The Deceit

7

Victor Sassoon saw the smoke of the second small bomb from his hotel window. The fifteenth-floor balcony of his hideous 1970s concrete tower gazed across the Nile, from the dense and frazzled streets of Muslim Sohag, to the smaller, ancient, more Coptic, west-bank town of Akhmim. The smoke from this latest bomb rose like a long-stemmed lotus flower above the dense medieval streets.

Then came the sirens, harsh and plaintive in the noonday heat. Had the Muslims attacked the Copts again? Or was it the Copts attacking the Muslims in return? The only thing anyone knew for sure was that the violence was worsening. The papers had informed him this morning that the Zabaleen were also rioting in Cairo. Egypt was truly roiled.

Yet this very morning the poor people from the countryside had tethered their shallow boats to gather reeds from the side of the Nile, much as they must have done in Pharaonic times. This was Egypt, turbulent and tumultuous, and also unchanging.

Turning from the balcony, Sassoon sat on his bed and unscrewed his precious bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and filled a tooth mug with half an inch, slugging it in one go. It gave him courage for the day ahead, and it dulled the pain. The pain in his lungs and in his legs; and in his heart.

Lifting up the bottle, Sassoon examined the liquor that remained. Five inches maybe. And it would be hard to buy more: Sohag was a dry city. Islamist.

Everything was running out. Time and whisky, and life.

He rose, buttoned his blazer and picked up his stick. In the street he hailed an old, pale blue fifties Ford taxi and got in the back seat to negotiate the day. The driver, Walid, spoke a little English and asked Victor if he knew his brother Anwar who lived in Manchester and worked in a car showroom.

Victor confessed that he had never met Anwar, despite living in the same country. Walid seemed very disappointed by this, until Victor told him what he wanted: to be driven to all the nearby ancient Coptic monasteries, for the next two days; and then Victor added that he would pay a hundred dollars for his time and gasoline.

This was an absurdly generous offer, but Victor was infinitely beyond caring. He had tens of thousands of dollars in his account — the product of a lifetime of academic salaries and scholarly frugality — and he had no family. What better use could he find for the money than discovering a great and final truth?

But he needed to be quick. The pain in his lungs was like a murderer had stabbed a sharpened crucifix in his chest.

‘Please.’ Victor gestured at the donkey cart blocking their way. ‘Let’s go.’

Walid smiled a tobacco-stained smile and slammed his horn, frightening the donkey, as they screeched out into the Sohag traffic.

They talked about the bomb as they made their slow way through the chaos of trucks and cabs, and old Mercedes minibuses full of Egyptian matrons, in vividly coloured headscarves.

‘Much bad,’ said Walid. ‘Very bad. Soon they will make the Coptic leave Egypt. Sadat, Mubarak, they protect the Copt. But now … No good. No good.’ He made a chopping gesture with his hand.

Sassoon gazed at the rear-view mirror, and the absence of dangling prayer-beads. ‘You are a Christian?’

‘La.’ Walid shook his head and ignited his third Cleopatra-brand cigarette of the morning. ‘Muslim. But I having many Coptic friend. We are all Egyptian, all People of the Book. The bad men want to … make hate. You smoke?’

Victor demurred. He had once been a smoker. Forty years a smoker, then he’d stopped. Evidently he had given up too late: the lung cancer was very advanced. He listened placidly as Walid smoked and sighed and cursed and swore at the politicians and chattered away about his eight children, and his annoying new wife, until at last they reached the desert.

The transition was sudden, as always in Middle and Upper Egypt. The fertile valley of the Nile was a vivid and glorious sash of green across the ochre of the Saharan wilderness, but when the desert began it did so with a painful severity: in a second one travelled from emerald to grey, or from city to nothingness.

Ahead of them, in the first desert sands, was the White Monastery. In truth it looked quite unprepossessing, like an ugly and very humble pile of mud bricks and cracked pillars, yet it was one of the oldest church buildings in the world.

‘I wait here. You take time. Plenty time.’ Walid parked, with a brisk spin of the wheel, at the steel gates of the monastery complex.

Victor ejected himself from the taxi, his chest and his knees complaining at the effort. Two bored-looking Coptic men greeted him, and frisked him, then allowed the harmless old man beyond the gates. He was instantly greeted by a young, anxious-eyed Copt called Labib — a ‘server’, not a monk. Labib spoke good English and wore badly-fitting jeans and poignantly cheap shoes; he carried a large bunch of keys. It seemed he single-handedly ran the White Monastery complex.

First, Victor made a generous offering to the monastery coffers, and then Labib spent the next tedious hour showing Victor the remnants of the old monastery, the Armenian brickwork, the fifth-century apse and the huge monastic graveyard, and then he showed his visitor all the exciting new buildings: the grotesquely ugly new church with its glass elevator, the bizarrely fresh murals of Adam and Eve painted in red and green on the perimeter wall, and then, the greatest triumph of all, a six-metre-wide animatronic statue-fountain of Christ’s Miracle of the Watered Sheep.

‘Look,’ said Labib, sighing slightly. ‘I can show you the miracle.’ He stepped behind the huge, cement-and-plaster sculpture. Victor leaned on his stick with a grasping sense of despair. He heard the squeak of a metal tap being turned.

The water duly cascaded from a fake cement rock and ran past the smiling plaster Jesus who lifted his holy plaster hand and the animatronic sheep bent their animatronic heads in the manner of sheep drinking at a miraculous stream in the desert.

Victor flushed with faint embarrassment, and looked away. He had at least five more monasteries to visit. And then what? Victor felt the full futility of the exercise. Even if he found the right monastery, how was he going to get into the archives? Was he going to burgle them at night? Climb through the mud-brick windows? Hire a tractor and smash the walls down?

Labib emerged from the back of the automated Jesus, and gestured at the sheep. ‘It is a good miracle. Do you think?’

‘Yes. Ah. It’s marvellous.’

Labib gazed at Victor, and smiled forlornly, and shook his head. ‘No it is not … It is stupid. You know this.’

‘Erm …’

‘I can see you are intelligent man.’ Labib turned, and gestured at the wide-eyed Jesus. ‘Look. This is what we are reduced to, the Copts, making stupid miracles out of toys. But what can we do? We are in prison.’ He exhaled, with enormous weariness.

There was nothing to be said. Sassoon gazed at some crumbling, pitiful heaps of mud brick as they began the trudge back to the gates. He tried to change the subject to something more fruitful. ‘The White Monastery was much bigger once?’

‘Yes it was,’ Labib answered. ‘Many times bigger. We had kitchen and churches, and the great library. A thousand monks lived here in Saint Shenouda’s time. Fourth century.’

‘You know a lot of the history.’

‘I was a history teacher, at the university, Sohag. But they closed the department. Islamists did not like us teaching Coptic history. Now I have three children to feed, so I do this. I make the sheep drink from the miracle water. Twice a day.’

Victor paused. And daubed his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. ‘Tell me about the library.’

‘It was famous. The Codex Borgia came from here, and the Gospel of St Bartholomew, the Acts of Pilate, Gospel of the Twelve — many, many texts. But it was all scattered: Arabs burned some of the books; people stole them, Germans and French and English. Many times monks hid the books — in the caves in the hills. Now we are trying to rebuild the collection.’

‘What hills, Labib?’

The young man pointed at the desert cliffs beyond the gate, to the west. ‘The Sokar cliffs.’

Victor gazed at the wall of daunting rock.

Labib muttered, ‘I think Sokar is the name of an Egyptian god? There are many caves.’

Victor thought the puzzle through. There were probably a thousand places in Egypt named after Sokar: a god of the sands, of the western afterworld, of cemeteries and canals. But the coincidence of this and the library? He had surely found his goal. He stared at Labib. Gentle, sad, helpful Labib, a scared and unhappy young man, with a family he was desperate to feed.

It was time. Victor Sassoon abandoned his last shred of morality. ‘Labib,’ he said, ‘do you ever think about emigrating?’

The eyes of the young Copt glanced upwards, as if God might disapprove of his answer.

‘Yes, yes of course. Many Copt thinks of this. I want to go to Canada, take my wife and children … I have cousins there already. But I do not have any money.’

‘How much money would you need?’

Labib laughed, long and bitterly, in the desert sun. ‘Five thousand dollars. Ten? It is just a dream.’

Victor opened his arms as if offering the world.

‘I will give you ten thousand dollars if you do something very difficult for me.’

The sun burned down on Labib’s astonished face. ‘Do what?’

Victor took him by the arm and explained. Labib stared. And stared. And stared. And the plaster Jesus behind him lifted his mechanical hand, and blessed the miraculous waters.

They arranged to meet the next evening, in Victor’s hotel, at nine p.m. Ten minutes before the designated time, Victor took the clattering hotel elevator down to the lobby, where he sat and gazed at the headscarved women drinking Lipton’s tea; then he looked at his watch, on and off, for two hours.

Then he went to his room and drank whisky. Labib had not shown up.

At midnight he got a cryptic text message:

Cannot get in. I will try again one more time. If I succeed I see you in hotel tomorrow 21:00 at your room. Labib.

Precisely twenty-one hours later, Victor heard a furtive knock at his hotel-room door.

Labib.

Labib was out there in the twenty-watt darkness of the landing, carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. Mutely, full of shame, the Copt handed it over.

Victor grabbed the bag. An urgent glance inside gave him confidence. The contents looked authentic. Victor strained to contain his agitation, and his jubilation.

Now it was his turn. From the inner pocket of his blazer he took a thick envelope.

Labib didn’t even bother to count the thousands of dollars therein. Instead, he just smiled, very regretfully; then turned and walked away down the landing.

Alone in his room Victor sat on the bed, trying to quell his excitement. But his hands were trembling as he opened the bag and gazed at the frail documents bound in even frailer goatskin.

The call to prayer echoed across Sohag, across darkened Akhmim, across the moonlit reaches of the Nile, as Victor Sassoon took out the crumbling papyrus sheets of a very ancient document, and began to read.