I was mind-numbingly frightened. I did not want to die, least of all a violent death in a frozen and god-forsaken country. I had not yet become a mother. There were too many unspoken things between me and people I loved. But out of the fear came a little voice inside which said: but at least you died believing in what you do. That’s not nothing. After that, an incredible calm came over me. The brutal bombardment went on, but I eventually got out.
I LAST SAW Felicia Langer during the first Gulf war. We lost touch. But I never forgot her, never forgot what she gave me. In a sense, I should curse her: my life, of course, would have been simpler had I never seen that photograph of the bulldozer and the Palestinian teenager, never went into her office, never saw the tears running down her face. But I guess that was not how I was destined.
So when I see photographs of ethnic cleansing – Alexandra Boulat’s classic photo of that family – or hear about rape in the Congo or child soldiers in Somalia or abused sex workers in India, I feel sad or despair at the state of the world. But I also feel indignation, anger and the twitchy feeling that something can, and will be done, and that human beings, sometimes, can save each other. And I owe that to Felicia Langer, and that day in West Jerusalem.
The Man Who Laughed
in a Tomb
ANTHONY SATTIN (born London, 1956) is a specialist on North Africa and the Arab world and the author of several books of history and travel, including The Pharaoh’s Shadow and Lifting the Veil. He discovered and edited Florence Nightingale’s letters from Egypt, which inspired A Winter on the Nile, an account of parallel journeys to Egypt by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. He writes regularly for the Sunday Times and Condé Nast Traveller and presents features for BBC radio. He is currently writing the biography of an early traveller in Arabia. He lives in London.
The Man Who Laughed in a Tomb
ANTHONY SATTIN
I had never met Saïd before, but his friends assured me that he was a wonderful guy, always lively, happy to get involved. He had been a regular at the café for as long as anyone could remember. On weekdays, he went home from work, saw to his wife and kids, had something to eat and then took up his place in the café, ready to share a joke or a trouble. On Friday, he came directly from midday prayers, shaved, washed and in a pressed white gallabiya.
When he died suddenly, Saïd was wrapped in a winding sheet and his family and friends brought him to his favourite table while they went to prepare his interment. He lay stretched on a board, resting over a couple of chairs, a green cloth laid over him, while we drank tea and chatted. When the time came, we all stood up to support him on the first few steps of the final journey. To me, this was extraordinary. But there was nothing unusual to people in this part of Cairo about the presence of death in a lively café, just as there seemed also to be no surprise at the idea of life in the cemetery, the realm of death.
The café stood just outside the Gate of Victory, whose towering blocks of stone were built against the arrival of Crusader knights and Mongol hordes. At that time it marked the passage between the city and desert though, as the city grew and a cemetery spread outside the walls, it became the link between the city of the living and that of the dead. Modern Cairo has now become so large and so confused, there is no longer any demarcation. The living have engulfed everything and even parts of the old cemetery have had to make way for apartment buildings and workshops.
A huddle of black-robed women was hanging around at the corner of the road that led to the burial grounds. They were professional mourners, waiting for a funerary procession to pass, so they could tout their trade. Nearby, a flower seller had arranged sprays of palm fronds and gladioli: funerary flowers. A man who turned out to be a reciter of the Koran tried to take a cigarette off me – sorry, o ma’alim, I don’t smoke – and extracted one from a passing friend. Then I met Abdu.
There were many unexpected things about Abdu, not the least of which were his size – he was very tall and very broad – and the fact that he lived in a cemetery. But what disconcerted me more than that was the fact that he thought we had met before. ‘Really?’ I asked.
He laughed, assuming I was teasing, showing his broken teeth.
I was not teasing.
He scratched his grey stubble. ‘But we know each other.’
Given the way the day was going, I half expected him to tell me we had met in another life, but he assured me we knew each other here and now in this one. ‘In Cairo, only last year … Or was it the year before? But Roberto, why play like this?’
‘Roberto?’
‘Roberto Cairo.’
I assured him that my name was Anthony, but he was certain that I was joking.
‘Come home and say hello to Attiyat.’
Curious as to where this might lead, I followed his tall, heavy figure along the unpaved track, then off it to the right, between a scattering of tombs, ever deeper into the cemetery.
Cairo has been burying people outside its gates for more than a millennium – the unfortunate Saïd, carried from the café, was just the latest in a long time – and among the great domes and religious complexes you might come across the tomb of a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, or a medieval sultan, a nineteenth-century king or a twentieth-century movie star. But the northern part is less illustrious, its tombs mostly flat-topped wooden shacks, and the best you might find here is the tomb of the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, or the Swiss traveller Jean Louis Burckhardt. Abdu led me past these, weaving his way across the sandy ground to his home.
This turned out to be a patched-up wooden shack, built over a single, simple grave. Slight frills around the edge of the wooden roof were Turkish in style; the house was at least nineteenth century, maybe much older. Abdu and his family had made the area their own by putting out some rickety wooden benches, stringing an awning above them and hanging washing lines between the markers of other tombs. When we arrived, Attiyat, his wife, was making tea over a two-ring stove installed on the raised bench of another grave.
She was a solid, fleshy, no-nonsense sort of woman, her hair inside a plain dark scarf, her eyebrows plucked far apart, gold hoops on her ears. She sat me down on one of the wooden benches and poured a glass of black tea.
I discovered, as we slurped the scalding sweet liquid, that Roberto Cairo wasn’t a name Abdu had made up: he had mistaken me for a Spanish actor whom he remembered from a film he had seen long ago. I insisted that I was no actor and that we had never met before. I asked him what he did.
‘I am the guardian of this part of the cemetery. I used to live in a place called Hassaniya, but when our house fell down, we moved to the tombs. I’ve been here forty years now, so it’s part of my life. My mother and father are here as well: we are on top of them all the time.’
It took a moment for that one to sink in. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My brother Bulbul lives in a house over their grave.’
Twenty-six years earlier, Abdu had met Attiyat. ‘Before that, I was married twice. Or was it three times?’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Maybe there were more than three, I really can’t be sure.’ He roared with laughter, a devilish sparkle in his eyes. ‘One wife was scared to live in the cemetery, so I divorced her after a month. Another wife didn’t want me to work. Well that was no problem – I wasn’t going to object. But then someone had to make the money, and she didn’t. This one,’ he said, winking towards Attiyat, ‘bears with me. We have been through the sweet and the dark. One day we eat chicken, another day bread and salt. She is prepared to live according to the wind.’
I had difficulty talking to Abdu that first time. It was too strange to be sitting in a tomb, with someone buried beneath me, someone else beneath Attiyat’s cooker. I struggled to reconcile the marble-topped monument with the fridge, beds, cupboards and photographs. Macabre shadows – the word echoes the Arabic maqbar, tomb – hung over my thoughts.
Abdu was more pragmatic. ‘The dead, may God pr
otect them, they are finished. They don’t want anything from us or from the world. No matter what you offer – the wealth of the world – it is of no concern because they are with God. We respect the dead. They are under the ground now. People like us, who live in the tombs, must believe in God and live rightly, because we are living on sacred ground, but we don’t worry about the dead.’
Attiyat, who had been listening to us as she cooked, said, ‘But if we invite someone at night, they are scared and we have to go and pick them up.’
‘What are they scared of?’
‘Afarit, djinns, the ghosts of dead people,’ she listed as easily as ingredients for the dish she was preparing.
‘There aren’t any afarit,’ Abdu insisted, starting to laugh. ‘None of that is true. It’s just something we tell our children. But other people believe in all that, and sometimes we make fun of them when they pass at night.’
‘What do you do?’
‘We put on masks of devils and appear out of the dark. It always scares them.’
Attiyat laughed with him and said it was time to eat. It was also getting dark. Not wanting them to go to the expense of feeding me, and not wanting to be spooked, I made my excuses and left.
THE NEXT TIME I saw Abdu, a week or so later, it was again at sunset and the muezzin were calling from the old city’s many mosques. Night falls quickly in Cairo and I was surprised to see so many people out among the tombs. ‘Where are they all going?’
‘There are many people in the cemetery at night,’ Abdu explained. ‘Some are lovers looking for a quiet spot. We tell them to go away, because this is sacred ground. Sometimes there are thieves, but we always catch them. And there are other things.’
‘Such as…’ I prompted, remembering that the last time we met, he had insisted that there was no such thing as a spirit or djinn.
‘Once,’ and his voice was serious, ‘when I had been out working and I was coming home, I saw someone wearing a white suit. I ran after him and eventually chased him into an alley. The alley was blocked at the end, so I thought, ‘Aha, I’ve got you.’ I was going to find out who he was. But do you know what happened? He just disappeared. Gone. Vanished. I was scared after that.’
‘Scared of what exactly?’
‘I can’t talk about it. The whole cemetery is full of secrets. There are angels and zahira [visual phenomena] and other things that I can’t tell you about.’ What he could, and did, tell me about, was the city beneath the city, a mirror to the living world, a mythical place that only a remarkable few were ever allowed to see. Abdu assured me that Napoleon had been taken there after he had captured the city. I knew better than to hope to see it for myself.
I VISITED ABDU on many occasions over the space of a year or two and he was always welcoming and playful. He owned very little, had no savings, no idea of exactly where the next meal would come from, but he also had an unshakeable belief that it would come. Then, on one occasion when I turned up unexpected, he and Attiyat and their children had gone. The neighbours told me that they had agreed to be rehoused in a new project far from the city centre. But months later they were back, complaining that whatever the shortcomings of making a home in the cemetery, at least they had electricity, and neighbours, and water, a souk and a café nearby.
Sometimes I took pastries or other food, and Attiyat always offered me tea while Abdu told me something I didn’t know. He explained the hierarchy of the place, the bosses, the guardians and tomb diggers, the stonecutters, Koran reciters and all the others who made the cemetery work. The list was very similar to a head-count one could have taken in an ancient Egyptian cemetery, even down to the people Abdu didn’t mention, the outlaws, the draft-dodgers and the people who hung around in the hope that the mourners’ charitable instincts would provide them with a hand-out.
Abdu lived in a tomb that belonged to the family of an Egyptian diplomat. ‘He’s an ambassador, so he is always out of the country, but his family look after us when they come to visit. We eat well after that, cook rice, kofta, chicken and other good things, and instead of two kilos of meat, we might buy three or four.’
He was always keen to talk about the ways of the world, the corruptness of officials and the hardships of life. He taught me that life could be enjoyable even if it was unjust. And he came to personify for me that most common and most called-upon of all Cairene virtues, the ability to laugh at misfortunes. There was always a long list of those, at the top of which he placed the threat to his job. ‘The government wants us out. They say it doesn’t look good to have people living in the tombs. We say that we keep the place clean and safe. But they sent someone to count us and look,’ he said, pointing to a number that had been painted on his front door, ‘now we have also been counted.’
There was always a surprise with Abdu. On our first meeting, it was the fact that he lived in the cemetery and that he thought he knew me. On another occasion, when I had come to terms with who he was and where he lived, there was the surprise of a photograph, hanging on his wall, in which Abdu appeared alongside a famous Egyptian actress.
‘That is my other work.’
‘As what?’
‘A kombarsi, an extra in the cinema. I’ve been doing it for years, since I was fifteen or sixteen. I got into it thanks to a man from the studios whose mother is buried here. He sat with me as you are sitting with me and he told me I was good to do cinema. So the next day I went to the studios and since then I have appeared in about fifty films and plays and TV soap operas.’ He went over to the only cupboard in the tomb and came back with a plastic album full of pictures of himself arm in arm with some of Egypt’s most famous movie stars. ‘Am I not famous?’
‘You are a star, Abdu.’
‘So now you know,’ and he pulled a strong-man pose, flexing his considerable biceps, a hand on his head, which is how I left him. ‘Come back soon, Roberto Cairo,’ he said, laughing, as I went.
That is how I remember him. I never sat in a café with another corpse and I never saw Abdu again. The next time I went to the cemetery, the tomb was still there, but the shack was empty. Abdu and Attiyat had gone. For me, at least, the two worlds of the living and the dead separated themselves back out.
A Villain
HORATIO CLARE (born London, 1973) is an author and journalist. He has published two memoirs – Running for the Hills and Truant – and a book of natural history travel, A Single Swallow, following the birds’ epic migration from South Africa to South Wales. His first novel, Clip’s Truth, will be published in October 2011. He currently divides his time between London, the Black Mountains of South Wales, and Verona, Italy, where he writes, teaches and tries to avoid the local staple: horse with gnocchi.
A Villain
HORATIO CLARE
This happened in another country, in a town of low hills and hard times. The people on the train were very polite. At each stop the doors admitted hot rectangles of orange sun; cramped passengers made careful space for each new arrival. In derelict acres beside the track the buddleia bloomed, still fountains of purple scent and flies. We passed cracked concrete, shuttered warehouses and cars which looked abandoned, as though their drivers had given up on some shady business and walked away. The little train swayed exhausted into the station and we disembarked with many after-yous. The taxi drivers wore jellabas. There were two mosques and shops which smelled of spice.
In the months I lived in the town I came to know the skyline: the roofs of bankrupt factories; the chimneys which sprouted plants; the volleys of birds and the low heads of the surrounding hills. I found the people very friendly. My friends were teachers, several men who did odd jobs, small traders and a woman who sold food. They were a close and kind society. On Friday evenings we all gathered in a dusty garden where men and boys played boules. It was here, I think, I met him.
‘Where are you from then, mate?’ he said. His voice was soft. His eyes were the first thing you noticed. They were slow and brown and bright. They considered you with a gentle
sort of sadness which made you want to see him smile. The second thing you noticed was the way he listened. He did not wait for you to finish so that he could speak. He did not follow your words for the hook which would give a starting point for his reply. He just listened, his head angled down slightly so that his eyes tipped up, as if he watched you over the top of invisible spectacles.
The third thing you noticed was the effect he had on women. ‘Oh, I just love him!’ one said. ‘He’s absolutely gorgeous,’ agreed another, her mouth enjoying the word. ‘Such a good man – such a beautiful man.’
Even on the slightest acquaintance with him one felt oneself agreeing with her. He was not a George Clooney type: not tall or pretty-featured, not thick-haired. He had an air of competence and he was strong-framed. If you were asked to guess his profession you might say builder – possibly a specialist, perhaps a craftsman, but then there was that slow gaze and those listeners’ eyes. Could he be a detective? And there was the contained, quietly watchful worldliness – a soldier?
He never stayed for very long. After he had gone the women discussed his girlfriend. It was quite a recent relationship and when it was beginning the women had felt they needed to say some things. They took this girlfriend aside and warned her: ‘Now you just make sure you look after him, right? Because he’s gold and we love him and we wouldn’t want to see him hurt…’
The girlfriend had not taken kindly to the implications in this, but it was all sorted out now, and the women had decided they liked her and that she was good for him.
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