by Tuvia Fogel
Yehezkel smiled. “I took the liberty of asking the rahib to tell the Franks that you detained me, my lord, because I am your subject by birth, and you needed more physicians for your wounded.”
“Ha, ha! You’re giving me ideas, Tabib . . . but no, I don’t want to interfere with your search in al-Kuds. How do you plan on reaching the Holy City from here?”
“No, Commander of the Faithful, not from here. First I have to find a document in a synagogue in Fustat, so I thought we would sail up the river.”
Al-Kamil laughed. “I like your style, Tabib! If those bloody Franks—may Allah curse them to oblivion!—didn’t feel they had the right to impose their trading privileges on the rest of the world, I’d probably be taking a cruise on the Great Mother Nile myself . . . though no one in my harem is a match for your stunning Christian lady!” He laughed again.
“I love the Great Mother Nile,” said Yehezkel, “more than any other waters I’ve sailed in, and that includes most of the Mediterranean.”
“A sailing Jew!” laughed the Sultan. “I don’t believe the ummah has known many of those!”
“You’re right, my lord. My teacher, Musa ibn Maimun—may his memory be a blessing—always opposed my love for the sea. He said God lives on mountains.”
“He was a wise man,” said al-Kamil. “Here, this is your authorization to search the Haram al-Sharif. I hope your erratic behavior won’t make me regret signing it.”
“May Allah keep you alive as long as time exists!” said Yehezkel, bowing deeply. He took the rolled-up letter, thanked God in his heart for how things had gone in the Egyptian camp, and left the tent.
Yehezkel told Galatea the good news, asked her to get ready to sail in the morning, and then found Aillil and walked to the riverbank village of Färiskür with him to look for a jalabah. As happens to villages close to besieged cities, in the six months since the sultan’s camp had moved there from al-Adiliyah the daily passage of men, arms, and victuals coming down the Nile from al-Kahira had turned Färiskür into a bustling little town.
He was looking for a decked boat so that Galatea could sleep below while he, Aillil, and the jalabah’s owner slept on deck. He knew that September breezes would blow from the north, pushing them south to al-Kahira, and would have preferred a jalabah with two sails that opened out like a butterfly’s wings. That would have guaranteed them enough speed to overcome the current even when the breeze behind was light, thus avoiding having to zigzag their way up the river with constant stern tacks, jibing the sail every time they approached a bank.
It didn’t take him long, on the crowded riverbank quays, to find Ahmed ibn Suleiman, a cheerful man with a droopy moustache and spindly legs poking out of Yemeni-style trousers. Ahmed owned a decked jalabah and, for a fee Yehezkel found reasonable, would take the rabbi and his companions to Fustat. Yehezkel examined the boat, and the two men agreed on a time of departure.
As he walked back to the camp, Yehezkel reflected that he was about to return to Fustat for the first time in fifteen years. Images of his father, Naomi, and his teacher floated up before his eyes. He sat down, overcome by nostalgia. “All the people I loved are dead,” he thought. His mother had died when he was a child, and for some strange reason the memory of her funeral was sharper than that of her face.
He was startled by the sudden thought that he must not shed tears in front of the nun. Then his mind turned to the search in the geniza*53 and something that emerged from the whirlwind of memories unsettled him. He’d grown up praying in the Ibn Ezra synagogue and remembered the curse that lay on anyone who dared to remove any writings from its geniza. His mind jumped on the challenge.
“The simplest way to avoid the curse is to read the letter in the geniza and leave it there,” he thought but then followed that through. “But Makarios said the Old Man wouldn’t collaborate unless I showed the letter from the rabbis. But surely the Templar master will tell him to collaborate, won’t he?” The next thought made his face drop. “What if the synagogue elders forbid me to even enter the geniza to avoid a curse on their community?” He wondered if mentioning Rav Eleazar of Worms would have any effect on the rabbis of his hometown and decided it wouldn’t. He went as far as considering a nighttime burglar’s expedition into the synagogue. At this, his alter ego burst out, “What? And bring a flame into a room full of parchments and papyri? Have you gone mad?”
Finally, he decided that Divine Providence would find a way to help, stood up, and entered the camp.
FÄRISKÜR, 22ND SEPTEMBER 1219
By the next morning, with everyone on board and Ahmed casting off, Yehezkel forgot both sad memories and geniza preoccupations. A breeze in his nostrils and the war in another world, he relished the four sublime colors of the Nile Valley for the first time since arriving in Egypt: the yellow desert, the green irrigated valley dotted with date palms, the purpley blue of the Nile, and the whole scene topped by the whitish sapphire of the Egyptian sky. Unable to contain himself, Yehezkel started declaiming.
“Madame, Aillil: before you is the mother of all life, the great Nile, without which Egypt would not exist!” Ahmed couldn’t help laughing at the strange sound of his Latin. Galatea and Aillil were smiling.
“My teacher—may his memory shine forever—used to say that in this land, the Nile is never far from the eyes and never far from one’s thoughts. But look! All around us are dozens of jalabahs like this one—to me, the river’s true beauties! Their sails, full of breeze under thin, arched bamboo yards, make them look like graceful white butterflies. See, their hulls are the same size, in proportion to the sails, of a butterfly’s body in proportion to its wings! They may move on the water, but from afar you can almost imagine them suddenly begin to flap their sails and take off, a cloud of white butterflies flying over the river!”
“How poetic, Rabbi!” exclaimed Galatea, touched by this dreamy vision.
For an instant, inadvertently calling him “Rabbi” despite Aillil’s presence made her feel as if they were a family and there were, in effect, no strangers. She shook her head hard to dispel the notion that they could ever be a normal family. Sometimes there were limits even to dreams.
Yehezkel started rushing around the jalabah, tugging on sheets and halyard until he was satisfied that their single lateen sail was propelling them as fast as the breeze would allow. Ahmed nodded approvingly as he squatted by the hatch that led belowdecks, preparing some pomegranate drinks. Then the sailor rabbi sat down next to his Christian partner again and reminisced.
“These jalabahs are what made me fall in love with sailing when I was a boy.” Smiling at the memory, he went on, “My heart would miss a beat when a gust of wind filled the sail, but the pull on the sail didn’t yet overcome the boat’s weight and the water’s grip on it. Then, the next instant, the jalabah wrenched itself free of those reins and surged forward, and a scream of pure joy would erupt from my throat, to the great amusement of the sailors on board.”
Galatea thought of the sudden surge of the galley leaving Limassol and knew what the boy felt.
“I took part in maneuvers on board whenever they would let me,” went on Yehezkel, “and one day the owner of a jalabah told me that if I should decide not to become a rabbi, he could make a good sailor of me, and after saying it he laughed so hard he knocked one of his mates into the river!”
Galatea’s laugh, as usual, crossed languages better than a sermon by Brother Francesco, and Ahmed’s face, when he heard it, lit up in a nearly toothless grin. They sailed upstream until nightfall, a wonderful northeastern breeze pushing them along the bends in the river as they drank in the landscape and enjoyed the day as if they hadn’t just spent a month and a half in the middle of a brutal war.
As the crow flies, al-Kahira is about a hundred leagues—parasangs, as they were known in the East—from Damietta, but along the winding bends of the Nile’s eastern branch, which sometimes doubled back on itself twice in a row, a boat had to cover almost double that distance, and the jalabah
’s best speed meant it would be at least a week before they reached Fustat.
Farther upstream, closer to al-Kahira, the river’s banks would become solid—made of earth, sand, or rock—but in the delta its edges mostly vanished into a smelly, humid, insect-ridden swamp, a place that at night seemed noisy and dangerous to Galatea, the dense bamboo and papyrus surely hiding crocodiles on the prowl. Much as she was excited by the days and moved by the sunsets, the abbess would later recall nights in the delta as among the most harrowing times of the whole pilgrimage. When, before darkness, Ahmed would steer the jalabah close to the swamp and throw its grapnel anchor overboard, Galatea would wrap herself in every stitch of fabric she owned and go into hiding below.
The jalabah’s passengers were twice woken in the middle of the night by strange screeching and warbling sounds echoing out of the swamp. No one, not even Ahmed, could imagine what they might be, which contributed to Galatea’s anxiety. As if all that weren’t enough, experience in the Venetian lagoon had taught her that mosquito bites left swellings on her delicate skin that took days to disappear. But her mood always improved when the sun rose and the jalabah left the marshes for the middle of the river. She had sailed on a cog, a tareta, and a galley in the space of six months and moved around on Ahmed’s little sailboat with a confidence that impressed the Egyptians, both Saracen and Jew.
“Actually,” she said to herself after a compliment from one of them, “for a Tuscan girl who grew up riding horses, I don’t make such a bad sailor after all.”
One day the jalabah was sailing around a bend not far from the village of Zifta, halfway to al-Kahira, when suddenly, through some gaps in the vegetation, they glimpsed a collapsing ancient temple. Ahmed had seen it before and didn’t pay it much attention, but his passengers, curious as monkeys like all kuffar, excitedly asked him to drop anchor so they could go ashore and explore the ruins.
Fear of crocodiles and snakes limited the time they spent on the muddy bank, but it was enough for them to step onto the remains of a paved plaza and walk around the half of the temple that had not fallen into the surrounding swamp. It was clearly a construction from the time of the pharaohs, the mysterious symbols of their tongue—depicting everything from eyes and hands to birds and palms—carved into many stones. They saw statues of hawks and dogs, and Yehezkel explained that the pagan ways before Islam were collectively known as jahiliyyah, which he translated as “the days of ignorance.”
In hindsight, after living under the wing of the Angel of Death in the Christian camp, witnessing the slaughter of the 29th of August and running the risk of joining Brother Francesco’s martyrdom, the lazy, peaceful days on the river were a badly needed, refreshing pause in a hectic pilgrimage.
FUSTAT, 29TH SEPTEMBER 1219
On the seventh day, after sailing past the point where the Nile splits into its two branches, they sighted al-Kahira. Beyond the fertile fields on the right bank, three parasangs to the south, the vision took shape like a trembling mirage. From that distance, in the late afternoon haze and with the sun behind them, the city looked like a snowcapped mountain—an illusion, explained Yehezkel, created by the two palaces in the center of the city. Built in front of each other, they had by now four thousand rooms, haphazardly built on top of each other, and the whole structure was whitewashed every year, so that it looked like a shining white hill emerging from the mist.
It was a sight to make one’s heart sing. As they sailed past it heading for Fustat, a handful of parasangs further upstream, they had to maneuver among hundreds of jalabahs and narrowly avoided more than one collision. Even as he frantically jibed the sail—untying its sheet, raising the yard until it was vertical, and then quickly passing it onto the other side of the mast—Yehezkel kept up a stream of lyrical lore about Egypt’s jewel. Galatea and Aillil both rolled up their eyes mockingly.
“I never saw Damascus or Baghdad,” he intoned, “but the Jewish medicus of the Hunchback’s Tale, in the Thousand and One Nights, calls al-Kahira Great Mother of the World. Where will I ever find a more moving sight,” he said, “unless one day the Lord, in his infinite mercy, allows me to see Jerusalem?”
In front of Fustat, the Nile is so wide it contains the whole island of er-Roda; Island of the Rich, as Egyptians call it. In effect, the richest men had marvelous palaces and gardens built there since the time of the pharaohs. Now, too, the island’s mansions were no less luxurious than those of Western kings.
As Galatea watched the fabulous residences, Yehezkel told her that when the Torah says, ‘And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river,’ it is speaking of the palace on er-Roda, so it was among the reeds before them that Moses was saved from the waters.
When they finally disembarked and paid Ahmed his due, Yehezkel took them to the house of his teacher’s son, Avraham ben Moshe ben Maimon, who had been appointed nagid, head of the Jewish community, on Rav Moshe’s death by the previous sultan, despite being only seventeen. Avraham welcomed his old friend, gave Galatea and Aillil a guest room in his house, and then kept Yehezkel up all night with questions on the Kabbalah he learned in Provence.
Yehezkel grew up with Avraham, who was four years younger, and had watched his friend turn, perhaps as a reaction to his father’s famous rationalism, into a soft-spoken mystic, influenced by Fustat’s Sufi schools to the point of writing, “The mystics of Islam walk in the footsteps of the prophets of Judaism.” Before leaving for Provence to avoid taking another wife after Naomi’s death, Yehezkel took comfort from a rabbinical opinion in which Avraham recommended postponing marriage until spiritual perfection is achieved.
The next day, the 30th of September, was Yom Kippur, and Yehezkel spent it fasting and praying in the synagogue of his youth while Galatea and Aillil visited the Coptic church of Abu Serga, Saint Sergius and Bacchus, inside the Roman fortress of Babylonia, built on the spot where the Holy Family rested on their journey into Egypt. Unfortunately, the Nile was high, and they could not descend into the crypt.
When Yehezkel emerged from the synagogue in the afternoon, he found Galatea waiting outside, a little worried by his haggard look, to accompany him to break his fast.
Yehezkel knew that Maimonides had died some six months after his departure for Provence, so the first thing he did on meeting Avraham was to inquire after Rav Moshe’s grave. On hearing that five years earlier the body had been taken to Eretz Israel and reburied there, he rejoiced for the soul of his teacher but also regretted the lost opportunity to visit his grave.
Despite the disappointment, the next day he went to Fustat’s Jewish cemetery to visit his own father’s grave. He asked Galatea and Allil to wait outside the plot, and they watched from a distance as the rabbi placed some pebbles on the tombstone and recited a prayer.
As black crows squawked ceaselessly around them, Galatea caught herself thinking that the somber, low tombstones, identical except for the inscription, contrasted sharply with Christian crypts and mausoleums, which betrayed a habit of continuing to compete for prestige, even from under six feet of earth.
Another embarrassing comparison between the customs arising from their respective faiths happened when Yehezkel, a day later, entered a beit midrash, a Jewish house of study, to consult the Book of Kings about a detail in her Cypriot dream that baffled him. Galatea waited outside, but soon curiosity drew her to peer in through a window. Yehezkel was sitting at a table, his head in a book, when someone announced it was time for Mincha, the afternoon prayer. The Jews who’d been studying in pairs, or eating, or joking in the big, bare room full of nothing but books and parchments, suddenly stood, faced Jerusalem and started to pray. In an instant, the room turned into a synagogue. Galatea was startled.
When the rabbi emerged, she confided to him the comparison the sight had provoked. “You know, Rabbi, we Christians, in order to pray, have to first surround ourselves with altars, sacred paraments, silver utensils, and the smell of incense.”
Yehezkel laughed. “As usual, madame, the sharpnes
s of your mind shapes your natural intuition. The observation you make shows two things: first, that real prayer is between you and God, something you do in your soul, so you should be able to do it anywhere, even on a ship’s bowsprit.”
Galatea smiled at the memory of the rabbi deep in prayer, tied to the forestay of the Falcus.
“And second,” he went on, “that turning the room you’re in into a synagogue confirms the notion that God is everywhere, while the dramatic difference between churches and other places makes it easier—for simple people—to conclude that in the tavern God is absent.”
Galatea thought of the Age of the Spirit that Gioacchino and Brother Francesco said was arriving and for an instant wondered if Jews weren’t already living in it. Then her teacher surprised her again.
“Having said all that, when we still had our Temple in Jerusalem, we were also very fond of altars, sacred paraments, silver utensils, and the smell of incense. I guess the fact that we’ve learned to do without them is one of the lessons of exile.”
They looked at each other and smiled their complicit, Averroist smile.
Jewish sacred books that are no longer usable cannot be thrown out because they contain the name of God, so they are put in a geniza, from the Hebrew meaning “to store,” usually in a synagogue’s attic or basement. In the year of the Lord 882, the Jews of Fustat bought and renovated the derelict Coptic Church of Saint Michael, turning it into the Ibn Ezra Synagogue, where Yehezkel had prayed as a boy. For three centuries Fustat’s Jews stuffed such writings into a hole high up in the wall of the women’s section, and through it into a small attic under the roof.
The way Divine Providence helped them was to ensure that Avraham ben Moshe would be the nagid, so that if he decided to allow them into the geniza, no rabbi or notable in the community, curses notwithstanding, would dare to object.