The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

  It was possible, of course, that this particular dehairing process had been developed earlier than previously known. It was possible that Ezra had chosen goatskin for his scroll, instead of the typically more highly prized calf- or sheepskin. Still, if she had to guess, knowing nothing of its true provenance, Agnes would date the scroll sometime between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, and she would have to presume that the parchment had been prepared in southern Europe.

  “Amazing,” Agnes said. Avoiding her sister’s gaze, she turned to Rabbi Ben Shimon. “Thank you so much for this opportunity.”

  What else could she say? She couldn’t very well announce her theory. To do so would strip the community of its most treasured possession or, even worse, accuse the Chief Rabbi of willful misrepresentation. So she kept her thoughts to herself until she and her sister were lying alone in the darkness of their hotel room.

  “Meggie,” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “The parchment,” she said, “I’m fairly certain it was goatskin, treated with lime.”

  Margaret knew far less than her sister about the identification of ancient documents, but she understood at once the implication of this conjecture. A long silence pressed down on them, during which Agnes reached out and took her sister’s hand.

  “How certain?” Margaret asked.

  “We cannot be absolutely certain about such things.”

  “We cannot be absolutely certain about anything, can we?”

  “No, I should think not.”

  Perhaps it would have been better if they had never seen the scroll, if they had been allowed to persist in the illusion of its perfection. At the same time, they both took some comfort in the absence of certainty, in the muddled space between the true word of God and its interpretation. Was it not the pursuit of the divine that gave us meaning? The chasm of faith between the Eucharist and the blood of Christ, Kierkegaard’s battle of the living room, the chain of transmission between the Hadith and the true words of Muhammad, the black cloth separating the Kaaba from the pilgrims circling around it, the impossible longing of the Jewish people for their home in Jerusalem, for a temple always already destroyed, these leaps to faith were divine in their own right. The idea of the scroll was as real as the scroll itself.

  And they could still hope, couldn’t they? Might it not be possible that the scroll they had seen was nothing more than a feint? In which case, the Ezra Scroll really did exist, buried still in a closet somewhere, waiting patiently for a future scholar to uncover it. Or maybe the true scroll was not meant to be uncovered. Perhaps the Ezra Scroll was meant to remain forever in its dark closet, tucked away in the backstreets of Old Cairo, forgotten, untouched and undiscovered until the end of humanity.

  16

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE I left Cairo, I went over to Uncle Hassan and Aunt Basimah’s for my final Sunday lunch. Aunt Basimah made my childhood favorite, lemon breaded chicken, and we talked about my plans for the following semester. I thanked them for all their kindness. And, as he hugged me goodbye, Uncle Hassan told me I was welcome back anytime.

  “You are a good boy,” he said, holding me out by the shoulders to get a better look. “Your father would be proud.”

  After lunch, Aisha offered to give me a ride home. We drove the first few blocks in silence, past the gilt-lettered entrance of the Maadi Sporting Club, over the Metro tracks, and through the center of Maadi, its streets crowded with fast-food restaurants and men selling electronics off the sidewalk. As she turned onto the main road leading north toward downtown, the outline of the Muqattam Hills rose up at the edge of the horizon.

  “Do you know how to get to Bassatine?” I asked.

  “The cemetery?” she said. “Sure. It’s just off the road to Heliopolis.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?” I said. “Stopping by on the way home?”

  “Not at all.”

  A few minutes later we were on the road to Heliopolis, one side of the freeway speckled with apartment buildings and half-finished shopping malls, the other a vast expanse of factories, radio towers, and military installations. After a while, we turned off and continued on a dirt frontage road that led into an industrial area crowded with stonecutters and brick makers. The air was thick with pulverized building material and the only other vehicles in sight were forklifts and pickup trucks laden with red roof tiles, stone pillars, and tired dusty men.

  Past the warehouses, backed up against a curve of the freeway, was the Jewish cemetery, Bassatine, its front gates secured with a thick chain and a padlock that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. While Aisha waited in the car, I looked around for another entrance and shouted for someone to let me in. After a few minutes a stonecutter from one of the nearby workshops wandered over to see what I was going on about.

  “No entry,” he said, and pointed to the padlock.

  “Do you know if there’s another way in?” I asked him. “My father is buried here.”

  The stonecutter shook his head. Then, after considering the situation, he linked his hands together and positioned himself next to the front gates.

  “Be careful,” he warned as he boosted me up over the wall. “There are ghosts in there.”

  Once inside the cemetery, I was able to find my father’s grave without much difficulty. Set off by a short brick wall, the non-Jewish section of the cemetery was located in a far corner between the main gate and the mausoleum of Moïse Cattaui. My father’s grave was near the back, a simple black headstone engraved with his name, his date of birth, his date of death, and a short verse from the Koran. God is watchful over all things. I stood next to the grave for a long while. Then I knelt down and rested my forehead against the warm black marble. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I could see the condensation of my breath collected on the surface of the stone.

  There was so much I wanted to tell him, about the fragment, Abdullah, and Mr. Mosseri; about the scroll I had held like a baby, which may or may not have been the scroll from the newspaper clipping, which may or may not have been the scroll that was taken from the synagogue. But in the end, instead of telling him, I asked the question I had been wanting to ask for years.

  “Will you tell me a story?”

  I waited a moment, looked up at the outline of the Muqattam Hills, listened to the sound of the stonecutters, the freeway, and the birds chattering in the branches of a nearby plane tree. Then I stood, brushed the dirt from my knees and placed a small stone on top of his grave. On my way out, I found the gravestones of my mother’s grandparents. After paying my respects to them and to an entire row of Shemaryas, I climbed back over the fence and asked Aisha to take me home.

  “Did you find him?” she asked when we were back on the main road.

  “I did,” I said. “He was right there all along.”

  My last days in Cairo were spent tying up loose ends, packing, and buying presents in Khan el-Khalili, but that final evening I reserved for Abdullah. He couldn’t leave his post until later that night, so we ate dinner together on the front steps of the building. When we were finished, I balled up the paper wrappers and pushed an errant curl back behind his ear.

  “You should come with me,” I said, only half serious.

  He shook his head.

  “You’ll be back,” he said. And he was right.

  Over the years, I’ve come back to Cairo more times than I can count: for research and for pleasure; for Aisha’s wedding and the birth of her first daughter, Mariyam; for colloquia about the medieval Mediterranean world, the fall of Mubarak, and the poetics of Judeo-Arabic verse; to visit Mr. Mosseri and to pay my respects after the death of his mother; to tend the graves of Shemaryas and al-Raqbs, to watch over the memories of those whose descendants no longer remember. But that night the city was frozen in place. Abdullah put on Astral Weeks and we listened through the first side, sipping g
reen apple Fayrouz and lightheaded with each other, watching the city pass by like stars across the desert sky.

  * * *

  —

  In the years since, I’ve often wondered—for my father’s sake and my own—whether it really was the Ezra Scroll, propped up on the chair between Mr. Mosseri and Rabbi Saada. Could that scroll really have been the same one my father tried to protect from the police, the soft-glowing magical object Ali al-Raqb used to woo his beloved, the perfect text Agnes and Margaret wanted so much to discover? The question pops up at odd hours of the day, while I’m in line at the cafeteria or hunched over an ancient marriage contract; it’s sparked by the smell of parchment, the shudder of a fluorescent light coming to life, or a splatter of sunshine on the River Cam.

  Whatever it was I held that night in the courtyard of the synagogue, it did its work. The morning after dancing with Mr. Mosseri, Rabbi Saada, and Khalid, I woke up with a pounding headache, a pasty mouth, and an intense, immutable desire to spend the following semester at Cambridge, in the company of the geniza documents. That afternoon I changed my plane ticket. I told my adviser that I was planning to extend my leave of absence and found a new subletter for my apartment in Berkeley. Rabbi Saada helped me to find a job at the Geniza Research Unit, and that is where I’ve been ever since.

  It’s not a particularly glamorous life. I wake up every morning at seven, have a quick breakfast, then cut across town to the back entrance of the Cambridge University Library. The Geniza Research Unit is on the second floor, between the stacks and a row of administrative offices. My desk is at the back of the conservation room, an old drafting table topped with an acid-free blotter and a blue tackle box containing the tools of my trade, the brushes and blades, magnifying glasses, wheat-starch paste, and archival plastic sheets. Aside from the occasional palimpsest or illuminated manuscript, the work is relatively simple. First I remove the fragment from its box and carefully brush away any ancient detritus. Then I cut a sheet of plastic down to the appropriate size and anchor the fragment to the plastic with a single stitch of acid-free thread. Finally, I cut a second piece of plastic and sew it up around the edges. When I’m finished, I tag the fragment for the catalogue and send it off to the photographers. Then I begin again.

  There are hundreds of thousands of fragments, waiting in a climate-controlled vault on the third floor of this great brick library. We did the math the other day at lunch. With three of us working forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, it would take somewhere in the realm of three hundred years to work through all the fragments. It can be humbling, chipping away at a project beyond the scale of a human life. But in my moments of doubt, I remind myself of what Rabbi Tarfon said, nearly two thousand years ago: You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.

  Over the years, my Hebrew and Arabic have gotten quite good. I can read some Syriac and I’m comfortable with the grammatical quirks of Judeo-Arabic. But to truly understand the fragments, you need to be fluent in another language, the idiom of paper and dust, the anxious slant of a scribe trying to finish a letter before sundown, the urgency of a peculiar crease. You have to be able to read the meaning in food stains and sun damage, misspellings and half-erased words. Each fragment contains dozens of stories, entangled in the weave of the paper, the cure of the parchment, the degradation of various inks. And it’s my job to raise these stories from the dead, to release them, protect them, and preserve them for the scholars of the future.

  At first, I told myself the job was only temporary, something to get out of my system before I went back to Berkeley and finished up my doctorate. Or perhaps, I thought, I could start over again at Cambridge, get a D.Phil. in Middle Eastern Studies. And maybe one day I will. But for the time being, I’m happy with the life I’ve chosen. I know my father would be proud. And my mother, eventually she came around to the idea too. When she and Bill visited a few years ago, I took them up to my little office and, as I was explaining the various tools of my trade, their technical names and functions, her eyes welled up. She took off her glasses, and when she hugged me I could feel her tears against my cheek.

  “It’s all a mother wants,” she said, “to see her child happy.”

  And I am. After so many years in my head, it was a revelation to work with my hands, to feel the texture of a story beneath my fingers. I’m a reader above all else, bearing witness to the marriages, domestic squabbles, and business agreements of people who died centuries ago. But with so many stories swirling about, it’s probably no surprise that, eventually, I felt compelled to set down my own. A few years ago, not long after the July 2011 revolution, I began writing, in the mornings before work, on weekends and holidays, attempting to arrange the shards of my family history into a coherent whole.

  I went back to Cairo last year to sit down with Mr. Mosseri, Madame el-Tantawi, Uncle Hassan, and Aunt Basimah. I asked them all the questions I had been saving up over the years. Why did the Jews of Cairo give Solomon Schechter the geniza documents? Who told my father all the stories he told me? I spent a week digging through the archives of the Jewish community. I sought out distant cousins, took rubbings from gravestones at Bassatine. And slowly, the stories began to emerge. Mr. Mosseri told me family legends I had never before heard. Aunt Basimah described the first time she met my grandfather, how impressed she was by the elegant cut of his suit. And Madame el-Tantawi told me the story of my father’s great-uncle Rashid—the youngest son of Muhammad al-Raqb—the one who, in his youth, was found in unnatural congress, as she put it, with a Jewish boy named Marcel Bechor.

  According to Madame el-Tantawi, Great-Uncle Rashid had worked for many years in the kitchen of the British Consul-General’s residence, then found a position at the Nile Hilton and eventually worked his way up to become the head chef. Uncle Hassan remembered him as a strict and somewhat reserved man, but neither he nor Mr. Mosseri knew anything more about his life, how he got the job at Lord Cromer’s house, whether it might be connected somehow to the scandal with Marcel Bechor. It wasn’t until I got back to Cambridge that I found the story—or part of it, at least—in Agnes and Margaret’s papers.

  Before leaving Cairo for the Sinai, the twins had written a letter to Lord Cromer, in which they recommended the services of a very capable young man called Rashid al-Raqb. When they returned home three weeks later, they found a note from the young man himself, thanking them for their kind assistance. You cannot imagine how much this new environment has ameliorated my situation, of which I think you have been informed. I hope that one day I will be able to repay your generosity.

  At first I wanted to write a book that would contain all of these stories, a thousand pages encompassing a thousand years of Jewish life in Cairo. Over time, however, my project settled into a more modest frame, this fragmented account of fathers and sons, cousins and strangers, grief, forgiveness, and forbidden love. I’m well aware of the book’s shortcomings. It’s imperfect and incomplete. But what novel isn’t? Language is a gesture—a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself—and eventually, all stories must come to an end.

  Whatever comes of these pages, I have found satisfaction in writing them. In my research and in the shape of my days, in the wheat-starch paste and the acid-free thread, in the long hours hunched over ancient paper and my walks home along the River Cam, I have found myself, in more ways than one. I wouldn’t call myself religious, not in the conventional sense—that would require me to actually choose one—but there’s a spark there that wasn’t before. And who am I to say what that is? Or isn’t? Like my father and his father before him, I am but a watcher, a guardian, protecting the geniza documents, and content to persist in their mystery.

  Author’s Note

  The story contained within these pages is, like all novels, a mix of fact and fiction. Some of the characters are based on historical personages, some are inspired by people I’ve known, some are entirely inv
ented. The same can be said for the various plot lines. With a few small exceptions, the story of the Cairo Geniza and its “discovery” is based on historical record (particularly Janet Soskice’s book The Sisters of Sinai, Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s Sacred Trash, and S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society). The story of the al-Raqb family was inspired by a conversation I had on an airplane with a Bengali Muslim woman whose family served for generations as watchmen of a synagogue in Kolkata. The story of Joseph and the descriptions of contemporary Cairo are based in part on my own experience living there in the fall of 2000. In general, I have tried to render the historical, cultural, and geographic context as accurately as possible. To that end, I have been assisted greatly by the work of scholars like Timothy Mitchell, Joel Beinin, David Sims, and André Raymond. Any inaccuracies, intentional or otherwise, are my own. As the poet Edmond Jabès wrote: “The writer, like the historian, lends a meaning to the past but, contrary to the latter, he destroys the past by giving it form.”

  For Mona,

  her mother,

  her grandparents,

  and on back through the generations

  Acknowledgments

  Endless gratitude, first and foremost, to Nicole Aragi—literary agent, guardian angel, and dragon slayer, maker of baba ghanoush, provider of slippers, and so much more—for reading this book in its many different forms, for shaping it, for shepherding it into the world. And to my amazing editor, Emi Ikkanda, for believing in it and for seeing what it might become, for being the type of editor people say no longer exists, and for championing the book near and wide. Thank you also to the inimitable Duvall Osteen, and to the wonderful team at Spiegel & Grau and Random House, especially Cindy Spiegel, Julie Grau, and Denise Cronin.