The Cairo Codex (12 page)

When she awoke again, it was 8:00 a.m. and the lights were still on. Slipping into her unlaced sneakers to climb over the layers of broken glass, she went down the stairs and into the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror.
My god! My head is swollen and purple—I look like hell!
She touched her head and flinched. After a long pause, she carefully stepped into the shower, struggling to keep her wounded leg and head out of the direct flow of the tepid water.

The intensity of her fear in the crypt bothered her. Was it justified? Could the same reactions have been expected of anyone in those circumstances?
I kept my wits about me
.
I took cover, found my belongings, and worked my way up the stairs. I didn’t freeze up. Maybe that’s the best I could have hoped for.
She shut off the water, refreshed her bandages, and decided to be kinder to herself, at least for the time being.

Standing before the empty window, she watched the now-quiet city, the silence disrupted only by distant sirens. People moved about with boards and rolls of duct tape as if in a silent movie. Far to her right, Justine could see that the massive glass front of the Semiramis Hotel had collapsed into the driveway. A row of soldiers stood guard. The river and sky looked as indifferent as they had the day before.

The phone rang. “Do you still insist on going?” asked Nadia.

“Absolutely. Where will I meet you?”

They decided that Nadia would pull up on the river side of the Corniche in thirty minutes. Sitting on the side of her bed, Justine pulled on her brown leather boots, a khaki skirt, and a long-sleeved blouse. She found a hat with a modest brim and pulled it down over her bruised forehead. No telling what conditions they would encounter today. “Ready!” she declared, observing herself in the mirror as if she were a stranger.

She reached into her canvas bag and extracted her small bottle of warm water, her notebook, and her scarf. Where was her new camera? She was disturbed by its loss, but her attention was quickly diverted when her fingers brushed against an unfamiliar surface. She grasped the item and pulled it from her bag.

A little book of worn leather with a shiny patina stared back at her. A faint memory floated into her consciousness . . . something small and unfamiliar at her feet when she crouched under the pillar during the earthquake. An earlier visitor must have dropped it.
But this is no modern notebook.
A slight, momentary dizziness caused her vision to blur, then refocus.

Her skin tingled as she carefully opened the stiff leather cover, which looked vaguely like that of her grandmother’s bible. One line of words appeared on the first page, which was followed by fewer than a hundred fragile and discolored pages, all of them inserted as full sheets and tied together along the rib of the book. She turned the pages cautiously to keep from crumbling them into crusty flakes. The language looked vaguely familiar, although—except for a few Greek words distributed sparsely throughout—she couldn’t read it.

Someone’s Bible? A Koran? A Rabbi’s prayer book? Might it have been dropped by Michael or the priest?
When she held it, the images from her dream came back to her—the dark cave, the warm water.

She felt it somehow—this was the missing piece to a puzzle, but what puzzle she didn’t yet know. When she glanced up, her eyes caught the clock: she was running late to meet Nadia. She gently wrapped the treasure with her best silk blouse and placed it under a stack of underwear in the dresser.

Nadia and Justine drove out of the city to the north, crossing the July 27th Bridge. Several buttresses were cracked down to the water line. They wove through Bulaq on a poorly paved road that turned to dirt not long into the thirty-five kilometers to Birqash. The city gave way to fields of beans, mango trees, and community gardens on the left, while the right shoulder of the road hugged one of the canals branching northwest from the Nile to form the Delta. Clusters of red rhododendron, yellow oleander, and acacia growing at the base of sycamores and willows hosted an occasional hoopoe bird and miniature crane. Garbage-filled ditches gaped between the flowering roadside and the canal. Every few miles, a small village embraced the potholed road. Driving was necessarily slow. Justine wondered whether the Renault could make it.

She watched the contrasting colors and primitive villages as they flowed by, but her mind was on the book in her drawer.
Any book that old must hold great significance . . . perhaps it is as old as the time of the Mamluks, or even medieval times. The 1500s were radiant in Cairo, as they were elsewhere . . . literacy abounded, and books were traded like saffron.
The more she thought about it, the more her excitement grew.

As the car bounced in and out of a particularly deep pothole, she was shaken out of her private thoughts.

“What is your greatest fear about what we are going to find?” she asked Nadia.

“My greatest fear?” Nadia paused, pressing her lips together. “I guess the safety of the children and their families. I’m praying that the quake left them unharmed. But returning my calls wouldn’t be at the top of their list . . . I’m sure everything’s okay,” she reassured herself. “We’re not seeing a lot of damage as we drive, are we? Birqash might have been out of range of the quake.”

“Who would have called you? The teacher? A parent?” They were passing villages thrown together with aluminum, plaster, and clay bricks around small stores selling boxed milk, tissue paper, bread, a few canned goods, bottled water, and soft drinks. Miniature refrigerator cases offered lunchmeats, cheeses, and yogurt. Some sold plasticware as well: brightly colored bowls, bottles, and floppy sandals. A few were open; most were not.

“Layla should have called me. She’s the teacher. Then Om Mahmoud, the mother of two of the students and the community leader of the school council. I surely would have heard from her if anything had happened.” The road was a continual stream of small villages now, with tiny cafés and clothing shops that looked like mini Walmarts, devoid of anything made of Egyptian cotton, which was exported for the high price it brought in Western markets. “It’s nearly impossible to know if anything has happened. The men will drink their tea and smoke their water pipes under any conditions.” She shook her head as she glanced at another café brimming with local men huddled in conversation over a scattered array of cups and small plates.

“Is it unusual for a woman to lead the school council?” asked Justine, seeking to distract Nadia from the increasingly disturbing scenes around them. People were milling around a few collapsed buildings. As in Cairo, the effects of the quake here were erratic—seeming to have no pattern, no rhyme or reason.

“It’s not unusual for a woman to lead the council in our project,” Nadia managed. “We actively recruit women leaders as role models. Right now, four out of the six council leaders are women.” She glanced at Justine. “I’m glad you came along today. I’m more anxious than I thought. It steadies me to talk.”

Justine nodded, careful not to jar her throbbing head. She’d taken a couple of Tylenol before leaving the hotel, but they weren’t helping much.
Perhaps this headache accounts for my strange reaction to that little book.
Staring at the dead camels strewn along the side of the road, she asked uneasily, “Is this a result of the quake?”

“I’m afraid it isn’t. We’re nearing the camel market. When camels die from the strain of the trip from the Sudan, or other ailments, they are just thrown along the side of the road. A common practice.”

Memories of the old camel market rushed back. “My dad took me to the market in Bulaq when I was a kid. Drivers and herders in flowing robes and white turbans, romantic characters holding hands in a circle until a deal was struck. Camels were sold for transport, and for food, as I recall.” Scenes of unnecessary cruelty were vivid in her mind: camels beaten with long sticks while they stood still, unable to figure out what was wanted of them. “I was outraged to see the camels beaten and told my dad I wanted to do something about it, anything. I was disappointed when he said, ‘No, Justine, it is their way.’”

“He was right. It is their way.”

As the car approached the next village, they could hear the wailing of women before they could see them—the piercing sound of sorrow, an eerie trilling of the tongue signaling life’s most dramatic moments. It sounded like death. A large crowd was gathered in a circle, the wailing women on one side, men on the other. By the size of the small coffins, three children lay dead.

Nadia’s eyes were welling up as she parked the car just beyond the crowd, near to the school. Two sides of the aging, white-plastered building had collapsed inward. Wooden tables and benches, books, and papers were scattered across the now-visible floor. As Nadia headed toward the crowd of mourners, Justine stood back, surveying the damage. She understood that families were particularly sensitive at times like these and might not welcome a stranger in their midst, so she joined a small, helpless crowd standing nearby. The women were weeping. Justine entered a nearly collapsed store and grabbed several bottles of water, leaving a few pounds on the counter, and returned to the bystanders to hand out the bottles.

Seeing that one woman was simply holding one of the water bottles, leaving it unopened, Justine took the bottle from her, opened it, and offered her a drink. The woman lifted her eyes and met Justine’s, and the story of the quake poured out of her. After two more conversations, Justine was able to piece together the story of the catastrophe and heartbreak.

She and Nadia found each other shortly after the service, faces pale from watching the villagers’ agony. “These children died when the school collapsed—while sitting in a learning center,” said Nadia. “One of the girls was six, the others two and seven. Other children have been injured. The six-year-old was Om Mahmoud’s daughter Nora.” She and Justine reached for each other and held on in a tight hug.

Justine said quietly, “I talked with some of the neighbors. There was the quake, then two strong aftershocks. Small aftershocks during the night. At the first aftershock, the school collapsed, and a couple of the neighbors were injured trying to find their children. They were also in the school when the last aftershock hit.”

Nadia held Justine at arm’s length. “How are you?”

“A little shaken, but I’ll be okay. Did you find the teacher?”

“She left and no one can find her. They think she was unharmed. She should have called me, but she may have been too traumatized.”

“Let’s find her,” Justine said, her leg and head throbbing anew.

“
Iwa
, we’ll leave the families with their grief and return when they’re ready to think about rebuilding the school.” Nadia snapped into action and walked toward her car. “I’ll call Om Mahmoud in a couple of days,” she said over her shoulder. “Today is not a time to talk about the future.”

Since the passenger door was nearly impossible to open, Justine slid into the Renault through the driver’s seat, hugging two bottles of Evian and wincing as her leg rubbed against the frayed seat cover. “Was the school built by UNESCO?” she asked as Nadia started the car on the second try.

“No, the building was an old storage area that the community converted into a school,” Nadia answered once they were back on the road. “In our project, each community provides its own space. But I still feel responsible. I never questioned its safety, never asked about whether it met building codes. Those questions are just not asked.”

“Mohammed told me that building codes here are either not known or not followed. It’s not as though you neglected to follow good practice.”

“I understand that, but my guilt is hungry. I feed it with what I have before me.”

Justine grew quiet as she considered Nadia’s confession. She hadn’t thought of guilt as hungry, but understood that it could be. She could feel the dampness of tears on her own cheeks, and she turned to gaze at Nadia’s tearful eyes. How awful to think of three young girls lying in homemade coffins and the grief of family members who had sent them to school so that they might have better lives.
How will Allah’s actions be interpreted here? Will it feed old doubts about Allah’s plans for girls?

“Do you know where Layla lives?” Justine knew how difficult it was to find teachers for rural schools. They needed to find this one.

“In Shoubra, one of the oldest and most fragile parts of Cairo. I doubt if much is still standing. But it’s so far from Birqash. Surely she couldn’t be home.”

“Let’s give it a try,” Justine pressed.

“At least her family might know where she is.”

As they approached the Nile north of the city, Nadia turned onto the damaged bridge leading into Shoubra. She had predicted accurately. The destruction here was much more pronounced than in downtown Cairo. They wove their way through the debris to a small apartment behind a closed butcher shop. People were inside, even though one wall of the building was leaning inward. Justine and Nadia stepped through the rubble to the front of the apartment.

“Layla! Layla!” Nadia called from the street. “Are you there?”