In the Hebrew of the original Biblical account, the word used for the humble basket in which the baby Moses was hidden by his mother was teva. But the English translation was ‘ark’. I breathed a sigh of relief. Daud knew nothing about my true reason for being in Egypt. Of course I knew about the ancient tradition that Moses of the house of Levi was hidden on this very site among the rushes in a floating basket, a miniature coracle. The rushes were the feathery papyrus reeds that still line the banks of the Nile and that have been used for making paper for around 5000 years.
His recitation over, my friend made the sign of the cross, bowing and mumbling to himself. Turning his bony, mottled face towards me, he smiled and fingered the large gold cross he wore over his shirt. Daud had crossed himself in a stagey, ironical way, like some corrupt Italian prelate. And like some corrupt Italian prelate I knew it did not mean much. He had begun to lose his faith while he was studying at an American theological college. He had lost it completely by the time he had finished another undergraduate degree and an MA in an English university. He was fond of quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ‘Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.’ Daud was no longer religious but he was proud of his remarkable knowledge of the Bible, great swathes of which he knew by heart and could quote in Coptic, Arabic, or English. And for reasons I did not at first understand, he always wore sacerdotal black shirts with a large gold cross swinging from a metal chain around his neck.
Notwithstanding his overall eccentricity, in one respect he conformed to Egyptian norms: he was opposed to all the doings of the Israeli state (he refused to use the term ‘Israel’ and persisted in calling it ‘the Zionist Entity’) and extended this animosity to the Jews of recent times with the exception of Einstein and the Marx brothers. He had reservations about me, too, as I was a frequent visitor to Israel, but had substantially overcome them as I had done some work on an illustrious ancestor of his called Labib who had played the leading role in the (failed) revival of Coptic as a spoken language. It was my interest in the Coptic language revival that had led me to contact his family, and thus meet up with him.
Daud was anxious to show me this ancient but much restored Cairo synagogue as part of the tour of the city he had planned for me. This was not, however, out of love for the ancient Jewish heritage in Egypt, but because it was the site of an ancient Coptic church. The church, he told me, had been bought by the Jews for the paltry sum of 20,000 dinars over a thousand years before, in AD 882.
‘Only 20,000 dinars - they had it for nothing, effendi. Yo u can’t imagine the price of land in Cairo,’ he said. Once they had purchased the church, the Jews turned it into a synagogue. ‘Damned cheek, ya achi,’ he said indignantly. ‘They tricked us out of our birthright, same as they are doing with the Palestinians.’
His anger caused his face to break out in small pink blotches. For Daud it was as if the purchase of the church had taken place the day before - yet another reminder of the vividness of historical memory in the Middle East.
‘Come on, you ineffably daft Copt,’ I said. ‘The Jews would not have much use for a bloody church, now would they? Anyway I read somewhere that the Copts couldn’t afford to pay their taxes and were forced to sell the church. Yo u could say the Jews helped them out.’
‘Wallah, another Jewish lie!’ he snorted, shaking his head violently and causing another layer of his shedding derma to explode over his shirt. ‘The Copts were rich in those days. They could afford their taxes. They were the intellectual and commercial elite of Egypt - always were, still are. No, the rubbish Jews cheated us.’
The day was oppressively hot. We were standing in the shade of the synagogue. ‘That was the hiding place,’ he repeated, stabbing his finger at a point to one side of the building. ‘That’s where the bulrushes used to be. That’s where the prophet Musa was hidden and that’s why we built a church there - one of the finest churches in the whole of the Middle East.’
He put his arm round my shoulder and opined piously: ‘Wallah, Musa was a great man! He had horns, it is true, like quite a few Jews, so they say. But he was a very great man. A great prophet.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘He managed to rid Egypt of all its rubbish Jews when they escaped from slavery under the Pharaohs.’
His face became sombre again. ‘Problem is, they came back. And desecrated our damned church.’
Again he fingered his cross, a troubled look on his face.
After a brief look around the synagogue, we walked through medinat al-mawta, the City of the Dead, Cairo’s ancient cemetery, which has given shelter to the living as well as the dead for over a thousand years. Thieves, outlaws, pilgrims, professional reciters of the Quran and guardians of graves have often made their homes here in the tombs and, over the last many decades, their numbers have been swollen by hundreds of thousands of homeless people. The cemetery used to be in the desert, far outside the city, but the city has grown around it and this vast area is now right in the centre of the great noisy metropolis that is Cairo.
The City of the Dead was an island of relative calm. In its alleys there were bands of black goats and dirty, ragged children. Today the whole area was covered by veils of smoke and mist which formed and dissolved around the shapes of the tombs, leaving one to guess what was real and what was imagined. The few spring flowers were dulled with a coating of fine white dust.
Daud obviously knew the cemetery well. Walking at breakneck speed, despite his pronounced limp, he led me on a tour that took in most of the important shrines and mausoleums. He gave me a hurried explanation of the main sites and then pushed on restlessly to the next one. Finally he came to something that really interested him. Just next to a stone-built marvel of high medieval Islamic architecture, crowned with a dome, the tomb of some long-dead poet or saint, a group of men were constructing an ugly concrete breezeblock wall around what appeared to be a small vegetable patch.
After our long walk in the heat of the day, the normally indefatigable Daud now complained of tiredness and wanted to stop for a while to smoke a cigarette. We walked over and sat close to them on slabs of masonry from another age fringed with red and yellow lichen. A cold tainted draught seemed to be coming out of the tomb itself.
From the proprietary way he had walked around the tomb, Daud gave the impression that he knew the place.
From the colour of their skin I guessed that the builders were from the south of Egypt or perhaps from further south still, from the Sudan. They were black, emaciated men with faces devoid of any semblance of hope. They appeared so crushed by the burden of their lives that they did not greet us or even acknowledge us.
A woman walked out of a squat aperture set into the side of the tomb. She greeted Daud with a knowing smile. On her shapely hip she was resting an aluminium tray on which I could make out some small gold-rimmed glasses and a number of home-rolled cigarettes. She placed the tray on the ground and poured out thick black tea, the colour of ink, which is typical of Upper Egypt, from a charred pot sitting on the ashes of a cooking fire, and served the men: each one received a glass of tea and a cigarette. The men squatted on the ground, arms resting on their thin knees, in the lengthening shadow of the wall they were building, and lit up. The fragrant smell of hashish mingled with the smoke of the fire.
‘This is a drug den,’ sneered Daud, showing his blackened teeth. ‘They are building the widow a wall, and she pays them with tea, drugs and I don’t know what else. Egypt is a strange place. Our wonderful law bans the growing of tobacco - nobody knows why - so we have to import millions of tons of it every year; but every delinquent grows hashish in his back garden. This widow, this Maryam, grows it and sells it.’
One of the men picked up a drum and started playing an intricate, pulsating African rhythm. Daud had forgotten his tiredness and started performing a kind of lopsided disco dance. Ricky Gervais has serious competition. It was the strangest dance I had ever seen: he would leap in the air, eyes rolling, cross himself fervently and then bow deeply in the direction of the setting sun. No one paid much attention.
After