Читать книгу The Deceit - Tom Knox - Страница 6

The taxi stopped in the City of the Dead. Victor Sassoon stared out of the dusty cab window, adjusting his spectacles, and cursing his seventy-five-year-old eyesight.

Ranked on either side of the unpaved road, that led directly through the cemetery, was a monumental parade of Mameluke shrines, yellow-painted mausoleums, and enormous white Fatimid graves; in front of the larger tombs, young children played obscure games in the ancient dirt.

Sassoon stared, a little deeper: he could glimpse shrouded Arab women in the unknowable interiors; he could also see the blue and orange of charcoal braziers: the women were cooking chicken claws and flatbreads amidst the corpse-dust.

The cab engine idled. The women gazed, from behind their veils. Sassoon wondered if the denizens of the City of the Dead could tell he was Jewish. Anglo-Jewish.

He leaned and tapped the cab driver on the shoulder.

‘Why have we stopped?’

Silence.

‘Why?’ he repeated.

The driver shrugged, not turning; the violet prayer-beads hanging from his rear-view mirror shivered in the breeze of the Cairene winter.

A kid in a grimy djellaba – the long Arabic robe worn across North Africa and beyond – wandered over to the taxi. The boy was smiling at Victor, as if he knew something Victor didn’t.

‘Why? Tell me.’ Victor raised his voice, a hint of panic therein. He didn’t want to be stuck here in the cemetery with the fellahin. The City of the Dead, one of Cairo’s direst slums, was a dangerous place to linger.

‘Aiiii.’ The cab driver squinted at Victor via the mirror. ‘Afwan, khlass, ntar—’

‘Stop!’ Victor snapped. ‘I know you speak English!’

Not for the first time, Victor condemned himself for his inability to speak much modern Arabic – despite speaking dead languages by the dozen.

The cab driver sighed.

‘You are from England, yes? Inglizi?’

Victor nodded once more.

‘So I see you do not understand.’ The driver smiled, patiently. ‘I will explain. You want to go to Manshiyat Naser?’

‘Yes, you know that. Moqqatam.’

‘Aiwa. Moqqatam.’

The wind was picking up as the winter sun weakened: it made Victor cough, and reach for his handkerchief. The breeze was carrying a hateful dust: the residue of the dead.

Victor wiped his mouth and spoke.

‘We agreed you’d take me there.’

The driver shook his head.

‘Look and see. Thief and drug-seller live here. In the tomb.’

‘So let us go. Please. Quickly.’

‘Ahlan sadiqi, you are not understanding. Even the people here, even the people in City of the Dead will not go to Moqqatam.’

‘I don’t care. You said—’

‘No.’

‘But—’

‘You walk now. Is just a walk? One or two kilometre. That way.’

The driver was pointing at a raised freeway thick with frenzied Cairo traffic, and beyond that a mighty cliff, grey and gloomy in the impending twilight.

Under that cliff, as Victor knew, was the abandoned quarry which was home to Cairo’s poorest of the poor: the Zabaleen.

The Zabaleen suburb, Garbage City, had a terrible reputation – worse, perhaps, than that of the City of the Dead. But Victor did not care. At the back of Moqqatam was, apparently, an ancient church, the Monastery of the Cave. And in that monastery was an old priest who could tell him whether the Sokar Hoard really existed. And whether it could be deciphered.

And right now the archaic documents that comprised the Sokar Hoard meant more to Victor than his own dwindling life. The faint but persistent rumours in London, in Egyptological circles, were too startling to ignore.

The Copts have discovered a cache of documents in Middle Egypt. Parts are written in Arabic and French, as well as the most ancient Coptic. The Arabic and French commentaries imply that the Coptic source texts are revolutionary: they could alter our entire understanding of religion.

Of course these rumours were probably exaggerated. But even if you stripped out the hyperbole, the prospect was extremely enticing. Not least because the supposed provenance of the Sokar Hoard – Coptic Middle Egypt – made it all the more plausible that someone had indeed found something.

Coptic Middle Egypt was one of the historically richest yet least explored areas of the Middle East. Middle Egypt was where, in 1945, two farmers had unearthed an old earthenware jar which turned out to contain the famous Gnostic Gospels: heretical Christian writings which had since radically altered the conception of Christianity’s evolution.

And yet this new prize, the Sokar Hoard, was said to be vastly more significant?

Victor had to find it. It was his final calling, his allotted task, his Jewish destiny. He was probably one of a handful of scholars who could translate the source text, the Ur text in old Coptic.

But right now he was stuck in a rusty Cairo taxi, surrounded by dirty kids who lived in tombs.

The cab driver sighed, again.

Belatedly, it dawned on Victor what the driver wanted. Baksheesh. More money. Of course.

He reached in the pocket of his blazer, pulled out his wallet and handed over a fold of new notes.

‘Two hundred Egyptian pounds. Now take me to Moqqatam!’

The driver stared at the money in Victor’s hand as if it was something utterly repugnant. Then he took the cash and jammed it in the sweat-stained pocket of his nylon shirt. And started the car.

The drive took merely ten minutes, past the last of the Fatimid ossuaries, past the final tombs of the Abbasid nobles, past an Ottoman mausoleum adapted into a car-repair workshop. They made a quick dash and a violent U-turn on the angry motorway with its angry taxis, and then the smell hit.

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.