The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

  “Yusuf!” he exclaimed, holding out his arms to greet me.

  I had spent most of the past few weeks trying to find this man—calling him, walking up and down every Gamal al-Din Street in the city, talking endlessly about him with Abdullah and Aisha, searching the Internet, the phone book, the halls of the Mogamma, staring at his business card and the newspaper clipping from my father’s room, hoping to uncover some clue as to his whereabouts—and then, just like that, there he was, shaking my hand and kissing me on either cheek.

  “Mr. Mosseri.”

  There was a whiff of gardenia about him and, as he straightened his suit jacket, I noticed a bright orange silk handkerchief glancing from his breast pocket. He had an easy smile, a broad nose, and an elegant, almost courtly demeanor.

  “I’m so very glad you came,” he said. Then he put a hand on my shoulder and raised his eyebrows to a sympathetic peak. “Your father would be so happy to know you’re here.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not sure how else to respond.

  He asked me about my accommodations, and was beginning to say something about an Italian restaurant he knew in Garden City, when a realization crossed his face.

  “I do hope you haven’t been trying to call me.”

  “A few times,” I admitted.

  “That card,” he said and, in the way he covered his mouth, I could see that he understood exactly what had happened. “I am so sorry, Yusuf. This business with the telephone company, the new exchanges. It really has been quite maddening.”

  He went on for a few minutes—trying to explain the new exchanges, how the state telephone company had added an extra digit to all the landlines in Cairo, or changed the area code, or something along those lines—then he stopped himself midsentence.

  “But here you are,” he said. “And I can’t imagine you want to hear me go on about our problems with the telephone company. You must have quite a few questions.”

  “I do,” I said, and I did, though I hadn’t thought to arrange them in any particular order.

  Mr. Mosseri raised an expectant eyebrow, then seemed to change his mind.

  “Before we get to all that,” he said, “perhaps it would be best to have a quick tour of the synagogue. It really is most magnificent in the daylight.”

  As we climbed the stairs to the women’s section, Mr. Mosseri described the restoration process he had helped oversee a few years earlier and pointed to some of the building’s more notable architectural details. The interlocking diamond pattern on the ceiling had been designed by a craftsman whose great-grandfather worked on the previous renovation. And the gleaming red-and-gold ark at the front of the room had been built to the exact specifications found in a century-old architectural plan.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, and it was.

  Looking out on the succession of black-and-white marble arches that suspended the women’s section above the main prayer hall, I tried to recall the last time I had been inside a synagogue. Rory Trout’s bar mitzvah, maybe, or my grandmother’s funeral in Paris. I couldn’t remember exactly, but I knew it had been a long time ago, at least ten years. And wherever it was, it was nothing like this.

  “Yes”—Mr. Mosseri smiled—“we are very happy with how it turned out.”

  He patted the iron railing in front of us, then turned to lead me back down the stairs to the main prayer hall.

  “You know,” I said before he could continue with the tour, “I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about the—”

  I paused, not sure what to call the piece of paper my father had sent me.

  “The fragment?” he offered. “Yes, of course.”

  It was difficult to know for certain, Mr. Mosseri explained, especially with such an old document. But one could be relatively confident about the basics: the fragment comprised two different letters, most likely from the middle of the eleventh century. In all probability, these notes were part of a longer exchange between the chief adviser to the sultan and the leader of Cairo’s Jewish community. As for their content, they both mentioned a young Muslim boy named Ali and the question of whether he might be suitable to serve as watchman of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue.

  “Ali al-Raqb?”

  “As I said, it is difficult to know such things for certain.”

  “I thought that was just a story.”

  “Yes, well,” Mr. Mosseri observed, “a story is never just a story.”

  He hesitated a moment, then continued on in another vein, describing the fragment’s historical and material context, the Jewish prohibition on throwing away documents that might contain the name of God, and how, sometime in the middle of the eleventh century, the Jews of Ibn Ezra began discarding these papers in the attic storeroom of their synagogue. He answered all of my questions, and then some. Still, I got the sense that he was stepping lightly around the edges of the story, that there was some piece of it he was doing his best to avoid.

  “When he asked you to send me the package,” I said halfway through a story about the papers’ dispersal, something about a rabbi and two sisters from Cambridge, “did my father mention anything in particular?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did he,” I tried to put it more clearly, “was there any particular reason he sent me the package, any reason he thought I should want it?”

  “You know, of course,” Mr. Mosseri said, “the fragment, it is quite invaluable. But I suppose you’re asking—”

  As he paused, trying to find the right words—unsure, it seemed, how much exactly to reveal—I noticed Mr. Mosseri’s gaze rest on a squat rectangular opening just below the ceiling of the women’s section.

  “Is that it?” I asked. “The geniza?”

  “It is,” Mr. Mosseri conceded.

  Not much larger than a bathroom window, the entrance to the geniza was edged in dark wood trim and covered with plywood. If you didn’t know what to look for, it would be easy to miss entirely.

  “We can’t go inside, can we?”

  “The geniza?” Mr. Mosseri said, somewhat taken aback. “Oh no, it is quite difficult to access. No one’s been inside for years.”

  “But it would be possible?”

  He looked at me a moment, then his expression softened to a smile.

  “I suppose it would be.”

  Without another word, he led me to the other end of the women’s section. I could feel my pulse in my throat as he retrieved an old wooden ladder from a pile of construction materials and propped it against the lower lip of the entrance to the geniza.

  “There are no lights,” he warned, holding the ladder for me as I climbed, “and I can only imagine how dusty it is in there.”

  At the top, I pushed aside the plywood door, then maneuvered over the ledge and lowered myself down to the ladder on the other side. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but when they did I saw that the room was almost entirely empty and the floor was thick with murky gray dust.

  Standing there at the edge of the geniza, I imagined it filled with paper, a thousand years of love letters and prayer books, business contracts, deeds, and the occasional shopping list, all muddled together in a great heap of possible divinity. I thought about all the al-Raqbs who had stood in that very place—from the first watchman to the last, from Ali al-Raqb to my father—passing through the attic on their nightly rounds. I thought about all the documents that had settled there and what those pieces of paper meant: a wedding or a new business partner, a death in the family, an unreturned letter from a brother on the other side of the world.

  The room was empty, but there were thousands of stories embedded in the space. There was also, I noticed, a charge in the air, a faint prickle of energy. I took a step toward the center of the room and, feeling it even more strongly, remembered what my father had said that afternoon on the Nile, about the scroll h
idden in the attic of the synagogue.

  It was then, as I tried to recall what exactly he had said—something about the prophet Ezra, rumors of magic, the name of God—that I saw a flash of gray peek out from behind a pile of cleaning supplies. My heart skipped and I jumped back. Then I saw another movement, much closer, and realized it was a cat. The attic was teeming with them, dozens of scrawny little creatures, and all with the same slightly luminous silver coloring.

  “We do our best to keep them out,” Mr. Mosseri said as he climbed down into the attic, “but it’s a losing battle. I imagine they must have found a way in through the roof.”

  I nodded and watched the cats retreat into the darkness.

  “So this is it,” I said.

  “This is it,” he confirmed, “not nearly as grand as one might imagine.”

  We were both silent for a moment, then Mr. Mosseri clasped his hands together, like a weary host smiling the last of his guests out the door.

  “Do you mind,” I said, “can I ask another question?”

  “Not at all.”

  There were so many things I wanted to know—about the fragment and Ali al-Raqb, the geniza and my father’s time as watchman of the synagogue—but instead I asked the question at the top of my mind.

  “My father mentioned something once, about a scroll hidden in the attic.”

  Mr. Mosseri’s smile drooped. He opened his mouth and closed it again, as if paging through a variety of possible explanations. He started to speak, then stopped himself, looked back at the entrance above us and lightly tapped the side of his head, as if to dislodge a vital piece of information.

  “Are you free this Friday evening?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he said as he produced a large white handkerchief from the inside of his jacket and wiped the dust off his glasses, “you could join us for dinner. I think I might have something that you would be interested in seeing.”

  After returning the handkerchief to his pocket, Mr. Mosseri turned back to the opening through which we had entered. Knowing well enough not to press any further, I followed him out and, blinking in the shift of light, closed the door behind us.

  9

  THE QUESTION OF Bassatine—that is, the question of whether to visit the cemetery and see what they might uncover there—was contested almost entirely in silence. It was less a discussion than a war of attrition. Agnes could not reconcile herself to the idea of disturbing the graveyard, no matter what they might find there, while for Margaret the potential of rescuing invaluable documents from plunder and dispersal trumped any concerns about honoring the dead. Besides, they would not be disturbing any human remains.

  In the twenty-four hours following Mr. al-Raqb’s revelation that there were documents—including, perhaps, the Ezra Scroll—buried in the Bassatine cemetery, Agnes and Margaret did not exchange more than a dozen words. Neither raised the question; neither so much as whispered the name of the cemetery. There was no need. Each knew what the other was thinking. For the better part of a day, they circled each other silently, bolstering their fortifications, mustering counterarguments, and reading clues into the smallest aberration in routine. An extra dollop of butter at breakfast, an offhand remark about Miss de Witt or Dr. Schechter, anything might reveal the other’s hidden assumptions.

  Playing white, Agnes moved first.

  “How would you like it if someone dug up our graves?”

  Margaret set down her book—a collection of travel accounts written by the fifteenth-century rabbi Obadiah de Bertinoro—and looked at her sister, who had just finished her forward bends. Margaret had anticipated this line of reasoning, but did not expect it so early. It could be a trap, but more likely her sister’s thinking was clouded by an overwhelming sense of righteousness.

  “According to Obadiah,” she said, touching the book in her lap, “the documents are buried in an unused section of the cemetery, more than two cubits from any grave.”

  Agnes sat down on the edge of her sister’s bed.

  “It still feels wrong.”

  “Think of it as buried treasure, Nestor. Just imagine. A perfect Torah scroll, written by Ezra himself, four centuries before Christ.”

  Margaret knew it was unlikely that the Ezra Scroll would be buried at Bassatine. Still, even the possibility was a potent argument.

  “Should we place so much weight on Mr. al-Raqb’s word?” Agnes asked. “And what about Dr. Schechter? Can you imagine what he would say if we told him we were planning to dig up a Jewish cemetery?”

  “I think Dr. Schechter would heartily approve,” Margaret said. “But even so, we should probably keep the plan to ourselves.”

  Agnes exhaled, a sign of impending surrender, then flopped onto her stomach.

  “Will you do my ointment, Meggie?”

  With a little pressure, Margaret knew she might force her sister to concede then and there. Experience, however, had taught her to delay such gratifications. It was far better to wait, let old Nestor come around on her own steam.

  And indeed, the next morning at breakfast, Agnes raised the topic again. Overnight, her concerns had shifted to the particular. Where exactly was the cemetery? How could they conduct their visit without arousing suspicion? Having already thought through the answers to these questions, and many more, Margaret laid out the details of a plan by which they might visit Bassatine, find the documents, and remove them, all while avoiding detection by Dr. Schechter, Mr. Bechor, and the others. By the end of breakfast, Agnes’s fears had been allayed, and together they composed a note to a Coptic fixer upon whom they had relied a number of times over the years.

  The next morning at dawn they set out with five donkeys, two empty trunks, a clattering assortment of shovels, and three bulky men, excellent diggers and all—the fixer assured them—very discreet. According to Margaret’s Baedeker guidebook, Bassatine was located on the southern edge of the city, sandwiched between the east bank of the Nile and the limestone quarries of the Muqattam Hills. The land had been granted to the Jews in the ninth century, after Ibn Tulun built his palace atop their previous cemetery. When Obadiah de Bertinoro visited the graveyard six hundred years later, he reported that the road was rife with bandits and the cemetery surrounded by empty desolation for miles. In the intervening centuries, a few military installations and quarries had sprouted up, but the area still retained a rather desolate feel. Aside from a family of carrion crows, the only sign of life was a camp of Bedouins, their dark brown tents pockmarking a depression given on the map as Wadi Turah.

  Agnes and Margaret did not notice the cemetery—separated from the rest of the desert by a stone wall the same color as the hills behind—until one of the diggers pointed it out. They watched from atop their donkeys as their fixer roused the old Bedouin charged with guarding the graveyard and offered him a cigarette. Anticipating the necessity of a bribe, they had agreed in advance that they would be willing to provide thirty pounds to the guard for showing them the document burial ground, if one existed, and for looking the other way as they excavated it. After half an hour of negotiations, shouting, hand waving, and gesticulation, the guard agreed to abandon his duties for the sum of ten pounds.

  “Southwest corner,” the fixer said, pointing with his chin as he rolled a celebratory cigarette, “behind the Mosseri plot.”

  Dismounting, Agnes and Margaret walked through the cemetery while the diggers brought their gear around to the southwest corner.

  “That wasn’t too difficult,” Margaret said, laughing, as she helped her sister over a small iron fence that separated two sections of the cemetery, “now, was it?”

  “No,” Agnes agreed, and they continued for a few paces in silence, “though I can’t help but think. How are we any different from common tomb robbers?”

  “Intention,” Margaret said, knowing her sister’s guilt would be best assuag
ed by a simple answer. “A good intention makes all the difference.”

  While the diggers set about their work, Agnes and Margaret established themselves on a stone bench abutting a great marble mausoleum inscribed with the name Mosseri. With a saddle blanket draped over their legs, they watched the diggers’ progress in silent anticipation. Their men were clearly not the first to trouble this plot. The top three feet of soil were loose and devoid of documents. Both sisters worried that there might be nothing left. But then, after more than an hour of fruitless labor, one of the men shouted and pointed to a yellowed piece of vellum reaching out of the earth like a disembodied hand.

  “Stop,” Margaret cried, and she scrambled into the ditch.

  The men leaned on their shovels while she brushed sand off the document and scanned its first few lines.

  “A marriage contract,” she said, handing it up to her sister.

  “More rubbish,” Agnes sighed.

  Having resided for many years under the dark dry press of sandy loam, the contract was remarkably well preserved. Of course, they had not come all the way to Bassatine for a marriage contract. They had not defiled a graveyard for such common ephemera. But its presence signaled the likelihood of more treasure below. Agnes laid out their blanket as if preparing for a picnic and placed the contract at the top left corner. Meanwhile, Margaret directed the diggers to abandon their shovels and continue with hand tools, scooping the soil into tin pails and carefully handing up any papers they unearthed.

  They continued on like this for most of the morning. Then, just past midday, the old Bedouin guard ran out of his tent yelling and waving his arms. At first they couldn’t understand what he was saying. As he got closer, however, Agnes realized that he was shouting, over and over, the classical Arabic word for horse—khayl—almost identical to the more modern word for pride or arrogance.