The Deceit

25

A fine crescent moon rose above the tiny crucifix that adorned the dome of St Sergius. The symbolism was apt. Ryan stared around, sensing the danger. They were parked in a side street three minutes from the hushed white walls of Coptic Cairo.

Despite the curfewed calm of these deserted streets — the disturbances were miles north — the place felt surrounded. Besieged and frightened in the darkness. And perhaps facing its final doom, after two thousand years of remarkable survival.

Hanna pointed. ‘Here’s my contact.’

Albert’s ‘friend’ was a Coptic youth of maybe fourteen or fifteen. The boy’s expression was mute and defensive — but he led them through the shadows to a decrepit wooden door, set low in the perimeter walls.

‘Hurry,’ said Callum. ‘Hurry up.’

The boy fumbled nervily with an enormous set of keys. At last the door swung open and they slipped inside. Ryan stared around. The Coptic boy had brought them to a Christian graveyard behind the churches. Large marble angels stared at the crescent moon; columns and pilasters recessed down pathways; a faint scent of dead flowers perfumed the normal Cairo smells of sewage and pollution and cooking oil.

Their protectors stopped inside the gate. Callum snapped an order: ‘You guys go. We’ll wait here. Do what you have to do. But do it quick.’

Hunched low, Albert, Helen and Ryan followed the boy along a gravel path that slalomed between the tombs and mausoleum, to the old buildings of Coptic Cairo. Dead faces in monochrome photos, affixed to the more recent graves, stared at them in disappointment as they slunk past. Helen had her camera switched on, filming their progress. Ryan squinted ahead, trying to make out their direction. He’d been here once before, as a young man: he’d walked this labyrinth of ancient passages and cobbled lanes, bewildered but seduced; by night the ambience was more troubling.

‘Asre! Onzor!’

The Coptic youth was beckoning them into the very deepest shadows, between two high old walls: presumably the walls of monasteries. The moonlight was just sufficient for them to follow his progress, beyond another corner, past a brace of grim and shuttered tourist shops, where a more modern church rose up abruptly. It had no doubt been erected on the footings of a previous church, which was built on a synagogue, which was built on a Roman temple of Mithras, which was built on an Egyptian temple of Isis …

Ryan swooned a little in his thoughts as they approached this precipice of religious history, this vertiginous drop through time and faith. It was simultaneously marvellous and unnerving. Coptic Cairo was like an exposed fossil bed, showing the strata and the evolution: the fishes then the dinosaurs then the mammals. It gave him the same rhapsodic vertigo he’d felt in Saqqara, when he was happy, when he was a younger and better man, when his wife was pregnant, when they’d walked together in the sunset by the Djoser Pyramid, when they’d kissed—

‘Ryan!’

It was Helen, grasping his shoulder.

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’ But was he?

‘Let’s get this done.’

They followed the boy once more until Albert pointed at a small but handsome stone building beyond a railing. ‘The synagogue of Ben Ezra.’

The boy unlocked the railing; they crept quietly along the path and slipped inside the synagogue. Scratching a match into flame, the boy lit some candles, his hands shaking. Ryan picked up and carried his candle in its little candle-tray like a Victorian rector roused from sleep in his nightshirt.

In the guttering candlelight he plodded the aisles, scrutinizing the bejewelled and evasive interior of Ben Ezra synagogue. The glow of his candle showed Ottoman carvings in cedarwood and marble, palmettos and lotus flowers, rich and sensuous and distantly sad; the Jews of Cairo had gone, all the Jews of Egypt fled, making this more of a mausoleum than a living building.

But why had Macarius come here?

‘Albert?’

Hanna materialized from the shadows.

‘Albert, tell me, this place, the history, the synagogue.’

‘It is ninth century, but it is adapted from a church that is older, maybe eighth century.’

‘But our papyrus is probably sixth. So if he came here he didn’t see this.’

Hanna nodded. ‘C’est vrai.’

‘Where is the spring, where Moses was found?’

‘I’ll show you.’

The spring was behind the building. Outside, the candle in his hand guttered and died in a firm nocturnal breeze.

Ryan stared down. The great and famous spring, the place on the Nile where Moses was found, where Jesus was washed, where Jeremiah preached — was now a gurgling manhole with an orange gardening hose coiled at the side, and plastic rubbish stuffed in the grille.

Albert spoke. ‘You know … I believe there was an even earlier church here which was demolished, so the bulk of the, ah, most venerable antiquities, from that time, would now be found in the museum?’

Ryan paused, and thought it through. This made sense. What should he do?

Helen was inside the synagogue, still filming, but the lad was at the door, his face wrought with anxiety. Ryan brushed aside his own doubts, and asked the boy to open the museum door. He quailed visibly. Ryan insisted. The boy shook his head.

Albert emerged like a genie from the gloom, flourishing a handful of dollars.

In the silent movie of the moonlight, the boy’s smile was very white. ‘La moshkelah!’

The museum was apparently barely three hundred metres away, at the ancient centre of Roman Cairo.

The moonlight shone on the silent flagstones; the three of them kept to the shadows, until they emerged into an impressive courtyard. Hulking Roman watergates loomed above them, the path between led to a set of huge, intricately patterned doors. The museum itself, as Ryan recalled, had once been the Roman fort of Maser; the site had been lavishly reconstructed and restored, but the brooding quality of the military building remained.

It felt as if they were breaking into a prison.

Albert hurried the boy. At last the great wooden doors opened and Ryan stepped hastily inside. Echoes of darkness and nothingness answered him. He needed light: so this time he took the risk and used the flashlight in his phone. The boy shrank from the alarming and unexpected dazzle.

Ryan turned. Where was Helen?

Albert hissed at him from the shadows, ‘We must be expeditious, Ryan. It is dawn soon, and Cairo wakes early.’

‘Yes, yes, OK.’

He ran down the vast hall, from exhibit to exhibit, gazing in the sturdy glass cases: at ancient gold Coptic Bibles, at purple stoles of Akhmim weaving, at a pair of sultry Roman erotes — naked sex gods, carrying aloft the Virgin. It was all here. But what did it mean? Here was a truly strange icon: two dog-faced saints, Ahrauqus and Augan, approaching Jesus. Ryan recognized the iconography. Like the jackal-headed god Anubis? God of the mummy wrappings, baptizer of the dead.

And here was a tomb carved with ankhs, the Egyptian symbol of life, a cross with a head, next to the real cross. The ankh and the cross interchangeable. And over here was an entire wall painting. He turned his flashlight to read the explanatory text: ‘Only two of these are known to exist; the other can be found in the small church at the Monastery of St Tomas, at the mouth of Wadi Sarga, sixteen kilometres north of Akhmim.’

The painting showed a coronation of the Virgin Mary. She wore a blue robe decorated with lozenges; just like the Egyptian goddess Nut at the temple back in Abydos, a goddess spanning the vault of heaven, her dress spangled with delicate stars.

Akhmim?

‘Ryan!’

It was Albert, almost running.

‘We have to go, now. My boy says someone is in the graveyard — trouble — we must go!’

It was intensely frustrating: Ryan felt he was on the verge of something — a breakthrough — yet he was obliged to leave. Reluctantly, he followed the urgent steps of Albert Hanna. Helen joined them. They whispered as they walked quickly, sliding from shadow to shadow, fleeing the walled city, making for the cemetery, and the gate — and safety. ‘I filmed the spring, did you get anything in the museum?’

‘No — I—’

‘What?’

‘Jesus.’

Someone was indeed in the graveyard.

Wordlessly, Ryan pointed. Helen followed his gesture and her eyes widened.

An Egyptian peasant was sitting next to a gravestone, praying, or mumbling, but he was also hitting his head repeatedly against the gravestone: the noise of his skull impacting was audible and ghastly. Clunk. And again, he mumbled and butted the stone. Blood was now pouring down his face. Slam. And again. More blood. The sight was horrifying. The man was slowly killing himself.

‘Stop him!’ Helen cried, quite anguished. ‘Can we help him? Look—’

‘There is no time, he will attract others. Come on!’ Albert’s voice was fierce.

So they ran, openly and blatantly, to the gate where Simon was waiting, crouched, like a trooper in a street battle, keeping a low profile. ‘Get in the fucking motor!’ he spat.

The Hyundai was parked and revving and ready to go, Callum at the wheel. Ryan glanced across. Waiting placidly at the gate to the cemetery was a donkey cart, piled with rubbish. The road was otherwise deserted, in the pallid light of the Cairene dawn.

The garbage and timing meant it was surely a Zabaleen cart: that was what the Zabaleen did, go round Cairo at all hours, picking up rags, in their donkey carts. Ryan saw the logic. The cart must therefore belong to that peasant in the cemetery. Therefore, the man slamming his head against the stone, trying to injure or kill himself, was a Zabaleen.

Just like the boy on the balcony in Sohag.

What did it mean?

Callum cracked the gears as they sped downtown. Ryan stared pensively out of the window. The traffic was light but growing, shop owners were yawning and stirring. They had rejoined the angry and eternal chaos of al-Misr, the Mother of Cities.