style="font-size:15px;"> Ben Yusuf Guon identified himself as the vice-president of Alexandria’s Jewish community and as its youngest member. “I’m the baby,” he joked. “I’m fifty-three.”
Crossing a courtyard planted with palms and ficus trees, he told me there were twenty-three Jews left in the community, mostly women. “We have eighteen very poor ladies and two very rich ones. Cairo has thirty Jews, all women, no men.”
Among the buildings in the compound that still belonged to the synagogue, one had been a Yeshiva. Now the state rented it as an Egyptian girls’ school. “We have no rabbi,” he said. “One comes from Israel for Passover and stays until Yom Kippur. When he’s not here, we don’t have services. I light a candle for my mother and father. That’s all.”
Under the portico, well-fed dogs napped on the stairs. They didn’t stir as we stepped over them. Arabs consider dogs unclean, little better than vermin, and chase them away from mosques. But Ben Yusuf Guon laughingly referred to these as “Jewish dogs.”
“For security?” I asked.
“The Egyptians take care of that. No problems. We have good relations. All the police are very correct.”
“Now that Egypt and Israel have diplomatic relations is there any chance Jews will come back to Alexandria?”
We were in the rear of the synagogue putting on paper yarmulkes. “They return to visit,” Ben Yusuf said. “A woman was here today. A lady in her fifties, like me. She found her family pew and was happy.”
“I mean is there a chance Jews will resettle?”
He shook his head, saying, “There’s always a good smell here. It’s very clean.”
It was an olfactory theory of religious distinctions that I had first encountered in Beirut in 1969, and had heard since in a dozen countries and would hear again throughout North Africa. Arabs, Christians and Jews believed their own neighborhoods smelled sweet and other ethnic groups stank.
Ben Yusuf explained that the synagogue had been designed by an Italian architect in 1890. He invited me to admire the Corinthian columns that supported a gallery where women had once worshipped. Then he called to the custodian, an old black man, and had him unveil the Ten Commandments, chiseled in Hebrew.
Ben Yusuf’s cell phone cut him off in mid-sentence; its ring tone was “Dance with Me” by Dean Martin.
While Ben Yusuf spoke in French, the custodian introduced himself as Abdel Naby, which he said meant “Servant of the Prophet.” He came from Aswan, in the far south, and he saw nothing exceptional about a Muslim being employed in a synagogue. He said the Jews treated him well and had even taught him a little Hebrew.
Ben Yusuf snapped his phone shut and appeared eager to finish the tour. He had little interest in discussing why he had stayed on in Alexandria and how he had managed to do so. Only when pressed did he reveal that his father had been Nasser’s tailor. “Nasser used to send a car to bring my father to his villa for fittings.”
“So it was a personal relationship?”
“No. Professional.”
“And that’s why your family wasn’t expelled?”
“No. It was because we didn’t have dealings with Israel. The people who were expelled were in contact with Israel.”
I didn’t argue. The absurdity of the statement was its own rebuttal. Alexandria’s fifteen thousand Jews hadn’t been uniformly Zionist. Still, all except for a handful had had their property seized and been exiled.
We returned our paper yarmulkes to the table and stepped out over the dogs on the portico. I asked what would happen after the last Jew died. Ben Yusuf Guon chuckled. “When I die, it’s finished. They’ll turn the synagogue into a museum.”
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Christians were forbidden to ride horses in Egypt, Europeans reached Pompey’s Pillar on donkeyback. I doubt, though, that their buttock-bruising expeditions were any more unsettling than my taxi trip to one of the few monuments in Alexandria that have remained intact since antiquity. We hadn’t gone three blocks before the cabbie picked up a second passenger. “My brother-in-law,” he said.
“I assume we’ll be splitting the bill?”
The cabbie pretended I had exceeded his fluency. “I speak small English.” He held his thumb and index finger a millimeter apart.
“I am journalist,” the brother-in-law spoke up, “making pictures on tourism.” He swiveled around in the front seat and handed me his card. When I didn’t exchange the courtesy, he demanded his card back. He carried a camera and from time to time he told the driver to stop while he snapped shots through the windshield. He didn’t bother to climb out for a clearer view. But it wasn’t laziness that kept him in the car.
“My brother-in-law is a bad man,” the cabbie said. “He makes pictures of trash and other things the government doesn’t like to show. He has to hide.”
The guy did have a splendid eye for ugliness-and often the city appeared to be nothing but ugliness and oddities. Inch by inch the car advanced through a bazaar of intimate apparel. Brassieres were stacked shoulder high, smaller cups nestled in larger ones, like Russian dolls. Sherbet-colored panties fluttered in a breeze that kicked up dust and spicy odors. Then, on a street of furniture stores, there were sidewalk displays of brocade chairs as grand as pharaohs’ thrones. Chickens and cats roosted on them.
The brother-in-law clicked away, then clucked with delight when he spotted a herd of goats gnawing weeds from the wall around Pompey’s Pillar. Leaving him to his antic amusement—I couldn’t imagine that his was a real job—I paid admission at a wooden shack. Beyond it, the pillar and a pair of sphinxes dominated a mound of potsherds and crushed bricks, crumbling walls and tunnels. A wooden staircase zigzagged uphill, punctuated by newel posts without hand railings. Yellow plastic tape, the kind that police string up at crime scenes, connected the posts.
A uniformed man bolted from the ticket shack and raced after me. He didn’t bother with the stairs. He chugged straight up the rubble heap, setting off explosions of sand. He wore an armband stenciled in English: TOURISM & ANTIQUITIES POLICE, which suggested that his job was to protect the site and its visitors. But he viewed his mission as that of cheerleader. “America! Number one!” he panted. “Pillar of Pompey, twenty-seven meters tall.”
From between the sphinxes, I surveyed the whelming desolation that stretched from the pillar to a Stonehenge of bleak modern apartment towers, with carpets flapping from balconies and TV antennas trembling on rooftops. A spring wind, the khamseen, swept the city, blowing cinders between my teeth and grating my nasal membranes.
“Pillar of Pompey, twenty-seven meters tall,” the man repeated. “Now we see library-temple Roman.”
Whatever he expected in the way of baksheesh, I would have paid double if he would have left me alone. But he urged me over footpaths and splintered bridges, down into a gopher hole whose sandstone walls had been hewn into shelves.
“Books all gone,” he said, “to Cairo Museum.”
I felt in my pockets, but found no change, only bills, frayed as old handkerchiefs. I was reluctant to drag out a wad of Egyptian pounds and inflame the man’s avarice.
