A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  Itamar laughed. “An existential crisis? Please. If you were having a gastrointestinal crisis, then I might care.”

  “No, it’s really upsetting, Itamar. I don’t know how to describe it. This woman, she keeps belittling me—first it was subtle, but now it isn’t anymore, it’s like she’s trying to make me justify my life. I don’t even know what she means. She’s dressed very modern, I don’t think it’s a religious thing, but it’s—”

  “It’s four more days, yekirati,” he said in Hebrew. “Enjoy the fun parts. Be glad you aren’t vomiting. Everyone likes the ice cream there. Go out and eat more ice cream.”

  That night Josie lay in bed, thinking of Tali, hoping to dream of her. Instead she dreamed that Nasreen took her out for ice cream. Just as Josie was about to lick the sweet white cream for the first time, Nasreen tore the cone from Josie’s hand and threw it into the sea, grinning as she skipped it across the surface of the water. Josie woke up frozen in the air-conditioned room, unsure of whether it had been a dream.

  THE NEXT DAY, her second-to-last in Alexandria, Nasreen barely looked at her. But they couldn’t avoid each other; there was too much to be done. Nasreen took her through the library’s storage rooms, making sure there were clear plans for each collection. Toward the end of the second floor, they walked through a room whose books were assembled in literal stacks, waist-high piles of peeling leather and yellowed paper. It was as though the paper had decided to reconstitute itself back into trees.

  Josie paused in the windowless room under the dim overhead light. The air was warmer here, and shuddered against her breath. After so many days surrounded by smooth screens and pristine shelves, she stood motionless in this forest of words, suddenly aware of each buried book’s life, long ago, in someone’s warm hands. She breathed in the dark dry smell of cracked leather and rotting paper. Like inhaling a shadow.

  “What do you keep in here?” she asked.

  “Mostly rubbish,” Nasreen said, lingering by the door. Her posture was proud, erect against the doorpost. “When we first started planning the library, we made a public call for materials. People sent us whatever they found in their grandmothers’ closets, because there was a rumor that we would pay. They all think they’ve given us great treasures, of course. Hundreds of English books that we already own, for instance. And the same in French. The directors don’t even want us to catalogue this room until we finish with everything else. It’s really nothing but rubbish. I’ve looked.”

  Trivia, Josie thought. Nasreen’s cell phone buzzed. Nasreen fished it out of her bag and began speaking in Arabic, her voice low, professional. Josie stepped toward the column of books by the door, and crouched slightly to read the spines. The bindings had flaked off many of them; most titles were illegible to her, even the ones in Roman letters. Josie picked up a decrepit volume from the top of the stack, the capital of a column of trivia. The book was small, but thick, its pages packed into a dense brick of paper. The binding flaked onto her hand as she looked at the cover. To her astonishment, it was in Hebrew.

  “This is Guide for the Perplexed,” she said aloud, almost unconsciously. She opened the book and read its title page, awed by how quickly the familiar letters resolved into meaning: Moreh Nevukhim la-Rambam, translated into Hebrew from the Judeo-Arabic by Shmuel ibn Tibbon in the year 4960—or, as Josie quickly calculated, 1200—and printed in Cairo in 1928. She flipped through its pages, smelling its dense blocks of print. She had never read it, and didn’t want to. In her mental Genizah, she had entered her childhood living room. Her father, dressed in an undershirt, black socks, and ill-fitting pants, was hunched over an English translation of Guide for the Perplexed, delicately deboning the book with a four-color pen. He had already started growing out his beard, then. When she entered the room, he didn’t look up.

  “This book,” he said, “should be required reading for being alive.”

  “Why?” Josie had asked.

  “Because it explains why we think we know everything, when we actually don’t know anything at all.”

  Her father was a mathematics professor at a no-name college twenty minutes from their home, and he spent his days convinced that he had been slighted by the universe. Josie and Judith and their mother were part of that slight—particularly their mother, who had often declared that her religious beliefs stopped at the idea of one god. She accepted that intuitively, she once told Josie, exempting it from knowledge, but anything beyond that—and of course, including that—was impossible to know. It occurred to Josie, based on her father’s comment on Guide for the Perplexed, that perhaps her father and her mother actually agreed with each other.

  “What is Guide for the Perplexed?” Nasreen asked. She had put her phone away now, and stepped toward Josie, looking over her shoulder.

  “I—I don’t know,” Josie stammered. She regretted speaking. The last thing she wanted was to get involved in another conversation about the will of God.

  “How did you even read the title?” Nasreen asked, pointing at the cover. “Do you read Hebrew?”

  Josie panicked for a moment, mentally scrambling. Trust me, it just makes everything easier, her friend who had spent the year in Cairo repeated in her head. She flipped the book over, about to put it down, and then noticed the lettering on the book’s back cover. “I read French,” she said, which was true. Le Guide des Égarés de Maïmonide, the other side of the book said. Édition bilingue.

  Nasreen sighed, bored. “It’s quite ridiculous what people brought to this library. Some of the contributions weren’t even proper books, just notebooks of someone’s grandmother’s ­recipes, or folders full of their grandfather’s business receipts. A few people even brought stacks of old letters.”

  “That sort of thing could be very valuable in the future,” Josie offered.

  In the windowless room Nasreen was beautiful, her profile hard and statuesque under the bare incandescent bulb. Nasreen turned around, her back to Josie as she flicked off the light. The book was still in Josie’s hands. Without thinking, Josie slipped it into her own bag as she followed Nasreen to the doorway.

  As she closed the door behind them, Nasreen sniffed, a noble breath. “People will do anything for money,” she said.

  THAT NIGHT THE CAR scheduled to take Josie back to the hotel arrived fifteen minutes earlier than planned. She saw it idling outside the library windows as she finished her work. It was out of character for Alexandria. Usually, Josie was left waiting in the air-conditioned lobby for ages, as the pre-­arranged time receded into the happy night air. Early was unheard of. But that night Josie was relieved and reprieved. Tomorrow would be the end. She hurried out to meet the car, jumping in and closing the door even after she saw that the driver was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans instead of the usual uniform and cap.

  “Four Seasons, please,” she announced.

  “I stop for passenger first,” the driver replied.

  The driver’s accent was light, pleasant. He smiled at her in the rearview mirror, as though he were eager to chat. What he said barely registered.

  “What?”

  The car had already moved around the corner, beyond the library’s grounds. It pulled over near a gray apartment building, where a man in a black shirt and dark pants opened the door.

  “He is passenger,” the driver said.

  Josie nodded, trying to seem unconcerned. She had been judging everyone and everything since she arrived in Egypt, but by now she had learned not to judge. “All right,” she said. Her mistake.

  The man climbed into the car, sliding into the seat beside her as the door closed. He had on sunglasses that covered most of his face. A moment later it occurred to Josie how odd it was that he was wearing sunglasses after nightfall. But by then he was smothering her with a rag that smelled of milk and poison, and her body sank into a dreamless sleep.

  WHEN JOSIE AWOKE, SHE was convinced she was dreaming. She couldn’t have been in the hotel room, because she was warm, her back slicked with
sweat. For a fleeting instant she thought she was lying atop the cliff in Ein Gedi, feeling the warm desert air on her face and the bare rock beneath her. Then she returned to herself, rational, and knew the air conditioning must have broken. Something was wrong with the bed too; it was hard, like the ledge in Ein Gedi. She looked down at herself and saw that she was wearing the same skirt and blouse she had worn to the library that morning. She sat up suddenly and shook her head hard, fighting a thick and unexpected haze of dizziness. Then she saw that there was no bed.

  She was lying on the floor of a small room, surrounded by four windowless walls. The walls were mottled, blotched with patches of cracked brownish plaster. An old room, unequipped for anything. Its only feature was a six-foot-long slab of stone about two and a half feet high, standing like a table parallel to one of the room’s walls, with worn Arabic inscriptions on its surface. Aside from the stone, there was no furniture except a square yellow plastic bucket in one corner. Three electric lights hung from the ceiling, suspended from hooks, with black electrical wires running down along the walls and under a wide wooden door.

  She tried to stand up. She lost her balance at first, then righted herself, more carefully this time, and stepped toward the door, trying the knob. It wouldn’t move. She looked around again, at the lights and the walls and the door, feeling the hard stone beneath her feet. Then she looked down and saw that her feet were bare. She spun around, scanning the room and then her body for her bag, for her phone, for her watch, for her shoes, for the emergency pouch with her passport, credit cards, and cash that she kept under her shirt. Nothing. Her eyes widened in the room’s bright lights. She fidgeted, rubbed her hands together, and noticed that her wedding ring was gone.

  She was shaking now, breathing hard. She threw herself at the door, threw herself at the door again, screamed for help, screamed again, pounded, screamed, pounded, screamed, then wept, until she sank back down to the floor again, crawling to the back of the room, silent and defeated. Now she understood.

  A loud clank jarred her out of a stupor of silence. The door opened, then closed, too quickly for her to rise from where she was leaning against the room’s back wall.

  A man entered. He was a short man, with short greased hair, a day’s worth of stubble, and large black sunglasses that covered most of his face. The same man from the car, Josie thought. Or was he? He was wearing black pants and a black T-shirt with white English lettering on it. As he approached, the words printed on his shirt became clear: “Jon’s Bar Mitzvah, April 28, 2007.” Josie almost laughed. The man saw her smile, and to her surprise, smiled back, raising his thin eyebrows. For an instant it was as if they were friends.

  “You had good dreams?” he asked.

  His accent was dense, almost parodic. He was holding something long and dark behind his back, a stick of some sort. He squatted down, his face level with hers as she sat on the floor.

  Josie was trembling again, her lips shaking hard. But now she sucked in her breath. Suddenly she knew that her only resources were her words and her brain. As always. All of life was like a game of chess. You just had to be the smartest person in the room. And for Josephine Ashkenazi, how hard was that?

  “How much do they want for me?” Josie asked, controlling the quaver in her voice. “What are they asking for?” It was a knight’s move, an indirect probe, one of the only moves available to her just then. The “they” was to belittle him, but also to find out who was involved. She needed to know one thing: was this some sort of fundamentalist insanity, or were these people just in it for the money? If it were merely money, she sensed, there was a possibility of remaining alive.

  “Twenty million dollars,” he said, with a proud smile.

  Josie breathed out. Here, in the end, was the ask she had been expecting. If only the businessmen at the Four Seasons Hotel had been so blunt. “They could have at least been realistic,” she said. She felt a flutter of pride, emboldened by her ability to respond without shaking. “Is this negotiable?”

  The slap to her cheek astounded her, but not as much as the raised truncheon held before her eyes. As the black metal hovered beside her temple, her mind slipped into chess mode: she had just lost a knight, but other pieces remained in play. Surely she was worth more to them unharmed, wasn’t she? She pushed away every human thought and held her breath.

  “You are a very pretty girl,” the man said, and smiled.

  The smile horrified her much more than the truncheon, which was now resting on her damp cheek. She swallowed, trying very hard not to tremble. No one had called her a girl since she had given birth to her own. She already knew that he couldn’t see her cry, that that would be the end: checkmate.

  “A pretty girl. And a smart girl. We are making a movie of you, and we want you to be very pretty in our movie. No marks on your face.” He tapped her cheek with the truncheon, then gave it a light smack. Her hand flew to her face, but by then the metal club had suddenly flipped downward, cracking against her shin. She crumpled, doubled over on the floor. “Your leg is not in this movie,” the man said as she groaned. “Just your face.”

  From the floor she saw the man looming above her, the irrational words “Jon’s Bar Mitzvah” wavering on the periphery of her vision. In her delirium she imagined Jon’s bar mitzvah, Jon himself a prepubescent pimpled boy in an ill-fitting suit beneath an enormous prayer shawl, his voice cracking over an ancient scroll as the man in the sunglasses stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder, controlling, guiding, proud.

  When Josie stopped groaning—was it five minutes later? five hours? five days?—the man was holding up a cell phone, its screen in front of his sunglasses.

  “Read this,” he said.

  She thought he meant the phone, but then he threw a ball of paper at her, still suspending the phone in the air as the paper landed behind her.

  Josie made a point of standing up to get the piece of paper instead of crawling across the room. Her leg howled. She unwrinkled the page and scanned the handwritten words, printed with a ballpoint pen in curled block letters that looked almost Russian. She sank back to the floor, gulping at the air until she could speak without moaning.

  “This doesn’t even make sense,” she finally said.

  The man held up the truncheon. “Your other leg is also not in this movie. Read.”

  He meant read aloud, she understood. She balanced herself as she knelt, the humiliation total. If he had told her to lick the floor she would have done it. The paper shook in her hands. “Hello, I am Ashkenazi and I am held against a will,” she read aloud. These people were amateurs, she thought. That probably made things worse. She tried to smile at the camera, imagining Itamar and Tali behind it, until the man raised the truncheon again. “I dream to come back to you,” she recited. “I have the human condition. Please make a wish to put me in a safe.”

  The man fiddled with the phone before leaving the room. An instant later the door opened again, and someone’s arm reached in to deposit a plate full of pita bread and a large plastic pitcher of water in the room before slamming the door shut. Before Josie could haul herself up, she heard the clanking sound of locks. Alone, Josie pulled up her skirt and examined her leg. Below the knee it was swollen, bright red and purple. She crawled to the water and the bread. She had the presence of mind to pour some water on her hands before eating the bread, avoiding drinking. Instead she chewed on the sawdust pita and stared at the slab of stone, trying to find clues as to where she might be.

  The stone was too high to be a bench, and too low to be a table. She tried sitting on it, but found it too painful for her injured leg to dangle several inches from the floor. As she eased herself off, she looked at it more closely, running her fingers across the carved Arabic lettering on its surface. In many places the letters had been worn away. One end of it protruded slightly higher than the rest, as if the slab had once been a bed with a headboard. As she inched herself toward the stone’s raised end, she saw that it really had been a headboard once; a j
agged edge marked where some large part of it had been broken off. Not a headboard: a headstone. She stepped back as she realized that the stone was a sarcophagus.

  It was the City of the Dead, she understood now. This must be one of the thousands of half-abandoned tombs, the ones built in the Middle Ages with rooms for visiting mourners to sleep with their dead relatives—rooms now occupied by the living. She remembered it from online guides she had read before coming to Egypt. Was there a necropolis like that in Alexandria too? Josie didn’t think so, though she couldn’t be sure. More likely she was back in Cairo, in the enormous cemetery that had become an endless slum for squatters, so engorged with the destitute and the criminal that no stranger who entered could find his way out. No one would ever find her.

  As the air in the room began choking her, she at last surrendered to the mute wail of the jug of water her captors had placed beside the sarcophagus. There was no cup. She poured the water directly down her throat. It wasn’t long before she began vomiting.

  The next hours and days passed as though she were crawling through a dark tunnel of dirt and filth. She burrowed deep into the ground, filling the plastic bucket again and again as she draped herself across the stone floor, twisted in delirium. If the man came in to empty the bucket, he did so only when she was asleep. Sleeping and waking blended together into one long night, her body a tight clay jar containing the dark thick agony of her gut. When she dreamed she dreamed of snow, long winter mornings, waking up to hear that school had been canceled, the world dipped in white, receding into cloud. Awake, she imagined moaning into her lost phone to Itamar, to Judith, to her demented mother, to Tali. If you were having a gastrointestinal crisis, then I might care, she heard Itamar laughing. I have the human condition, she begged him. Please put me in a safe. As she woke from a dream that was nothing more than snow, she found herself lying beside the sarcophagus, her sweat- and vomit-drenched body pressed against the stone house of the dead. She turned her head to see a new figure standing above her in the room.