Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick

Author:Cynthia Ozick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction.Historical, Fiction.Contemporary
ISBN: 9780618618804
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2004-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

34

HE HARDLY KNEW why he'd picked Cairo. Probably it was because of the Pyramids. Or because there were rumors that war was about to break out in Europe. He didn't care anything about it, but he guessed that if it was going to be England against the Kaiser, he was for the Kaiser, he couldn't be for England: his mother had dressed him like a little English boy, and his father had drawn him that way, he had been turned into a caricature of Englishness, and some people had even gone so far as to compare him to Christopher Robin. So of course he hated everything English, and was indifferent to Europe—but if there was going to be a war, he didn't want to be anywhere near it or in it. He did what all tourists in Egypt do, hired a guide, rode on a camel, sailed down the Nile in a dhow, gaped at the endless sands, the ancient stones, the crumbling paws of the Sphinx—and, in a decaying museum whose walls were cracked and patched, met the eerie stretched-leather face of a mummy. The mummy was in a glass case; a living fly had somehow got in and was standing on a horrible cracked yellow tooth, rubbing its front legs together. There were flies everywhere.

Jerusalem wasn't far; he went to Jerusalem, where there were just as many flies, and idling squads of Turkish soldiers, and monks in long brown robes and Arabs in dusty white djellabas and Jews in dusty black caftans. The soldiers and the Jews and the Arabs mostly wore proper shoes; the monks wore sandals, exposing their dusty toenails. It was as hot as it had been in Cairo, unendurably hot, but at dusk, which came on suddenly, a delicate coolness drifted from hill to hill.

He took a room at the YMCA, and every day walked over rocky fields sprouting sparse scrub—sheep nibbling at it under the weary eye of some elderly shepherd—to the Old City. He wandered into the souk to watch the cobblers and bloody butchers in their dim cavelike shops, and men in kaffiyehs smoking waterpipes in dirty doorways under medieval arches. In another part of town (to his surprise, fabled Jerusalem was no bigger than a small town) he bought a hat with a great brim from a Jewish shop, to keep the sun off. He avoided the Wailing Wall, but once he stumbled into what he thought was one of the smaller churches—the place was rife with sects—and though he never knew it, it was an old Karaite synagogue. Now and then there were riots: Arabs, Jews, soldiers. Knives, shots, screams. He ignored these events as well as he could; they weren't his affair. In late June he learned about the assassination in Sarajevo. He read it in the Palestine Post, went up to Jaffa, found an Italian freighter, and headed for Algiers.

It wasn't easy to get passage, even on a freighter, but in Egypt he had discovered the law of the Levantine bribe, which could procure anything one liked and satisfy any whim.

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