Uncle Hassan rubbed the back of his head and loosened the gold band of his watch.
“Of course,” he added, “I did quite well for myself.”
It was true. Without connections or capital—in a country that ran on relationships and bribes—Uncle Hassan had turned his father-in-law’s corner store into a produce distribution empire that sold tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants to nearly every hospital and school in the city. He drove a new Mercedes and sent his daughter to the best schools. But in spite of all this, he said, he was still the younger brother, and in the al-Raqb family the first son was the one who mattered. The first son was the watchman.
“Do you think…” I began, trying to find the right words. “Do you think there might be something else?”
Leaning back from the table, Uncle Hassan folded his hands over his stomach and glanced up at the ceiling. The shadow of a thought passed over his face. But he shook it off before it could settle.
“Something else?”
“Maybe in my father’s room?”
He glanced down the hall in the direction of the small room where my father had lived for more than twenty-five years. Then he reached across the table and plucked a particularly gooey piece of baklava off the platter. As he chewed, he seemed to be making a calculation of sorts, brother divided by nephew, the privacy of the dead minus the curiosity of the living.
“It’s worth a look,” Aisha said. “Don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Uncle Hassan agreed, though he didn’t seem entirely convinced.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said, standing up from the table before he could lodge any objections.
“It might be stuffy,” Aunt Basimah cautioned, readjusting the edges of her hijab. “No one’s been in there since I cleaned it. After—”
She took a step with me down the hall, then stopped herself and let me go on alone.
Earlier, Uncle Hassan had asked if I wanted to visit my father’s grave that following Sunday. I had evaded the question, mumbling something vague and noncommittal. I knew I wasn’t ready to visit his grave. It was too soon. But his room, that was something different, a vestige of his life rather than a monument to his death. And who knew what I might find in there? An address book perhaps, a half-written letter, a few scattered notes to himself?
As I opened the door, hand still on the knob, I felt my heart snag and time collapsed around me like a circus tent. Here was that yellow-flowered wallpaper, the chrome clock above the dresser, the blue-green Persian carpet. I could almost see him, sitting there on his bright orange armchair in the corner of the room, listening to the radio, slipping his shoes off at the end of the day. I could see the lonely imprints of his slippers on the carpet next to the bed, feel the scratch of his sweater, smell that faint potpourri of cigarette smoke, body odor, and cologne.
After standing in the doorway for a moment, I stepped inside, ran my hand along the bedspread, looked in the closet, and opened a few of the dresser drawers. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Regardless, there wasn’t much of interest: a few shirts, a stack of old VHS cassettes, a ballpoint pen on top of the nightstand. I looked under the bed, flipped the radio on and off. Then, as I was about to leave, leafing through one of the old paperbacks on his dresser, I found a faded newspaper clipping—used as a bookmark or maybe hidden away for safekeeping—a short article accompanied by the picture of a squat bald man holding a Torah scroll. A leader of Cairo’s Jewish community, read the caption, Mr. Claude Mosseri, standing next to the newly refurbished Ibn Ezra Synagogue. Someone, most likely my father, had made a small question mark next to the scroll, as if this picture might be the answer to a question he had been pursuing for some time.
* * *
—
Uncle Hassan was right. Mr. Mosseri was the one to answer my questions about the package. He was the one who would know what that scrap of paper meant to my father and why, of all the things he might have sent me, he had sent me that. But Mr. Mosseri was not an easy person to find. Aside from a disconnected phone number, the newspaper clipping, and a few of Uncle Hassan’s childhood memories, the only thing I knew about him was his address, 72 Gamal al-Din Street.
Unfortunately, there were six different Gamal al-Din streets in Cairo, fourteen when you included all the variations on the name, like Gamal al-Din Afifi or Gamal Izz il-Din.
“I bet it’s this one,” Aisha said, after lunch a few days later at her favorite koshari restaurant. She pointed to a small winding street in Garden City, a couple blocks from my apartment, then turned the map around so I could see it.
“What about this one?” I asked, turning to the page for Dokki.
“Could be,” she said as she flipped to the map of Heliopolis. “Or maybe this one?”
There was no reason to think Mr. Mosseri lived on the Gamal al-Din Street in Garden City or the one in Dokki or the one in Heliopolis. But I had to start somewhere, and it might as well be down the block. So, that next morning, I walked up Qasr el-Einy Street to the Canadian embassy and took a left on Gamal al-Din.
If you closed one eye, you could imagine how the street might have looked a hundred years earlier, a wide looping avenue lined with saplings and great stone villas built to the taste of newly rich industrialists, a few blocks from the Nile and a short carriage ride from downtown. These days, the street was home to the Indonesian embassy, a police substation, the Happy Child English Language Nursery School, and a handful of old villas that had been chopped up into single-family apartments. But no number 72.
The only thing between number 74 and number 68 was a narrow alley occupied by a stainless-steel lunch cart.
“Excuse me,” I said to the man behind the cart. “I am looking for Mr. Mosseri.”
I handed him Mr. Mosseri’s business card and he inspected it for a moment before passing it to the man sitting on a wooden stool behind him.
“Mr. Claude Mosseri,” read the man on the stool. “Seventy-two Gamal al-Din Street.”
“He was a friend of my father,” I added.
The men both seemed sympathetic to my search—especially when I told them that my father was Egyptian and had recently passed away—but neither of them knew any Mr. Mosseris. Nor did the proprietor of the produce market on the corner, nor the owner of the newsstand in the middle of the block. The doorman of 74 Gamal al-Din Street said there were no Mosseris in the building. Still, he suggested, I should leave a note for the superintendent, just to be sure. It was a stab in the dark, but I didn’t have many other options. So I borrowed a pen and paper from a copy shop down the block and composed two notes in my best Arabic handwriting.
Dear Sir,
My name is Yusuf al-Raqb.
I am searching for Mr. Claude Mosseri.
If you know him, please call me. My phone number is 018 736 2583.
Thank you,
Yusuf
I gave one of the notes to the doorman of 74 Gamal al-Din Street and the other I put in the mail slot of the dentist’s office next door. Then I went back to the lunch cart, bought a few half-moons of pita filled with ful, taamiya, fried eggplant, and pickled vegetable, ate them, and walked back down Qasr el-Einy to my apartment.
“Did you find him?” Aisha asked when I called her later that afternoon.
“There wasn’t even a seventy-two,” I said, and she laughed.
“On to the next.”
Over the course of the following week and a half, as August slipped into September and the carob trees outside my apartment began dropping their fruit, I visited Gamal al-Din streets all over Cairo, in Giza and Abbasiya, Nasr City, Heliopolis, and Imbaba. I crisscrossed the city in taxis with ripped-up plastic seats and pasted-on decorations. I walked when I could. I rode the subway. And I pushed my way onto rattling multicolored buses packed with middle-aged men, families, and the occasional older woman with a cage full of ch
ickens. Sometimes I wandered the surrounding neighborhood for most of a morning. Other times, I only stayed a few minutes. But I always left behind a note, slipped under the door of 72 Gamal al-Din Street or one of the buildings nearby.
It was exhausting at times, struggling through the traffic and the pollution and the heat, walking up and down this seemingly endless string of Gamal al-Dins. The neighborhoods began to bleed together, all those piles of trash, concrete, and rebar, the faded political banners hanging between buildings, the children in blue-and-white school uniforms chasing each other past wooden carts piled high with overripe produce, the grease-stained small mechanic shop next to a corner store next to a restaurant serving roast chicken cooked on an open rotisserie.
But there were the occasional flashes of promise. I met an older man at a café in Agouza who said he went to primary school with someone named Mosseri. In Nasr City I ate lunch with a security guard outside a bank who told me that there was a Mr. Mosseri who lived next to his mother. And every so often, as I made my way to one Gamal al-Din or another, I came upon a barbershop or a little café that, for no particular reason, reminded me of my father. Looking through the glass, I would imagine him sitting upright in a green vinyl barber’s chair or playing backgammon at the far corner of a café. One day I saw him riding a motorcycle across the Qasr el-Nil Bridge. A few days later he was smoking a cigarette outside a government building. I knew it wasn’t really him. Still it gave me some comfort, that feeling of being watched over. And every time I saw him—drinking tea with a police officer or maneuvering a pickup truck through traffic—I knew I was headed in the right direction.
* * *
—
In retrospect, I can see how lonely I was, going from neighborhood to neighborhood, searching for answers to questions I wasn’t fully able to articulate. Sure, I had lunch every so often with Aisha and her friends. I went over to Uncle Hassan and Aunt Basimah’s for Sunday dinner. I talked to my mother on the phone. I sent cheery mass emails to my friends, layering my impressions of the city with humorous anecdotes and the occasional somber reflection on wealth disparity. But most of the time I was alone.
During those first few weeks in Cairo—as I wandered around the city looking for the right Gamal al-Din—my most regular and sustained interactions were with the doorman of my building, the bawab, Abdullah. He was always there, when I left in the morning and when I came home in the afternoon, eating his dinner, drinking tea, or smoking a cigarette with one of the taxi drivers across the street. Occasionally, he would ask me a question about my day and once or twice, I shared a tea with him on the front steps of the building. I waved to him and we exchanged greetings. But I didn’t think much about him and, for the most part, our interactions were limited to small talk and jokes.
All this changed one afternoon when, coming home from a particularly dusty Gamal al-Din Street out by the airport, I found him in the lobby of the building, sitting in the doorway of the tiny closet where he slept, legs crossed and eyes shut in contemplation of the Van Morrison song coming from a little tape player at his feet. He wasn’t conventionally good-looking. But there was a certain charm in the disorder of his features. And when he opened his eyes, at the end of the song, the directness of his smile caught me off guard.
“Will you help?” he asked, rearranging himself to make room for me in his closet. “With the words? It is a very difficult song.”
“Play it again,” I said and squatted down next to him.
We listened a second time, then a third, trying to catch the words before they melted into the honk and shout of the street. The fourth time around, I could make out a few more phrases—met them face-to-face outside…living with a gun—enough to get the basic thrust. There was a bar fight, a fugitive, some unintended consequences. Maybe that was all we were supposed to know. Maybe it was our job to sketch in the empty spaces, to make meaning from what we had been given.
“It’s difficult to understand,” I said, when he asked about a particularly confusing line.
“Difficult to understand,” Abdullah said, “but not difficult to feel.”
“Yes,” I said. He was right.
As we listened to the next song and the next and the next, I stared at the wall above him, careful not to move, not wanting to lose the charge of our proximity, that feeling of warmth and the sharp yeasty smell of his body. This was his bedroom, I thought as he leaned over me to retrieve the tape case. It was his living room, and who knew what else, a few square feet of space, furnished only with a nest of blankets, a couple of pillows, the tape player, and a gilt-framed piece of Arabic calligraphy. I had no idea where he kept his clothes and toiletries, where he went to wash himself or brush his teeth. I literally could not imagine the most basic components of his life.
“Linden Arden,” he said, reading from the back of the tape case. “Who is he?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You are not very helpful,” he teased.
I took the case from him and looked at the cover. A shaggy-haired Van Morrison sat alone in a bright green field, flanked on either side by Irish wolfhounds. It was another world, as different as you could imagine from this closet a few blocks from the Nile.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“My friend Gerrit,” he said, “from Rotterdam. He gave me the tape, many years ago when he came to visit Siwa.”
Abdullah paused significantly, letting the question of Gerrit hang between us.
“You know Siwa?”
I had heard of Siwa, could maybe point to it on a map, a lonely oasis out there in the middle of the desert, near the border with Libya. Beyond that, all I knew about it was the story of Alexander the Great following a flock of birds across the desert to visit the Siwan Oracle.
“The sweetest dates in all of Egypt,” Abdullah said.
“Is that right?”
He smiled and took the case back from me.
We sat there for most of the evening, listening to Van Morrison and watching the building’s residents file in with their packages, their children, their black plastic shopping bags. All of them nodded and greeted us. A few asked Abdullah if he could come up later and check on a leaky faucet or a malfunctioning air conditioner. But none of them seemed to think twice about the two of us huddled up together in the closet listening to music.
As dusk filtered in through the front door, Abdullah told me about growing up in Siwa and moving with his family to Cairo when he was seventeen. The plan had been for him to take pre-veterinary classes at Cairo University while his mother cleaned houses and his father worked as a bawab. But halfway through the program his mother got sick, and he had to take over the bawab responsibilities from his father, who started driving a taxi.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, anticipating my sympathy. “I read, listen to music. I watch the people come and go.”
“I guess not,” I said, staring out the empty doorway.
Growing up, I was always slightly embarrassed by the idea that my father had been a watchman. I pictured him as a security guard at a bank or a fast-food restaurant, a gun for hire in a phony uniform, not quite heroic enough to be a policeman or a firefighter. But sitting there with Abdullah, chatting with the residents as they filtered into the building, I began to see the quiet dignity of the position. A watchman was more than just a guard. He was the spirit of the place, the embodiment of the building in human form.
“Do you know what this is?” Abdullah asked, pointing at the wall behind me.
I followed his finger to a framed piece of Arabic calligraphy just above my head.
“No.”
“It is a saying of the Prophet Muhammad,” he said. “ ‘Be in the world like a traveler, or like a passer-on, and reckon yourself as of the dead.’ ”
I stared at the calligraphy, trying to make out the tangle of letters, t
rying to understand what he was getting at, what he wanted to tell me.
“Are you very religious?”
It was a silly question, simplistic and a step or two removed from what I actually wanted to ask. Still, he took it at face value.
“I believe in God,” he said. “But there are some things I don’t agree with.”
“Okay—”
As I shifted, trying to formulate the next question, I realized that one of my legs was asleep. I had been sitting in that same position for most of the evening.
“My leg,” I said, as I stood up and leaned against the wall, flexing to get the blood pumping again. “It’s asleep. Pins and needles.”
I stood there for a moment, massaging my own leg.
“I should probably be getting to bed myself.”
Abdullah looked up at me, reached over, and squeezed my calf, just under the spot where I had been massaging.
“Thank you for your help with the song.”
“Good night,” I said, but I didn’t move.
We stayed like that for a good two minutes, me standing over him, his hand on my leg, neither of us moving, not even looking at each other.
Everything was telling me to go for it, to lean down and kiss him. But I knew well enough to hold back. I knew things worked differently in Egypt, that platonic touching was normal, that even the most homophobic of men wouldn’t think twice about walking down the street holding hands with a friend. In Egypt, gay wasn’t something you were, it was something you did. It was an act, or many acts, not an identity. All of which inclined me to mistrust my intuition, to restrain any irrevocable advances until I was sure of Abdullah’s intentions.
“I really should be getting to bed,” I said eventually.
“Yes,” he agreed, and he placed the empty tape case next to my foot. “I will see you soon, I hope.”
* * *
—
In the days that followed, Abdullah and I began spending more and more time together. I brought him dinner from the hummus and ful restaurant down the block. We smoked shisha on the front steps of the building, drank sweet black tea, and watched the neighborhood pass by. I told him about my father, Mr. Mosseri, and the various Gamal al-Din streets I had visited. I told him about the waiter who insisted on paying for my lunch, to give me strength, and the group of kids who followed me down the street yelling “Co-ca-Co-la, Co-ca-Co-la.” But I didn’t say anything about the package my father had sent me—the impetus for my search—in part because it was too complicated to explain and in part because I knew that the package would lead to the synagogue and, if I told him about the synagogue, I would have to tell him about my mother’s family, which would mean telling him I was Jewish. Not that I necessarily thought it would be an issue, my being Jewish. But with all the other uncertainties between us—the question of his intentions, the significance of that Arabic calligraphy on his wall, the unavoidable power imbalance inherent in our respective positions—I thought it would be easier to avoid all of that, for the time being.
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo Page 8
