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THE MAP MR. Mosseri had drawn for me—sketched with his fountain pen on the back of our bill for lunch at the Nile Hilton—indicated my father’s grave with a little square and two Hebrew letters. He had drawn a fence around the northeast corner of the cemetery to show the small section reserved for non-Jews, where my father was buried. A few dashes and a circle marked the main entrance, the undertaker’s house, a large tree, and the mausoleum of Moïse Cattaui. But the map wouldn’t be much use until I found the cemetery itself.
“The City of the Dead,” I said as I slid into the passenger seat of a cab idling outside the hotel across the street from my apartment.
The Jewish cemetery—Bassatine—wasn’t on any of the maps. But from what Mr. Mosseri had said, it didn’t sound particularly difficult to find, tucked in along the base of the Muqattam Hills, between the Citadel and the Southern Cemetery, somewhere in that vast necropolis known as the City of the Dead.
“Where are you going?” the driver asked me in English.
“The City of the Dead,” I repeated, “the Southern Cemetery.”
I had spent most of the previous week trying to understand the significance of what my mother and Uncle Hassan had told me. I went back over my parents’ letters, talked to Aisha, Aunt Basimah, and Mr. Mosseri, trying to piece it all together. The questions regarding my mother weren’t particularly difficult to answer. But the ones involving my father—how he must have felt after the Ezra Scroll was taken from the synagogue, what it was like for him moving in with his younger brother, why he wrote that question mark on the newspaper clipping, where he thought the Ezra Scroll might have disappeared to, whether there might be some way to redeem him—those were questions I couldn’t answer.
And so there I was, riding south along the Nile toward the City of the Dead, on my way, as Abdullah had put it, to ask him myself.
“Where are you going? Where are you from?” the cabdriver sang as he merged into the weave of traffic. “Where are you going? Where are you from?”
It wasn’t a song, really, at least not in the strictest sense of the term, more like a melodic mantra, a poetic commentary on the ephemeral nature of life.
“You’re a philosopher,” I observed.
The driver smiled broadly at this and raised a finger toward the drooping ceiling of his cab, indicating that everything was in God’s hands. If he had any philosophical inclinations, he owed all thanks to the divine.
“In sha Allah,” he said, annunciating each word of the saying. If God wills it.
Then he pointed at the shiny green-and-gold tissue-box holder affixed to his dashboard. I couldn’t make out the calligraphy on the side of the box, but I assumed it said something about the will of God.
“Inshaallah,” I repeated and he smiled again.
“You know where you are going?” he asked a few minutes later, as we pulled up in front of the entrance to the Southern Cemetery.
I told him that I was going to Bassatine, the Jewish cemetery, and he shook his head.
“In the Southern Cemetery we have the Mosque of Qaitbay, Mosque of Barquq, and many very poor people living in the tombs. There is no Bassatine,” he said; then he drove off.
The City of the Dead was a slum built on top of a cemetery. Or maybe it was a cemetery built on a slum. The Lonely Planet wasn’t particularly clear on the question of which came first. Regardless, it was an arrangement that had persisted for hundreds of years. The wide dirt paths of the cemetery were lined with ornate stone tombs and mausoleums, each inhabited by a family or occupied by a little store selling cigarettes and candy bars. It was a fully functioning neighborhood, with produce vendors, taxis, and electricity jerry-rigged from a nearby substation.
I wouldn’t want to romanticize the probably very difficult lives of those who made their homes there. Still, there was an inescapable poignancy to the neighborhood. And its residents all seemed to possess a certain tranquility, an uncomplicated coexistence with the deceased judges and merchants among whose graves they lived. The woman peeking through shutters the same mint-green color as the mausoleum next door, the man selling cell phone chargers under the ribbed dome of a saint’s tomb, the young girl beating a carpet hung between two gravestones: they were all keepers of the past, guardians of that translucent border between life and death.
After wandering around the neighborhood for ten or fifteen minutes, I stopped to buy myself a bottle of water from a makeshift corner store. Across the way, a woman in a faded purple housedress was sweeping the ground in front of the mausoleum where she and her family appeared to live.
“Excuse me,” I called out to her, “do you know where I might find the Jewish cemetery?”
“The Jewish cemetery,” she repeated and, shaking her head at the preposterousness of the idea, went back to her sweeping. “There are no Jews here.”
An older man sitting on an empty oilcan nearby overheard our exchange and motioned for me to sit down next to him.
“You are looking for the Jewish cemetery?” he asked. I told him that I was.
“Gone,” he said. “Mubarak paved it over three years ago. It’s a shopping mall now. Soon, all this will be a shopping mall.”
I knew it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. If the cemetery had been paved over three years ago, how could my father have been buried there? But in the City of the Dead, anything seemed possible, if only for a moment.
After an hour of searching with no success, I stopped to rest in the shade of a squat little building with a crested dome. According to the Lonely Planet, this was the Tomb of the Abbasid Caliphs, one of the more notable mausoleums in the Southern Cemetery. Peeking in, I saw that the interior was decorated with a cascade of stucco niches rising toward the peak of the dome. I was about to step inside when I felt someone standing next to me.
“Ten pounds to enter,” he said.
The guard didn’t look particularly official, in his old suit jacket and dingy gray galabiya. But it could be difficult sometimes to separate the legitimate authorities from the self-appointed ones, those micro-entrepreneurs who granted themselves dominion over various parking spots, street corners, and tourist attractions. To a certain extent, the distinction was immaterial. If you stood in front of something, you became its guardian.
“I’m just looking,” I said.
Without batting an eye, the guard put out his hand.
“To look is five pounds.”
I laughed and gave him the money. After spending most of the morning surrounded by abject poverty, searching for my father and a cemetery that might not exist, I was happy to engage in a simple transaction, an exchange of currency for labor. Handing over the five pounds, I took a step back, to really look at the building, and the guard followed alongside, determined to give me my money’s worth. He rattled off the names of the Abbasid caliphs, then explained how their remnants had been transported from Baghdad to Cairo in the thirteenth century, after Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols.
“Everyone wants to be close to the tomb of Sayyida Nafisa,” he added, shielding his eyes from the sun as he pointed up at the dome of the mosque above us, “even the great caliphs. She is the protector of Cairo. She is protecting the mother of the world.”
It had always seemed strange to me, that saying—Cairo is the mother of the world—but looking up at the Sayyida Nafisa Mosque, its yellow stone dome presiding over the past and the present, the living, the dead, and those yet to come, I understood how this dusty metropolis might have given birth to the rest of the world.
“You are Egyptian?” the guard asked, pausing to examine my face as he led me to the next section of the tour.
“I was born in America,” I explained. “But my parents are Egyptian.”
“Yes,” he said and he shook my hand, as if to congratulate me on the good fortune of my heritage. “I knew it. I always know an Egyptian.�
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“Actually,” I told him, “I’m looking for my father’s grave.”
“You know where he is buried?”
“In Bassatine,” I said, then paused, “the Jewish cemetery.”
“Jewish cemetery?” the guard repeated, squinting a little as he inspected me more closely.
“He wasn’t Jewish,” I said, “my father. My mother is. But my father—”
I stopped myself and tried to start over, tried to explain why my father, who was Muslim, was buried in a Jewish cemetery, but before I could get the words out, the guard put his hand on my shoulder.
“This is your cemetery,” he said and he threw his arms out to encompass all the tombs and mosques and gravestones around us. “When we die, there is no Jew or Muslim, no Christian. In the City of the Dead, there is only one God.”
In a way, he was right. It was my cemetery, regardless of who my father was or where he was buried. For the dead were always all around us, in their letters and their stories, in those plane trees and in that wispy white cloud cutting like a river through the sky. As I walked back through the cemetery and out along Khalifah Street, I thought about the lives of those interred around me, overlapping and intersecting with the millions of souls currently passing through the realm of the living. That woman selling sugarcane juice, the man guarding the Tomb of the Abbasid Caliphs, the Abbasid caliphs themselves, the Mongols, the al-Raqbs, the Shemaryas, and that mottled little tabby cat digging for scraps in a mound of trash, we were all living in the same city. For every city is a city of the dead, every one of us a dweller of this particular slum.
* * *
—
I had two voice messages when I woke up from my nap later that afternoon, one from Aisha, calling to see if I was free for dinner, and one from Mr. Mosseri, telling me that Simchat Torah was on Saturday and he would be honored if I could join him for a special celebration at the old synagogue, Ibn Ezra. There was going to be dancing and vodka, he said. If we were lucky, Rabbi Saada might join us as well. I called him back, hoping he might be able to give me better directions to the cemetery, but all he wanted to talk about was Simchat Torah.
“It is the end and it is the beginning,” he said. “The Torah is a circle, always re-creating itself, always in the process of becoming. Simchat Torah is that point of inflection where the book folds in on itself and is born anew. We celebrate the end of the story and then we start over again at the beginning, with Genesis and ‘Let there be light.’ ”
“But the cemetery,” I began, trying to bring us back to my original question.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Of course. We can talk about that on Saturday.”
Before we got off the phone, Mr. Mosseri said that the synagogue could be difficult to find at night. Even though I had been there just a few weeks earlier, he repeated his directions twice. Walk up the passageway that leads through the middle of the neighborhood; take a right at the Nunnery of St. George and a left at the Abu Serga Church. If I found myself at the entrance to the Greek Orthodox cemetery, I had gone too far.
A few days later, when my taxi dropped me off and drove into the darkness, I was glad Mr. Mosseri had insisted on repeating his directions. After passing through the main gates of Old Cairo, the moonlight settled into a dark purple gloom tinged with the buzz of the nearby Metro station. Aside from a banged-up ATM and a restaurant serving what smelled like lentil soup, the storefronts were all shuttered with rolling steel. The few people I saw along the passageway were either closing up, hurrying home, or huddled into some dark corner for the night. Following Mr. Mosseri’s directions, I took a right at the Nunnery of St. George and a left at what I thought was Abu Serga. But I couldn’t find the synagogue. No matter which way I turned, no matter how long I spent trying to decipher the inscriptions carved into the walls, I found myself again and again at the entrance to the Greek Orthodox cemetery.
I had gone too far a fourth time, and was beginning to think that I had misremembered the directions, when I heard the tinny beat of Egyptian pop music coming from behind a stone wall. A bit more investigation led me down a dark alley to a tall iron gate topped with a Star of David. Even then, I almost didn’t recognize where I was. The courtyard was completely dark except for the moon and a bright yellow arc of light that swung out from the open door of the prayer hall. Mr. Mosseri and a man I assumed was Rabbi Saada were sitting at the tip of the arc, warming themselves around a coal brazier. There was a boom box on the ground and Rabbi Saada was holding a Torah scroll in his lap.
“Here he is!”
Jumping up from his chair, Mr. Mosseri introduced me to Rabbi Saada and to Khalid, a watchman from Abu Serga whom they paid to look in on the synagogue every so often.
“Am I early?” I asked, looking around the courtyard. Aside from a pair of silver cats slinking about the edges of the light, it was just the four of us.
“No, no,” Rabbi Saada said. “You’re right on time.”
“There was a service earlier this evening, at the new synagogue downtown,” Mr. Mosseri explained. “This is something we like to do for fun, a special celebration.”
With a conspiratorial wink, he pulled a bottle of Smirnoff out from under his chair and poured a healthy shot for each of us. Handing the scroll to Mr. Mosseri for a moment, Rabbi Saada made a toast and we all drank. The first shot burned its way down my throat, but the second went down more smoothly, and the third I hardly felt. Half listening to Rabbi Saada expound upon the final chapter of Deuteronomy—how Moses saw the promised land from the top of a mountain but never reached it himself—I let my gaze wander to the open door leading into the prayer hall, from the pews to the ark to the white marble dais in the middle of the room.
“And so we pass,” Rabbi Saada said, “each generation building on those who came before. We can climb the mountain. If we’re lucky, we might catch a glimpse of the promised land. But we must rely on the next generation to continue our journey.”
It was always just out of reach, the promised land, always over that next rise. Still, the wandering continued, generation after generation. The same stories were repeated, year after year, and always with the same hope, that the end of the journey was close at hand. After so many years of wandering, there had to be something at the end.
Unless, of course, the wandering was the story, an end unto itself. In which case, there was only the desert, an infinite scroll of sand fixed at the far distance with the hope of an oasis. And in two or three hundred years, the synagogues of San Francisco and New York would look no different from this one, dusty husks of grandeur one might stop in to visit on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge or the Statue of Liberty. It was a strangely comforting thought, that a few centuries from now, a group of Jews would be telling these same stories in Bangkok or Kolkata, believing once more that they had found their safe harbor, that their long journey had finally come to an end.
“And this is the blessing,” Rabbi Saada concluded. He laid a hand on the place where the Torah’s shoulder would be, if Torahs had shoulders. “Joseph buried his father with his own hands. Moses watched over the bones of Joseph. And the burial of Moses was presided over by none other than the blessed lord our God.”
“Wonderful,” Mr. Mosseri said, and he poured out another round of shots. “It’s a shame we can’t have you here all year.”
I watched Rabbi Saada throw back his shot.
“I thought you were the rabbi here,” I said, “in Cairo.”
As the words stumbled out, I could hear the slur of vodka rounding out the edges of my harder consonants.
“Oh no.” Rabbi Saada laughed. “I’m a rabbi for hire. I was born here, in Maadi. But I’ve lived most of my life in England, right down the road from the geniza.”
“The geniza?”
I glanced reflexively at the attic of the synagogue and noticed an old wooden ladder leaning into the open mou
th of its entrance.
“The geniza documents,” Mr. Mosseri corrected, then turned toward me. “Most of the documents from the geniza are in Cambridge.”
“Cambridge,” I said, trying the shape of the word in my mouth. “How did they—”
The outline of an idea appeared, then vanished into fog.
“Now then,” Rabbi Saada said and, rising with the help of my knee, pulled me up to standing, “we need some music.”
Khalid turned up his boom box and, as the electricity of the beat worked through me, Mr. Mosseri joined hands with Khalid and Rabbi Saada. They all circled around me, dancing a kind of makeshift hora, slow enough for Rabbi Saada to keep up, but fast enough to give me the spins.
“You hold it like a baby,” Mr. Mosseri said as he handed me the Torah scroll.
I had never held a baby before. But I understood the basic idea: cradle the head and support the body. Closing my eyes, I swayed with the beat, felt the steady pulse of the scroll and its warmth, like a stone that’s been in the sun all day. There were only three in the circle, but beyond them I could sense the presence of those who came before us, all the Shemaryas and the al-Raqbs whose lives revolved around this place, those who prayed in the synagogue and those who watched over it.
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo Page 20