The Cairo Diary

by Maxim Chattam

  Azim was captivated by the account. He forgot where he was and what he was doing amid all these fabrics, hanging from the ceiling.

  “And its hands … I saw its hands too, and even in the darkness I could see that they weren’t human. Its fingers were too long, and … and it had enormous claws, even more menacing than an eagle’s talons.”

  Azim blinked and his mind cleared. He asked the trader for a little information and discovered that he lived less than five hundred and fifty yards as the crow flies from the place where the ghul had been spotted by the old smoker.

  “Do you have children?” asked Azim.

  “Four.”

  “Then do not let them sleep on the roof, even if it is hot.”

  The man approached Azim. “Are you mad? I saw that monster. I would never do anything of the kind! And my children never go out alone.”

  “A wise precaution. Even if I do think that it is unlikely that this … thing will come back through your district—”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” asked the trader in astonishment. “It didn’t come just once. I have seen it three times.”

  20

  Fantasy.

  Marion got up to stretch her numb muscles.

  This tale of a creature prowling the darkness, this ghoul, was pure fantasy.

  She considered the diary’s black cover.

  What kind of text was it? What had she happened upon? For the first time since she had begun reading, she felt uncomfortable. She had felt uneasy during the descriptions of the children’s murders, and yet that was part of the story, part of the investigation. But this tale of a monster betrayed a certain naïveté that Marion didn’t know if she should impute to the man or to the era.

  The author, Jeremy Matheson, wrote down in the first person what he had experienced or felt, and wrote a long parenthesis on what his colleague, this man Azim, had done during this time, giving glimpses of the fact that they had spoken about it subsequently. It was curious to note how precise he could be in his descriptions, almost romantic in places. He even attributed precise emotions to Azim, so intimate that it was unlikely they had really discussed them. No, Jeremy had made calculated guesses, deduced, or imagined.

  Nevertheless, the theory of the ghoul remained hard to swallow.

  Marion stifled a yawn.

  It was midafternoon, she had only paused briefly for lunch, and her hours of reading had made her feel groggy.

  The weather was sad, the sky displaying an entire spectrum of grays, from broken white at the zenith to an ashen horizon.

  She pulled on a warm sweater and opted for the trench coat in order to go for a walk; the cold had intensified over the last two days. The feeling of the diary in her pocket was almost reassuring.

  If the notion of the ghoul beggared belief, she had to admit that she was gripped by this tale, and excited by what the yellowed pages still held in store for her. Since she had found it, she had almost never separated herself from her precious treasure. It exerted a perverse fascination over her. It provoked a voyeurism that she could never hold back.

  She walked along the edge of the little cemetery, and skirted around the entrance to the parish church of Saint-Pierre to get back to the rue Grande. From there, she headed into a passageway between two ancient buildings and reached the curtain wall. From one tower to the next she walked along, buffeted by the wind’s powerful breath. Down below, the sea had left stretches of water in its nocturnal wake, puddles with absinthe-colored reflections, some of which reflected misshapen images back to the skies.

  The Tombelaine rock loomed up in the distance, standing alone with its cloud of barnacle geese. It inspired a certain melancholy in Marion, this lost fragment of France in exile, damned forever amid the mists and tides of the bay.

  Damned or privileged, she corrected herself.

  Its stark, ascetic shape made her feel even sadder.

  A dark shape was moving diagonally between the Mount and Tombelaine. Marion strained her eyes and confirmed what she had sensed: A man was calmly walking back toward her.

  He made a large detour and Marion was just thinking that there was no reason for it, when she recalled what people said about the bay. The moving sands had claimed their share of victims. They bit ankles and drew down calves, sucking on their food at leisure, until the rising tide came along and drowned whatever jutted out above the sands.

  The stroller clearly knew the way, and was getting closer to the curtain wall.

  When he was a short distance away, Marion took in the details of his appearance. He was a mature man, tall and slender, not brown-haired as she had at first thought, but wearing a sailor’s cap over his white hair. He moved elegantly, hands thrust into the pockets of a navy blue pea jacket.

  He hailed her with a little wave of his arm.

  She was at first astonished, then realized that she was the only person on the entire length of the ramparts and that she had been watching him for a while already, which he was sure to have noticed.

  Marion responded with an answering wave.

  To her own surprise, she started walking along the curtain wall, parallel to the walker, descending toward the entrance to the village.

  They met under the arch of the Porte du Roy.

  The stranger took off his hat, leaving his lily-white hair ruffled, and bowed slightly, hands behind his back. “Madam.”

  He was much older than she had at first thought. At least eighty, thought Marion. His face was half-invisible beneath a week’s growth of beard, as dazzlingly white as his hair, and two deep furrows ran vertically down his cheeks. His eyes were barely discernible under the protection of his half-closed eyelids, yet they radiated an astonishing vivacity, seemingly piercing right through her. The man held himself perfectly upright, his bearing in no way forced, and accompanied by a certain natural charisma. As a young man, he must surely have been stunning for, despite his age, Marion found him very attractive.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the honor of meeting you before, however I think I know who you are. The village is small, and information circulates quickly, even more so than on that Internet everyone is talking about. You are on retreat with the brotherhood, are you not?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Allow me to introduce myself: I am Joe.”

  “Joe?” she repeated.

  “Yes, that’s my name. I bid you welcome, madam…?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Marion.”

  She held out her hand and he shook it affectionately. His skin was like parchment; perhaps because of the cold, she thought.

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance. The thing is, we don’t have many visitors during the winter, and even fewer long-term residents.”

  He had a hint of an accent that Marion couldn’t quite place. Alsace, she thought uncertainly.

  The Mount really was a veritable Tower of Babel. The majority of the inhabitants she came across were not natives of the area but had been imported from the four corners of the country.

  “I spotted you on the ramparts just now. It’s a magnificent walk, and if I may offer one small piece of advice: Go up there at dusk, it is beautiful enough to burn your eyes. From a distance, the grasses take on orange and violet tints; it’s incredible.”

  Marion replaced a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I shall make a note of that, thank you. Have you been to Tombelaine?”

  “Indeed.”

  “It must be a beautiful place.”

  “That it is. I can take you there sometime if you would like; it’s around four miles, there and back. On the other hand, don’t try your luck alone; the edges of the bay are treacherous. You have to know your way to get there.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. I’d be delighted to accompany you next time. You … you live here, if I understand rightly.…”

  “Yes, a little higher up, but come along and have some tea, if you’re not busy?”

  Marion nodded and followed the old man as he started walking up t
he rue Grande.

  “Is the brotherhood’s welcome to your taste?” he asked.

  “Yes, everybody is very nice,” replied Marion. “And I have all the tranquillity I was dreaming of.”

  “Tranquillity! You were certainly inspired when you chose Mont-Saint-Michel if it’s tranquillity you’re after. And there is no better place than the abbey in which to meditate.”

  “From what you say, it sounds as if you’ve been here a long time.”

  “Oh, yes. But no time at all in comparison with that … stone,” he said, looking up at the soaring mass of the summit.

  As they walked up the street, Marion was surprised to note that he was really much taller than she was; he must be almost six two.

  “Where are you staying?” he inquired. “Opposite the cemetery, I assume?”

  “Yes, does news travel that fast here?”

  “Faster than you can imagine,” he said, laughing. “In fact, the brotherhood usually houses people on retreat in attic apartments lower down in the village if there are several of them, and in that little house if there is only one.”

  He leaned toward her with a knowing smile, and added, “I told you: I’ve been here a long time.… Everyone knows everybody else’s business on the Mount.”

  “I can see that.… On that subject, how many of you are there living there at the moment?”

  “Well … there’s Béatrice the shop owner, and her son. The postal clerk only comes here to work at this time of year, like the hotel staff and the people who work at the Mère Poulard restaurant.… Ah, Ludwig the night watchman lives among us. The members of the brotherhood, and myself. So that makes … thirteen! My God, I’d never realized. So you are now doubly welcome! The fourteenth resident of the Mount, to dispel bad luck!”

  “Oh, don’t give me such an important part to play; people might not want me to leave,” said Marion with amusement.

  “Here we are.”

  They entered a medieval house, with lofty ceilings, broad windows, and a wooden floor that creaked underfoot. Dampness and the smell of wax shared the place between them. Joe showed Marion into an outsized living room, in which the fireplace took up more space than a Norman wardrobe.

  “Do sit down, I’ll be right back.”

  He returned a few minutes later, carrying a tray, and poured out piping hot tea accompanied by buttered biscuits.

  “So, how did you end up here, if I may ask?” he wanted to know.

  “By chance.”

  Joe gave a brief nod. “How do you mean, by chance?”

  “Almost. I wanted … needed some rest. To recharge my batteries. I found out what was possible for me to do, the different places where I could go on retreat. The temporary vow of silence isn’t my thing, so I ruled out a convent in Savoy, and the next one on my list was Mont-Saint-Michel. I didn’t ask myself any more questions, and I decided to try my luck,” she lied with aplomb.

  Joe gazed at her, his eyes lingering on the cut in her lip, which was beginning to scar over. Then he looked her straight in the eyes. Marion observed him in return. He seemed ready to receive her confidences, imagining that here he had a battered wife fleeing from her husband, or the victim of an attack who had come here to regain inner peace. Whatever he might think, Marion saw that he was not fooled and that he could guess at a few more dramatic reasons for this retreat.

  “What would you say to a good fire?” he asked with sudden enthusiasm. At which he stood up and laid a log and some twigs in the hearth. “For my part, I’ve been here since the war, you know!”

  Marion lifted her cup of hot tea and blew gently on it. “So you know everyone, and every nook and cranny of this place, I presume.”

  Joe grabbed an old newspaper, which he tore into strips, crumpling them up before sliding them underneath the heap of wood. “I certainly hope so!”

  Marion held back from asking him the question that kept running through her head.

  She swallowed a mouthful of tea.

  The living-room windows looked out onto a tiny neglected garden, over which the ramparts loomed. The grayish sky diluted the daylight in a vast cupola.

  Joe struck a match and lit the balls of paper in the fireplace.

  Marion allowed her curiosity to overcome her reserve and asked, “If you’ve been here since the forties, perhaps you’ve heard of an Englishman who apparently stayed on the Mount…”

  Joe lost interest in his burgeoning fire. “An Englishman?” he repeated. “Why an Englishman?”

  She made up her reply on the spur of the moment. “It’s … oh, just a chance thing, stuff people have told me; I just wanted to know if it was true or if someone had been playing tricks on me.”

  “Who told you that? Brother Gilles?”

  Marion made an effort to place Brother Gilles in the whole brotherhood. He was the eldest, not very nice, with his aquiline profile. An old grouch, she recalled instantly. He was too close. She’d have to find somebody else, or her lie might be discovered.

  “No, not at all,” she replied. “It was in Avranches. A group of men trying to be funny, I would imagine. They told me that an Englishman came to the Mount for a stay…”

  Joe shook his head. “Ah, the town.… They’re not trustworthy. In any case there weren’t any Englishmen here, not as far as I know. Was it important to you?”

  Marion caught herself lying with an intoxicating ease. The words and the confidence came to her spontaneously, without hesitation, without fear; her hands were not moist and her legs were not shaking. She had revealed herself as a thoroughgoing liar in the pay of the DST, in a way.

  This idea pleased her. In her own way, she embraced this new career, that of spy.

  “Why are you interested in a visit by an Englishman?” asked Joe. “There are hundreds of more entertaining and mysterious things in the history of the abbey, so why that?”

  “It’s just that I was told that an Englishman had stayed here a while before going away again and leaving a private journal behind him. But apparently nobody has ever found this journal. I was so bored that the story was enough to appeal to me.”

  Joe opened his hands in a sign of powerlessness. “Sorry, but I’ve never heard such a story, and yet I’m the kind of old fellow people come and question about that sort of thing; I’m in a way the eyes and ears of this lonely rock. If I may permit myself, don’t listen too closely to what you’re told in town; the Mount gives rise to many rumors, but they are rarely true.”

  Behind his back, the flames rose little by little, making the branches crackle as they licked at them.

  Marion drank some tea and enjoyed a biscuit as she warmed her hands before the hearth. “Just now, you asked me if it was Brother Gilles who told me that story about the Englishman.… Do you know him well?”

  Joe bit into one of the biscuits and wiped his chin with a paper napkin. “Yes, we’re both a bit like this old stone. Almost immovable in the middle of the bay.”

  “I don’t think he likes me much,” confided Marion.

  “Don’t fret about it. He doesn’t like anybody, not you, not me, not the tourists who pass through. In any event, nobody who is not directly attached to the Mount. If you weren’t born here or as good as, in his eyes you’re a parasite on ‘his’ abbey, a cockroach liable to damage this legacy of ancient times.”

  “Then why doesn’t he like you? You were here long before, weren’t you?”

  “Brother Gilles? No, he arrived a year before me, with Sister Luce, whom you must surely have noticed.”

  Marion remembered a very old woman, with a profile strangely similar to that of Brother Gilles, and every bit as taciturn and sour-tempered. “Indeed…”

  “And since then they have been the repositories of the spirit of Mont-Saint-Michel, or at least they think so!”

  Joe started to laugh, his mirth restrained but sincere.

  “Brother Gilles and Sister Luce, are they … from the same family?” asked Marion with interest.

  “That is a vast
debate! I don’t know. To see the pair of them, one as acerbic and disdainful as the other, you might think so. But in the end, I still don’t know if they already resembled each other back then, or if it’s this bitterness that has brought them closer together in terms of physical appearance. I just can’t remember what they were like, when they were younger. That’s what old age is like, my dear, it means forgetting, or getting confused. Or no longer having the strength to go far in efforts of memory. So we harp on about what we have left.”

  “You seem in very good form to me, for someone who’s saying such things.”

  “Don’t trust appearances, Marion, still less here than elsewhere.”

  He took the plate of biscuits and offered it to her so that she could take one, then took one himself. “Have you met everyone?” he asked.

  “Yes, everyone you have mentioned.”

  “All fine folk.”

  “That’s what they seem to me. Actually, it’s quite funny because I’m discovering each inhabitant of this … this island in one way or another, and I find myself liking them all for the little I know of them, even though I am generally suspicious by nature, not to say misanthropic. You know, I have often thought, stupidly I agree, that only people with sinister secrets to keep could want to set up home on a pebble like this one, set apart from the world.”

  Joe joined his palms in front of his nose and leaned his chin on his thumbs as he gazed at the fire. “Secrets, all the families in the world have them,” he confided. “All. More or less well-kept. It isn’t the secrets that lead people here. It’s the answers. The men and women who live here do so because their souls are like this Mount, made up of truth sometimes concealed by mists, sometimes unveiled by the sun. We are here because we are all made up of fluctuating memories, like the tide. No other place could suit us better.”

  “Are you talking about yourself?” Marion dared ask.

  “No, I don’t think so. More in the name of all the Mount’s inhabitants.”