The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

  “I will be forever indebted to your kindness,” Ali said, and so it was settled. He sent word to Fustat, and the following afternoon he departed.

  Waving farewell from atop his donkey cart, Ali felt as if he were a prince leaving home for distant battle. It was a luxury for him, traveling by cart. His possessions—a few changes of clothes, some bedding, a basket of food, and an old teapot Aunt Fatimah had given him as a parting gift—could easily have fit on the back of a donkey, but at the last minute he chose the cart, and he was glad he had.

  Following the east bank of the Nile past the Siba bridge, Ali leaned back against his bedroll and watched the midday sunlight reflect white off the sails of ships lining up to unload their cargo. It was a beautiful day, and he felt that all was right with the world. His only regret was leaving his cousin Fawziyah behind. He knew how much she hated being alone with her parents and, homely as she was, she could not count on marriage to deliver her a better situation. She was only fourteen, and already the matchmaker was trotting out widowers and cripples. If anything, Fawziyah’s married life would be worse than her current circumstances. Ali wanted to help his cousin, to give her some piece of the good fortune he had stumbled upon, but aside from contributing to her dowry, there was nothing he could do. He was starting a new life in Fustat, and there was no room in it for Fawziyah.

  2

  THE PACKAGE ARRIVED on a Tuesday in early August, a bit less than three months after my father died. I must have slept late that morning, because I woke to the squeaky clank of the mailbox lid followed by the sound of the doorbell. The mail lady was gone by the time I got downstairs. But there, in the middle of my green plastic welcome mat, was a package the size of a shoebox, wrapped generously in tape and stamped all over with the logo of the Egyptian postal service. My name and address were printed across the top in a careful schoolboy hand that I recognized immediately as my father’s. Someone else had written the return address, along with instructions, in both English and Arabic, to handle carefully.

  It was one of those annoyingly perfect Berkeley summer days. A soft-peaked range of clouds hid the progress of a distant plane, and a pair of squirrels chased each other from roof to roof before disappearing into the foliage of a backyard oak. I don’t know how long I stood there on the porch—staring down at his handwriting, picturing him hunched over his desk, copying out my address, crumpling up the balls of newspaper he always used as packing material—but at some point the whine of an ambulance broke through. I blinked back to myself. Then I took the package inside and cleared a space for it on the kitchen table.

  He had been sick for a long time—seven or eight years, depending on how you counted; still, it took me by surprise when my cousin Aisha called, a few weeks before the end of that spring semester, to tell me that he was in the hospital, that he was going off chemotherapy.

  Two weeks later, she called again.

  “He died in his sleep,” she said.

  According to Muslim tradition, a person was supposed to be buried as soon as possible. So there was no way I could make it back to Cairo in time for the funeral, not without getting on a plane that afternoon.

  “It’s going to be small,” Aisha said, to make me feel better about not being there.

  Besides family, they expected a couple of employees from Uncle Hassan’s produce distribution company, maybe some people from Ibn Ezra. As far as I knew, that was the extent of my father’s life: his family, his work, and the synagogue he had watched over when he was a young man.

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “I will,” she said.

  But what could I do? What was there to be done? What was done was done, wasn’t it? After I got off the phone, I stretched out on the couch and pulled a throw pillow over my head. I remember noticing its musty thrift-store smell and the flicker of a television across the street. I knew I needed to call my mother, to tell her what had happened. But before I did, I wanted a moment to hold the news myself. We had never been especially close, my father and I. Aside from a few summers in Egypt when I was younger, our relationship consisted almost entirely of phone calls and birthday cards. Still, he was always there, on the other side of the world, occupying the position of father. Until now.

  I didn’t have much in the way of responsibility that summer—a seminar paper that needed some light revision before I could submit it for publication, the stack of books I was supposed to be reading for my preliminary exams—nothing I couldn’t put off for a few months. Plus, people understood. They were understanding. Among my friends in Berkeley, the consensus was that I should try to embrace the grief, indulge its various whims.

  “You do what you need to do,” my adviser, Steve, had said.

  And so, that was exactly what I did.

  I spent most of June at home in New Mexico with my mother and Bill, slept in my old room above the garage, took long runs in the hills behind our house, and tore through a couple of the Navajo mystery novels Bill liked to read before bed. We didn’t talk much about my father. It was all still too raw. But one night, toward the end of the visit, my mother sat with me out on the back deck and retold the story of how they first met, so many years ago in the courtyard of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue.

  “I still remember,” she said. “I can see him like he’s right here.”

  It was late. We were at the far edge of the deck, drinking tea and watching the bright white veins of heat lightning flash across the desert night.

  “He was always so thoughtful,” she said, and then she began a story I had never heard, about a scrawny little cat my father used to look after, how he fed it and protected it from the other kids.

  “Such a kind heart,” she said, “such a good man.”

  When I looked over I saw she was crying, her face streaked with the silver reflections of porch light. I put my hand over hers and we sat like that for a long while.

  It was always a little strange for me to hear her talk about him like that, to think that they had been together once. When I was younger, I used to picture the two of them as distant planets, at opposite ends of the universe, my Muslim father and my Jewish mother, the bushy-mustached produce salesman and the silver-haired French professor with rectangular red glasses. Most of the time, I told people they were divorced, though the truth was they never married. As far as I understood it, the arc of their relationship was relatively brief. They had met as children and wrote letters back and forth after my mother’s family left Cairo in the late 1950s. My father visited her in Paris in the fall of 1973, just after the Yom Kippur War. I was conceived. Then my mother dropped out of graduate school, moved to California, and met Bill. This was the story I had always known. But something in my mother’s voice that night—a faint wobble of emotion—made me think that perhaps there was something else lurking in the background. Either way, the question of my parents’ relationship wasn’t at the front of my mind.

  At the end of June, I flew back to Berkeley and let the rest of the summer evaporate into pub trivia and backyard barbecues. I grew my beard out and watched old foreign movies at the art house around the corner from my apartment. I drank too much, made bad decisions, read trashy magazines, and let the take-out containers pile up on the kitchen counter. Some days, I thought about my father all the time. Other days, I hardly thought about him at all. Then, cracking an egg on the edge of a pan, I would remember the sound of his voice or the way his mustache curled down over his upper lip.

  There were no stages to my grief, at least not as far as I could tell, no orderly progression from denial to anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead, my feelings stalked me in a pack, like wild animals. One moment they were lazing on a distant hillside and then, all at once, they were upon me.

  Meanwhile, gurgling up beneath these other feelings was a strangely persistent sense of expectation. Or maybe it was hope. There must be something mor
e, I told myself. How could there not be? All summer, I had been hoping for a message from my father, some last words of advice or reconciliation, a belated birthday card or an errant voicemail lost in the wires between Cairo and California. All summer I had been waiting—and then, just like that, there it was, this package in the middle of my kitchen table.

  I ripped through the tape with a key and pulled back the flaps. Inside, peeking out from beneath a layer of balled-up Egyptian newspapers, were a note from my father and an old red leather presentation case that looked as if it might contain a mayoral declaration or a service award from the Rotary Club. The note was in English, written on the back of an index card in dark blue ink.

  Dear Joseph,

  I think you should want this.

  Your Father,

  Ahmed al-Raqb

  Nestled in the black velvet lining of the case was an ancient-looking piece of paper pressed between two panes of glass. It was no larger than a page torn out of an airport novel, ragged at the edges and speckled with holes that seemed to bloom from the letters themselves. One side was covered almost entirely with an elegant downward-slanting Arabic script, the last few words of which curled up into the margin. The reverse contained five lines of Hebrew and a signature. It appeared to be a letter, or maybe a pair of letters, but I couldn’t read Arabic well enough to make out more than a few words, and the Hebrew might as well have been Greek.

  Turning it over in my hands, trying to understand the significance of this thing my father had sent me, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. There was a general tightening in my chest, and that familiar chorus of self-pity began warming up. I knew I should be glad to have anything from my father. I knew there was no reason to feel sorry for myself. But there was something uniquely frustrating about the package, the scrap of paper, the shortness of my father’s note. I had gotten exactly what I wanted, and I had no idea what it was.

  According to a small brass plaque affixed to the inside of the presentation case, this ancient scrap of paper had been Presented to Mr. Muhammad al-Raqb, friend of knowledge and guardian of Ibn Ezra Synagogue, by Mrs. Margaret Gibson and Mrs. Agnes Lewis, February 1897. The only other information I could find was a business card stuck to the bottom of the case with a piece of packing tape. Printed on thick, cream-colored stock, the card gave no title or company, just a name—Mr. Claude Mosseri—a telephone number, and an address. On the back, Mr. Mosseri had written a short note. Your father asked me to send you this. He was a great friend. Please call if you ever find yourself in Cairo.

  Muhammad al-Raqb, I assumed, was a distant relative of some sort. But I had no idea who Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis were. As for Mr. Mosseri, he was probably someone my father knew from the synagogue. I had never heard of him before, but that wasn’t particularly surprising. My father’s past, especially those years before I was born, had always been something of a mystery.

  Trailing my fingers along the mottled velvet lining of the presentation case, I went through the package again, hoping I might uncover some hidden indication of what it meant or where it came from or how it had found its way to my kitchen table. I removed all the balled-up pieces of newspaper and flattened them out one by one. I looked under the cardboard flaps at the bottom of the package, searched the exterior for identifying marks. It was postmarked June 14, 2000—about a month after my father’s death—but that was the only piece of information I could discern. There was nothing else, no explanation or instruction, no last will or testament, only this ancient scrap of paper, its case, and a one-sentence-long note.

  It was fitting, in a way. After twenty-six years of long-distance part-time fatherhood, those were his final words to me. I think you should want this. Hadn’t that always been how it was? He would send me something—a postcard, a birthday present, an ancient scrap of paper—and I was left to puzzle out its significance. I knew that he had tried, that he wasn’t always able to fully express himself in written English. But would it really have been so difficult to write a few more sentences? Would it really have been so hard to explain why, of all the things he might have sent me—a tie clip or an old sweater, a photo album or a strand of wooden prayer beads—he had chosen to leave me with this?

  “Would it?” I said later that afternoon, on the phone with my mother. “Would it really have been so difficult?”

  “Maybe it was,” she said, taking the question at face value. “Maybe he didn’t understand it himself.”

  “Then when did he send it to me? Why did he say he thought I should want it?”

  I could have called Mr. Mosseri or Aisha or Uncle Hassan or one of my friends who studied Hebrew and Arabic literature. But my mother was the first person I called. Not because I thought she would be able to shed any light on the meaning of the package. She wasn’t. I called her because I knew she would understand.

  “He could be difficult,” she said, after a pause. “But he had his reasons, usually. And he loved you, so much. You know that, Joseph, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I said, and in spite of my frustrations, I did.

  After I hung up, I looked at Mr. Mosseri’s business card, calculated the time in Cairo, and thought about whom from the department I might call to help me with the translation. But even then, I think, at the back of my mind, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

  * * *

  —

  For most of my childhood, my father occupied that sector of my imagination otherwise reserved for myths and legends. Somewhere between King Arthur and Zeus, he was that distant and usually benevolent demigod who oversaw the realm of air mail and phone calls, provider of pharaoh statues, pyramid paperweights, and, for my ninth birthday, a real Egyptian scarab. Playing catch, driving me to school, telling me to buck up when I struck out or skinned my knee—all those more prosaic paternal duties were covered by my mother or Bill. All things considered, they did a pretty good job of it. There was nothing tangible missing from my childhood. Still, I was always aware of a disjuncture, that fatherly lacuna.

  I have no doubt that he tried his best, in spite of the distance. There were postcards and visits. His birthday presents always came on time and, for as long as I can remember, he called me every Sunday night just before bedtime. Our conversations usually followed along the same path. He would ask me about school or soccer practice. Sometimes he told a humorous anecdote he had heard from Uncle Hassan or the man who sold newspapers on the corner outside his apartment. And every week, as I settled into bed with the hard plastic earpiece of the phone pressed between my head and the pillow, he would ask if I wanted to hear a story.

  My father told stories about dragons and djinns, buried treasure, fishermen, and wayward princes. But his best stories were those drawn from our family history, stories about the long line of al-Raqb men who had, for nearly a thousand years, served as watchmen of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue. There was the story of Ahmed al-Raqb, my father’s namesake, who had faced down an angry crowd that believed the Jews were immune to the Great Plague. There was the one about Ibrahim al-Raqb, who convinced the ruthless Mamluk ruler Baybars to accept a fine in lieu of destroying the synagogue. And then, of course, there was the story of Ali al-Raqb, that first and most noble watchman, whose bravery helped to establish our family name.

  I often fell asleep before the story was finished and would wake up again when my mother came in to kiss me good night. She would take the phone out of my hand and, as I drifted back to sleep, I would hear her talking to my father in the living room. These were the only times I ever heard her speak Arabic, and I remember how different she sounded then, in her native language, almost nothing like the woman who packed my lunch every morning, kissed me on the top of my head, then went off to teach French at the local community college.

  For many years, this is how it was. There were birthdays and sleepovers, ski weeks and a shelf full of plastic trophies. Then, one Sunday toward the end of fi
fth grade, my father asked me whether I wanted to spend the summer with him in Egypt. He and my mother had already worked out all the details. I would stay with him in Cairo for two months, then come back to Santa Fe a few weeks before school began.

  “It’s up to you,” my mother said the next morning at breakfast. She liked the idea. It was a great opportunity, a chance for me to spend time with my father. “I just want to be sure that you’re sure.”

  “It’s a big trip,” Bill added.

  I didn’t understand why there was even a question. Why wouldn’t I want to spend the summer with my father in Egypt?

  “I’m sure,” I said, looking up from my Raisin Bran. “I’m sure I’m sure.”

  And so it was settled.

  There must have been more conversations, discussions of what to pack and whether it was a good idea to drink the water in Cairo, a trip to the travel doctor. But I don’t remember any of that. I don’t recall how I got to the Los Angeles airport or whether anyone helped me change planes in Amsterdam.

  What I do remember, distinctly, is stepping onto the tarmac in Cairo, my little red-and-black-plaid suitcase in one hand and a blank customs form in the other. My father was waiting for me just past border control, leaning against a white pole and smoking a cigarette. He wore an old gray suit jacket, and I remember thinking that his mustache looked like a small aquatic mammal, a river otter maybe, or a ferret. I saw him before he saw me, and for a moment I just stood there, watching him smoke. My father. I repeated the phrase a few times under my breath, trying it on for size. Then I took a step forward and he spotted me.

  “You are here,” he said, and when he leaned over to embrace me, my head spun with that potent Levantine potpourri of cigarette smoke, cologne, and stale sweat. “Welcome, my son.”