“I see you are troubled with love,” Hasdi said.
“What?” Ali was shocked that this man he had just met could so easily see the torment within him.
“Who is it?” the magician pressed. “What is her name?”
Ali took a step back and nearly knocked over the pile of books on the chair behind him. He knew that he could not reveal the identity of his beloved. The very sound of her name on his lips would be a scandal, one that would most likely cost him his position as watchman, but the thought of unburdening himself—even to a stranger, especially to a stranger—gave him a sense of relief he hadn’t felt for months.
“There is someone,” Ali said finally.
Hasdi laughed.
“No need to be coy. I know who it is. I can read it on your face.”
Ali turned toward the cage of frogs, croaking weakly near the entrance of the shop.
“With a simple charm, I can make her fall for you.”
Ali swallowed and let his mind wander along the path it had so often trod. She would live with him in his small house next to the synagogue, and every afternoon he would wake to her smile. He wanted more than anything to make this dream a reality, but at the same time he worried the charm might harm his beloved.
Just the other day, Doctor Mevorakh had told the men outside the fabric shop a story about an older Coptic woman he had treated. When he saw her, Doctor Mevorakh said, her eyes were yellow and her hands gripped in tight fists. Her children said that she had been shaking and feverish for days. He tried every medical cure available, but had no idea what was afflicting the woman until, on his way out the door, he tripped over an amulet covered with Coptic and Hebrew letters. As it turned out, she had been struck by black magic intended for her neighbor.
“It is a mild spell,” Hasdi said, as if reading Ali’s thoughts, “and there is no cost. I enjoy helping young couples in love.”
Before Ali could think of another reason to refuse, Hasdi began rummaging through a shelf behind the counter. He produced a small scrap of fabric along with a shard of clay. Mumbling to himself, he wrote a Hebrew letter at each corner of the fabric, wrapped it around the shard, then tied the entire charm with a length of string.
“Take this,” he said, handing it across the counter. “Keep it with you at all times. Soon you will become irresistible to your beloved, and maybe to a few other women as well.”
“But I—”
“If it is not successful, come back in a week and I will give you something more powerful.”
As Ali made his way back to the synagogue, he felt the sharp edges of the charm rubbing through his pocket. He had done nothing wrong, he told himself. He had fallen in love, lost his way, and accepted a gift from a stranger. He had acted entirely without malice or premeditation. He had not sought out or requested the amulet. He had merely accepted it and agreed to keep it in his pocket. Ali knew that such acts—premeditated or not—could lead eventually to much larger transgressions, but for the moment at least he slept soundly.
* * *
—
Later that same night, Ali woke to a strange humming in the near distance. Although it was his night off, he did not hesitate to rise from his bedroll and check to see where the sound was coming from. Pulling on his galabiya, he grabbed his lantern, and went outside. There was no one in the courtyard. The front door of the synagogue was closed, and the only light came from the moon, hanging pale yellow above the tops of the palm trees like an upside-down fruit. Ali held his breath and listened into the darkness. A low rhythmic hum seemed to be coming from the alley behind the synagogue. In all his nights on guard, Ali had never heard such a thing. It was dense and almost otherworldly, on the edge between sound and feeling.
Standing on the front steps, Ali thought about how he might later describe this moment in a story, the courageous watchman preparing himself for an encounter with the unknown. He imagined the Shemarya brothers relating the story to their sister. Then he touched the charm in his pocket, lit his lantern, and crossed the courtyard.
Pausing just inside the main gate, Ali could hear the humming quite clearly, along with the footfalls of four, maybe five men. Or perhaps, he thought, they were not men at all. Steeling himself, he swallowed, stilled his breath, and pushed the gate open with his foot. At the other end of the alley, near the entrance to the women’s section, was a collection of figures all dressed in white robes and turbans.
“Stop,” Ali said with as much threat as he could muster. “Who goes there?”
There was a muffled whisper amongst them, and then one stepped forward, his palms out in a gesture of peace. Ali raised his lantern.
“Do not be concerned,” the man said as he stepped into the light. It was Ephraim ibn Shemarya.
“It’s a holiday,” said another voice, which sounded very much like Doctor Mevorakh. “Simchat Torah.”
“You are a good watchman,” Ephraim said, smiling to himself. “We thought you would not hear us.”
Ali hesitated for a moment and looked up at the men. One of them, toward the back, was carrying a large luminous object, the same size and shape as the Sefer Torah he had seen on the New Year. It was as big as a sack of flour and pulsing with a watery glow, like moonlight on silver.
“Go back to sleep, my son,” Doctor Mevorakh said. “There is no need for concern.”
Ali extinguished his lantern and watched the men disappear, one by one, into the synagogue, all of them humming a soft melody as they processed. When the man with the scroll entered, he shut the door behind him and Ali went back to bed, gripping the charm tightly in his hand as he drifted off to sleep. He was a good watchman. It was true. And yet he couldn’t help but feel that, by accepting this charm, he had betrayed the very people he was charged with protecting.
5
SUMMER IN CAIRO is an angry and vengeful god. Even at six in the morning, even with the fan on high and the AC unit whirring full tilt, I could feel the heat of the day seeping in through the walls. The sound of traffic drifted up from the street below and, lurking at the edges of the room, there was a sharp incendiary smell like kerosene or burnt trash. I stayed in bed for a long while that morning, trying to get back to sleep, staring up at the water stain on the ceiling, letting myself ease into this new space.
“It’s perfect for you,” Aisha had said when she described the apartment to me over the phone.
I could see what she meant. On the third floor of an old villa in Garden City, the apartment had an air of faded glamour, a kind of romantic decay, like an old movie star gone to seed. There were two bedrooms, ceilings as tall as an elephant, and a formal dining room complete with French doors and a frosted-glass chandelier. It had a bidet, wainscoting in every room, and a heavy stone balcony looking out onto a quiet street overhung with carob trees. This was where I spent most of that first morning in Cairo, sitting out on the balcony with my tea and a package of crackers I had found at the back of the otherwise empty refrigerator, watching the sun rise through a hazy curtain of smog and thinking how strange it was, actually being there.
It had all happened so quickly. A few days after the package arrived, on my way back from lunch with a friend near campus, I had paused outside a travel agency on College Avenue and, as I stared at one of the antique postcards hung in the window, the idea had presented itself—Why not spend the semester in Egypt?—just like that. Before I could think any better of the plan, before I could question my motives or the cost of a last-minute plane ticket halfway around the world, I walked in and told the woman at the front desk to book me on a flight to Cairo. I didn’t know what I was looking for, where I would live, how I would pass my days. But I had faith that I would figure something out, that this decision, rash as it might seem, was the right one.
Not that a semester in Egypt was such a radical proposition. When your friends are all graduate students, you get used to the c
omings and goings of the academic life. A semester at the Indian national archives, a summer of Spanish classes in Guatemala, a year teaching in Rome: it all blurred together after a while. Boundaries were porous and bodies moved across them with ease. Once things got rolling, it was almost too easy, packing up my life and leaving it all behind. My friends thought it was a great idea. Devon said he might try to visit on his way back from a conference in Madrid. And Analise, she even had a name for what I was doing.
“Wrestling the grief,” she said, “that’s what my therapist called it. It’s an important stage.”
Even the stickiest of logistics went off without a hitch. My landlord didn’t mind me subletting to the Romanian biochemistry student I found standing next to the bulletin board outside International House. Aisha said she would try to find me a place to stay. And my adviser, Steve, couldn’t have cared less.
“Sounds great!” he wrote, responding to a four-paragraph email I had spent much of the morning composing. “Keep me updated.”
Over the next few days, as I went about the various errands I had to complete before leaving town—buying traveler’s checks, filing for a leave of absence from school, getting vaccinated for typhoid and rabies and hepatitis A—I could already feel my life in Berkeley beginning to slip away. I had lunch with friends, went out to drinks, and took a last run in the hills above campus, but none of it seemed real. The Craftsman bungalows all lined up with their weathered shingling, stained glass, and sunflowers in front-yard raised beds, the Gore and Nader signs as far as the eye could see, my friends, the stack of books I was supposed to be reading, the article I was supposed to be revising, the Albatross, Zachary’s, the little Thai restaurant down the street from my apartment: the entire city was soft at the edges and fading from view.
When people asked me what I was going to do in Cairo, I didn’t say anything about my father or the package or Mr. Mosseri. Instead, I told them that I wanted to work on my Arabic, see family, maybe look into new angles of research. And by the end of the week, by virtue of constant repetition, these justifications had calcified into a sort of reality.
The only person with any questions about the plan was my mother.
“Cairo?” she said. “You really want to spend the semester in Cairo?”
“I think it will be good for me,” I told her. “You know, the mourning process, wrestling the grief. Plus, I’ve been wanting to work on my Arabic.”
“Do you think it’s safe?” she persisted. “I mean, it wasn’t so long ago they killed all those tourists in Luxor.”
“Mom,” I said, my voice taking on that familiar adolescent whine. “You know that’s not what it’s like.”
Although she hadn’t been back for more than forty years, although she always made sure to emphasize that she was an Egyptian Jew and had spent most of her childhood in Paris, my mother had been born in Cairo and still very much identified as Egyptian. She planted molokhia in our backyard, read Al-Ahram online, and drove the twelve hours to Los Angeles twice a year to stock up on spices. All of which, she reasoned, entitled her to whatever opinions she might have about Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I’ll be safe,” I said, and left it at that, not wanting to get into an argument about terrorism or corruption or the decline of Egyptian culture.
“I know, it’s just—”
She didn’t need to say anything else. I knew where she was going. It was always the same story. When she was ten years old, my mother and her entire family had been expelled from Cairo—along with the rest of the foreigners and Jews—kicked out of a city they had lived in for more than a thousand years. She had been forced to leave her friends, her teachers, and the only home she had ever known. Which was why, for her, any discussion of Egypt always came back to the same thing: us vs. them. You couldn’t trust “them,” whoever they might be. And right or wrong, “we” had to stick together.
In the past, I might have tried to push back a little, poke holes in her oversimplistic binary. I might have pointed out that identity didn’t have to be so immutable and that, although she was kind enough to include me in her “us,” I was equally one of “them.” But I knew it would be easier to just change the subject.
“I talked to Steve yesterday,” I said, playing to her perennial interest in the details of my academic life. “He said it shouldn’t be a problem, taking my prelims at the end of spring. He thought it was a great idea, actually, going to Cairo.”
“I just want you to be happy,” my mother said after a long pause, the implication being that, regardless of what Steve or anyone else might think, regardless of what I was hoping to find, going to Cairo wasn’t a good idea and it certainly wasn’t going to make me happy.
And maybe she was right, I thought, watching Garden City tilt into morning. Maybe I was just running away from my problems. Maybe I was putting myself in danger. Maybe I was sacrificing my graduate career, such as it was, to chase after ghosts that would never give me any answers, at least not the ones I wanted. Maybe it was a bad idea.
I set the empty mug down next to me and glanced at the little blue cell phone Aisha had given me. It was almost seven already and below me, the neighborhood was coming to life. A knot of older men were smoking shisha on wooden stools next to a bright green newspaper kiosk, and across the street a couple of squat black-and-white taxis idled in front of a cheap hotel called Pharaoh’s Palace. In a way it didn’t matter whether my mother was right, whether I had made the right decision or the wrong one. Because either way, there I was.
* * *
—
By the end of that first week in Cairo, I was beginning to understand the shape of my neighborhood. There was the little café around the corner, the elementary school across the street, and a grocery store two blocks down that stocked peanut butter and Marmite for the diplomats who lived nearby. If you walked too far in any one direction, you were bound to run into either the Nile, Qasr el-Einy Street, or one of the heavily fortified compounds—the U.S. embassy, the British embassy, the Ministries of Tourism and Petroleum—that separated Garden City from downtown. By the end of that first week, I had gotten used to the heat and the pollution, the big hotels, the neon billboards, and the buzz of taxis swarming around Tahrir Square. My Arabic had started coming back. Aisha took me to a used-furniture market near Ramses Station and I bought an electric kettle at a shiny two-story department store on Talaat Harb Street. But as much as I was beginning to feel at home again in the city, I still didn’t know anything more about the package that had brought me there.
It was there on the coffee table, waiting for me every morning when I woke. And every afternoon when I got back to the apartment—after a trip to the grocery store or lunch downtown with Aisha or wandering around the neighborhood looking for an ATM that would accept my debit card—it was still there, waiting. Occasionally, if I wasn’t too tired, I would sit down on the living room couch, lift the presentation case up from its nest of newspaper, and hold that ancient scrap of paper in my hands, tilting it toward the light as I ran my thumb along the edge of the glass and tried to imagine my father in his armchair, inspecting this very same object.
At first, it had been the words that interested me most. But with time, I began giving more and more thought to the grammar of the thing itself, that dull reddish stain across the top of the page, the weave of the paper, the faded brown tint of the ink. For every object had its story; every key or rock or piece of glass made its own meaning as it moved through the world, from pocket to hand, closet to shelf, attic to kitchen table. And somewhere, beneath those words, hidden in the space between the letters, was the story of the object itself, the thread of its passage through the centuries, from father to son, father to son, until eventually it found its way to me.
What it signified, where it came from, why my father had sent it to me, these questions remained unanswered. I had tried calling the number on Mr.
Mosseri’s business card at least half a dozen times. But every time I called I got the same recorded message telling me the number in question was no longer in service. When I searched online, at the dusty Internet café around the corner from my apartment, the only Claude Mosseris I could find were a wholesale fabric dealer in Paris and a banker buried in the Bassatine cemetery outside Cairo.
My family wasn’t much help, either. When I showed them the package—that first Sunday after lunch at their apartment—none of them quite knew what to make of it. Uncle Hassan said he thought the scrap of paper might be from the attic of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue. And when Aisha tried to read the Arabic side of the note, she could only make out a few isolated phrases, not nearly enough to make any sense of it.
“I don’t think this is Arabic,” she said, and passed it to her father, who puzzled over the words for a few minutes before giving up.
“What about Mr. Mosseri?” Aunt Basimah asked as she placed a platter of baklava in the middle of the table.
“Yes,” Uncle Hassan said absently, glancing at Mr. Mosseri’s business card. “He is a good man. And he was a great friend of your father’s. I think he is the one who should know about this piece of paper.”
“Do you have his number?” I asked. “The one on his card doesn’t work.”
“He was at the funeral,” Aisha offered and Uncle Hassan nodded.
“We grew up together, in the old neighborhood.”
But neither of them knew how to get in touch with him.
“What about my father?” I persisted. “He never mentioned anything about any of this? Nothing about the package or this piece of paper?”
Uncle Hassan shook his head.
“We were very close, your father and I. We lived together, worked together, shared our meals. But when it came to the synagogue, there were some things he could never tell me. I was the second son, you know, and in our family, that was everything.”
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo Page 7