The Deceit (6 page)

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.

‘But where are we going,
effendi
?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I am not understanding?’

‘Please, just drive on.’

Walid shook his head, and lit a Cleopatra cigarette. The smoke filled the taxi as they drove through yet another dusty, sunlit Egyptian village, with metal shacks selling palm oil and soap powder, and minarets soaring into the dusty sky. Dark-skinned boys played naked in the canals.

The cough came again, a hacking, savage cough; Victor Sassoon saw Walid checking him, anxiously, in the rear-view mirror.

‘I sorry,
effendi
, I smoking, sorry, I stop.’

Walid threw his half-finished cigarette out of the taxi window, even as Victor made vague protestations: because it really didn’t matter, not any more. There were specks of blood in Victor’s handkerchief, tiny sprinkles of scarlet prettily arrayed. He quickly stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and clutched the shopping bag close to his aching chest.

Inside the bag were the Sokar documents. They were far more revelatory than he had expected; more explosively challenging, more conclusive. The first pages of Gnostic spells and curses were interesting, but the next codex in the most obscure dialect of Akhmimic Coptic was quite remarkable, and the Arab gloss, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, was astonishing. And what about the tiny concordance – that brief note in French, probably early or mid-nineteenth century – written by whom, and how, and why? It was perhaps the most killing evidence of all.

Who had hidden these documents? And who had compiled them? Seen the connection? Who had put them together? Some renegade monk? A Copt from the White Monastery? Why not then destroy them?

Sassoon’s first urge had certainly been to destroy the Hoard, to burn the books. But he just
couldn’t
. Burning books was the antithesis of everything his life had been about: burning books was what the Nazis did, the men who killed his mother and father, his entire family. So Victor had decided to preserve the books, and he was going to take them with him.

An hour passed. Walid smoked and then apologized for smoking. The scenery grew ever more bucolic, losing the last ugliness of urban Egypt, reprising its timeless rural beauty. A side channel of the Nile lay alongside the road, where egrets flapped and dived, dazzling white in the sun. Reeds of green and hazy gold surrounded mud houses; yoked donkeys stood patiently under African palms, drowsing in the heat.

Sassoon tapped on the glass. ‘Where are we?’

‘This next village –’ Walid pointed with a tobacco-stained finger – ‘this Nazlet, I think. End of road, into desert. Or we go on to Assyut.’

Nazlet Khater? Victor recalled a fragment of history. The earliest Egyptian skeletons were discovered here. In caves.

‘So we stop.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Here,’ Victor said. ‘This is where we must stop. I need to go and look at something.’

Walid turned and frowned. ‘Here? Is nothing here! Camel shit. Peasant people.’

‘It’s all right, Walid, I know what I am doing.’

The driver shrugged. ‘OK. I wait you here. How long?’

‘A few hours.’

Another stubborn shrug; Walid was clearly unhappy, but in a protective way. Perhaps it was because Walid was a Muslim, and Victor was, in a way, his guest; Walid’s faith demanded he look after him. Momentarily, Victor considered this paradox, the paradox of Islam – a faith capable of great violence, and yet tenderly hospitable and sweetly generous, and truly egalitarian, too. But all religions were paradoxical, more paradoxical than Victor had ever imagined.

As he walked away from the car he could sense his driver staring after him, at his old Jewish passenger, regretful and sympathetic and frustrated. Victor ignored this; flicking stones with his walking stick, he turned a corner by a scruffy little mosque and saw that the road really did end.

Two camels were tethered by a rusty lamppost at the broken edge of the pavement. The last of life. Beyond them was rock and plains and level sands and nothingness.

Victor kept on walking. The road immediately turned into desert rubble. The sun was hot. He had water and some food in his shopping bag along with the Sokar documents. He wondered how strange he must look: an old Englishman in a blazer, carrying a shopping bag, just walking out into the emptiness.

But there was no one here to see him. Victor walked and walked, with the last of his strength. He felt the sun weaken as he went, beginning to set behind the mountains of the western desert. As the true darkness ensued he sat on a boulder in the cooling shadows. An eagle wheeled in the twilight. The silence was enormous: hosannas of quiet surrounded him.

He slept in his clothes, under a ledge. The pain in his chest was so intense it was like a lover, clutching him too tight. He remembered being a student, sleeping in a tiny single bed with his first wife. Intensely uncomfortable and yet happy. Cambridge. Bicycles. His wife dying in the hospice. There was dust in his mouth. A memory of a young rose by a leaded window.

When he woke the sun was already warm and he drank the very last of his water. He had no idea where he was: just somewhere in the desert. Dirty and dishevelled and dying. But that was where he wanted to be, somewhere no one could find his body: not immediately, anyway.

Two or three more hours of shuffling across the sands brought him to an outcrop of orange-red rock, hot in the sun. Shadows of birds on the sand told him that vultures were circling above. He’d thought that only happened in movies. But it was true. The birds sensed carrion: a body. Food.

But they were going to be disappointed. Victor crept around the rocks, then down the adjoining cliff, looking for a cave. His tongue was cracked with dehydration, his eyesight was failing. But at last he found a cave, and it was dark and long and cool.

Victor got down on his aching knees and crept inside. At the very end, where it became too narrow to even crawl, he laid his head on a rock and stared into the infinite blackness of the darkness above and around. He was clutching the Sokar documents to his chest, and gazing into the darkness of deep time. Maybe one day someone would discover his corpse: another body mummified by the Egyptian desert; and with him the codices and the parchments in their plastic shopping bag.