leads her to the synagogue entrance. There he fetches his wife and asks her to take the exhausted foreigner under her care. Once Hamoutal has been led away, he goes back inside the synagogue, says a prayer, sets aside the letter and David’s tefillin, and returns to his daily routines. Later that morning he climbs the stairs to the upper level and, with a brief, murmured prayer and a measure of religious decorum, flings the two objects through the dark hole at the end of the women’s gallery into the old genizah, relinquishing them to the dust and the centuries.

  Misr al-Fustat means something like ‘Egyptian city of the tents’. According to legend, a dove built its nest in the tent of Amr ibn al-As, the seventh-century Muslim leader who conquered Egypt. Amr was charmed to find the dove brooding there and saw it as a sign from God. Instead of packing up his tent before he went into the field, he left it behind to shelter the dove’s nest. When he returned victorious, he saw that the tent was still standing, untouched. The doves had flown away. Amr decided to have a whole tent camp erected around it; Fustat was born from a dove’s nest.

  The Jews of Fustat may have had their best years under Fatimid rule. Their prestige and prosperity grew, and they could count on respect and a privileged status. The Ben Ezra Synagogue became the hub of the largest Jewish community to have formed since the fall of Alexandria. ‘The Jews who live there are very rich,’ wrote Benjamin of Tudela around 1170. Fustat became a centre of Jewish power that extended beyond Egypt to Palestine and Syria. It was, without a doubt, the best place Hamoutal could have washed up in those days.

  She needed all conceivable forms of care and emotional support, and the congregants attached to the synagogue, after learning the identity of her distinguished father-in-law, must have been more than willing to offer that support. They would no doubt have dissuaded her from travelling onwards any time soon, and not only because of her weakened state. They received news almost daily of the atrocities committed by the crusaders in the East. After the so-called People’s Crusade met with its first defeats, the Christian soldiers gathered near Constantinople – vast armies of French, Flemish and Norman warriors – and advanced on Jerusalem, slaughtering and looting as they went. The age-old balance of peoples was thrown into disarray. Cruelties and abominations were perpetrated left and right in the name of revenge and counter-revenge. The catastrophe of the crusades had descended on the Near East, making the world an unpredictable place. It would have been reckless for Hamoutal to follow in the crusaders’ footsteps, seeing as they were now her worst enemies.

  So Fustat is a turning point in her quest. She is well cared for and treated with great honour and respect – which she richly deserves, in the eyes of the community there. For her, it’s like slowly waking from a nightmare. But something inside her has given way; her grief has become a kind of vacant staring into space. After a few months, she starts to get a grip on herself and her dealings with the considerate, chatty women around her. It begins to dawn on her that there is almost no chance she will ever see her children alive again; maybe they found themselves in a disorderly rearguard of the People’s Crusade and were killed in one of the great defeats inflicted on those hordes. How could the crusaders, in the miserable conditions of their campaign to bring down the world order, possibly look after of a couple of children? Even in the best case – if they’re still alive – they were sold as slaves at an Oriental market months ago. She begins to understand that Fustat is not just an oasis for her, but her journey’s end. Here, around the Ben Ezra Synagogue, she is safe.

  Each month, she must descend into the mikveh again. She grows accustomed to the lukewarm darkness, immersed in Nile water. One day it takes her mind back to the ice-cold waters of the Nesque in the mikveh in Moniou. For a moment she thinks, I don’t want to come up again. But a person stays alive as long as she can’t stop breathing. Panting, she rises to her feet, her hair dripping, and shivers in the heat of the day. She hears new psalms, Arabic in origin, old poetry and prayers, piyyutim and hizana, Talmudic texts mixed with Egyptian incantations. She is instructe
d by the rabbi and absorbed into the community’s everyday life.

  It takes her a long time to adjust, but step by step, day by day, she does. She is able to correspond with her husband’s family, thanks to the excellent ferry services run by the Jewish merchants in Fustat; when the sea is calm, letters are delivered in three weeks at most. That’s how she learns that, in any event, her children haven’t returned to Narbonne.

  Did Hamoutal ever see the pyramids in Giza, the head of the sphinx in the burning sun? Maybe not – the suburb of Giza is on the far side of the ruins of Fustat. She would have needed a very special reason for travelling to that desolate spot to see things that no one could fathom. Sightseeing was unheard of; the past was not yet a tourist attraction. By the time I arrive, the place is teeming with day trippers, and there’s no chance of experiencing anything remotely historical. The whole site is spoiled by the shouting vendors, the jovial traders, the Arab students taking selfies. Tourists ride around the desert in camel-drawn carriages. Taking refuge nearby in the cool of stately Mena House, I try to imagine what Hamoutal’s contemporaries made of these colossal vestiges of a then-unimaginable culture. What questions might they have asked themselves? These structures must have seemed unearthly, and in times when everything was seen in terms of Christian, Jewish and Muslim religion, they were utter enigmas. I have found no eleventh-century accounts that even mention this place. The Sphinx’s head may have been buried deep in the hot sand.

  One day she is an accidental witness to the public execution of an adulteress. The woman has been convicted by an Islamic court and is to be stoned. She kneels prostrate, her face in the sand, as the men around her engage in lively discussion. The gaon, the head of the yeshiva, is there too. He disapproves of the stoning and draws the Muslim law enforcers into a learned argument. The gaon speaks with calm authority, making a strong impression on the listening crowd. But then, from behind the backs of the arguing men, someone throws a large, sharp stone that hits the woman right in the temple. She falls to the sand like a rag doll. Pandemonium breaks out; the bystanders start pushing, pulling, cursing. The gaon’s voice goes unheard in the racket. The woman’s head is running with blood. The next stone hits her full in the stomach. Then the torrent begins.

  The gaon backs away from the bloodbath and sees, in the outermost circle of the crowd, a blue-eyed woman in tears, biting her lip. He is startled; he knows this woman by now, he was involved in her introduction to the congregation, but it surprises him to see her here, crying with such abandon at one of these events – which, sad to say, happen all the time. Did she know the stoned woman? Does she have some personal stake in this matter? It always pains him to see how heavy-handed the Islamic court can be in such cases – the issue has been debated for generations.

  Moved by the foreign woman’s empathy, he goes to her and asks, Why are you crying, Hamoutal? His question elicits a stifled sob; Hamoutal turns to leave. He takes her by the arm. Don’t go, Hamoutal. He walks beside her as she hurries home to the women’s quarters. She knows the gaon; his name is Shmuel, an unusual name for a Romaniote Greek Jew from Alexandria. His presence intimidates her; no words have ever passed between them before. He grasps her by the arm again and says, What made you cry like that? What exactly happened to you?

  Hamoutal shuts him out. She shakes her head, tugs herself loose, and flees into the house.

  The gaon strokes his beard and walks on.

  But it’s a small community. A few days later, he sees her sitting alone by the river, watching the goings-on around the moored boats. She throws pebbles at alley cats. He sits down beside her and says nothing. The sun glides through the warm mist. Half an hour later, she starts to stand up, but he stops her and looks into her eyes. Only now does he notice that her blue eyes are slightly crossed; the sight fills him with affection. They say nothing. Minutes pass. Then he stands, laying his hand on her shoulder. Galana, he says, laughing: blue-eyed one. He wanders off to chat with some fishermen standing nearby. She sees him against the sunlight, and her thoughts are confused and dark.

  In the weeks that follow, they run into each other often. Eye contact becomes more awkward. In the evenings, she likes to sit by the Well of Moses. One day, she finds Shmuel there beside her, gazing at her. Galana, he says again. He laughs, showing his teeth, and without further ado asks her to marry him.

  She stands up, walks away, roams the streets. A few days later, the congregation is informed of Gaon Shmuel’s proposal. The gossip begins. Women and giggling girls latch on to Hamoutal, eager for news. She shakes her head and hides in the women’s quarters.

  The gaon is a wealthy man who has earned the trust of the Muslim authorities and belongs to an elite profession, the mintmasters. He has a reputation as strict and fair, but she doesn’t feel ready to share her life with a man, not ever again. For a long time, she repels his advances, which grow more formal and more insistent, until one day the rabbi’s wife tells her that this principled man is just the husband to offer her a balanced, sheltered life, that she will live in a fine, peaceful house, and that he would do anything for her. She goes to the rabbi that evening, who gives her the same advice.

  She has a message sent to Narbonne to ask her father-in-law’s opinion. He responds that she has the right to remarry and therefore has his blessing. After a few weeks of sleepless nights, she decides to choose life over endless mourning. It becomes clear to her that the people here are her new home, that she cannot pass up this second chance.

  One warm, wet evening she heads for the gaon’s house. In the drizzle, the smells of damp fabric tingle in her nostrils. She knocks on his door; he opens, sees her look of dread, bows and invites her in. She agrees to marry him on one condition: she wants to travel on to Yerushalayim after all, with his help. Her request irks him. He sits opposite her in silence and says, Let’s get married first. I’ll take care of you. Hamoutal nods; he lays his hands in hers. The next day they go to the rabbi and set everything in motion for the marriage that will take place six weeks later.

  4

  The Jewish community in Fustat has a much more rigid hierarchy than the progressive, enlightened community in Narbonne. Their morals and social forms are more conservative; women are less liberated. Hamoutal has to adjust to her life’s new pattern. She spends most of her time in the women’s quarters, sometimes without seeing her betrothed for days. In any case, their relationship is a good deal less sentimental than her romance with the silver-tongued young man who stole her away to Provence. She often sees Shmuel at the evening meal, which tends to go by in silence. He treats her with perfect respect, but since their bond was formalised, he has grown reserved. Everything is so close and out of reach. The bell of the Coptic church comes clanging through the Jewish evening prayer; in the distance, they can hear the muaddhin’s Allahu akbar.

  She meets with a tailor in Fustat to discuss the ritual prayer shawl he will make for her future husband. They do not see each other at all the week before the ceremony, as tradition demands. Her hair is dyed dark with henna. The day before the wedding, Hamoutal plunges into the ritual bath. Underwater she sees a shapeless horror, a small bloody thing in a monster’s maw. She surfaces, steps out of the bath, and accepts the towels the women offer her, as they laugh at her golden gooseflesh.

  The making of the ketubah, or marriage contract, is a long process. It is planned and drafted by the rabbi and then presented to the leader of Cairo’s Jewish community, the rayyis. After that it is submitted to the muqaddam, an Islamic official, and once he has consented, it must go to the supreme leader of Egypt’s Jews, the nagid. Only then can it be returned to the Ben Ezra Synagogue. After all the formalities have been completed, they marry; once again, she becomes the wife of a prominent Jewish man. They sign the ketubah, which is then solemnly presented to Hamoutal for safekeeping. Shmuel covers her face with the veil. The ceremony is much more exotic and the guests more diverse than at her first wedding; Muslim leaders and a few Coptic Christians attend. After they step unde
rneath the chuppah, strange music is played. Shmuel smashes the glass; this time there’s no cloth wrapped around it. Shards glitter and crunch beneath his feet. The Muslim drummers at the banquet fill her with strange emotion. The guests bring gifts to the bride and groom, greeting and welcoming Hamoutal with distant courtesy. By the standards of the day, she is already an older woman, but everyone agrees she makes a good match for her solemn new husband.

  The beautifully illuminated marriage contract, on papyrus of pounded sedge from the banks of the Nile, must have been cast among the countless documents in the dark genizah half a century later and consumed at some stage by mice or rats. Or maybe it’s found its way into the hands of researchers in Cambridge, or somewhere else in the world, but the names are no longer legible.

  Bit by bit she gets to know the Jewish community’s elite, although she never leaves the house without an escort. But she can move more freely now with the other women. She receives instruction from her mother-in-law, who acts as her muallima or teacher. Side by side with that vigorous, fleshy woman, she elbows her way through the cacophony of the Arab souks, learns to cope with the traders’ mannerisms and ways of speaking, grows used to haggling over price and quality, and gains insight into the household of a well-to-do Egyptian Jewish woman. In her own house, she has about ten servants: brisk, unspeaking people who remain leery of their new mistress. Over the weeks, she wins a degree of trust by rolling up her sleeves and setting to work. From her cook, she learns how to bake pieces of huge Nile perch in hot ashes, to dry figs and dates, and to cure olives and lemons in brine. She looks up at the birds and the sky, so bright it always stings her eyes. She enjoys the smell of smouldering fires in the alleys, of orange blossom when rain passes over the city, and of the swaying oleanders in the courtyard. She and the other women go to the olive oil mill, a tall, gloomy building where flat stones rotate and screech, turned by a blinded mule. The oil runs out of a spout into the old jugs; its fragrance is bitter-sweet; the shining skin of the half-naked boys has a green-gold lustre. She learns to make ful, mashing boiled fava beans in olive oil and adding cumin, lime and sesame. She stirs and stirs and still cries sometimes in secret, remembering her lost children. The hours blur during the slow siesta, a warm, unreal fold in time where memories come to life, a hot languor that makes her weak and dreamy till she flinches awake to the sing-song call of the muaddhin from near the old city wall. Many Egyptian Jews speak fluent Arabic; after a few months, she can understand most of the jokes in the souks. Her imperfect Aramaic, which showed traces of Sephardic Spanish, now has Judaeo-Arabic undertones. Only when she’s caught by surprise, or in dreams, does something northern surface, a language from another life, something hard and grey and cold for which she sometimes feels homesick beyond bearing. By the time the Egyptian winter arrives, she is pregnant again.