A smell of apocalyptic grime and aching misery.
This was it: Moqqatam. Ahead of them was a road which led to a kind of mock gate made of mud-bricks, old tyres and crushed metal.
The taxi stopped again. Victor reached reflexively for his wallet. But this time the driver waved a dismissive hand, and his frown was sincere.
‘La. You are here, mister. Manshiyat Naser.’
‘But—’
‘I am a Muslim. I cannot go in there … Not with …’ He nodded in the direction of the gate. ‘Not with the Christians.’
The last word was expressed with utter contempt, as if the driver was spitting on a rat.
There was no arguing for a second time. Victor Sassoon accepted his fate. He grabbed his walking stick and climbed stiffly out of the taxi, which reversed in a cumulus of dust, then accelerated back up the hill into real Cairo, where the Muslims lived.
Victor regarded the gate, and the suburb beyond.
Even the people in the City of the Dead will not come here.
Leaning on his walking stick, Victor said a quick Jewish prayer. This was his greatest scholarly adventure, the fitting culmination of a life spent untangling the truth of Jewish history and Jewish faith. This was the moment towards which his entire existence had been building. But he was ageing and ill, and time was short. Stick in hand, Victor Sassoon walked towards the City of Garbage.
The first thing that he saw as he passed under the gate was quite unexpected: two beautiful, unveiled young Coptic women walking past in embroidered robes, laughing as they made their way through the mud and the stench. He glanced at them, warily, but they ignored him. Just another stooped old man.
Victor sighed stoically, and walked on. A plastic Christian icon, suspended above the road, swung in the chilly breeze.
The main street was lined on both sides by enormous sacks of rubbish. Faces gazed, perplexed and blank, from dark windows and doorways. These stares certainly weren’t friendly. Yet neither were they necessarily hostile. They possessed a kind of desperate inertness.
Victor advanced. He knew from his research that the Monastery of the Cave was somewhere at the other end of the suburb, right under Moqqatam Hill, carved out of the cliffs. He could be there in ten minutes. If he wasn’t stopped.
To quell his anxiety, he went over what he knew.
The name Zabaleen meant, literally, ‘the rubbish collectors’. But fifty years ago they were called the Zarraba, or the pig people, because that’s what they had once been: peasant swineherds dwelling in the region of Assyut and Sohag, two hundred miles south of Cairo. In essence, they were just another tribe from Egypt’s ancient Coptic communities – Christians who had been living in the Middle East since the second century AD, long before the Muslims arrived.
No one knew why the Zabaleen had suddenly decided to migrate to Cairo. Their lives in Middle Egypt had certainly been poor, and Assyut was a dusty and sometimes violent region: home to many Islamists, who had grown in power and audacity – and hostility to Christians – in the last fifty years. Yet, still, why did they move here? Victor Sassoon found it difficult to imagine that any peasant life in the sticks could be worse than that now endured by the Zabaleen in Cairo.
He’d reached the main street of the City of Garbage. Looming beyond the lofty and toppling houses of the township were the limestone cliffs that delimited Cairo’s eastern suburbs. Directly behind him was the vastness of the City of the Dead and the urban motorways.
The whole neighbourhood was cut off and excluded. It was also situated in a hollow – a great and disused quarry – which made it invisible to the rest of Cairo.
A young man stepped across the road towards Victor. He had a cheeky, Artful Dodger-ish grin.
‘Hey. Hello? Mister? You tourist? Take photo of us? Fuck you.’ The lad laughed, flicking his chin with his hand, and then sauntered away down a darkening alley.
Victor walked on. He was nearly there. He was trying not to look left or right but he couldn’t help it. The scene was so extraordinarily medieval. No, worse than medieval.
Groups of women were sitting on stinking heaps of rubbish inside their own homes. The women spent their days herein, picking over the rubbish brought into Moqqatam by the men with their donkey carts. The women were looking for rags, paper, glass and metal: anything that could be recycled. Because this was what the Zabaleen did, this was their daily toil, and the sum of their existence: they sifted and recycled the garbage of Cairo, in the City of Garbage.
Pigs and goats scuttled between the tenements. Children played among bales of hospital waste; a toddler had been placed on sacks of refuse. Her smiling face was covered with flies.
Compassion pounded in Victor’s heart. He wanted to help these people, shut away in their claustrophobic ghetto. Yet what could he do? He’d heard that some brave charity had opened a clinic here a few years ago, dispensing rudimentary medicine to deal with the wounds and infections the Zabaleen contracted from their repellent environment.
Yet some also said the Zabaleen mistrusted modern medicine and refused help, preferring their traditional solace: religion. It was God that made the lives of these people bearable. If the Zabaleen were notorious for their bellicosity, for their sad or drunken desperation, they were also famous for their religious fidelity and devotion. The churches around here were thronged every Saturday, the Coptic Sabbath.
Even now Victor could see two women on a street corner kneeling to kiss the fat gold ring of a lavishly bearded Coptic priest. The black-cloaked priest smiled serenely at the purpling sky, while the women kneeled and kissed his jewellery, like supplicants in front of a Mafia godfather.
A priest? A priest meant a church. He needed to find the Monastery of the Cave.
Ahead, the main road, such as it was, forked left and right. On the left a man was butchering a pig in the gutter. The other lane led to a wall of distant rock. That was surely the route. And yes, through the dust and the bustle of Moqqatam, Victor could make out the arch of a monastic gate: probably the only noble piece of architecture for miles.
Victor Sassoon approached a wooden kiosk erected beside the gate. Inside, a badly shaven man sat scowling on a stool. The interior of the kiosk was decorated with lurid pictures of the Virgin Mary, with farcically huge eyes. Like a seal-pup.
‘Salaam,’ Victor said, as he leaned to the open window of the kiosk. ‘Ah. Salaam aleikum, ah – ah—’
‘I speak English.’ The middle-aged man spat the words. ‘What do you want?’
This was less than friendly.
‘I am a visiting scholar from London. I am keen to meet Brother Wasef Qulta, in the monastery.’
A definite sneer lifted the gatekeeper’s face.
‘Many peoples want to see Brother Qulta. You need permission.’
‘I have emailed and telephoned but I have been unable to get a response from the Coptic episcopate. Please. I only need a few minutes of his time. I have come a very long way.’
The gatekeeper shrugged. No.
Victor had expected this; and he had a plan.
‘Perhaps I can explain better. I am … happy to make a very considerable donation to the monastery. I will entrust it with you?’
This was the entirety of