The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

  A couple of weeks later, Aunt Basimah called to give me an update on my father’s health.

  “He sends his love,” she said at the end of the call.

  “Is he there?” I asked. “Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s asleep,” she said, a little too quickly. “But he said, he wanted me to send his love.”

  It was like that all summer. Every time I talked to Aisha or Aunt Basimah, at the end of the call I would ask to talk to my father, and every time he was either sleeping or too tired or not feeling up to it. He sent his love. He asked after me. But he could never talk. Aisha said he just needed some time and eventually I was able to convince myself that everything would work out. One day he would call and everything would go back to normal. But of course Aisha was wrong. You can never go back to normal.

  When, at the end of August, he finally had the strength to talk, our conversation was limp and stilted. We were like two old college roommates whose lives had taken us in different directions. We talked about the weather and the news, Uncle Hassan’s business, Aunt Basimah’s cooking. He asked about my internship and I told him that one of the stories I had picked out of the slush pile might get published in the magazine.

  “What’s it about?” he asked.

  I tried to describe the story, but ended up getting lost in the different narrative strands.

  “It sounds interesting,” he said.

  It was then—in his polite interest, in the strain at the end of his breath—that I understood. This might be the best I could expect.

  Not that it was so bad. During sophomore year, my father’s cancer went into remission, and we settled into a new routine, talking once or twice a month on Sunday morning. There was a warmth to those conversations, if not much depth. I told him about the Arabic classes I was taking, my thoughts about applying to graduate school, and, when I got in, the pros and cons of the various programs. We talked about family, politics, literature, and soccer. But we avoided digging too deep, making sure to stay clear of any subjects that might upset the balance of our relationship. In seven years, we never once discussed my personal life. I never mentioned any of my boyfriends or breakups. I didn’t really even talk about my friends. And I never once asked how his treatment was going, how he was feeling. I never asked what he was thinking that evening at the Lebanese restaurant in Mohandessin. I never asked him about leaving the synagogue or meeting my mother. I never asked about Ali al-Raqb or the Ezra Scroll. And I never asked him to tell me another story.

  3

  MRS. AGNES LEWIS and Mrs. Margaret Gibson arrived in Cairo on the Two-fifteen Express from Alexandria. This was how their timetable referred to it, the Two-fifteen Express. Although in actuality the train was rather ponderous. When they finally pulled into Cairo Station—having been delayed by high winds, flooding, a faulty track switch, and a fugitive cow ruminating in the middle of the tracks—it was already well past dusk. Agnes’s pocket watch showed 7:25, more than three hours behind schedule.

  Taken alone, the travails of the Two-fifteen Express would not have been especially irritating. But the twins had been traveling for six days straight, without proper rest or sanitation, and they were both feeling rather crabby. Fifteen years ago, they might have reveled in the adventure of it all—the Channel passage, the train across France, the boat trip from Marseilles. Fifteen years ago they might have overlooked the fleas and the damp and the motion sickness. They might have brushed all that aside as soon as the looming hulk of the Citadel came into view. But this was not fifteen years ago. It was the first month in the year of our Lord 1897. They had turned fifty-four just a few weeks earlier, and felt every aching year of it. No matter what might happen, whether they found their documents or not, this would most likely be their last trip to Egypt.

  Agnes alighted first, followed by Margaret, and they stood side by side at the edge of the platform. From a distance they were indistinguishable, both women of distinction, both wrapped in furs, both squat and sharp-eyed with stringy gray-brown hair wrapped in a loose bun. Closer scrutiny would reveal Margaret’s mole, the creakiness of Agnes’s gait, and a slightly different shade of green in the eyes. For all intents and purposes, however, they were perfect replicas of each other, an august pair of British widows fringed with the scorch of Presbyterianism.

  Undisturbed by the tumult of the platform, Agnes and Margaret took in the arc of the station’s new steel ceiling and the useless clack of the arrival board. Green-turbaned pashas brushed past half-naked stevedores and dusty fellaheen laden with great bags of cotton. Two or three dark-veiled women haunted the edges of the crowd, slipping through a brigade of British tourists tromping, no doubt, to Shepheard’s Hotel, lunch at the Gezira Club, and a steam packet down the Nile. With a subtle tilt of her chin, Agnes indicated an old Nubian porter smoking a cigarette next to the newsstand, and they crossed the platform toward him.

  “Excuse us,” Margaret said, using her most mellifluous Arabic. “We have ten trunks on the Two-fifteen from Alexandria, all marked with the names Lewis and Gibson. We would be exceedingly gratified if you were to convey them to our carriage outside.”

  The man hesitated for a moment to examine them more closely. Then he extinguished his cigarette on the bottom of his sandal and set off to collect their things.

  “They’re fragile,” Agnes called after him, but he did not appear to hear.

  Once their trunks were loaded and the porter paid, the carriage driver set off down Clot Bey Street toward the Hotel d’Angleterre. He took the long way, as Margaret requested, through the Ezbekiyya Gardens.

  “It is a slight detour,” she said, in anticipation of her sister’s objections, “but so much more pleasant. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” Agnes said, softening into her seat. “I do.”

  For there was nothing quite like riding through the gardens at twilight. The shadow of overhanging palms, the warm night air, the scrape of carriage wheels on gravel, it all brought back that same girlish excitement they had felt on their first visit to Cairo so many years ago. Under the yellow flicker of gas lamps, the old city appeared to be nothing more than an outline, a quaint sprinkling of minarets against the darkness. And when their hotel appeared, rising up between a hedgerow and the gently arched frond of a palm, it looked like an enormous pink cake.

  This was not their first stay at the Hotel d’Angleterre, but in the past few years its decor had changed considerably. The lobby had been draped in heavy teal curtains and someone had seen fit to adorn the room with paintings of typical Egyptian scenes, as if to imply that the Nile, the pyramids, Mount Sinai, and the Colossus of Abu Simbel were all waiting there on the other side of the wall. As they followed the bellhop across the lobby, the sisters both glanced at a party of package tourists huddled around the grand fireplace, drinking cordials and talking excitedly about the high quality of perfume to be found in the Khan el-Khalili. Margaret gave them a quick smile, pleasant almost to the point of inviting conversation, but not quite.

  “Your room, please,” the bellhop said, after leading them up the staircase. Agnes stepped up to the threshold of Room 327 and leaned in to get a better look.

  “Your room,” the bellhop offered again, stiffening his arm to indicate that they should enter before him. The sisters exchanged a glance and Agnes stepped back into the hallway.

  “Unfortunately,” she explained in Arabic, “this is not our room. We asked for a north-facing room with two queen-sized beds and a bath. This room faces south and, I may be mistaken, but I do not see a bath.”

  The boy looked to Margaret, who nodded her agreement.

  “Please,” he said in English and, holding up his index finger, rushed back down to the lobby.

  A few minutes later, he returned with the concierge, a large man with the aspect of an overripe and somewhat bruised tropical fruit. Arriving at the threshold of Room 327, he wiped his forehead w
ith a handkerchief and looked inside.

  “The ladies’ room is not to their liking?”

  “The room is nice enough,” said Agnes. “Unfortunately, it is not the ladies’.”

  While Margaret explained that they had requested a room with a north-facing view, two queen-sized beds, and a bath, the concierge sucked at his mustache and watched his fingers walk around a circle of prayer beads.

  “There is one room I can offer,” he said, “on this floor, very large, facing north, with two queen beds.”

  Room 322 was across the hall. And indeed, it was quite a bit larger than 327, with a north-facing view, two queen-sized beds, and a claw-foot tub in the bathroom.

  “Of course,” the concierge said, when he saw that the ladies found their new room to be satisfactory, “this room is somewhat more expensive.”

  “Of course,” Margaret agreed, placing a hand on her sister’s forearm.

  Traveling throughout the Near East, often without the fortification of male companionship, Agnes and Margaret had, over the years, developed a nose for swindlers and a stomach for bargaining that matched even the most tenacious of shopkeepers in the Khan el-Khalili. Not that they needed to be frugal. Their dear father had left them enough money to be happily fleeced for the rest of their lives, and then some. For the twins, thrift was a point of pride. And moreover, every pound saved was another pound they could give to charity. In a very real sense, this smarmy concierge was attempting to divert funds away from the assistance of war orphans, the rescue of ancient documents, and the establishment of a new Presbyterian Synod in Cambridge.

  “We will gladly pay the price we agreed to last month,” Margaret said. Reaching into her handbag, she produced a letter from the owner of the hotel, detailing the terms of their agreement. “Seventy piastres a night, I believe.”

  “Yes,” the concierge said, without looking at the letter, “seventy piastres a night, plus taxes and tips.”

  * * *

  —

  After their trunks had been brought up and a round of baksheesh dispensed to everyone the least bit involved with the endeavor, Agnes lay down for a moment while Margaret busied herself making certain all their luggage had arrived in good condition. Between them, the twins had ten steamer trunks. Four were filled with various dresses, petticoats, shoes, furs, hats, and other sartorial items required for a journey that would take them from the dining room of Shepheard’s Hotel to the wilds of the Sinai Desert. Two trunks were crammed with dictionaries, Bibles, lexicons, travel accounts, and sundry other books essential to the identification of ancient manuscripts. One trunk contained all the foodstuffs and medicines they knew they could not procure in Cairo. Another held their tripod, two hundred photographic plates, and the camera itself, a traveling half-plate from Fallowfield. There was a trunk filled with the chemical reagents and other conservation equipment they would need for their trip to St. Catherine’s. And the final trunk contained those items that Mrs. Schechter had asked them to deliver to her husband: a respirator, its attendant spare parts, quinine, and a large magnifying glass.

  Once certain everything was in good condition, Margaret unpacked their chess set from the second library trunk and began arranging the board on a small side table. She was nearly finished setting up her own pieces when the bellhop knocked and slid a note under the door.

  “A letter?” Agnes asked, raising her head from the pillow to see what Margaret was holding.

  “From Dr. Schechter,” Margaret confirmed.

  The twins had come to Cairo to assist Dr. Schechter in obtaining a cache of documents currently housed in the attic of a synagogue in the old city. They had originally planned to travel with him. However, at the last minute they had been detained in Cambridge by an urgent piece of business related to the establishment of the Presbyterian Synod, and everyone agreed that it would be best for Dr. Schechter to go ahead without them, so that he might begin securing the necessary permissions from the Jewish community. Given the exigencies of travel and the sorry state of the postal system in Egypt, they hadn’t heard from him since he left Cambridge, nearly a month earlier, and they were eager for his news.

  “Will you read it?” Agnes asked.

  Margaret glanced over the note, written in Dr. Schechter’s broad and rather hasty scrawl, then seated herself on the edge of the bed and began reading aloud.

  After the requisite salutations, welcoming them to Cairo and asking after their journey, Dr. Schechter informed the twins that they would be very happy to hear of his progress with Rabbi Ben Shimon. He was looking forward to discussing these matters in detail that following evening, when he hoped they would be able to join himself and Miss de Witt for dinner.

  “One supposes that Rabbi Ben Shimon is the Chief Rabbi of Cairo,” Agnes said, once her sister was finished, “but who on earth is Miss de Witt?”

  “I have no idea,” Margaret said, “though it does appear that Dr. Schechter has been rather busy.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “Not at all.”

  Agnes and Margaret had known Dr. Schechter for years. They were of the same set in Cambridge and often saw each other at Dr. Taylor’s house. In addition to their shared interest in biblical scholarship, there was another unspoken bond between them as well: the somewhat bitter knowledge that, in spite of their many scholarly accomplishments, the three of them would always be relegated to the outskirts of Dr. Taylor’s circle and none of them would ever be allowed to join the permanent faculty at Cambridge, Dr. Schechter because of his religion and the twins because of their sex. This knowledge did not encourage a deeper relationship, however. If anything, it did the opposite. Occasionally, the twins had Dr. and Mrs. Schechter over for tea, as part of a larger group, but their connection with him had never progressed much beyond this initial stage of congeniality and shared resentment, at least not until recently.

  One afternoon that past spring, Agnes and Margaret had invited Dr. Schechter over to look through a pile of documents brought back from a previous trip to Egypt. In their initial perusal they had found more than a few intriguing manuscripts, including a fifteenth-century prayer book and a clump of what looked to be ancient incantations of some sort. When they had described the documents to him a few days earlier at Dr. Taylor’s house, Dr. Schechter had been rather excited. Seeing them for himself, however, he seemed unimpressed. Shuffling through the general hodgepodge of ancient letters and business contracts, he paused here and there to smile politely or read a few words aloud. His gaze didn’t rest on any item for more than a moment until, at the bottom of the pile, he came upon a seemingly unremarkable leaf from an early Hebrew codex. After staring down at it for a full three minutes, Dr. Schechter asked whether he might remove the fragment for further inspection. When he returned, later that afternoon, he was in a state of what could only be described as hysteria. The fragment, he had said, once he was able to calm himself, appeared to be a leaf from the original Hebrew version of Ecclesiasticus.

  The sisters exchanged a glance.

  “The original Hebrew?”

  “I believe so,” Dr. Schechter said.

  The implications were tremendous. If authenticated, the fragment would establish a reliable source text for Ecclesiasticus and might even prove Dr. Schechter’s theory about the language of its composition. But what excited him most was the idea that there might be more where this had come from. The condition of the fragment, its size, and the paper on which it was written, all these things led Dr. Schechter to suspect that this leaf from Ecclesiasticus was, as he had put it, but a single petal in a great field of wildflowers. Hands trembling so much he could barely drink his tea, Dr. Schechter had tried unsuccessfully to explain the Jewish prohibition against discarding Torah scrolls, prayer books, and any other papers that might contain the name of God, how most congregations buried these documents in a special section of the graveyard, but some chose to g
ather their godly texts in an attic or storeroom, known as a geniza, until they could be disposed of properly.

  Despite his incoherence, the reason for his excitement was clear. Somewhere in Old Cairo there was a synagogue, the attic of which was filled with ancient manuscripts that hadn’t seen the light of day in hundreds of years. If they were able to secure these documents and bring them back to Cambridge, it would be among the most significant discoveries of the past twenty years, with profound effects on liturgy, linguistics, and biblical scholarship. But they needed to act quickly. For if Agnes and Margaret had been able to purchase this fragment from a common manuscript dealer, it meant that others would be able to buy them, too. Someone with access to the synagogue—a member of the Jewish community, or perhaps one of its employees—was selling the documents on the black market and, without their speedy intercession, this treasure trove of manuscripts would soon be dispersed to the four winds.

  Agnes and Margaret had reason to believe that the synagogue might also contain an even greater treasure: the Ezra Scroll. That very morning in fact, on their journey from Alexandria to Cairo, Margaret had stumbled upon a passage in a seventeenth-century travel account, suggesting that the ark of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue possessed a recess containing a copy of the Mosaic law, written in the very hand of Ezra the Scribe himself, of happy memory. Upon reading those words, she had let out a small yelp of joy and showed the passage to her sister, who responded in a similar manner. The very notion of the Ezra Scroll—a perfect copy of the Hebrew Scriptures written thousands of years ago by the prophet Ezra—was enough to make one’s skin goose with anticipation. If it truly existed, if they found it, if they were able to bring it back to Cambridge, the implications truly could not be greater. It was an idea almost too delicious to ponder. An indisputable source text for the Old Testament, without hint of error or innovation, the Ezra Scroll would be the greatest archeological discovery of the century, if not the millennium. Their names—Mrs. Agnes Lewis and Mrs. Margaret Gibson—would be known to history for years to come and, more importantly, the scroll would serve to establish the true word of God, a perfect and unimpeachable copy of the Hebrew Bible without intermediary or innovation.