The Cairo Diary

by Maxim Chattam

  Her ears were hurting from the attacks of the coming storm.

  Finally she came out in the street, her street, panting for breath.

  She covered the last few strides down the dark alley.

  Before stopping suddenly in front of an unexpected obstacle, a mass battered by the elements that bounced off it.

  He was there.

  In front of her.

  The light came up suddenly, pointed directly at Marion’s face. She took a step back, protecting her eyes with one arm.

  “Hey!” she protested.

  There was no reaction from the figure in front of her.

  Marion had only had sufficient time to spot that the stranger was much taller than she was, and very powerfully built.

  “Will you please lower your flashlight!” she snapped. “You’re blinding me.”

  She could no longer see him, but heard him moving. His shoes squeaked on the paving stones.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

  The torch went out.

  “I don’t know you. Who are you?” demanded a man with a strong Northern accent.

  “Excuse me? Are you joking? You’re the one who’s attacking me, with your light!”

  “That’s my job, little lady. I’m the Mount guard. So who are you?”

  Marion relaxed a little. She detected the release of a more intense tension than she’d been aware of. “I … I was invited here by the brothers and sisters to—”

  “That’s what I was telling myself. You’re with the brotherhood. That’s what I thought when I realized that I didn’t know your face. Gaël, Brother Gaël, informed me that they were playing host to a woman on retreat for the winter. Excuse me if I frightened you.”

  Marion was annoyed that someone had said she was going to stay all winter. “That’s okay, let’s not talk about it again,” she said. “My name’s Marion.”

  “And I’m Ludwig.”

  He raised his torch and lit his face from beneath, to show himself. “Now you’ll recognize me,” he chuckled.

  He was indeed very tall, a good six foot two, a little overweight, with plump cheeks and a circle of beard enclosing his mouth. His eyes were as dark as his close-cropped hair. Around thirty, Marion estimated.

  “You shouldn’t stay outside, the storm’s coming,” he warned her. “Pretty soon it’s going to be blowing a gale around here.”

  “I was just going back home, I’ve been out for a little walk.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t hang about. I’ll finish off my round and then I’m getting under cover. After then, there’ll be nobody left on the streets.”

  Marion pointed to the narrow street that ran behind him. “I live down there…”

  “Oh, ’scuse me.”

  He stepped aside to let her pass. “Right, anyhow, we’ll have a chance to get to know each other if you’re spending the whole winter with us. Good night, madam.”

  She nodded and felt a surge of relief as she reached her front door.

  The man’s “madam” hadn’t pleased her. Too overdone. How old was he himself? Five or six years younger than she was? He had spoken the word as if a whole world existed between them. As if she were … old.

  Thin-skinned.

  Yes, so what?

  She locked the door and switched on the ceiling lamp in the entrance.

  What had come over her, going out like that?

  She slid a hand into her pocket and removed the envelope.

  She shook her head gently, bemused by her own attitude.

  And she placed the envelope on the hall table.

  7

  The dawn was gray.

  And noisy.

  The storm had launched its first attack during the night, waking Marion many times. For the time being, all that was left of it was its tail end, a continuous wind that whistled against the walls and transformed the whole bay into a vast, sooty sky in which nobody could tell the difference between sea and air.

  Marion opened her eyes gradually.

  On the bedside table a cream-colored sheet of good-quality paper lay, unfolded. An elegant fountain pen had written the following words upon it:

  Bravo.

  Bravo, and welcome.

  The sheet of paper was newly crumpled, a gesture of irritation the previous night, when Marion had opened the envelope before going to bed.

  She got up before eight o’clock. She went down wearing a dressing gown “borrowed” from a fine London hotel during an international symposium on legal medicine, to which she had accompanied the female director of the Médico-légal Institute. Somebody had dropped a note through the letter slot and it had slid onto the tiles in the entrance hall. Marion sighed as she picked it up.

  Neither a riddle leading to nothing, nor anonymous, thankfully.

  This time there were no obscure phrases. Sister Anne explained that she was at the abbot’s residence for the whole day and that Marion could join her there. As Friday was the day of the Passion, no member of the brotherhood would be taking any meals, so she would have to eat alone, and she ended by hoping that the storm hadn’t disturbed her sleep too much.

  Marion arched her eyebrows and let the note fall to the ground.

  Still dazed with sleep, she opened the refrigerator and found some orange juice. She ate some crackers, sitting on the big sofa, staring distractedly the tops of the roofs through the window.

  She had no desire to be among the brothers and sisters today, and especially not to listen to any talk of Christ, God, the Church, or religion as a whole. She aspired to a real, entirely personal peace.

  She took a shower, dressed in jeans and a thick woollen sweater, then rang the abbot’s residence, whose number was on a list beside the telephone. She explained to Sister Anne that she would like to be alone, and hung up. She had made no mention of the previous evening’s riddle, and still less the fact that she’d gone out. Either thing would become clearer on its own, or not at all.

  In any event, the day passed more quickly than she had imagined.

  In the morning, she braved the wind, which was still just as strong, to wander along the main street of the village. Apart from Mère Poulard’s restaurant, there was only one shop open. The handful of resolute winter tourists had melted away at the announcement of the storm. Marion was alone in the street.

  When she entered the souvenir shop, the saleswoman offered her most beautiful smile and begged her to buy a postcard, so that she wouldn’t have opened up for nothing. They laughed and quickly hit it off. They drank a few coffees as they got to know each other. The saleswoman’s name was Béatrice, she was forty-four, and she lived on the Mount with her eighteen-year-old son, Grégoire. Several times, Marion remarked that she was a beautiful woman, with bobbed red hair and high cheekbones that led to a slender nose, and that it was a shame for her to live alone in this exile, at the end of the world. There couldn’t be hordes of attractive men around here, apart from the usual ones, you’d get through them all pretty quickly, and if she hadn’t found one who suited her—

  Béatrice swiftly replied that she was divorced, and had been single for a long time. “How about you?”

  Marion answered with a nervous laugh. “Never married, no children, never divorced, in other words I’ve never taken any risks,” she said in a single breath.

  “So was it your career, or haven’t you ever met the right guy?”

  “I think one influenced the other, and vice versa.”

  “Shit, you say that as if everything was already over and done with. You’re delightful, Marion, and that’s not just flattery, it’s what I really think. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  Béatrice spat out the smoke from her cigarette as she gave her a sidelong look. “And you’ve come to Mont-Saint-Michel to look for your Grail? My dear, you can’t go questing for an escort, sorry, for your Prince Charming in a place where there isn’t anybody.…”

  “I’m on retreat. With the brotherhood.”

  Mar
ion followed to the letter the story Sister Anne had given her. She was on retreat for the winter or at least for a few weeks, fleeing the stress of the city to find herself again, regain serenity. Sister Anne had asked her not to mention anything about her real life, to make up a false surname for herself if she had to give one. Nobody outside the religious community must know her real identity, as a safety precaution.

  The worst thing, she realized, was that she found it disconcertingly easy to lie. Her apartment in Paris, near the Gare de l’Est, was transformed into a house in Choisy-le-Roi, her job at the institute became artistic director for a small advertising agency, and so on and so forth for all the “formalities” of her existence. The most difficult thing was lying about the spiritual aspect of her presence on the Mount. She was not a believer, and not into Zen or Feng Shui and the rest, either; she found her own personal spirituality in the records of Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Rickie Lee Jones.

  Béatrice invited her to lunch at her home, above the shop. Grégoire wasn’t there. He had left school a year earlier and was looking for work in one of the region’s small or medium-sized businesses. He borrowed his mother’s car and spent most of his time away from the Mount.

  The two women joked a lot and found out more about each other. Marion offered to look after the shop for a day or two, if that would be of help to Béatrice, and in exchange Béatrice promised to take her for a trip to terra firma if she should feel too hemmed in behind the fortifications.

  Marion got back home late in the afternoon and made herself some dinner with the fresh vegetables she found in her refrigerator. Sister Anne had explained about shopping. All she had to do was provide a list, and at least once a week, one or two of the brothers would go to Avranches to buy everything.

  At least she had gained a home-delivery service.

  The storm began again early that evening. The rain poured down on the roofs with impressive enthusiasm. The chimneys soon disappeared in a grayish haze, spangled with the occasional distant flash of lightning.

  Marion was beginning to get used to her new living room. The long window was its soul, she realized. A direct view into the life of this place, the village, then the bay, and the mainland in the distance.

  She fell asleep in front of the television, and when she opened her eyes it was pitch-black. The rain was still falling, but with a more muffled sound, and the thunder had deserted the shore. Only solitary flashes of lightning remained on the horizon.

  Marion gazed at the sight for several minutes.

  This must resemble what it had been like during the landings in 1944. Spectral lights that tore through the darkness, and the vague echo of the guns. And not one human voice in all the chaos.

  Marion switched off the TV and went up to bed.

  * * *

  The weekend was cast in the same mold. The brothers and sisters held a Mass in the abbey, before an audience of the staunch faithful who had defied the bad weather to come to Mont-Saint-Michel. Marion chose to remain on her own. She went to visit Béatrice and spent the two days arranging her few possessions in the house.

  On Monday morning, the storm had ceased.

  As had been planned, Brother Damien came to fetch Marion that morning to drive her to Avranches, where they were going to do some classification of the age-old collection. The old Simca carried them a good distance from the Mount, to the town hall square, where they parked between the brown puddles that filled the potholes.

  Brother Damien showed his credentials, greeting all the members of staff by their first names, while Marion followed in silence. They climbed a staircase adorned with paintings to the glory of the great individuals who had created the town’s history, and entered the library.

  Marion thought she had entered a wooden cathedral.

  The shelves reached very high, transforming the books into a single body of knowledge, accessible only by sloping ladders. A narrow and fragile-looking U-shaped gangway ran around almost the whole room, serving the top shelves, some five and a half yards above the ground.

  Brother Damien roused her from her contemplation. “Do you know that among the manuscripts stored here are fragments of an eighth-century Bible? Phenomenal, isn’t it?”

  “I’m completely overwhelmed,” murmured Marion.

  The floor creaked like the deck of an ancient three-master as they walked along.

  “It is kept in an adjoining room, in an enormous safe, like the ones they have in banks. You have to put on white gloves to touch it, you know!”

  “I can imagine…”

  Brother Damien chatted with the chief librarian, a small and jolly man who wore half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose; then they set off up the spiral staircase that led to the upper gangway.

  The books stretched away in rows until perspective made them appear as slender and small as a fingernail. Marion leaned on the guardrail, laying her hands upon it. Since her adolescence she had developed a theory, which held that all the keys to the cosmos were assembled at various earthly points: libraries. An individual who knew all the books in a few libraries could understand the universe, right down to its most intimate, most savage elements. You’d have to read everything, in order to be equal to the task of cross-checking, to know what had—sometimes stupidly—escaped the scientists. The main part was already within our reach, but dispersed, so one mind must assimilate it all; there were experts in each discipline, but nobody covered them all. All you had to do was choose your libraries well, perhaps ten or so, and the kinds of material oriented toward the absolute, and the mind would become the possessor of knowledge. Its reasoning would carry out the analyses, exchanges, and conclusions leading to knowledge. The impossibility of the task for a single brain and a single life reflected all the truth of this ultimate knowledge: It was not within the grasp of mankind. Marion had often thought about it. Why not accept that we were simply not capable of really understanding the whole cosmos? How could we imagine a cat working on the implications of the theory of relativity? And yet that doesn’t mean it is incapable of thinking, at its own level, according to its means. This reasoning did not imply that we should stop wanting to understand, of course, but that Man should become humbler, less greedy, and that his conception of knowledge should be less a violation than a reflection. For sooner or later the Earth, on its own scale, will remind us of the cost.

  Marion’s hands gripped the guardrail.

  She hadn’t had these types of thoughts for a long time. Imitation eco-freak, hippie fever. None of the things she respected or wanted to be. And yet … the routine of work, the need to integrate into society, having a bank account, bills, a social life: From year to year, all of this pushed further back what she had been when she was younger, with her hard-line, anticonformist ideas. What others regarded as maturity suddenly appeared to her like a sort of brainwashing. And finding herself abruptly isolated, no longer seeing her few friends, being shut away in her home, doing nothing but thinking … little by little, all of this awakened that part of herself that she had forgotten, or at least believed had moved on.

  “Get back!” the librarian shouted up from below. “Don’t lean on the rail like that; it’s not very stable!”

  Marion straightened up and gave him a nod.

  Brother Damien had disappeared.

  She followed the one and only path to the corner, from where four steps led up to a minuscule door, which stood ajar.

  “Come in, don’t be afraid.” Brother Damien invited her in with his usual bonhomie.

  Marion entered the attic. It took the form of a rectangular, low-ceilinged room, lined with shelves that groaned under the weight of books, old magazines, local periodicals, cards, and ornithological sketches. A fanlight at each end allowed in a little light, just enough to move without tripping over the piles of encyclopedias or old magazines that grew here and there on the floor.

  “This is our office for the days to come,” joked the brother.

  “Is all of this part
of the heritage of Mont-Saint-Michel?”

  “Not at all, it belongs to the town of Avranches. We come here to draw up an inventory; the town hall employs us for that. Each brother and sister in our brotherhood earns a salary, not for personal gain but simply to earn his or her living. Generally we work part time. Right, well, we’ve got plenty on our plate!”

  Brother Damien handed her a notebook and a pen and allocated her the left-hand section. Her task was to list all the works in minute detail, by hand and with no classification system save the one in which they were already more or less arranged.

  Marion faced the hundreds of well-worn spines lined up before her. And she set to work.

  Seeing that they were going to be there for several days, she suggested to Brother Damien that they should equip themselves with a radio the next day, so they could at least listen to a little music. He grimaced at the idea, and reminded Marion of the virtues of working in silence, for thought and prayer.

  Behind his permanent good humor, Brother Damien was still a member of the brotherhood like all the rest, Marion reminded herself.

  For more than three hours, she sorted and listed periodicals, newspapers, and newsmagazines covering all of the second half of the nineteenth century and up through the 1940s. The covers gave off the forgotten smell of the colonies, the Roaring Twenties, the fox-trot, and of journeys by steamer or airship. And the smell of war.

  The industry of death.

  By the end of the morning, from superannuated images of bygone cultures and their delicious fascination, Marion had declined into a misanthropic melancholy.

  At noon, Brother Damien took her to a café in the square, along with the librarian and a few members of staff from the town hall. Marion remained silent, introduced by Brother Damien as being on retreat in their community. She left them while they were having dessert and went to buy Ouest-France at the café opposite, where she settled herself at the counter to read.

  The scandal that had forced her to leave Paris was still on the front page.