“You uncover my heart,” he says, placing his rough hand on my cheek and touching my tears. He does not move to brush away his own.
For whom do I weep? “You have given me a life I cherish,” I say, sitting close beside him.
“If we had not come to Egypt, we would not have lost her.” The pain in Joseph’s voice pulls at my heart.
“It was not your fault—not your fault,” I insist. “It was God’s will.” God’s will. How often have I said those familiar words, even when I am so unsure?
“Ho,” Noha cries out, catching a whiff of simmering garlic. “What are you cooking, my friend? It smells like the feet of my donkey.” She plunks a jug of wine down on the worktable near the entrance to the cave and settles onto one of the stools near the fire pit. Rachel, our family friend and midwife, who accompanied us to Egypt, does not turn around.
“Nothing so delicious,” I answer. “Only a moonfish stew. Our eldest caught two large ones last night.”
“Are you sure they are fresh?” demands Noha. “A terrible death comes to people who eat bad moonfish.” I see a smile tug at the edges of Rachel’s lips; both of us are used to Noha’s scorn.
“Thank you for your concern, Noha,” I manage to say politely. “I do believe they are fresh. We cleaned them last night and kept them in a cool place in the cave.”
Noha scowls but says nothing in return. Scornful comments accompany Noha wherever she goes, though she saves the most cutting comments for her husband, Isaiah.
My youngest son waits for me inside the cave, where he has been listening to our conversation. “Why are you so kind to Noha, Mother? Her angry words make us all join in her misery.” He sits halfway onto one of the wooden chairs, placing his elbow on the edge of the table.
“The more difficult it is to extend kindness, my son, the more we please God by offering it. Noha gives us all a chance to please God. But today I’m afraid I wasn’t very successful in my heart.” I pull eight clay cups from the wall.
My son grins and stands, taking the cups from my hands and placing them on the table. “But why is she so angry?”
“When we left Palestine, your father invited Isaiah and Noha to come with us. Noha opposed the journey, thinking it too dangerous and uncertain. She didn’t want to leave her family. I understood. But Isaiah agreed to make the journey. Even before she arrived, Noha had made up her mind she would never be happy here.” I take eight large wooden spoons from one of the niches carved into the cave wall and place them on the table below the cups.
“Will Noha ever be happy, Mother?”
“She may never be happy. God has not given her a happy heart.” I reach out and tousle my son’s dark auburn hair, pleased that he is still a child and welcomes my caresses. “What have you learned from the Rabbi today?”
A glint of mischief flickers through his deep brown eyes. “I find it most curious. The Rabbi quoted God’s word, ‘He will give rain to your land at the right season, the spring rains and the autumn rains.’ But it doesn’t rain here, Mother.” He sits down again and places his chin in both palms.
“You are right to be curious. Sometimes I am confused as well, but I have noticed that when God does not send rain, He sends the Great River to overflow and make the land fertile. Listen for God’s meaning and He will speak to you, my son.” I notice an intense glimmer in my son’s eyes when he wrestles with God’s purposes.
He sits very still and gazes at me for a long time before nodding.
“I’ve heard more about Isis in the market,” I say after the family sits down to our dinner of moonfish stew. There are eight of us at the long cedar table, including Rachel’s husband, Samir, and Noha’s husband, Isaiah. The late afternoon sun reflects off the eastern cave wall, holding the April warmth.
“Isn’t she a pagan god?” asks Rachel, picking up the basket of warm bread and passing it to Noha.
“An Egyptian goddess of medicine and wisdom, Rachel. One worshiped by man,” I say, my wooden spoon suspended over my bowl of stew. “Her husband, Osiris, lord of the underworld, was killed and cut into pieces by his jealous brother, Seth. From what I’ve heard in the market, Isis found the parts of Osiris scattered about the Great River, turned herself into a sparrow hawk and hovered over his body, fanning him back to life with her long wings.” Feeling playful, I allow my spoon to become a bird and swoop through the air, landing on my young son’s nose. It gives me pleasure when he giggles. “Isis became full with child,” I continue, “and gave birth to a son, Horus, who became a powerful falcon god and avenged his father by slaying Seth.”
“That is so,” Samir rumbles in his deep voice. “Isis is a giver of life. The Greeks call her Theotokos, Mother of God.” Although Samir converted to Judaism in order to marry Rachel, his heart belongs to the beliefs of his own people, and he takes pride in these stories. He reaches for the jug and looks around the table to find who is in need of more wine. Noha sets her cup down with a loud thud, signaling her disapproval of the story; she has expressed dissatisfaction before with my fascination with these Egyptian gods. She calls it childishness. Perhaps it is.
Samir refills her cup. Wine is a rarity in our household, reserved for days celebrating births and the Seder. Today is the day of Isaiah’s birth.
My young son stops eating, his expression intent. “Is this true, mother? Can people come back to life?”
“If God wills it, my son. God is all-powerful.” I feel unease with the sound of my own words and glance toward my husband.
He smiles at me and nods slightly before turning his attention to his older son. “What do you think of the power of other gods?” Our oldest son has been watching Noha’s agitation and is startled by the question.
He pauses before answering. “I hear much talk of these Egyptian gods with magical powers at the canal,” he replies, taking another piece of bread. “They do not know of the one true God. And I’m not about to tell them.”
“Why, my boy? Why do you not share the word of God?” asks Isaiah, visibly disappointed. Without children, Isaiah considers our son as his own. I pity Isaiah sometimes, elderly now and cowed and bent by years of marriage to Noha.
“They would ridicule me,” says our oldest. “I’ve heard it said that the Jews only need one God because we are a simple people.”
I watch my husband closely as he stares at our son. Is he questioning his real motivation? I share his doubts.
My husband turns. “Isaiah, what is your thinking about these strange gods?
“I . . . I know there is but one God. It is not proper to talk of other gods.” Isaiah is even more hesitant than usual, aware that Noha has turned away, upset about something he may or may not have done.
“Our Law also teaches tolerance and understanding. It is good to understand what others believe, is it not?” My husband says this with a gentleness he reserves for Isaiah and for me.
Isaiah lays down his spoon, preparing to speak, then changes his mind.
“Will our faith become weak if we talk of other gods?” our youngest asks, leaning forward, his elbow almost tipping his stew, his chair threatening to skid out from under him.
“Steady, my boy,” cautions Isaiah, placing his calloused hand on the back of the boy’s chair.
“Father . . . can it lead us astray?” he persists. “The Rabbi says, ‘Beware of letting ourselves be fooled into swerving aside to the worship and homage of other gods.’”
“I see your curiosity must be satisfied, my son,” says my husband. “God also tells us, ‘If you cry to intelligence and call for knowledge, seeking her out as silver and searching for her like treasure, then you shall see what reverence for the Eternal is and find out what the knowledge of God means.’ Knowledge makes us stronger. Ignorance makes us weak. If our faith is so weak that we can only keep it by shielding ourselves from knowledge, then we are not accepting the tests that God has set before us.” My husband tears off a piece of warm bread and dips it in his stew. He pauses, waiting for our youngest to spe
ak.
“But how are we to know what God wants of us?”
Silently, all of us gathered around the table tip our bowls to sip the last of the moonfish stew and pass the plate of figs.
CHAPTER 1
APRIL 6, 2007
TWO DAYS EARLIER
SHE WAS running.
Ahead of her, the yawing mouth of a cave reached deep into the flaking sandstone cliffs. Terror propelled her limbs. But what was she running from?
Moments ago, she’d been standing by a river, the sunlight skimming across the water, warm sand rising between her toes. She’d felt at peace, and yet beneath her contentment had lurked a darker worry, an omen of danger just out of sight.
Now, the blackness of the cave closed in on her. There was nowhere else to run. She couldn’t breathe. She—
Justine jolted awake with a gasp, her forehead pressed against the cold aircraft window. Overhead, the seatbelt sign pinged—they’d be landing soon.
She forced her racing pulse to slow and shook her head to dislodge the last remnants of the dream. Outside the window, the sapphire Mediterranean came into view, and the unsettled feeling left by the dream was replaced by excitement. Leaning forward, she placed her palm on the window as though she could reach out and take hold of Africa, the country that had beckoned to her since she’d visited with her parents as a teenager. At twenty-six she was returning to Egypt, free to discover it with her own eyes.
The plane passed over sparkling beaches; the new Alexandria Library rested near the shore like a giant disc, a spaceship with hundreds of Oriental eyes. Continuing its descent, the Lufthansa 747 aimed south across the verdant Nile crescent, emerging atop a landscape of tawny desert stretching as far as Justine’s eye could see. The sight ahead was nearly indecipherable: a tan, leathery blanket covering the city of nearly eighteen million, a few skyscrapers protruding above its smothering shield. She smiled as she recalled a comparable sight: two deep ochre towers extending above a white fluffy mantle of fog—the Golden Gate Bridge.
As they made their approach into Cairo International Airport, the runway met the plane with jolting intimacy. Reaching for her briefcase and purse, Justine stood up precariously and wormed her way back into a lightweight blue suit jacket. She was both exhilarated and apprehensive about what lay ahead. The Community Schools for Girls project would give her insight into today’s Egyptian girls, as well as help her to understand her own confusing roots. How am I to understand myself as a modern Egyptian woman? Am I an heir of Isis or of today’s Islamic women cloaked in hijabs? These were the questions on her mind.
She stared out the windows as she waited to exit with the other passengers crowding into the aisles. No longer the glorious view of Alexandria and the delta—leathery brown smog blocked her vision now. Heat rushed in from the open doors and the familiar chime signaled that everyone was free to go. Free to go. What an unfamiliar, though exhilarating, notion.
She had never really felt “free to go.” Raised by an Egyptian mother and a Berkeley professor father, she was often caught in the cultural crosscurrents of two stalwart individuals, both with immutable ideas about how to raise their headstrong daughter.
Justine’s Egyptian mother, Lucrezia, deliberately sought to marry an American, assuming she’d enjoy a more emancipated marriage than she could have had with one of her own countrymen. She was wrong. Morgan Jenner, with his roots in the American Midwest, was more than moderately protective of his exotic wife and young daughter. Each having disappointed the other, her parents divorced shortly after Justine moved to Chicago for graduate school.
Chicago had not been the liberating solution she had hoped. The endless demands of graduate work felt like a form of voluntary servitude. But here she was, for the first time, free of her father’s control . . . free of school . . . doctorate in hand . . . assuming her first professional position . . . free to go.
It seemed like a lifetime since she’d last walked through these corridors. When she was fourteen, her father, a renowned archeologist, had accepted a two-year assignment on a dig near the Serapeum at Saqqara, and her mother had come planning to take classes at the Cairo Modern Art Museum. Lucrezia, speaking rapid Arabic, had insisted on a customs line that didn’t exist, since the Egyptian custom was to cluster and push until you reached the desired window. Morgan had tensed against the press of bodies and held tightly to both his wife and daughter, juggling his briefcase and computer over his broad shoulders.
Justine remembered her mother reprimanding him sharply, “This is my home, Morgan. I can take care of myself.” Without answering, he had loosened his grip on her, but not his daughter. No, not his daughter. She’d been the last among her friends to date, and even then he’d insisted that a parent or another couple accompany her.
The Cairo airport was not what Justine remembered. The walkways were still a drab off-white, made even duller by dim fluorescent lighting. But there were quasi-lines this time, and an almost orderly check of passports and visas. On the periphery, young men in unfashionable suits and worn briefcases jockeyed for a place in line while a few women fully covered in black burqas milled around with small children in tow. Male family members steered them toward passport windows.
Justine offered her passport to the customs officer and smiled as he cheerfully said, “Welcome to Egypt . . .Welcome back to Egypt, Miss,” noting the earlier Egyptian stamps that she had retained in her passport despite having obtaining a new one.
“Shukran, thank you,” she replied, surprised that her Arabic returned quickly, as though she had put on an old record, one her mother had played for her as a child. She eased back into the crowd, surveying the people ahead, looking for her host. As she scanned the group of greeters just beyond the rope, she spotted the sign—DR. JUSTINE JENNER written in large block print. A middle-aged woman with a head of wild, graying hair held the sign with both hands, a bulky leather purse dangling over her right shoulder. Wide-set black eyes and shaggy brows crowned a deeply tan face with small lips. Sensible black shoes protruded from under a dark blue skirt. Just as I had imagined her.
“Nadia. Nadia Mansour,” Justine cried out, waving her free hand. The two women had been in touch by e-mail and by phone on several occasions after Justine applied for the position with UNESCO, but this was the first time they’d met in person. Nadia was the Director of the Community Schools for Girls project and a part-time professor at the American University of Cairo. She would be Justine’s supervisor. Her gregarious personality had seeped through their earlier communications.
“Inshallah, you’re still in one piece,” Nadia observed.
Justine laughed as she reached for Nadia’s outstretched hand. “Dr. Mansour, I’m delighted to finally meet you!” she said, struggling to keep her carryons from sliding off her shoulder.
Nadia gripped her arm, steering her toward the luggage area. “You have a reservation at the Shepheard and your Garden City apartment will be ready when Allah sees fit,” she said. “But first, we’ll tackle the luggage.”
They stood and watched as an avalanche of motley bags tumbled out from behind a black leather curtain, some tied with ropes, others merely taped-up boxes filled with T-shirts, baby clothes, and plastic shoes intended for sale in the street markets of Cairo.
“See those bags?” Nadia pointed to the ragged assortment of containers. “A metaphor for modern Egypt: tied together haphazardly, containing Western goods brought in by eager entrepreneurs, products for all ages, all sneaking out from behind a black curtain. Our primitive economy.”
Justine laughed at the honest observation. She attempted to respond over the cacophony of voices, but when she realized she couldn’t be heard without shouting, she simply stepped forward and pulled her new luggage and cardboard boxes from the carousel.
Nadia picked up one of the suitcases and handed it to a waiting porter in old sandals and a flowing kaftan. “My car is just across the street!” she shouted, leading the way. The porter followed them across two lanes of t
raffic, pushing a squealing cart that carried Justine’s luggage and two boxes of books wrapped and tied neatly with dark green cords. “Taxis are no longer allowed directly into the airport, so traffic here has improved,” Nadia said, pointing toward her car. “My air conditioning doesn’t work. Sorry.”
Justine attempted to open the car door. The handle swung loose in her hand. “I’ll get that,” Nadia grinned, reaching across the passenger seat and opening the door from inside. “Better take off that cute jacket.”
Justine obediently removed her blue linen jacket and laid it neatly in the backseat. “How long into town?” she asked. I hope I can survive this heat. I didn’t realize it would be quite so smoldering in April.
“Everything you remember about Cairo . . . traffic, size, pollution . . . just double it,” said Nadia, settling into her ancient Renault. “Today it could take a couple of hours to get downtown. Five million more people since you were here last, and I swear, they all have a car!” She handed Justine a bottle of warm Evian.
Justine couldn’t help smiling at Nadia’s capacity to be tolerant and exasperated at the same time. “Where does the British accent come from?” she asked.
“I attended a British school as a child. Even though the revolution was ten years old, my mother insisted: ‘You can never tell when those British colonists will come back and reclaim our land. Be prepared.’ That was 1962.”
“Prepare for all eventualities. Sounds like my parents, although each of them had their own notions of preparedness. My father is American and my mother’s Egyptian. Turned out to be an unworkable combination.”
“Your parents are celebrities of a sort here. Your father’s digs are as notorious as your mother’s beauty.” Nadia stopped at a booth to pay the airport fee, then jammed the Renault into gear, causing it to lurch forward.
Justine reached down for a seat belt that wasn’t there. “Notorious? That sounds romantic, but a bit ominous.”
The Cairo Codex Page 2
