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Their stories were all nonsense as well, Karl said, and he treated the natal narratives of Moses and the Christ child with the same blithe disdain I felt for wonder-working trees. “ ‘I found a baby in the river!’ ‘A god visited me in the night!’ ” he said in a high voice, mocking such explanations for untimely births. “And then we have the opposite: when a wife drops an inconvenient child down a neighbor’s well. ‘Gypsies stole my darling!’ ‘Jews used his blood for matzoh!’ ” He shook his head. “What a lot of trouble such women cause!”
I shushed him, concerned that he might offend others. “Are you an atheist, then?” I whispered, and I admit that I felt a small thrill simply saying a word I had never dared to apply to anyone, let alone a friend.
Karl threw back his head and laughed, blithely unconcerned. “I am an avis even more rara,” he told me merrily. “I am a realist. And you know what they say, don’t you? Birds of a feather … ?” He looked into my eyes until I blinked and looked away. He laughed again, though not at all in an unkind way. Rather, his devil-may-care amusement made me feel that he had seen the person I kept hidden even from myself, and that he approved of her and would be happy to see more of her if she dared reveal herself.
With Rosie bounding ahead at the end of her leash, he led me toward a hill just outside the walls, and if I was a bit winded when we achieved this minor pi
“Memphis is the earliest of the five cities you can see from here,” Karl said, pointing toward the pyramids. “It was founded perhaps four thousand years ago. The remains of the city itself are not much. Mostly they are covered by palm groves, but you can see there an enormous statue of Ramses II and the necropolis at Sakhara.”
“Sakhara! That’s— Winston invited me to go there next Sunday! Although given what happened the last time he invited me somewhere …”
“Ah, well, I think you must go, Agnes,” Karl said reasonably. “I believe you shall be safe there among many tourists. Ordinary Egyptians are very eager that business not be interrupted by the unpleasantness of politics.”
Near us, forming the western corners of the Old City walls, were two towers. Cylindrical and huge, they were constructed of bricks that were flatter and longer than any I had seen before. “They are Roman,” Karl said, “part of a fortress established about two thousand years ago. The fort itself lies above an even older city founded by the lawgiver Nebuchadnezzar. Down there?” he said, indicating the tourist entrance in the Roman wall. “That was once a water gate. The Nile used to run right along here, but its course has shifted since the time of the Romans. Their fort was built by Trajan about the era of Jesus.”
He turned westward and looked across the river toward an island. “That building on the point houses a Nilometer. Before the dams went in, the Nile would swamp this whole valley most years. When it retreated, the soil it left behind was very rich. Since ancient times, a Nilometer has measured the flood. If the river rose high, there was a festival of thanksgiving to the gods. If it was low, the priests would pray very hard because the crops might fail and there would be famine.”
“The seven lean years,” I said, remembering Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. “That was when the Hebrews first came to Egypt.”
“Yes, and four hundred years later, Moses said, ‘Let my people go!’ But there is an ancient Egyptian version of the Exodus as well,” Karl told me. “In their version, the Hebrews were not merely numerous but also tempted good Egyptians to apostasy. The Yahweh cult was an affront to the gods who ruled the Nile. And so? The floods failed. Catastrophe! In the Egyptian story, Pharaoh told our leaders, ‘Take your people and leave!’ He tried many times to kick us out, but we Jews refused to go because Egypt is so lovely. Finally it was necessary to drive us away with chariots.”
I laughed, amazed by the notion, and said, “I suppose there are two sides to every story.”
“Or three, or four,” he said.
And then it hit me. Us. We Jews.
“You yourself are … ?”
“Jewish. By heritage, yes,” he said, his lively features now quite still. “Are you shocked, Agnes?”
I had gotten used to the idea that Karl was a German, but now there was this, and it was a surprise. When I said nothing, he tried to make a joke of it. “See?” he offered, removing his hat and bending over to show me the top of his head. “No horns.”
You must understand—as Karl himself did—that in those days Christians believed it rude even to say the bare, bald word “Jew.” In public we might say that someone was “of the Hebrew race,” but never that someone was “a Jew.” In private, I am ashamed to tell you, the word was an insult among Americans of my time. When Mumma got a supplier to drop his price, there would be a glint in her eye as she whispered to us at di
Well, like me.
I’d never even met a Jewish person back in Ohio, as far as I was aware. To work in Little Italy among papist children was scandal enough, given that I was not there to evangelize among them. Yes, Cleveland had a growing community of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, but they lived in the Glenville neighborhood, where no one nice would ever think of going.
Standing there, watching my mute struggle with convention, Karl’s expression was one of suspended judgment, waiting for evidence of my true character. He busied himself with his pipe, packing it with tobacco, but something about the way he held his shoulders, the slight stiffness of his posture, made me aware that he was braced for the snub, prepared to be scorned. This man—so urbane and confident, so friendly and generous—this dear man could be wounded to the quick by what I said next.
Feeling another slender thread to my old life snap, I found my voice. “It makes no difference to me,” I said with what I hoped would sound like insouciance.
He lit the pipe, puffing rhythmically, eyes on mine, and the silence felt like a rebuke. Come now, his expression seemed to say, let us have nothing less than truth between us.
“It did,” I admitted then, my seriousness matching his own. “It used to, but … that was before I met you.”
Another moment passed. He drew in smoke, held it for a moment, and finally released a long, somewhat uneven breath, waving his hand at the plume. “Like a dragon, yes? I think that is why I took the habit up, when I was young,” he said. “I loved stories of knights and dragons, but I was always sympathetic to the poor misunderstood dragons.”
“They had a side, too,” I said, and Karl’s approval was plain.
It was such a simple idea, really, but many things seemed to click into place for me. It was not scandalous or sinful or dangerous to understand a different point of view. I had been raised to believe that to do so was to risk error at least and damnation at worst. Knowing Karl taught me that it was simply good ma
Karl, too, had recovered his aplomb. “Frankly,” he confided as we retreated down the hill, “I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religion into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that ca