At this point, my mother’s pale blue aerograms gave way to a stack of letters from my father, all of which were still sealed. They had traveled halfway around the world, from Cairo to Los Angeles, only to be returned, unread, back again to Cairo. Twenty-five years later, they were still unopened. And so, as I read through them, ripping into the envelopes with the edge of my thumbnail, I felt my father was writing directly to me, which in a way he was.
They began as love letters, as promises and dreams. You are my light, he wrote in October 1975, my closest friend and the mother of my child. We are meant to be together. But as the months progressed, the tone of his letters became increasingly desperate. We should be a family, he wrote on my second birthday. A family is best for everyone. A son needs his father. But also a father needs his son. By that point, my father had resigned his position at the synagogue. He was working for Uncle Hassan’s produce distribution company, beginning to make a new life for himself. Even so, he wrote, I will leave all this to be with you and Yusuf in Los Angeles or Paris or anywhere you want.
My mother wrote to him dutifully on the first of each month with a picture and an update on my development. She told him details about her life and even suggested the possibility that he might visit again, to see my development for himself. But she returned all of his love letters unread. It was almost as if she were afraid of how she might react, as if she were still fighting some part of herself that wanted to be with him. Regardless of her motivations for not responding, my father continued writing into the void, twice a month for more than a year. His letters continued on that same stubborn and lonely path, from Cairo to Los Angeles and back, until February 1977, when my mother sent a short note telling him that she was engaged. At the end of that letter, the last in the box, she informed him that she and her fiancé—Bill—were planning to visit her parents in Paris that following spring. This will be a good opportunity for you to see Yusuf, she wrote.
Although the visit took place more than twenty years ago, I can still remember pieces of it: the moldy smell of my grandparents’ apartment, the white marble stairs outside their building, a visit to the zoo on a rainy day. There are pictures, too, an album of overexposed snapshots my mother kept at the back of her closet. They are mostly of me, wearing brown corduroy overalls and a red-striped long-sleeved shirt, helping my grandmother blow out the candles on a birthday cake. But my father is there, too, smiling on the couch, sitting with me on the floor, playing with a blue plastic truck.
Even without the photographs, I can see his face, his eyebrows, the droop of his mustache. And in the lines of his smile I can begin to imagine how he must have felt, seeing my mother with her new fiancé, sitting with us in the living room of my grandparents’ apartment, knowing that in a few weeks the trip would end and we would all go back to our respective homes, as if none of this had ever happened.
* * *
—
When I woke up that next morning—having fallen asleep on the couch—I went through the box again and found the letter my mother wrote after my father visited her in Los Angeles, the one ending their relationship for good. As much as I care about you, she told him, the truth is that our lives have taken us in different directions and it’s best, I think, to acknowledge that now instead of later.
“It was so long ago,” my mother said when I called her that afternoon. “I remember him visiting. But the letter—”
She trailed off and I stared down at the semitranslucent airmail paper on the coffee table in front of me, my mother’s careful handwriting stretched from one edge of the page to the other. It had always been difficult for me to see things from her perspective, to see her as anything but my mother, but after reading through her letters, I was beginning to appreciate what it must have been like, being uprooted at such a young age and then, sixteen years later, leaving her friends and family and starting over again in a new country.
“You said it was something you had known for a long time,” I prompted, looking down at her words, “but hadn’t been able to admit to yourself.”
I had called to ask about the end of their relationship, my father’s trip to Los Angeles, what it was that made her think they couldn’t work together. But as I listened to her, trying to explain what was going through her head twenty-five years earlier, I kept glancing at that other letter, at the edge of the coffee table, the one in which she invited my father to come visit her in Paris. That was the heart of the matter, the fulcrum on which this story teetered. And more important, perhaps, than the letter itself was the impetus behind the letter, the shameful episode that caused my father to resign his post as watchman. For if he hadn’t left the synagogue, my mother wouldn’t have invited him to visit her, and if she hadn’t invited him, I never would have come into being.
“It was such a long time ago,” my mother said when I asked her whether she remembered why my father left the synagogue. “And your father, he wasn’t really one to talk about his problems.”
“You don’t still have his letters, do you?”
“I doubt it,” she said. I heard her shuffling through a pile of papers on her desk, as if she thought she might find the letters there, buried under a crust of bills. “I can’t imagine I would have brought them with me to Santa Fe.”
She paused and I could hear their dog barking in the background.
“Okay,” I said. But there was still one thing I didn’t understand. “Why did you return his letters? The ones he sent after he visited you in California?”
“I knew it wouldn’t work,” she said. “Whatever my reasons were at the time, I knew that for sure. And he was so charming. I guess I was worried that if I read any of his letters—”
She trailed off again and we were both silent for a long while, allowing his memory to balance on the line between us, imagining that alternative universe in which she had allowed herself to be charmed.
* * *
—
That Sunday, when I asked Uncle Hassan if he remembered why my father resigned from the synagogue, he scratched his palm against the armrest of his favorite chair and regarded me with a half squint, as if trying to determine the quality of a suspicious tomato. I had been over to their apartment every Sunday for the past month. But aside from that first visit, we mostly avoided the topic of my father. We talked about Uncle Hassan’s business and the upcoming American election, Mubarak and the protests in the West Bank. But it was best, we all seemed to agree, not to disturb my father’s memory.
“It was his great shame,” Uncle Hassan said finally. He glanced down into the bottom of his empty tea glass and frowned to himself. “His great shame.”
He looked up at me, to see whether this answer might be sufficient, but he knew it wasn’t.
“He should know,” Aunt Basimah said as she refilled her husband’s glass.
“He deserves to know,” Aisha put in.
“Yes,” Uncle Hassan conceded. “I suppose he does.”
He looked at me and blew across the top of his tea.
“It was his great shame,” he repeated, “his greatest shame. But your cousin is right. A son deserves to know his father’s pride also with the shame.”
And thus, Uncle Hassan began the story.
In those chaotic first hours of the Yom Kippur War, as Egyptian troops marched across the Suez Canal and Syrian tanks rolled into the Golan Heights, my father was at his post in the courtyard of the synagogue. There was nothing unusual to report until late morning, when he heard a commotion on the street that ran alongside the main prayer hall. Through the gates, he saw two plainclothes police officers and a dozen or so angry men from the neighborhood. The officers said they had reason to believe that the Jews were hiding guns in the synagogue and intended to attack the police substation nearby. My father tried to convince the officers that this was clearly nothing more than a rumor. In fact, he told them, it was a Jewish holiday. The
Jews were all praying at the other synagogue downtown. Still, the policemen insisted on searching the premises. If my father didn’t comply, they said, they would force their way in and arrest him.
Not wanting to jeopardize his own safety and leave the building unguarded at this critical moment, my father unlocked the gates. He accompanied the officers on their search, answering questions about various ritual objects and insisting the entire time that, no matter what might happen between Israel and Egypt, the Jews of Cairo were loyal Egyptian citizens who wanted nothing but to live in peace. For nearly an hour, my father trailed along behind the officers, unlocking doors and making sure they didn’t damage or steal anything. After scouring the courtyard, the prayer hall, and the ritual baths, they asked to be shown to the attic.
My father told them that it was empty, that it was dark and difficult to access. But the officers insisted. And so, reluctantly, he raised the dusty ladder and leaned it against the lip of the entrance. All three of them climbed in and the officers raked their flashlights over the room. They turned over an old metal pail and peered inside a wooden crate filled with jugs of bleach. But aside from these cleaning implements and a few broken lamps, the room appeared to be empty.
As they were about to leave, the smaller of the two officers noticed a crack in the wall panels and knelt down to inspect it more closely. As it turned out, the panel was the door of a secret compartment, inside of which was hidden an ancient Torah scroll. In spite of my father’s protests, the officers removed the Ezra Scroll and insisted on taking it to the station for further inspection. As they carried it out of the attic storeroom and down the stairs to the courtyard of the synagogue, my father tried to reason with them, to convince them that it was only a book, an ancient holy book that shouldn’t under any circumstances be removed from the synagogue. But they wouldn’t listen.
In a last-ditch attempt to stop them, my father tried to block their way out, standing in front of the synagogue’s main gates with his arms crossed over his chest. They told him to step aside and when he refused, the larger of the two officers laid my father out with a single punch. As they left, they spat on the ground next to his head.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Uncle Hassan concluded. “What else could he have done? Nothing. There was nothing else to do. But even so, he could not forgive himself.”
My father blamed himself for unlocking the gates and for not fighting back more vociferously, for allowing the officers to trample on the honor of the synagogue and steal its most valued possession. The day after the war ended, he submitted his resignation. It was accepted, in part because there was no money left to support his position and in part because there were many in the community who blamed him, even if there was nothing he could have done. A few weeks later, distraught and unsure what to do with himself, he boarded a boat for France.
“He could not forgive himself,” Uncle Hassan repeated. “For many years he was very depressed.”
“And the Ezra Scroll?” I asked, recalling the newspaper clipping I had found in my father’s room, the small question mark next to the Torah scroll Mr. Mosseri was holding.
“The Ezra Scroll?”
Uncle Hassan smoothed down the edges of his mustache and shook his head slowly from side to side.
“It was never seen again.”
12
IN THEIR GIRLHOOD, it was not an uncommon occurrence—to wake in half darkness with that hollow feel of doubling and the persistent image of a horse or a ship or a man with a hideous nose—but Agnes and Margaret had not shared a dream for nearly three decades. It felt rather childish, then, and somewhat unsettling, to be looking across the unfamiliar light of the hotel room, reaching out for confirmation of what they both already knew. To think the same thought was normal. They were twins, after all. Given the same set of information, it made sense that they would occasionally come to the same conclusion. But how could one understand dreaming the same dream?
“I still smell the dust.”
Margaret murmured her agreement. She smelled it, too. She saw the graveyard of paper and books, that storm of souls rising up to heaven like Judgment Day. It was not a nightmare. Still, the dream stayed with them both, the smell of the dust and all those frail souls swirling about it.
“What do you suppose it means?” Agnes asked as they performed their morning exercises.
“Perhaps it has some connection to our meeting.”
“Yes”—Agnes smiled into her forward bend—“and we will all soon be released from the purgatory of the Customs Authority.”
The previous evening, as they were preparing for bed, the sisters had received a very welcome note from Miss de Witt. Her uncle had cabled, she wrote, and said that the Consul-General would be delighted to meet them the following morning at ten if they were able. Neither of them had truly believed the girl when she told them that her uncle might be able to arrange the meeting with Lord Cromer. Still, they were both very happy to be proven wrong.
Now that they had their meeting, they knew it would not be especially difficult to impress upon the Consul-General the great importance of the geniza documents. For inside every colonial administrator was a public schoolboy entranced by the mysteries of the Orient. And once they were able to convince him of the geniza’s consequence, Lord Cromer would be able to snip the red tape of the Egyptian Customs Authority with a snap of his fingers. The documents would be released, and all without having to rely on Mr. Bechor or any of his unsavory connections.
“That girl is something,” Margaret marveled as she buttoned up the back of her sister’s dress.
“Yes,” Agnes agreed, leading the way downstairs to the lobby, “though I’m not entirely certain what.”
By the time they sat down for breakfast, the dining room was clattering with holidaymakers and pilgrims. The guests of their hotel were mainly British—it was the Hotel d’Angleterre, after all—with some Germans, a smattering of Slavs, and a table of Greek Orthodox priests stopping over on their way to the Sinai. More than a few of the British diners recognized in Agnes and Margaret the markings of a sympathetic tribe and smiled in acknowledgment of their shared origin. A pair of tight smiles allowed the twins to maintain a perimeter around their table without appearing overly disagreeable.
“Nine o’clock,” Margaret said when the clock struck the hour, and they rose as one to meet their carriage.
Although their meeting was not until ten, Margaret had ordered the carriage for nine. If one wanted to be punctual in this country, she knew, it was necessary to give the locals a wide margin of error. Of course, she and her sister were both rather excited as well. Lord Cromer did not meet with just anyone. He was a busy man, administering the entire country practically by himself, and they very much valued the time he had set aside for them.
“The British Consul-General’s residence,” Agnes said as they climbed into the carriage waiting outside their hotel.
“Thirty al-Maghrabi Street,” Margaret added.
She had looked up the address in her Baedeker guidebook earlier that morning, so as not to be at the whim of the driver.
“Thirty al-Maghrabi?” the driver asked, somewhat hesitantly.
“Yes,” Agnes snapped, “that is what she said.”
The driver took them along Abbasiya Street, across the northern end of the medieval city, and fifteen minutes later he brought the carriage to a halt across from a grand, though rather decrepit building on al-Maghrabi Street, clearly not the residence of the most powerful man in Egypt. The façade of the building was streaked with multiple layers of dirt and two of the windows on the third floor were boarded up with wood.
“Thirty al-Maghrabi Street,” the driver announced with a halfhearted flourish.
“I do not know where you have taken us,” Agnes said, “but this is certainly not the residence of the British Consul-General.”
Mumbling s
omething unintelligible to himself, the driver climbed down from his seat and wandered over toward the doorman of the building.
“The Lord has moved,” he reported upon his return.
“You know where he currently lives?”
“Yes,” he said. “Garden City, next to Qasr el-Einy Hospital.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“Not long.”
“Well, then,” Margaret said, “we should probably be going.”
As they rode back along Abbasiya Street toward the Nile, Agnes and Margaret were both rather agitated by the idea that they might be late for their meeting. And, worse still, there was no one to blame but themselves. They were both silent, watching the city pass until, turning off Qasr el-Einy Street, they stopped in front of the Consul-General’s residence, a gleaming white marble building with a mouthful of pillars and a garden far greener than any they had seen for months.
“We are here for a meeting with Lord Cromer,” Agnes said to the two smart-looking young men standing guard outside the front gate.
“Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson,” Margaret added, anticipating their query.
“I hope you will not mind a short walk,” said the taller of the two, after confirming the meeting in his logbook. “For safety reasons, there is a ban on native vehicles in the driveway.”
“Of course.”
They knew that this small plot of land was, legally speaking, a piece of the Queen’s dominion, but neither Agnes nor Margaret had expected to feel quite so much at home. It was uncanny. In the inhospitable and muggy climes of Egypt, not more than a hundred yards from the banks of the Nile, Lord Cromer had re-created perfectly the feeling of a British country house. Ordered and elegant, the grounds were lined with poplar trees and neatly trimmed hedges. At the top of the drive, the guard passed them to a butler, who led them through the entrance hall and up the main stairs to a small study that resembled nothing so much as the office of a Cambridge fellow. The butler bade them sit, which they did, though a moment later the Consul-General entered through an interior door and they both stood to greet him.
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo Page 17