The Cairo Diary Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Author’s Note

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Reading is an entirely personal experience: a crazy feeling of exaltation, resulting from a meeting between black marks on fragments of wood treated with spirit and a brain that captures the words and interprets them, according to its particular sensibilities. The engine that drives every story is the reader’s mind; his or her imagination is its fuel. All the author does is describe a more or less malleable landscape, and then works hard to ensure that the reader follows the guardrail.

  But it’s all about the senses.

  And I would like to share with you my experience as a reader, before I leave you alone with these pages.

  For a long time I liked silence when I was reading.

  The peace and quiet of a kind of impersonal nothingness, which enabled me to savor fully the sonorous cataclysm of the words.

  Then I made an effort: I began using music for reading. Symphonic music.

  At the start, the idea didn’t really tempt me. Then it won me over. The perceptive process of reading involves the senses. And music adds enormously to their power.

  Read a novel at home with music floating all around, or in a train car, with a personal stereo glued to your ears, or even slip a CD into the computer during your lunch break at work and plug the headphones into the CPU, and the magic of the imagination is set in motion.

  Believe me, if you’re not already an enthusiast, it’s an experiment well worth trying. The use of intoxicating music increases the already incredible power of reading tenfold.

  But not just any music.

  Making the right choice of background music is as difficult as choosing which book to open next.

  Usually, when I write, I deny myself any kind of distraction, anything that might make me lose my concentration (however tenuous it may be). For this novel, I tried a different approach … out of curiosity, to find out what kind of effect it might have on me.

  I was lucky. At my very first attempt, I discovered the music for the novel.

  Or perhaps it was the book that was inspired by the soundscapes.

  I work with music from films. It’s perfect, created to add sound to an image without supplanting it. Original film soundtracks are composed with the aim of being shared; they never make a name for themselves all on their own, so they are the ideal reading companions.

  Here are my recommendations, in the form of a few recordings, should you decide to follow my advice for the book you are about to read. True, it does demand a small amount of preparation, but I am sure that you will be rewarded emotionally.

  If you are tempted before even reading the first chapter, try to obtain the music from the film The Village by James Newton Howard. Careful now, don’t confuse the issues. We’re not talking about the film here, so it doesn’t matter whether you liked it or loathed it. The music itself is intoxicating.

  This recording should serve as your ideal companion for this novel. I listened to it on a continuous loop, day after day, throughout the time I was writing the part about Mont-Saint-Michel. And I never tired of it.

  If you wish to take curiosity and enjoyment still further, then you will have to find a second recording for the whole of the part about Egypt. For this, there are two possibilities, as far as I am concerned: either Peter Gabriel’s Passion or The Passion of the Christ, composed by John Debney, whose mysterious, Middle Eastern– influenced soundscapes should carry you far, far away into that strange land we call the imagination.

  I have told you everything. My reading secrets are now yours.

  In regards to myself, music changed the way I perceived things as a reader. The stories acquired more emotional density—which I would have considered unthinkable before. I felt like an amateur baker who discovers the existence of yeast.

  Of course, this is only a piece of advice, but it is like those good, small restaurants whose details friends like to pass quietly to one another, like an affectionate secret, and then hope to be there when the other finally arrives, to witness the smile on his face. In any case, I shall be around while you are reading; I simply hope to see those smiles appear on your faces.

  Finally, in this time of doubt, I shall allow myself to remind you that the time machine does exist. It is magic.

  And magic really exists. In words.

  That is the key to this story.

  Happy reading …

  —MAXIM CHATTAM

  Edgecombe, October 12, 2004

  Only he who carries the load knows how much it weighs.

  —ARAB PROVERB

  Man will occasionally stumble over the truth,

  but most of the time he will pick himself up

  and continue on.

  —SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

  PROLOGUE

  Tombs of the Caliphs, East of Cairo, March 1928

  The setting sun filtered through an ancient tomb, shining right across its immense structure from one window to the other like a red eye, tingeing the stone with a fleeting touch of blood. The necropolis had all the elements of a ghost town: its deserted streets, its structures inhabited only by sand and wind, and its increasingly dark shadows.

  The damaged monuments were dotted among more modest tombs. They were disproportionate in size, buildings of several stories surmounted by dizzy cupolas and flanked by silent minarets; they had courtyards, fountains that had forever run dry, spacious loggias, and everywhere those darkened openings, accoladed windows or holes designed to play with the light.

  All at once the sand in the streets whirled up and was borne away by the dusk wind.

  Stone remains emerged from the ground, rough stelae toppled by the centuries.

  Several acres of large, majestic tombs, as fine as palaces, waited at the gates of Cairo, like t
he last hope before the desert. A tardy, forgotten hope.

  Not far to the east, hills danced under the city’s ramparts, like a strangely fossilized sea-swell. Hills not of earth or sand, but of detritus: eight centuries’ worth of debris, abandoned here by organized city-dwellers. Heaps of rubble, shards of pottery, fragments of carved stone in a sea of picturesque remains.

  The silhouettes of the last people who had been crouching there, working, moved off in the direction of Bab Darb el-Mahrug, a gate leading into el-Azhar district. A group of three kids were squabbling, as was so often the case here, over a piece of enamel that could easily be sold. The question was which of the three had seen it first, lying among the rubble. The eldest was twelve years old.

  The children came here every day to dig through the debris, in search of the most insignificant, vaguely historic crumb that might bring a little money if offered to the wealthy tourists who swarmed all over Cairo.

  For once the dispute did not result in blows and the eldest child let the other two leave with their trophy, in exchange for a few threats about their future fate if he saw them hunting around there again.

  Seleem, who had been watching the scene from the steps of a tomb, finally stood up. He had been there for more than an hour, waiting for them all to leave. He did not want to take the risk of being seen.

  His presence in the necropolis was too important for that.

  And secret.

  Now that the sun was setting, Cairo was gradually lighting up, the ocher city progressively gaining color from the modern brilliance of the European-style buildings. A forest of minarets rose up above the old city wall.

  Seleem saw his city through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy who had never even crossed the Nile: with the feeling that the center of the world lay at the heart of those narrow alleyways.

  Nothing was more beautiful or more important than Cairo.

  Except perhaps this evening, this meeting.

  He adored legends. And he was on the point of experiencing one. He had been promised.

  It must be time.

  Seleem walked down the steps and along an interminable wall. He walked past the funerary mosque of Bars Bey until he found the place he had been told about.

  A cramped passageway disappeared between two tall mausoleums.

  Splintered wood was strewn across the sand.

  Seleem watched where he was stepping and entered.

  It was dark; the first stars were not enough to light up the narrow passage.

  Seleem walked to the end of what turned out to be a blind alley, and he waited.

  * * *

  Night had fallen, and now the stars were glittering powerfully above the tombs of the caliphs.

  Seleem let out his first scream.

  The echo of his cry rose up into the empty structures that surrounded him. Instinctively, without rational thought, he had just invented a language, and this cry was the most original definition of it.

  It had just given substance to terror.

  Before the ends of his hair had finished turning white, he was able to let out a second scream.

  This time, he spoke the language of pain.

  * * *

  A stray dog abandoned the old rag it had found and turned its head toward the blind alley. The screams had just stopped.

  The dog opened its mouth and the tip of its moist tongue lolled out. It headed toward the passageway.

  It stopped at the entrance, where the thick shadows began.

  Then it moved toward the source of those screams.

  Its canine curiosity vanished after a few feet, when it scented what haunted the air at the end of this blind alley.

  Its eyes saw through the darkness, making out the stocky figure that was moving above the body of a child.

  The shape unfolded, became tall.

  The smell spread out until it reached the dog’s maw.

  And the animal began to back away.

  When the shape advanced toward it, the dog urinated.

  It urinated on itself.

  The wind raised up its offering of sand and bore it away, far away, into the mysteries of the desert.

  1

  Paris, November 2005

  Paris was muttering angrily.

  A storm of indignation was shaking the entire city. The thunder of public rallies battered the fronts of Haussmann’s buildings, echoing through the alleyways on the great boulevards, until it reached the ministers.

  A leaden sky had lain across the roofs since the scandal began, strangling the capital like a too-tight scarf.

  Never had France known a November like it: so icy and yet so electric.

  The press had been dining out on it for the last three weeks; certain journalists went as far as stating that November 2005 would relegate May 1968 to the ranks of an anecdotal skirmish if things continued in the same way.

  The newspaper stands flashed past like milestones in one of the rear windows of the powerful sedan, issuing their information in regular doses, vital for survival in a civilized environment. All the front pages gave details of the Affair as they saw it; there was scarcely any room for the rest of the news.

  The sedan was running alongside a large truck.

  Suddenly, the reflection of a face appeared in its rear window.

  Marion flinched imperceptibly as she suddenly came face-to-face with herself.

  Her face was a ghost’s. Her pleasant features were not sufficient today to make her easy on the eye; she had grown too pale, her split lip divided her face like the comma in an eternally unfinished sentence, her sandy hair showed a few streaks of white, and, in particular, her eyes had lost all their brightness. The inquisitive, jade-green flame had given way to two dying embers.

  She was approaching forty, and life had just presented her with a really great gift.

  The leather squeaked as the man at her side leaned toward the driver and asked him to take a right. Marion blinked in an attempt to forget her face.

  Three males, as virile as they were cryptic, were surrounding her in this silent car. Men from the DST.

  Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—the French equivalent of the CIA.

  The acronym struck a heavy, slightly terrifying chord.

  Especially for Marion, who had never had any problems with the law, who had only been stopped by the police once in her life for a routine identity check, and whose job as a secretary at the Médico-légal Institute and morgue in Paris was the only original thing about her—if indeed it was original.

  She had always felt herself to be identical to the millions of other people she lived with in this country, caught up in the system of work, lifting her head a little higher after each year, so she could stay afloat and go on breathing.

  Nothing in her life had prepared her to find herself one day in this car, heading for the unknown.

  Until she’d returned from her holidays, at the start of October.

  Until that morning, very early, when she had entered the cold autopsy room. Each detail was engraved on her mind. Even the stuttering of the neon lights when she pressed the switch. Once again she saw the flashes of white light reflecting off the tiles, the immaculate stainless steel of the dissection table. Her heels echoed at each step. The antiseptic smell hadn’t completely masked the other, more acrid smell of cold meat. The only reason she was there so early that morning was to find Dr. Mendès, who was neither there nor in the adjoining storeroom.

  Marion had turned around to walk back across the room.

  Her eyes fell on it by chance, as though drawn to it.

  It wasn’t very eye-catching, hardly a cartoon strip.

  But it had changed her life.

  Until the DST came to see her and told her she was going to die.

  Probably.

  Unless she agreed to disappear. For a time at least, long enough for things to calm down, for a place to be found for her, for them to rely on her, for a system to be set in motion.

  Everything had been
so quick.

  Paranoia is a virus. Transmit it in the right circumstances and it will develop all on its own. From that moment on, Marion had spotted shadows in her wake, individuals spending the night in darkened cars in front of the building where she lived, and her telephone sounded strange, as if it had been bugged.

  Then the attack.

  She swallowed, ran her tongue across her lips. The cut was still there.

  A warning.

  Marion had agreed to disappear.

  Before the media discovered the identity of this woman, the initiator of the greatest scandal the Fifth Republic had known; before other people, dangerous in different ways this time, returned to attack.

  The man from the DST who took charge of her case had told her just to bring warm clothes, and her most personal possessions, as she wouldn’t be returning home for a long time; it could be a month, maybe a year. She knew nothing about her destination.

  The vehicle with the darkened windows passed through La Défense tunnel, heading toward the A13 Autoroute, and in a few minutes disappeared toward the west, evaporating into the anger and the gray-white horizon that encircled Paris.

  The smell of the sea gave Marion her first clue, but darkness fell too quickly for her to spot any landmarks as they passed by. She rested her head back against the seat, rolled up her window, and confined herself just to following the few lights with her eyes. For now, her future was nothing but a roar in the darkness, a doubt moving at eighty miles per hour, speeding toward the unknown.

  She reopened her eyes to find that the car was climbing a forgotten road, with nothing on either side but emptiness. Marion sensed that they were almost there, and pressed her face to the glass like an impatient child in need of reassurance. The vehicle slowed down and turned left before coming to a halt beside a stone wall.

  The front passenger immediately got out and opened the door so she could get out. Stiff after the journey, Marion had difficulty straightening her long legs. She stood up gently, numb with sleep. They were standing at the bottom of a steep hill.

  Ancient structures rose up from the slope, forming a collection of fortifications and dwellings worthy of a medieval film.

  Then the moon pierced through the low clouds, and trained its silver searchlight on the summit.

  Out of the shadows loomed a colossal tower, dominating the entire bay, its foundations crushing all architectural pretensions for miles around.