The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

  On the taxi ride back from the airport he was excited, rustling my hair and talking in his broken shuffle of English about our plans for the summer. I tried to pay attention to what he was saying, but I was tired from the flight and spent most of the ride staring out at the city, at the piles of trash and the crumbling unfinished apartment buildings, the freeway overpasses crammed with honking little taxis and the bright Arabic billboards advertising strange brands of laundry detergent and fruit juice.

  “Here we are,” my father said proudly as the taxi pulled up in front of a huge cement apartment block. “What do you think?”

  It wasn’t how I imagined. None of it was. But the last thing I wanted was for him to see the disappointment on my face.

  “It’s nice,” I said, doing my best to smile. “Really great.”

  That first week in Cairo wasn’t easy. Stuck in a strange hot polluted city with a father and a family I hardly knew, I had a bad heat rash and persistent low-grade diarrhea, both of which were exacerbated by my aunt Basimah’s home remedies. My father lived with his brother—Uncle Hassan—and his family, which meant I was forced to share a bedroom with Aisha. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she was forced to share a bedroom with me. In any case, she made no secret of the inconvenience I caused by being in her space.

  “Do you have to breathe so loud?” she asked that first night as we lay across the room from each other. Her slight British accent gave the question an extra sharpness.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind,” she said, then muttered something to herself in Arabic and pulled a pillow over her head.

  I told my mother I wanted to come home early and she said to give it a few more days. As usual, she was right. Eventually I got used to the microbes and everyone calling me Yusuf. The heat and pollution began to feel normal and, by the end of that first week, Aisha and I were inseparable.

  Most mornings, we spent lounging around the apartment, watching old black-and-white Egyptian movies on TV, reading The Cartoon History of the Universe, or helping Aunt Basimah in the kitchen. We played board games, wrote adventure novels set in Siberia and the Sahara; and Aisha taught me an Egyptian version of Truth or Dare that we played late at night while the rest of the family was asleep.

  But as much as I enjoyed spending time with my cousin, the best days were those when my father agreed to take me along with him on his rounds. After lunch, we would catch a taxi to Nasr City, Dokki, or some other unfamiliar neighborhood, and walk together up the main street, drumming up business for Uncle Hassan’s burgeoning produce distribution concern. My father was a born salesman and it was a pleasure just watching him work. As he wheedled and joked, smoked cigarettes and drank glass after glass of sweet black tea, I sat quietly in the corner of the restaurant or produce stand, reading my comics and thinking about the rice pudding the two of us always shared at the end of the day. Occasionally, a friendly waiter or shopkeeper would direct the flow of conversation my way and I would respond with the string of stock Arabic phrases Aisha had taught me.

  “I don’t speak Arabic well. I am American of Egyptian heritage. I like Cairo very much.”

  This was usually sufficient to slake their curiosity. And it was true. Aside from those first few weeks, it ended up being a great summer. My father and I rode camels behind the pyramids, we saw the mummies at the Egyptian Museum, and we climbed the stairs all the way to the top of the Cairo Tower, from which we could see the entire city spread out below us like a map. But of all the days that summer, the one that stuck with me most was the afternoon my father took me, Uncle Hassan, and a couple of distant male cousins on a felucca ride down the Nile.

  It was a bright blue-and-white day. There was a soft breeze blowing upriver and the windows of the skyscrapers along the water glinted with reflected sunlight. I was sitting with my father at the back of the boat while Uncle Hassan and my cousins manned the front. We sailed up the Nile for an hour or so; then the captain dropped anchor near the bottom tip of Zamalek and everyone stripped down to their underwear and jumped in. They beckoned for me to join, but in spite of my father’s assurances, I didn’t trust the water. It looked like the kind of river—thick with silt the color of coffee ice cream—where you might find leeches and piranhas or, at the very least, those slimy little fish that ate the dead skin off your feet.

  “No, thank you,” I said in Arabic and leaned back against the side of the boat in an effort to convey my comfort.

  After a few minutes of splashing around, Uncle Hassan pulled himself back into the boat. I remember he smiled and made as if to light a cigarette. Then, with a violent lurch, he wrapped his arms around my chest and threw me into the Nile. The abruptness of it knocked the wind out of me and when I came up, sputtering and coughing, trying to tread water in wet shoes and jeans, everyone was laughing. My cousins sang a humorous song in my honor and I tried to laugh along with them, even though I knew I was the butt of the joke.

  Back in the boat, I took off my wet clothes and set them out to dry. There were angry tears welling up at the corners of my eyes, but I held them back, knowing from experience that crying only made things worse. I was mad at Uncle Hassan. But most of all, I blamed my father, for allowing it to happen, for not protecting me, and for chuckling to himself as he draped the towel over my shoulders. To his credit, he didn’t say anything once he saw that I was upset. He didn’t try to explain himself or apologize. He just sat there with me at the back of the boat, watching the murky brown water pass a few feet below us.

  “There is a proverb,” he said eventually. “ ‘Drink from the Nile and you will always return. Swim in it and you will never leave.’ ”

  Then he leaned over the edge of the boat and cupped out a handful of water.

  “This is our blood,” he went on, trickling the water onto my knee. “Nearly a thousand years our family has lived on the Nile. This river is in our veins.”

  He lit a cigarette and we were both quiet for a long while.

  “We are watchers,” he said, throwing the half-smoked butt into the Nile. When I didn’t respond, he explained. “Our name, al-Raqb, it means ‘the watcher,’ ‘he who watches.’ ”

  “ ‘He who watches,’ ” I repeated, and he smiled.

  “It is the forty-third name of God.”

  He thought for a moment, shading his eyes against the sun; then he asked me the same question he asked every Sunday night.

  “Would you like to hear a story?”

  “Yes,” I said, and he began.

  “Once there was a boy named Ali—”

  I must have heard that story a dozen times before. But that particular afternoon—watching the city unfold from its haze—it felt more immediate, more real. This river a few feet below us was the same river that had flowed through the city a thousand years earlier, when Ali al-Raqb first took up the position of watchman, the same river that had flooded the valley every spring for hundreds of years.

  “We protect the synagogue,” my father said when the story finished, “and we guard its secrets.”

  “Secrets?” I asked.

  He shifted in his seat and, glancing back over his shoulder, dropped his voice slightly, so no one else on the boat could hear what he was saying.

  In one corner of the courtyard, he told me, there was a well that marked the place where the baby Moses was taken from the Nile. Beneath the paving stones of the main entrance was a storeroom filled with relics, including a plank from Noah’s Ark. And hidden in the attic, behind a secret panel, was the greatest secret of all, the Ezra Scroll.

  He leaned in, so close that I could feel his breath on my face.

  More than two thousand years ago, he said, during the time of the prophets, there lived a fiery scribe named Ezra who took it upon himself to produce a perfect Torah scroll, without flaw or innovation. He worked on the scroll for many years and
when he was finished, he presented it to the entire community. The people assembled outside the walls of Jerusalem. And when Ezra opened the scroll, they all stood, for they knew that this was the one true version of God’s word. It was the perfect book, the perfect incarnation of God’s name, and it glowed with a magic that could heal the sick, enlighten the perplexed, or bring back the spirits of the dead.

  “Have you seen it?” I asked. “Is it real?”

  My father lit a new cigarette and stared into the water, as if he might find his story there.

  “That’s enough for today,” he said, eventually, and I knew not to press any further.

  For the rest of the ride, as we sailed back toward the 26th of July Bridge, I sat with my father at the back of the boat, looking out on the water and thinking about the heroic history of our family, about the Ezra Scroll and the generations of watchmen who protected it.

  For much of my childhood, my last name—al-Raqb—had felt like a burden. I hated the questions it inspired, the taunts, and the well-meaning adults wondering where a name like that came from. I dreaded the moment when, without fail, substitute teachers would pause and glance up from the attendance sheet, apologizing in advance for their mispronunciation. It even looked strange—al-Raqb—the hyphen in the middle, the lowercase “a,” and that unpronounceable double consonant at the end. In third grade, prompted by a particularly embarrassing incident with a new teacher, I had waged a semi-protracted and nearly successful campaign to change my last name to Shemarya, like my mom, or Levy, like Bill. But that afternoon on the Nile, I wouldn’t have traded al-Raqb for anything.

  I was a watcher, I told myself. He who watches.

  * * *

  —

  My father and I often discussed plans for me to visit again. But for whatever reason—money, summer camp, conflicting schedules—it never worked out. And as the years passed, Cairo began to recede from my imagination. Middle school gave way to high school. Video games, pubic hair, and growth spurts were replaced with cross-country practice, AP tests, and bad poetry. I started college, came out, fell in with a group of art students in my dorm and, without much thought to the future, decided to major in English. I took to wearing long knit scarves, thick sweaters, and a tan peacoat I bought at a thrift store in Somerville. Instead of holing up in the library with the rest of my friends, I did my reading—Mrs. Dalloway, John Donne, Invisible Man—in a humid café off Commonwealth, trying not to be too obvious as I glanced up over the top of my book and noticed the barista or that guy across the room.

  Everything was going smoothly. Then one Sunday night, toward the end of my freshman year, I got a call from Aisha. She said my father was sick and that I might think about coming to visit.

  “Can I talk to him?” I asked, holding up a finger to let my friends know I might be a minute.

  “He doesn’t want us to tell you,” she said. “But you should come. It will be good for him to see you.”

  My mother and Bill said they would pay for my plane ticket, and the literary magazine where I was interning that summer agreed to let me start a few weeks late. So I went. Eight years later and twelve inches taller, I returned to Cairo, that gangly oversensitive eleven-year-old transformed into a reasonably self-assured college student, shaggy about the edges, smug, and bristling with the possibility of it all.

  Meanwhile, my father was wasting away. Aunt Basimah told me what the doctors had said, but I didn’t need red blood cell counts to see that he wasn’t doing well. His face was slack and his skin had the sallow appearance of soft cheese. Most days, he didn’t have the energy to go out. So I spent the majority of the visit sitting next to him on the couch, watching old black-and-white Egyptian movies while he sipped his tea and counted the pills on his tray.

  “You don’t need to sit here all day,” he said more than once. “Go out. Enjoy yourself.”

  But I knew he was glad to have me there. And I knew that one day I would be glad to have sat with him. We talked about my classes and my plans for the future. I told him about Boston and my internship. We discussed Egyptian politics, such as it was, and I explained the meaning of the term “postcolonial.” But he didn’t want to talk about his health. When I asked how he was feeling or whether the chemotherapy was affecting his appetite, he closed his eyes, as if the very question pained him, and changed the subject.

  “It is always the same movie,” he said one afternoon when I was especially insistent. He looked at me, then turned back to the television, where a handsome older man in a tuxedo was speaking to a desperate young woman. “Always the same movie, even when it is different.”

  In a way, I was glad my father didn’t want to talk about his cancer. I was still trying to understand what it meant, still trying to reconcile that man on the couch with the father of my imagination. And besides, I understood. When you said something, it became real. When you said something, you had to start dealing with it.

  “He’s so much happier with you here,” Aisha said a few nights later. We were at a bar on the roof of the Four Seasons, a birthday party for one of her friends from university. “You can see the difference in his face.”

  At the other end of the table, the conversation skipped from scuba diving in Sharm el-Sheikh to someone’s brother who worked in marketing at Unilever. One of Aisha’s friends was telling a story about his family’s maid, a refugee from the Sudan who had been living on the roof of their house.

  “I just wish—”

  I didn’t finish the sentence, but she knew where I was going.

  “If it makes you feel any better, he doesn’t talk about it with anyone.”

  I looked down at a plate of empty pistachio shells, then out over the edge of the roof. Below us, the lights of the city bled into each other like far-off conversations, interrupted only by the empty blackness of the Nile.

  “It’s always easier to pretend,” Aisha said, following my gaze, “for everyone.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess you’re right.”

  There was a double meaning to her comment. But I didn’t make the connection until a few days later, when we were all out to dinner at Uncle Hassan’s favorite restaurant, a fancy Lebanese place in Mohandessin with white tablecloths and crimson-vested waiters. Toward the end of the meal—the table covered with half-eaten plates of hummus, baba ghanoush, kibbeh, and stuffed grape leaves—my uncle started asking me, in his clunky businessman’s English, what I thought of the young women at the table next to us.

  “They seem nice,” I said.

  “Really nice,” Uncle Hassan insisted.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, brushing a pile of crumbs into my hand, “really nice.”

  I had come out to Aisha a few months earlier—right after I told my mother and Bill—and I think Aunt Basimah might have suspected something. But I didn’t intend to tell my father or Uncle Hassan, at least not for the time being. I wasn’t sure how they would react and didn’t want to stress out my father.

  Although, of course, that’s exactly what ended up happening.

  “What?” Uncle Hassan pressed, sensing my lack of enthusiasm. “Egyptian girls aren’t good enough for you?”

  “He’s too much in his studies,” Aunt Basimah interjected. “You should have a little fun, Yusuf. You’re on vacation.”

  Aisha did her best to change the subject.

  “What’s that spice?” she asked, taking another bite of the kibbeh. “Cinnamon? Maybe nutmeg?”

  But Uncle Hassan wouldn’t let up.

  “You’re on vacation,” my uncle said. Leaning in far too close, he put his hand on my forearm. “If you want, Yusuf, I know some nice girls.”

  “I don’t want any nice girls,” I said, and pulled away.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  He dangled the question in front of me like a flashy lure. And I knew in that moment I had a choice. I could con
tinue hiding, I could continue protecting them, and myself. Or I could lay it all out on the table and hope for the best. In the silence that followed, I took a sip of water, put my glass down, and looked directly at Uncle Hassan. He raised his eyebrows, waiting for a response, and I felt a chill wash through me.

  When it came down to it, the issue wasn’t really who I slept with. If I got a girlfriend for show and went around with guys on the side, everything would be fine. That was the standard operating procedure in Egypt, at least as far as I understood it. The transgression was in the act of confession.

  “Boys,” I said, in the calmest voice I could manage. “I want some nice boys.”

  At that point, my father, who had been watching the entire interaction in silence, rose slowly from his seat and laid his hands flat on the table. He gave his brother a look of disgust, then turned and, swaying slightly from a radiation treatment earlier that week, walked toward the bathrooms.

  A few minutes later he came back, lowered himself into his chair, and dabbed at his lips with a napkin. He didn’t say anything and neither did anyone else. We ate dessert, then drove back to the apartment, my father and Uncle Hassan silent in the front seat while Aunt Basimah went on about her great-aunt, who had married a Lebanese man and lived in Beirut for more than forty years before she was killed by a car bomb intended for a PLO leader who bought croissants every morning at the bakery down the street from her apartment.

  “My dad can be such a fucking asshole,” Aisha said, once everyone else had gone to bed. She kicked the foot of her desk. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, staring at my hand, “I think so.”

  There was a tingling in the tips of my fingers, and my breath felt shallower than usual. Other than that, I was okay. I hadn’t been disowned. No one had thrown any plates or made any angry proclamations. There wasn’t even any overt disapproval. But that next morning when I sat down next to my father, the couch cushion between us felt like a brick wall. We spent the following week in tense silence. I went out a few times with Aisha and her friends, bought some touristy knickknacks from Khan el-Khalili. Then I flew back to Boston and started my internship.