by Tuvia Fogel
Nissim ben Nahray traded mostly with the Maghreb, using both caravans and ships, and his house was so large that one reached its courtyard through an arched passageway, as if entering a keep. It had two floors, the top one a big harem with its own entry up a stairway in the courtyard. They were led into a hall on the ground floor, with a small fountain in the middle of black and white marble, and a divan—a raised wooden platform covered with cushions—on one side.
After a few introductions—Galatea impressing Yehezkel with the way she pronounced “shalom aleichem,” the greeting she rehearsed—a servant showed the rabbi’s new wife to her room. Then Nissim, a portly man whose fashionable dress reminded Yehezkel of Tofefloià, called for wine to celebrate the unexpected return, after fifteen years, of his “personal rabbi”—and with such a stunning new wife!
The next two days were Galatea’s first real encounter with Islam. Yehezkel had lived the first twenty years of his life under Ayubbid rule—the first ten, in fact, under Salah ad-Din himself—and as he showed her around the city, he gave her a brief introduction to the intricacies of Qu’ran, hadith, and siras.
“You see, madame, Islam’s constant, dominating thought, as its name says, is submission to Allah—or, as you call him, God the Father. Everything, from the rising of the sun each day to the point on a branch where a bird lands, is decided by him alone. I once read a Shiite tractate on geometry that stated that ‘two parallel straight lines are two lines that meet where it pleases Allah.’”
Galatea laughed. “If they didn’t want to seem disrespectful, they could have said it was Allah who decided they could never meet!”
“But that’s exactly the point, madame! The very next sentence in the tractate said, ‘And if somewhere, some day, two such straight lines should meet, how great is the power of Allah!”
Galatea laughed again, but this time she said, “I think I understand!”
The souk in the Pearl of Egypt was, as she had expected, as rich as Venice’s and even more Eastern than Limassol’s market. Its alleys were lined with hundreds of dekkakin, shops that were no more than holes in a wall with mastabas in front of them, stone or brick platforms on which the shopkeeper sat on cushions, legs crossed. Without ever moving from that position, the trader hawked his goods, haggled with clients, drank cider, gossiped with passersby, and joked or quarreled with neighbors. Galatea told Yehezkel she would have been happy to watch one snappy old spice trader for a whole day.
But snake charmers and street magicians she’d seen before. What intrigued her were strange figures, between monks and beggars, wandering the souk, who put her in mind of Brother Francesco piccolo. In the middle of their foreheads was a big, dark stain, and a bowl and a sling hung from their rope belts. Despite shaven heads, they stunk like goats. She asked the rabbi who they were.
“They’re called dervishes. They are the Shia equivalent of Sufis,” said Yehezkel. “The bowl symbolizes the Fount of Wisdom, and the sling is for chasing away Satan. They ask for charity, foretell futures, and sell talismans and charms with holy words on them. The language, I can assure you, is the only difference between what these dervishes preach and Brother Francesco’s sermons.”
Galatea smiled. “What’s the dark stain on their foreheads?”
“That’s no stain, madame; it’s a callus! It’s called a zebibah, and it grows above the brows of those who don’t just touch their foreheads to the ground when they pray, as is prescribed, but slam them down.” He grinned. “I heard that Domingo of Guzman whips his back with bunched-up iron chains when he prays.”
“Please, Rabbi, not the sermon on punishing one’s body again,” she graciously cut him off. “Rather, why don’t you tell me something about Sunnis and Shias? What’s the difference between them?”
Humbled by her frankness, he said, “Mmhh . . . not as easy a question as it may sound. I suppose you Christians would call it more of a dynastic than a theological dispute—or, better said, feud. It boils down to who should have been the Leader of the Faithful after the Prophet died. But then wars and martyrs piled up until it felt almost theological, if you see what I mean.”
“Of course I do,” she said wryly. “Don’t forget we’ve had our share of schisms and antipopes. But is there really no difference in the way they tell the story of Mahomet, in how they read the Qu’ran?”
“The closest thing to a doctrinal difference you will find,” said he, “is probably in their shahadas.*56 The Shias, after acknowledging the oneness of God and Muhammad’s prophethood, add the words, ‘And Ali is the wali of God.’ Ali was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, and wali is a guardian, a protector. Shia is actually short for Shiatu Ali, the Party of Ali. But thirty years after the Prophet’s death, when he’d been the Fourth Caliph for five years, Ali was killed in the war against Yazid, the Ummayad pretender. Since then, as you can imagine, Sunnis have called his followers heretics.”
“I see. And what does the name Sunni come from?”
“The Sunna is . . . well, everything the Prophet said and did. So since a Muslim must base his thinking and behavior on those of the Prophet, I suppose you could translate Sunna as orthodoxy.”
Galatea, seriously trying to understand the bewildering world she’d entered, clarified. “The Fatimids were Shias, and they ruled until fifty years ago, when Salah ad-Din, a Sunni Kurd, reestablished orthodoxy in Egypt?”
“As I’ve said before, madame,” smiled Yehezkel, “it would be hard for any teacher to have a better pupil than you!”
AL-KAHIRA, 14TH OCTOBER 1219
On the second day in al-Kahira, Yehezkel had an idea he thought would please his friends. He decided a visit to the hammam was the best way to steam both desert war and Nile swamps right out of their skins—in fact, out of their very souls!
Hammams were the thing Yehezkel missed most since moving to Provence. One of his Ishmaelite friends was the barber of a splendid Fatimid hammam. A barber shaved faces, cut hair, let blood, and headed the attendants who washed and massaged clients. He burned incense twice a day to purify the place, made sure that no lepers were allowed in and that no one ate beans or peas in the hammam, and that anyone intentionally revealing his private parts was promptly ejected. But above all, the hammam barber, being privy to the hidden talk, was the hub of a town’s news and gossip.
Aillil reacted enthusiastically to the idea, but Galatea was wary, both out of a Western diffidence for excessive contact with water and because women there would likely move around naked and expect her to do the same. Eventually, Yehezkel’s description of the sense of purification and cleanliness that followed a visit to the hammam convinced her to attempt the experience. She went on a day reserved for women, the rabbi accompanying her to the entrance. She was led down an arched passageway to the dressing room and from there, a towel round her chest, to the harara, the hot room where massages were administered.
This was a beautiful round hall, circled by columns and walled in colored marbles, with a few pools, stone benches, and steps everywhere. Discreet shafts of sunlight streamed in from windows in the domed roof. Amid clouds of steam, Egyptian women sat unveiled, some in light patterned robes, some naked but for a cotton cloth round their loins, all gossiping, laughing, suckling their children, or painting their faces after their ablutions. The muted echo in the harara repeated their every word thrice.
Having spent half her life in a convent, Galatea understood the appeal that the atmosphere of half-light and seclusion held for women as a quiet, temporary refuge from the world of men, but despite much smiling, her attempts to communicate failed miserably, and when she shed her towel for a massage, she became, as she’d feared, the object of the unwanted attention of every woman in the hammam.
It wasn’t just her milky complexion. Egyptian women shaved their bodies from armpits to pubes every ten days or so. After much giggling and pointing to her bushy black hairs, a lady found the courage to approach her. Eventually, through gestures pointing in succession to Galatea’s chest, to a sil
k veil on a marble bench and to the prosperous breasts of a nearby matron, the woman succeeded in explaining to the infidel wretch that her pitifully small breasts were Allah’s punishment for not wearing a veil.
“That’s the last straw,” thought the abbess, “the one that broke the camel’s back!”
She gave the bitch the smile she’d always reserved for the bishop of Torcello, turned around, picked up her towel and marched out to the dressing room.
On the third day, Yehezkel set out to find the shop where he’d last met Maître Chalabi—as the shady character insisted on being called, as if he were some kind of scholar. The rabbi walked quickly, Aillil close behind, trying to find the right alley, but Galatea was constantly distracted by sights so incredible she had to stop and verify it was not just her imagination running away with her.
At one point, she lost sight of the other two. “I’m tall, and so is he,” she thought, “so surely I’ll catch a glimpse of his turban in the crowd. Besides, he’ll notice I’m no longer behind them . . . won’t he?”
But this time she’d stopped too long, and they were nowhere to be seen. She was alone. A Christian woman alone in the capital of the Saracen empire. A shiver ran down her back. “Where will I look for him? On which desert trail, in which oriental city, on which battlefield swarming with crows and vultures?” Her breath was getting shorter, and she got a grip on herself.
“Don’t panic, Galatea degli Ardengheschi!” She reflected on the options. “I can’t find Nissim’s house again without revealing that I don’t speak a word of Hebrew and ‘ruining what’s left of his reputation.’ But even so, I can find the Venetian funduq and somehow make my way back to Fustat. Once there, I’ll ask for the home of the rais, and he’ll be there, waiting for me.” She frowned. “He won’t be happy, to be sure, but I think he’ll be relieved I wasn’t kidnapped and sold into slavery.” She smiled. “At least I hope so.”
Luckily, her moment of anxiety kept her from moving from the spot where she’d stopped. As she finally turned to do so, Yehezkel was standing behind her, smiling. “It seems that Aillil knows better than you, madame, not to lose sight of the person who can lead him back out of the souk.”
Later, Galatea would find her dependence on the rabbi, even in a Saracen land, excessive, but right then she was so relieved to see his burly figure that it was all she could do not to embrace him.
Yehezkel continued his search and eventually found Maître Chalabi in the same rickety wooden house where he’d conducted his business fifteen years earlier, the space doubled by the absorption of the shop next door. Chalabi, a ruddy Copt in his early fifties, was a Levantine merchant so busy making money that his pointed beard seemed like a visual invitation to his interlocutors to get to the point.
A worldly, widely traveled dealer, Chalabi spoke passable Latin and four other languages and traded in everything under the sun, sometimes for a commission, other times buying and selling the goods—be they spices, jewels, slaves, services by the underworld, or the oldest commodity in any souk: information.
As the rabbi ducked to enter his lair, Chalabi recognized him and got up to greet him. “Yehezkel ben Yoseph, what an unexpected pleasure!” he exclaimed. “How on earth did you get here from Provence despite the war, through Alexandria?”
Chalabi led his guests into a private room, where Italian merchants often clinched deals that would get them excommunicated if their pope ever got wind of them.
Yehezkel decided to reveal Galatea’s true identity to Chalabi. He’d considered passing her off as his wife with the Bedus, but then thought the reaction of a desert dweller on discovering, in the middle of the Sinai, that he was harboring a Christian woman, was unpredictable, but unlikely to be cordial.
Within minutes, before Yehezkel could mention caravans to Gaza, Chalabi’s attention shifted from his old Jewish acquaintance to the Italian noblewoman, whose first smile awoke his womanizing instincts in a way no female had done in years.
“I’m honored and enchanté that such an important Madonna is in my shop!” Galatea found his nasal singsong amusing. “A contessa, no less, and the head of a religious house. If your king of Jerusalem does not invade Egypt, I invite a hundred notables to a big dinner, just for the welcome you deserve!”
Chalabi wooed the abbess for ten minutes with a humorous account, in a mixture of Latin, French, and theatrics, of the shortcomings of his Cairene clients. Yehezkel fidgeted in his chair. Eventually, Chalabi’s knowledge of events in the Delta gave Yehezkel a pretext to interrupt the Copt’s vain monologue.
“Maître Chalabi, perhaps you could share with us the latest news from the war?” he interjected.
Chalabi turned to him with a knowing smile and answered in Latin, ever the perfect gentleman. “Sorry, Yehezkel. My first thought was to question you on why you traveled through a war to come here, but the charme and grace of your . . . companion lead me astray!”
Galatea blushed. Yehezkel started finding the room stuffy.
“The war goes well, I hear, but the capital slides into panic because of rumors that Damietta will fall within days. The sultan—may God grant him long life—had a marvelous idea, certainly inspired by Allah, when, four weeks ago, he offered to return their True Cross to the Franks if they leave Egypt.”
Galatea, whose knowledge of Outremer had grown in leaps and bounds, noticed that Chalabi, being a Christian, said “Franks” and not “infidels.” Chalabi went on. “Rumors say the offer sowed discord in the Frankish camp, and the truce the Franks accepted expires in three days’ time. If they refuse the sultan’s offer and Damietta falls, they’re sure to march on al-Kahira.” He grimaced. “Many wealthy Cairene are already packing and moving to their upriver estates.”
He looked at Yehezkel. “And you must have heard of the bloodthirsty armies threatening Baghdad from the East . . . these are such end-of-the-world times I’m not at all surprised to see you here, Yehezkel!” He laughed a high-pitched, slightly frenzied wartime laugh. Yehezkel thought Chalabi must be making more money from the war than the Venetians themselves but said nothing.
He had to relieve his bladder, but Galatea laughed enough times at Chalabi’s jokes that he worried about leaving her alone with him, even for a short time. He scolded himself for being jealous of a woman who not only wasn’t his, but never would be. Sobered, he stood, asked Chalabi where he could attend to a bodily need, and left the room.
When he came back the two were laughing heartily, as he’d feared. The youthful glint in Chalabi’s eye would normally have amused him, but his outlook on life was grim. Chalabi seemed instead in an excellent mood, end of the world notwithstanding. He got up and slapped the rabbi on his ample back.
“Yehezkel, I just had the idea that solves your problem! Madonna Galatea told me you are headed to Jerusalem, and you look for a caravan to take you to Gaza.”
Yehezkel shot Galatea a look of reproof, but Chalabi shushed him before he could say anything. “A Christian nun and boy in a Bedu caravan. Trust me, Yehezkel, I understand your problem, and you came to the only man who can solve it! I have just the clan for you. But I’ll need time to find their sheikh and speak with him. You go back to Fustat, and come to see me in November.”
“She even told him we’re staying in Fustat!” he thought, outraged at her naïveté, then caught himself. “Calm down. Chalabi always knew you live in Fustat. Try to keep feelings and reason separate.”
Galatea also seemed convinced they had come to the right person. Perhaps, he thought, it was because Chalabi was the first Christian—albeit a Monophysite heretic—that she’d set eyes on since Francesco left Färiskür: a whole month of Jews and Ishmaelites! But whatever it was, the abbess looked so pleased that he found himself wanting to leave the place.
He put up with the never-ending leave-taking and then herded Galatea and Aillil outside. On the way back to the haret Yahud, Galatea confessed with an embarrassed smile that she’d not been able to refuse a small cadeau Chalabi insisted on giving her
.
Yehezkel stopped abruptly and turned to face her. “May I know what it was, madame?”
She pulled a small silk bag out of a pocket, loosened its string and poured onto the palm of her hand a single, brilliant pearl. It was perfectly round and the size of a small olive. Yehezkel was no expert on pearls, but anyone could tell the big translucent jewel was worth a fortune.
That was when he knew something had happened between them. After the times he had saved her in those six months! Something constricted his throat, as if the air had just filled with fine dust. He began to cough and the next instant, without any warning, images of Chalabi forcing himself on the nun floated up before his eyes. Had he caressed her? Had he kissed her? Or had even more happened in there? That pearl was a sign of gratitude for something!
That last thought did it. Yehezkel lost control, and his bitter anger gushed out.
When it was over, Galatea stood there, trembling. “Is that my teacher’s opinion of me? Headstrong, capricious, selfish, an ingrate?” Each word had been a dagger in her heart. “If he really considers me such a shrew, then there’s nothing for it, I’ve disappointed his hopes, lost his esteem. What will become of me now? Perhaps being covered in mold in my convent is what I deserve.” She was silent, hands shaking, suspended between outrage for the humiliation and an overpowering desire to weep.
As she stood there, Yehezkel emerged from what felt like a possession. He realized nothing could have happened in the shop in Aillil’s presence, and a moment later saw a sack of flour that had fallen off a porter’s shoulder and exploded on the street stones, causing the fine cloud that had choked him. He saw what he had just done and fell on his knees before the abbess.
