A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  Nasreen looked at her for too long. “You sound just like your sister,” she said quietly. “If I closed my eyes, I would think she was here in this room.”

  Judith slid into the chair opposite Nasreen, surprised to find herself fighting back tears.

  Nasreen blinked, and finally smiled. She took the paper and entered the number into the computer on her desk. A moment later her face turned ashen, her eyes fixed on the screen. For a long time she was silent.

  “Did you find anything?” Judith asked.

  Nasreen turned to Judith. “Not in any of our databases, no. Only in my personal database. My Genizah,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your sister made a private Genizah for me, while she was here,” Nasreen said. Her voice trembled slightly. “I was laughing at her about it, about how useless it was. People saving all their personal details forever—it was so ridiculous to me. But after she died I started using it a bit. Not for anything private, of course, just as a way of maintaining my own records and contacts at the office. I—I don’t believe this.” Nasreen paused, her eyes still fixed on the screen as Judith stared at her.

  “Nothing came up when I searched the library’s archives,” she continued. “But it automatically searched this computer too. And now I’ve found it.” She held up Judith’s piece of paper. “This phone number belonged to my sister’s husband.”

  My sister’s husband. The words confused Judith at first, as though she stood accused. But then she began thinking again, and felt the slam of shock. “What?”

  “My sister’s husband. He—they live in Cairo, in the City of the Dead.”

  “What’s that?” Judith asked.

  Nasreen sighed, a curt, steep sigh. “It’s a city of tombs, in the southeast of Cairo. Muslims in Cairo used to build tombs with bedrooms, places for mourners to sleep with their dead relatives. It’s a custom left over from the days of the pharaohs. The City of the Dead is an enormous cemetery made of these tombs. In the last fifty years the tombs have been taken over by beggars. Hundreds of thousands of people live there now, perhaps even millions. Most of them don’t have running water or electricity. It is—what is the word? A slum. A slum for the living and the dead.”

  Nasreen paused, as if she were uncertain whether to reveal more. But Judith remained silent, riveted to every word. “My brother-in-law is the richest man in this cemetery,” Nasreen said. “His house has electricity, because he steals it from one of the mosques nearby. He built a pipe for water to come to his house from the well outside. He also took over the houses of his neighbors. The neighbors even collect his garbage for him now. He is like a pharaoh there. The king of the city of the dead.”

  Judith thought of the library she was sitting in, the vast treasure chest of books and brains, an enormous fortress of marble and glass. Then she looked again at Nasreen, at her pretty clothes, at the silk scarf on her hair, at the rings on her fingers, at the gold necklace around her neck. It was utterly implausible, impossible even, that this woman’s sister lived in a slum.

  “Is—is your family from Cairo?” she asked lamely. But as she said it, she already understood the answer. There was nothing that held sisters together, no common destiny that bound them both to failure or success. Why should she be surprised?

  Nasreen seemed to understand what she was actually asking, and answered the question behind the question. “No, but my brother-in-law was. He came to Alexandria to study.”

  This was even harder to believe. “To study? Study what?”

  Nasreen sniffed, shaking her head and waving a hand, as if to say, none of this ever happened. Or never should have. “He was an educated man,” she said at last, and Judith saw that she was suppressing a fury of her own. “That’s what maddens me. He—their lives didn’t have to be like this. Or perhaps they did. One cannot know God’s will.”

  Judith felt Josie’s presence now in her own body, in her chest, in her throat. Insolence rose to her lips. “Is—is your sister like you?” she asked. As she asked, she heard how ridiculous this was, how rude and also how pointless, how distant from anything she urgently needed to know. But the impertinent Josie within her struggled free, and won. “I mean, is she educated like you?”

  “We went to the British academy together. My sister Zulaika had started studying at the university,” Nasreen said. “­Zulaika’s English was as good as mine. Her husband spoke some English too. He was training to be an engineer.”

  Judith listened, astonished. She was no longer afraid of being bold. “How did they end up in a slum?”

  She watched Nasreen hesitate, her face locked in a stern professional frown. A wall was going up, Judith saw, a stone face rising before her. But then she saw Nasreen pinching a corner of her lip between her teeth. Nasreen was caught.

  “Zulaika married my brother-in-law against my father’s wishes,” Nasreen said simply. “As I see it, she was taken captive.”

  The words tightened Judith’s skin. “What do you mean?”

  Nasreen bit her lip again, paused again. At last she spoke. “She was pregnant,” she said quietly. “Then she had no choice but to marry my brother-in-law, because she had nowhere else to go, and by then he had captured her mind too. My father would have put her on the street. I am sure my brother-in-law knew that when he seduced her. His only mistake was thinking that he could get my father’s money too.”

  The evil of this story surprised Judith by making her physically ill. She shuddered in the frigid library air, tasting bile at the root of her tongue.

  “Now she only contacts me when she needs money,” Nasreen was saying. Judith swallowed, thinking of her own calls to her rich sister over the years, of her own pity-induced job. “He won’t give her anything. She calls me about once a month, for money, to arrange for me to come to Cairo and give it to her in person. But only when she can manage it in secret. He keeps her confined there, like a dog.”

  Judith stared at the shining blond wood of the desk between them, ashamed to have asked anything, ashamed to be a woman, ashamed to be alive. Nasreen, too, bowed her head. Then she looked up, jutting her chin at Judith as she spun the paper back across the desk. As the paper slid on polished wood, the Egyptian woman said, “Last week he was elected to the new parliament.”

  Judith was struck dumb. Surely this was some sort of grammatical error, a mistake. “Your brother-in-law was elected?”

  Nasreen sneered, an expression that on her angled face looked almost beautiful. “Of course he didn’t tell me this himself. I saw it on television,” she said, her voice holding back a smoldering rage. “I called this number then, but it was disconnected. I can imagine how he managed to do it. He must have been buying votes. Or threatening his neighbors. He does have many friends, as he calls them. There are all sorts of criminals there.” Nasreen paused, frowned, continued. “The television said he became popular enough to win because he was distributing some kind of software for mobile phones just before the election, to memorialize the martyrs from Tahrir Square. He became a hero overnight among the families of the dead.” Nasreen clicked her tongue.

  The sound startled Judith, alarming her with its familiarity. “I see,” she said. “That would make sense. You said he was an engineering student.”

  Nasreen clicked her tongue again. Judith knew what that sound meant: No, and don’t be stupid. “He was studying urban engineering, not computers,” Nasreen corrected. “In any case, he was failing. It isn’t even slightly possible that he made that software. He’s a thief, so he stole it from somewhere. And behold, here he is, leader of the people, sanctifying the martyrs’ deaths, turning Egypt’s misfortune into fortune. If one doesn’t care to follow the rules, if one is willing to trample everyone in one’s path, I suppose anything is possible. And this is our future. The country’s future.”

  Nasreen shook her head with a slow, aching disgust, a gesture somewhere between anguished disappointment and an animal shaking off a restraint. She pushed the paper back toward the edg
e of the desk, visibly revolted. At last she looked at Judith. “Why do you have this number?”

  Judith stared at the numbers on the paper. Her own evil rose before her like a column of fire, searing her lips. For a long time she couldn’t speak. But then she knew what was possible. Judith raised her voice.

  “My sister sent me a message from this number,” she said.

  Nasreen sucked in her breath. “Your sister, before she was killed?”

  “No,” Judith replied. “After that.” The strange filth of truth rose to her lips. “Almost a month ago, in fact.”

  Nasreen’s eyes widened. Her scarf slipped away from her hair, and she did not replace it. Orange glory blazed from her scalp, flaming up from dark brown roots. “From this number?” she said, in disbelief.

  Judith nodded. “Your brother-in-law’s number,” she said. “She was asking to be rescued. Or at least someone pretending to be her was.”

  Nasreen said nothing. For a long time the room was silent, the air between them stretching through invisible strings.

  “Do you think—do you think it’s possible—” Judith stuttered.

  “It did occur to me,” Nasreen said softly. “In fact, it occurred to me months ago, when she was taken.”

  “What occurred to you?” Judith asked.

  Nasreen paused, her motions suspended, like a statue. Then she stood, quickly, and rushed to the door. For an instant Judith thought Nasreen was running away from her, escaping. Then she saw her glancing down the corridor in both directions and softly, efficiently closing her office door. She returned in three long steps to her seat behind her desk.

  “My sister knew I was hosting an important businesswoman,” Nasreen said. Her voice had changed now. It was higher, more childlike, the faint outline of a wail. “When your sister came here, the library directors put me in charge of her. Someone was supposed to be minding her at all times while she was here, and I was the only woman at the library available to do it. I told Zulaika that that was why I couldn’t go to Cairo that week to give her money like I had promised. I don’t usually make excuses. I’ve never failed to visit her when she needed me, not once in many, many years. I know that if it weren’t for my money, he might let her starve.” She paused, pressing her lips together, then spoke quickly, as if she feared running out of nerve. “Zulaika asked me who this important woman was. I told her all about your sister. I didn’t leave out any details, because I needed her to understand how important it was, and that I was only neglecting to visit her for a very good reason. I promised her I would come to see her after your sister went back to America. I remember how she paused on the phone, how her voice changed when she said goodbye. I assumed it was because she was angry at me, or because her husband had just come into the room. Later I felt guilty, as if I was reminding her of what her life could have been. But after it happened, it occurred to me that—that maybe I had given them an idea.”

  A deep pit of rage seethed in Judith’s gut. The feeling was familiar. She imagined she was Itamar, suddenly knowing that she had been betrayed. “It occurred to you, but you never said anything to anyone about it,” she said. Sarcasm burned her lips.

  “No, I didn’t say anything,” Nasreen conceded. Her voice was still high, improbably innocent. “Because I wasn’t certain. And then your sister was dead before I could say anything more.”

  “You never called the police, even just to suggest it?”

  Now Nasreen laughed out loud. “You think like an American.”

  Judith grimaced. “You’ll have to forgive me for that.”

  Nasreen sighed. “You do not understand Egyptian police,” she said. “Before the revolution, the police killed Zulaika’s son, when they wanted my brother-in-law for something else. My nephew was thirteen years old. They actually murdered him.”

  Judith tried, as she often did upon hearing of other people’s disasters, to think of some excuse, of some reason why this particular world-ending catastrophe was completely fair and deserved. She had almost succeeded when she thought of Tali.

  “One would think such things have changed with the revolution, but they haven’t, or at least not nearly enough,” Nasreen was saying. “Don’t forget my sister is with her husband all the time. They have a daughter too. I knew what could have happened if I told anyone. I am not a fool. No one in this country can afford to be a fool.”

  Judith understood now. There was no recourse, no authority, no judge. Everything that happened here was based on no more than brute strength. But then how could one explain this stunning library, these new computers, this school of information sciences, this aggressive air conditioning, this—this—

  “And now he was elected?” Judith asked.

  Nasreen smirked. “Everything we thought was impossible for forty years suddenly happened. You thought that meant only good things, didn’t you? No. It means everything. The impossible is now possible. Even for people like him. Especially for people like him.”

  Judith was no longer thinking about justice, but logistics. “I need to see him,” she said.

  Nasreen looked at Judith strangely, as though Judith had just announced that she, too, had been elected. A deep unease swelled in the frigid air around Judith, chilling her throat. “Could you give me his address?” Judith tried.

  Nasreen laughed again. “You want to meet him? At his house? Brilliant. If you bring your own gun.”

  “You said you go to see them once a month.”

  “To see Zulaika,” Nasreen clarified. “I arrange to meet her at home, when she knows he won’t be there. Him I would never see.”

  Judith felt the churn in her stomach, and swallowed. “Would it be possible for you to give me her address in Cairo? I could go there in a taxi and just wait for him to leave.”

  Nasreen laughed once more, though this time she managed to control it, keeping her laughter to a few stunted breaths. “You cannot go to the City of the Dead alone,” she said. Her voice was flat now, cold. “It is not like the rest of Cairo. There are no real streets there, no signs, no addresses, no taxis, no guides. An American like you, alone, would be eaten alive.”

  In the frigid air her sister once breathed, Judith inhaled a confidence she had never known. “Then take me there,” she demanded.

  THE CITY OF THE DEAD resembled nothing Judith had ever seen before. It was a maze, a warren of endless square stucco rooms and domed mausoleums stretching for miles in every direction. The alleys that passed for streets were narrow, carved from dust and trash. Old men lounged in doorways, cigarettes hanging from their toothless mouths. Occasionally the endless rows of squat boxlike homes would break into open plazas, full of tall carved tombstones arranged in neat rows. Hiding between these tombstones were dogs, cats, trash, and children. Several of the children spat at Judith’s feet. Nasreen and Judith walked for over an hour, as Judith absorbed the glares and hisses of tired women who collected garbage in large fabric sacks. They were deep within the bottomless necropolis when Nasreen led her through an alleyway so narrow that Judith could touch both walls with her elbows. Then she turned another corner, which opened up into another burial plaza, this one marked by rows upon rows of free-­standing sarcophagi, simple granite boxes with elaborate carved headstones lurching out of one end. Children were climbing on them, jumping from grave to grave. Judith followed Nasreen as she turned into a final alleyway, dodged a mound of dung, and knocked on a painted blue door. Judith stared as a tall woman opened the door. She looked very much like Nasreen, but older, with a thick creased forehead and dark folds of skin under her eyes. The headscarf she wore was pinned tightly beneath her chin.

  “Nasreen!” the woman cried, and threw her arms around Nasreen’s neck. The woman began to chatter in Arabic, pulling Nasreen into the house by the hand. But Nasreen’s face was locked in a frown.

  “I’ve brought a guest, from America,” Nasreen said, in English, and nudged Judith forward. “This is Miss Judith Ashkenazi. She—she has come to see you too. Miss Ashkenazi, t
his is my sister, Zulaika Samir.”

  The woman considered Judith, cocking her head. Judith expected the woman to reply in Arabic, but when she finally spoke, English emerged from her lips. Her accent was almost as British as her sister’s. “A pleasure to meet you,” she said. She did not smile. “Please, come in.” From the relentless sun outside they ducked in the door. For a few moments Judith’s eyes failed her, as though she had just entered a cave. Only slowly did the outlines of objects in the space before her begin to emerge.

  They were standing in a large room, Judith could see now, cluttered but strangely lavish. One corner seemed to buzz with bright new appliances, lined up as if in a store display: a refrigerator, a washing machine, a stove. Around the sides of the room were a variety of benches and chairs, each covered with an elaborately embroidered cloth or rug, some of which continued onto the swept stone floor. Along one wall, resting on a stone countertop, Judith was surprised to see a large flatscreen TV. The walls were brown, with strange paint-peeling frescoes along their edges. In the center of the room were what appeared to be two kitchen islands, supporting large bowls of fruit and adorned with carved stone protrusions on their ends. A moment passed before Judith saw that they were sarcophagi, inscribed with Arabic lettering on their headstones. Nasreen’s sister was setting out glasses of tea on one of them, motioning for Judith and Nasreen to help themselves from the coffins of the dead. Judith declined, and sat with Nasreen on a cushioned stone bench along one wall. Nasreen’s sister sat down on a stool opposite them, her face grim.

  “What brings you to the City of the Dead?” Zulaika asked. She reminded Judith of the receptionist at her hotel: Business or pleasure?

  Judith considered what to say. “I am Josephine Ashkenazi’s sister,” she announced. The words were familiar; Judith had introduced herself this way, it seemed, for nearly all of her life. Josephine Ashkenazi’s sister. For what else was she?