The Cairo Codex

by Linda Lambert

  An image of Lucrezia in her white, flowing kaftan, sitting on her terrace in Fiesole, Italy, flashed into her mind. “I’m fine, Mother. Would you hold on a moment? Someone’s at the door.” She slipped her feet into flip-flops and hobbled down the steps to the living room. Reaching for the door, she motioned Nadia in. “Watch out for the broken glass,” she warned.

  “You’re hurt!” exclaimed Nadia as she followed Justine back up to the bedroom. Justine quickly held her finger to her closed lips.

  “What did she say? You’re hurt, aren’t you? Tell me what happened,” her mother demanded.

  “Just a few scratches. A couple of stitches. A few butterfly bandages. I was lucky.” As calmly as she could, Justine explained what had happened in Old Cairo. The damage she’d witnessed. Nadia sat on the edge of the bed and listened. Justine drew her legs up to her chin and examined the long cut on her calf as she talked into the phone.

  “How frightening. I’m so sorry.” Lucrezia’s warm voice trembled. It made Justine wish her mother were here, but she knew it was neither possible nor wise. “I’m coming over. I’ll get a plane tonight.”

  “Please don’t try, Mom. No one can move around the city. The road from the airport is closed, and things are just too chaotic. I’ll call every day—we’ll stay in touch. I’ll let you know when it is safe to travel. And Mom . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for calling. I really appreciate it. You remember the woman I told you about? Nadia? Well, she just arrived, and the hotel doctor has been here.”

  “I’m so relieved that you have help . . . but are you sure? You’re only a few hours from Florence.”

  “I’m sure, Mom. I appreciate your offer. By the way, what does the news say—how strong was the earthquake? No electricity here as yet.”

  “The report on BBC says 6.4. Not big by universal standards, but somewhat larger than the ’92 quake. And I know buildings in Cairo can fall down by themselves. Is the Shepheard intact?”

  “The Shepheard’s in fairly good condition. A few broken windows. Have you heard from Dad?”

  “He’s still in Peru, but I’m sure he will be calling one of us whenever he can get through. I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”

  “You’re not as courageous as you sound,” Nadia said gently when Justine had ended the call, her eyes welling up.

  Tears began to form in Justine’s eyes—at first, little droplets of moisture. “No . . . no . . .” Then emotion bubbled up from deep inside and turned to convulsive sobs.

  Nadia moved to her side and took her in her arms, patting her softly on the back. “Cry it out, honey. Take your time.”

  They sat together for several minutes until Justine slowly pulled back, drying her eyes on the sheet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to . . . I rarely cry . . .”

  “It’s good for you. We all need a good cry from time to time, and you’ve been through a lot.” Nadia settled in on the end of the bed, folding her chubby legs together. “How did you escape and get back to the hotel?”

  “The docent moved the boards blocking the way and pulled me up the stairs. I have to admit, I was terrified . . . then Mohammed found me stumbling along the street when he came out of the new mosque—it remained standing—and he had a car. We were able to work our way back to the hotel. I was never so glad to see anyone in my life! He says the earthquake is the wrath of Allah.”

  “Probably right,” Nadia said with a weak grin. “Mohammed is a good man. He can always be trusted to do the right thing. Hopefully another incident won’t test that rule, but I’m extremely grateful to him for helping you. We could have lost you . . .” Nadia had a way of fidgeting when she was nervous or upset: her eyes moved back and forth between the bed, the window, and Justine; her hands smoothed her skirt and the flowered blue comforter.

  “Is your family all right?” Justine asked. “Have you heard from the schools?”

  “My family’s fine. I only have a few scattered nieces left. My husband died a few years ago. I’ve received calls from three of the schools. I’m concerned about the one in Birqash. No word of any kind, and I can’t reach anyone.”

  “What will you do? Should we go out there?”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll go tomorrow. I was planning to go anyway.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  Nadia examined Justine’s leg, forehead, and hands and shook her head. “I don’t think so. You need to take care of yourself.”

  “Please, Nadia. I’d like to go,” Justine insisted.

  “Let’s see how you feel in the morning. Okay?”

  As Justine nodded, both women were startled by a fierce pounding on the door, which was accompanied by—or precipitated by—a horrible roar as the jagged remains of the room’s two-story window gave way and came crashing into the living room.

  “Open up! Open up!” Amir’s panicked voice was not distinguishable until the sound of falling glass subsided.

  Nadia slipped on her shoes and made her way to the door. “That sound was the window giving way!” Nadia yelled. “We’re okay!” She opened the door and stared at a disheveled Amir. His shoes were muddy, his jacket and shirt torn, as if he had just crawled out of a war zone. “Come upstairs,” she said, and they picked their way across the glass and up the stairs.

  “The sound was horrible,” Amir said uneasily. “I thought you were both in danger . . . Oh, my god, you are hurt!” he exclaimed, catching sight of Justine. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks a lot,” she said, managing a weak grin.

  Ignoring her slight indignation, he inspected her wounds, disregarding the cultural boundaries that would have normally prevented his examination of her leg, arms, and face.

  “Only a few cuts. I was lucky. What’s the report on your family, your grandfather?” she asked, moved by Amir’s unguarded concern, his tender gaze. Turning her head, she wiped the last of the tears from her cheeks.

  “I went directly to my grandfather’s house. You’ll remember how dilapidated his home was already.”

  Justine nodded.

  “He was sitting on the floor in the middle of his house. Two walls had fallen against one another. He looked like a patient Bedouin contemplating his fate. It’s a miracle he was unharmed, yet he resisted when I told him he would have to go home with me. I said I’d carry him if I had to. Heliopolis has suffered little harm, although sections of both Coptic and Islamic Cairo are severely damaged.”

  “Sounds like your grandfather. It’s a good thing you insisted,” Nadia said. “And now you need rest, young lady. You won’t be able to get services for a while, so I brought some fruit and water to tide you over. I’m told that the electricity should be back on sometime tonight. If you still want to go tomorrow, I’ll call you first thing in the morning.” Nadia nodded at Amir that it was time to go.

  “Iwa,” Amir said absently. “I’m on my way to Islamic Cairo to look for survivors . . .”

  “I’m going with you,” Nadia said, bending over to tie her shoes and find her purse.

  “Thank you both for checking on me. I appreciate it so much,” Justine said, yawning. “Amir, please tell your grandfather that I said to stop being so stubborn. And, Nadia, I do want to go with you in the morning. I’ll expect your call.”

  The electricity came back on suddenly at 4:30 a.m., waking Justine in a cold sweat, dreams rushing by like a frightening kaleidoscope. She gasped. In her terrifying nightmare, all the air had been sucked out of the crypt, and yet beneath it there’d been something else—the gentle undulation of the Nile, a bustling spice market, and some sense of unnamed worry, that same tension that had been tugging on her ever since she landed in Egypt. A cool breeze came in through the gaping window. The events of the previous day tumbled through her mind in random order, as though waiting to be rearranged. It didn’t make sense yet. She fell back into a fitful sleep.

  When she awoke again, it was 8:00 a.m. and the lights were still on. Slipping into her unlaced sneakers to cli
mb over the layers of broken glass, she went down the stairs and into the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror. My god! My head is swollen and purple—I look like hell! She touched her head and flinched. After a long pause, she carefully stepped into the shower, struggling to keep her wounded leg and head out of the direct flow of the tepid water.

  The intensity of her fear in the crypt bothered her. Was it justified? Could the same reactions have been expected of anyone in those circumstances? I kept my wits about me. I took cover, found my belongings, and worked my way up the stairs. I didn’t freeze up. Maybe that’s the best I could have hoped for. She shut off the water, refreshed her bandages, and decided to be kinder to herself, at least for the time being.

  Standing before the empty window, she watched the now-quiet city, the silence disrupted only by distant sirens. People moved about with boards and rolls of duct tape as if in a silent movie. Far to her right, Justine could see that the massive glass front of the Semiramis Hotel had collapsed into the driveway. A row of soldiers stood guard. The river and sky looked as indifferent as they had the day before.

  The phone rang. “Do you still insist on going?” asked Nadia.

  “Absolutely. Where will I meet you?”

  They decided that Nadia would pull up on the river side of the Corniche in thirty minutes. Sitting on the side of her bed, Justine pulled on her brown leather boots, a khaki skirt, and a long-sleeved blouse. She found a hat with a modest brim and pulled it down over her bruised forehead. No telling what conditions they would encounter today. “Ready!” she declared, observing herself in the mirror as if she were a stranger.

  She reached into her canvas bag and extracted her small bottle of warm water, her notebook, and her scarf. Where was her new camera? She was disturbed by its loss, but her attention was quickly diverted when her fingers brushed against an unfamiliar surface. She grasped the item and pulled it from her bag.

  A little book of worn leather with a shiny patina stared back at her. A faint memory floated into her consciousness . . . something small and unfamiliar at her feet when she crouched under the pillar during the earthquake. An earlier visitor must have dropped it. But this is no modern notebook. A slight, momentary dizziness caused her vision to blur, then refocus.

  Her skin tingled as she carefully opened the stiff leather cover, which looked vaguely like that of her grandmother’s bible. One line of words appeared on the first page, which was followed by fewer than a hundred fragile and discolored pages, all of them inserted as full sheets and tied together along the rib of the book. She turned the pages cautiously to keep from crumbling them into crusty flakes. The language looked vaguely familiar, although—except for a few Greek words distributed sparsely throughout—she couldn’t read it.

  Someone’s Bible? A Koran? A Rabbi’s prayer book? Might it have been dropped by Michael or the priest? When she held it, the images from her dream came back to her—the dark cave, the warm water.

  She felt it somehow—this was the missing piece to a puzzle, but what puzzle she didn’t yet know. When she glanced up, her eyes caught the clock: she was running late to meet Nadia. She gently wrapped the treasure with her best silk blouse and placed it under a stack of underwear in the dresser.

  Nadia and Justine drove out of the city to the north, crossing the July 27th Bridge. Several buttresses were cracked down to the water line. They wove through Bulaq on a poorly paved road that turned to dirt not long into the thirty-five kilometers to Birqash. The city gave way to fields of beans, mango trees, and community gardens on the left, while the right shoulder of the road hugged one of the canals branching northwest from the Nile to form the Delta. Clusters of red rhododendron, yellow oleander, and acacia growing at the base of sycamores and willows hosted an occasional hoopoe bird and miniature crane. Garbage-filled ditches gaped between the flowering roadside and the canal. Every few miles, a small village embraced the potholed road. Driving was necessarily slow. Justine wondered whether the Renault could make it.

  She watched the contrasting colors and primitive villages as they flowed by, but her mind was on the book in her drawer. Any book that old must hold great significance . . . perhaps it is as old as the time of the Mamluks, or even medieval times. The 1500s were radiant in Cairo, as they were elsewhere . . . literacy abounded, and books were traded like saffron. The more she thought about it, the more her excitement grew.

  As the car bounced in and out of a particularly deep pothole, she was shaken out of her private thoughts.

  “What is your greatest fear about what we are going to find?” she asked Nadia.

  “My greatest fear?” Nadia paused, pressing her lips together. “I guess the safety of the children and their families. I’m praying that the quake left them unharmed. But returning my calls wouldn’t be at the top of their list . . . I’m sure everything’s okay,” she reassured herself. “We’re not seeing a lot of damage as we drive, are we? Birqash might have been out of range of the quake.”

  “Who would have called you? The teacher? A parent?” They were passing villages thrown together with aluminum, plaster, and clay bricks around small stores selling boxed milk, tissue paper, bread, a few canned goods, bottled water, and soft drinks. Miniature refrigerator cases offered lunchmeats, cheeses, and yogurt. Some sold plasticware as well: brightly colored bowls, bottles, and floppy sandals. A few were open; most were not.

  “Layla should have called me. She’s the teacher. Then Om Mahmoud, the mother of two of the students and the community leader of the school council. I surely would have heard from her if anything had happened.” The road was a continual stream of small villages now, with tiny cafés and clothing shops that looked like mini Walmarts, devoid of anything made of Egyptian cotton, which was exported for the high price it brought in Western markets. “It’s nearly impossible to know if anything has happened. The men will drink their tea and smoke their water pipes under any conditions.” She shook her head as she glanced at another café brimming with local men huddled in conversation over a scattered array of cups and small plates.

  “Is it unusual for a woman to lead the school council?” asked Justine, seeking to distract Nadia from the increasingly disturbing scenes around them. People were milling around a few collapsed buildings. As in Cairo, the effects of the quake here were erratic—seeming to have no pattern, no rhyme or reason.

  “It’s not unusual for a woman to lead the council in our project,” Nadia managed. “We actively recruit women leaders as role models. Right now, four out of the six council leaders are women.” She glanced at Justine. “I’m glad you came along today. I’m more anxious than I thought. It steadies me to talk.”

  Justine nodded, careful not to jar her throbbing head. She’d taken a couple of Tylenol before leaving the hotel, but they weren’t helping much. Perhaps this headache accounts for my strange reaction to that little book. Staring at the dead camels strewn along the side of the road, she asked uneasily, “Is this a result of the quake?”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t. We’re nearing the camel market. When camels die from the strain of the trip from the Sudan, or other ailments, they are just thrown along the side of the road. A common practice.”

  Memories of the old camel market rushed back. “My dad took me to the market in Bulaq when I was a kid. Drivers and herders in flowing robes and white turbans, romantic characters holding hands in a circle until a deal was struck. Camels were sold for transport, and for food, as I recall.” Scenes of unnecessary cruelty were vivid in her mind: camels beaten with long sticks while they stood still, unable to figure out what was wanted of them. “I was outraged to see the camels beaten and told my dad I wanted to do something about it, anything. I was disappointed when he said, ‘No, Justine, it is their way.’”

  “He was right. It is their way.”

  As the car approached the next village, they could hear the wailing of women before they could see them—the piercing sound of sorrow, an eerie trilling of the tongue signaling life’s most dramat
ic moments. It sounded like death. A large crowd was gathered in a circle, the wailing women on one side, men on the other. By the size of the small coffins, three children lay dead.

  Nadia’s eyes were welling up as she parked the car just beyond the crowd, near to the school. Two sides of the aging, white-plastered building had collapsed inward. Wooden tables and benches, books, and papers were scattered across the now-visible floor. As Nadia headed toward the crowd of mourners, Justine stood back, surveying the damage. She understood that families were particularly sensitive at times like these and might not welcome a stranger in their midst, so she joined a small, helpless crowd standing nearby. The women were weeping. Justine entered a nearly collapsed store and grabbed several bottles of water, leaving a few pounds on the counter, and returned to the bystanders to hand out the bottles.

  Seeing that one woman was simply holding one of the water bottles, leaving it unopened, Justine took the bottle from her, opened it, and offered her a drink. The woman lifted her eyes and met Justine’s, and the story of the quake poured out of her. After two more conversations, Justine was able to piece together the story of the catastrophe and heartbreak.

  She and Nadia found each other shortly after the service, faces pale from watching the villagers’ agony. “These children died when the school collapsed—while sitting in a learning center,” said Nadia. “One of the girls was six, the others two and seven. Other children have been injured. The six-year-old was Om Mahmoud’s daughter Nora.” She and Justine reached for each other and held on in a tight hug.

  Justine said quietly, “I talked with some of the neighbors. There was the quake, then two strong aftershocks. Small aftershocks during the night. At the first aftershock, the school collapsed, and a couple of the neighbors were injured trying to find their children. They were also in the school when the last aftershock hit.”

  Nadia held Justine at arm’s length. “How are you?”

  “A little shaken, but I’ll be okay. Did you find the teacher?”