He turned westward and looked across the river toward an island. “That building on the point houses a Nilometer. Before the dams went in, the Nile would swamp this whole valley most years. When it retreated, the soil it left behind was very rich. Since ancient times, a Nilometer has measured the flood. If the river rose high, there was a festival of thanksgiving to the gods. If it was low, the priests would pray very hard because the crops might fail and there would be famine.”
“The seven lean years,” I said, remembering Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. “That was when the Hebrews first came to Egypt.”
“Yes, and four hundred years later, Moses said, ‘Let my people go!’ But there is an ancient Egyptian version of the Exodus as well,” Karl told me. “In their version, the Hebrews were not merely numerous but also tempted good Egyptians to apostasy. The Yahweh cult was an affront to the gods who ruled the Nile. And so? The floods failed. Catastrophe! In the Egyptian story, Pharaoh told our leaders, ‘Take your people and leave!’ He tried many times to kick us out, but we Jews refused to go because Egypt is so lovely. Finally it was necessary to drive us away with chariots.”
I laughed, amazed by the notion, and said, “I suppose there are two sides to every story.”
“Or three, or four,” he said.
And then it hit me. Us. We Jews.
“You yourself are … ?”
“Jewish. By heritage, yes,” he said, his lively features now quite still. “Are you shocked, Agnes?”
I had gotten used to the idea that Karl was a German, but now there was this, and it was a surprise. When I said nothing, he tried to make a joke of it. “See?” he offered, removing his hat and bending over to show me the top of his head. “No horns.”
You must understand—as Karl himself did—that in those days Christians believed it rude even to say the bare, bald word “Jew.” In public we might say that someone was “of the Hebrew race,” but never that someone was “a Jew.” In private, I am ashamed to tell you, the word was an insult among Americans of my time. When Mumma got a supplier to drop his price, there would be a glint in her eye as she whispered to us at dinner, “I jewed him down by half.” Or if someone got the better of her, she would admit, with grudging admiration, “He’s as clever as a Jew.” Even when there were good Christians on both sides of a transaction, to be a Jew was to be a sharp bargainer, avaricious and untrustworthy. And to socialize with Jews was simply unthinkable among people like …
Well, like me.
I’d never even met a Jewish person back in Ohio, as far as I was aware. To work in Little Italy among papist children was scandal enough, given that I was not there to evangelize among them. Yes, Cleveland had a growing community of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, but they lived in the Glenville neighborhood, where no one nice would ever think of going.
Standing there, watching my mute struggle with convention, Karl’s expression was one of suspended judgment, waiting for evidence of my true character. He busied himself with his pipe, packing it with tobacco, but something about the way he held his shoulders, the slight stiffness of his posture, made me aware that he was braced for the snub, prepared to be scorned. This man—so urbane and confident, so friendly and generous—this dear man could be wounded to the quick by what I said next.
Feeling another slender thread to my old life snap, I found my voice. “It makes no difference to me,” I said with what I hoped would sound like insouciance.
He lit the pipe, puffing rhythmically, eyes on mine, and the silence felt like a rebuke. Come now, his expression seemed to say, let us have nothing less than truth between us.
“It did,” I admitted then, my seriousness matching his own. “It used to, but … that was before I met you.”
Another moment passed. He drew in smoke, held it for a moment, and finally released a long, somewhat uneven breath, waving his hand at the plume. “Like a dragon, yes? I think that is why I took the habit up, when I was young,” he said. “I loved stories of knights and dragons, but I was always sympathetic to the poor misunderstood dragons.”
“They had a side, too,” I said, and Karl’s approval was plain.
It was such a simple idea, really, but many things seemed to click into place for me. It was not scandalous or sinful or dangerous to understand a different point of view. I had been raised to believe that to do so was to risk error at least and damnation at worst. Knowing Karl taught me that it was simply good manners, and a more interesting way to live.
Karl, too, had recovered his aplomb. “Frankly,” he confided as we retreated down the hill, “I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religion into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known? When we substitute concurrence for fact, fantasy quickly replaces knowledge. Why? Because knowledge is much more trouble to acquire!”
And yet, he seemed fascinated by all religions that day as we strolled from church to synagogue to mosque. Our first destination within the ancient city walls was the nearly unpronounceable El-Moallaqa, whose name I had noticed in my guidebook just before Winston arrived to ruin my day. Karl directed me toward a shuffling group of tourists, and as we trudged up a long stone staircase toward a set of twin bell towers, he asked, “You see how this church uses the Roman tower for some of its wall? This is the earliest place of public Christian worship. Legend says that Saints Peter and Paul both preached here.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“I believe there is a festival each year on their feast day. Lots of visitors bringing lots of contributions.” He pointed to a sign in many languages and several alphabets, displayed above a rack of postcards sold in support of a children’s home. I expected him to tell me that there was no such place, but Karl dropped a coin into the box and urged me to take a souvenir. “The orphanage is real,” he assured me, “and so are the needs of the children.”
At the top of the stairs, Karl tapped the tobacco from his pipe, letting the ashes fall over the balustrade. With a wink and a finger on his lips, he picked Rosie up and kept her tucked close to his chest, hoping to sneak her in, and in the event, nobody seemed to care.
We passed through tall doors standing between chiseled pillars topped by lavishly tiled arches. Inside, three barrel vaults rested on graceful arches completely covered by gorgeous geometric mosaics and supported by columns with beautifully carved capitals. “Eleventh century,” Karl said. “A good time for masons. The icons date to the late seventeen hundreds—”
“But … I thought you said this was the first Christian church?”
“I’m sorry. I was perhaps not clear. This is the first public place of Christian worship. The church itself has been demolished and rebuilt many times. There are always fires here in Cairo, and earthquakes.”
“And conquerors,” I said, pleased when he smiled.
“Most of the wall decorations are modern Coptic, but look at that pillar. You see, third on the right? That is probably ninth century.”
“Karl, I’ve heard the word ‘Coptic’ before. but I don’t really know what it means.”
“The Christians of Egypt are called Copts. The word is a corruption of the Greek for Egypt: Ai-gup-tios. The Arabs turned gup to qop, and the medieval Latinists made that Coptus. Typical of Egypt: layer upon layer,” he said with a smile. “The Copts claim to be the true descendants of the ancient Egyptians, and they may be correct. Look there! Can you see how the Egyptian ankh has become a Christian cross? Paintings of the Virgin suckling Jesus are very like those of Isis nursing the baby Horus. Most Egyptians converted to Islam thirteen hundred years ago. Coptic Christians are very few today. They have not much influence.”
Here and there, the blaring voices of tour guides competed for attention with Karl’s quiet instruction. “Now that the war is over, it seems the entire population of Britain has booked a tour with Cook’s,” he remarked. Then he leaned closer to speak quietly into my ear. “This church retains some aspec
ts of an ancient synagogue. You see the wooden dividers?” he asked. “They are to separate the men from the women, yet the overall design is that of a basilica. The main altar is behind those screens.” He gestured toward exquisite panels of cypress and sycamore. “They are very old. The most elegant in Egypt, I think.”
We passed out of the murmuring darkness into the narrow street beyond, and Karl took me to visit two more churches. Of them, I recall only the passage from sun glare to near blindness in the shadowed stony chill inside, and the disorientation I felt until my eyes adjusted enough to discern exotic artwork in sputtering candlelight.
Far more interesting were the lively neighborhoods into which these churches were wedged. Tourists busily shopped for rugs, brasses, and ivories in little stores. Local people haggled over onions, leeks, and cabbages piled high on rickety carts. Most vivid of all were the gaggles of children who pointed and laughed at Rosie or offered to sell us freshly carved scarabs and spurious antiquities, which Karl warned me not to buy. My students at Murray Hill had seemed poor, but they were kings compared to those stunted, barefoot urchins. Many were disfigured by scabby eyes or withered legs or scarred hands crabbed by burns. Parents sometimes deliberately maimed a son to make him more appealing to tourists, Karl told me. A visibly defective child might be sold or rented out to Fagin-like professionals who sent groups of little beggars out to collect alms, which they turned over to their masters. And yet those children all smiled gloriously, teeth gleaming white in their small dark faces. They seemed to me angels, or imbeciles, or both, by turns.
Around noon, we stopped at an outdoor café tucked into a blind alley off a side street. It was patronized by Egyptians and old Cairo hands, Karl told me, and therefore of no interest to tourists or beggars. He placed our order in Arabic; it was received with enthusiasm by a thin young man, who salaamed and disappeared inside his tiny place of business.
A few doors down, a barber was sitting cross-legged on the cobblestones. In lieu of a shop with a striped pole, he had spread a scrap of cloth upon the pavement and laid out a set of archaic-looking tools next to a copper bowl filled with water. Customers appeared out of nowhere. Young and old, one by one, each shook the barber’s hand and then squatted down facing him to await their turn.
Our coffees were delivered on a beautiful brass tray, in tiny glass cups set into filigreed metal holders. Sipping at the syrupy, sweet drink, I watched the barber at work, fascinated by this example of private life lived in the open air. Mustaches were trimmed to tidy points. The sides of curly mops were clipped close until heads resembled white-walled cottages beneath thatched roofs. When the barber finished, Karl told me, each customer would pay whatever he considered the job to be worth: one piastre or two—the equivalent of a penny or nickel at home.
“Karl, there was a beggar boy who caught my eye—he had a large square patch of hair shaved out, right on the top of his head. Did you notice him?” I asked while we waited for our meals. “Does that style mean something?”
“I suppose it is just for fancy,” Karl said, “or maybe for a wedding.”
When our plates of lamb and rice appeared, Karl spoke to the young waiter for a few minutes. Motioning at the top of his head, he evidently described the boy with the odd haircut. The waiter unleashed a broad and happy grin and spoke at length. To my surprise, Karl invited the waiter to sit with us.
His name was Ashour, the young man told me in remarkably good English, and the little boy’s unusual haircut was indeed in honor of a recent wedding, which was Ashour’s own. Ashour was twenty-three and admitted that was very late to marry. “For five years, I try to make wedding,” he said earnestly, “but I have bad luck. Each year somebody die, and I cannot.”
“If someone dies, there are no weddings for a year?” I asked.
“Yes, madams. Each year I try, and then at the new year, a baby die or an old gentlemans, and it cannot be.”
Last month, the great day had at last arrived. Ashour’s wedding was a grand affair. “There was big tent and everybody he come. From my village. From Cairo. From American Express Company! I wait tables, and I know many peoples, madams. Everybody he come and eat and drink. Tea, coffee, cocoa. Champagne and wine, and many other things. Meat and apricots and chicken, more than you ever saw.” Eyes shut, he swayed in memory of the magnificence. “And music! For three days, with eight womans to dance. Eight! Me, I not drink, ever,” he assured us piously, “but on third night, I am so tired, I am falling like drunk. So much food and music, so much dancing womans!” And he reeled in his chair, miming the effects of the endless meal, the exhausting beat of the music, the relentless dancing.
Ashour was quite a catch, I gathered. His job at the café had afforded him a house with three rooms, and he was able to provide his bride with a wedding dress from a store. Everyone was impressed when she sat down among the veiled women of two families. His bride’s hair was dressed with gold bangles, and she brought with her a dowry of gold necklaces and gold chains for her waist. She was, Ashour assured us, “very pure.”
Karl asked something in Arabic, and there was a brief, prideful answer and a short discussion before Ashour spoke again in English. “At first she cry,” he admitted to me, as though I, too, had followed their exchange. “Every day she cry. But soon she will make me a son, and she all the time very happy. And she keeps my house clean. Very clean!”
Once again, he and Karl fell into Arabic. The conversation ended in Karl’s polite demurral, handshakes, and a large tip left on the table.
“What was all that about?” I asked, walking away.
“He invited us to his village to be his guests, but I said no.”
I tried to hide my disappointment. “It might have been interesting.”
“I think it would be too sad. Ashour’s wife is only twelve years old.”
“Twelve!” I stopped dead and stared.
“But very pure,” Karl said, echoing Ashour’s guileless pride. “And she keeps his house very clean! That’s why he wanted us to visit: so we could see what a good housekeeper he has.”
“Good gracious! No wonder she cries every day!”
“Islamic theology is sublime, Agnes. For Jews, I think, it is more familiar than Christianity—a true monotheism, unlike the Trinity. But at the level of the family?” He shook his head, and we walked on. “Most religions seem to concentrate on making sure that men do not raise someone else’s sons. And if little girls are married off at twelve—”
“There is less opportunity for the gods to visit in the night.”
“And fewer inconvenient babies.”
We walked on in silence, alone with our thoughts, until Karl stopped at the austere facade of a building he identified as the Ben Ezra synagogue. “After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, many Jews fled to Alexandria. A few came here, where there has been a synagogue since the time of Jeremiah. There is a tomb inside. Legends say it is Jeremiah’s, but I think not. He lived in Taphanes.”
“Are we allowed to go in?”
“There’s not much to see.” Karl seemed oddly distracted, as though his mind were elsewhere even while he explained, “The most interesting thing about Ben Ezra was its geniza—a treasury of ancient writings. Egyptian Jews believe that any paper bearing the name of God must be preserved. When the building was being repaired in the last century, many documents were found. They are a detailed account of medieval life in Cairo, but in Hebrew, naturally. I learned some Hebrew when I was a boy, but I have forgotten it all.” His shrug was not embarrassed or regretful but, rather, seemed a reflection of a deepening gloom. “In any case, the documents were removed to Cambridge University.”
We walked on toward Amr Ibn al-Aas, the “ur-mosque,” Karl called it. Like the suspended church and the Ben Ezra synagogue, it had been destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly, he told me, but the site had been dedicated to the worship of Allah since the year 641.
Rosie, of course, would not be allowed inside. So as not to give even a hint of disrespect, Karl
stayed with her across the narrow street from the entrance. “That fountain is for ablutions,” he said, indicating a small stone object that dribbled water into what appeared to be a wading pool. “You must remove your shoes at the entrance. Walk through the water to wash your feet. Give the old man a piastre when you are finished. Then you may go in.”
It was a large, airy, open place, as unadorned and empty as the churches had been sumptuous. Like them, it was peopled almost entirely by tourists. In the center, however, stood three white-robed worshippers: two young men and an elderly one, who did not seem to notice that they were objects of foreign curiosity. Serene in their devotion, they dropped to their knees and bent forward until their foreheads touched the ground between hands held palms to the floor. Then they settled back on their heels, stood, and repeated the ritual.
“Muhammad was driven from Mecca for introducing that posture of prayer,” Karl told me when I returned. “He was forty when he was seized by God and commanded to recite the Koran and to preach islam: submission to Allah. To bow, forehead to the ground? That was outrageous and disgusting to the merchant princes of Mecca. Eventually, Muhammad defeated them in battle, and today a devout Muslim can be identified by the callus his forehead bears.”
As the day went on, Karl remained informative but distant from me, as though a pane of glass had come between us. I was increasingly distressed by the sense that I myself was the cause of his detachment. It was a familiar sensation: this feeling that I had unknowingly disappointed someone or failed to rise to an occasion when better behavior was expected of me. Anyone’s silence or despondency seemed to carry me back to childhood, as if I were still trying to imagine what I’d done to sadden Mumma and frantic to make it up to her.
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