Of Jews and slips and healing cracks: Part Two

2. Hany

(Hany el-Saeed Ahmed, Cairene tentmaker, on the left)

Our conversation with Hany the quiltmaker had gathered momentum. We had come to look at quilts, but after a good half hour the topic had not so much as glimmered on the horizon of our discussion. While I do not doubt Hany’s sincere enjoyment of our company, I understand that the growing frequency of our patronage must go a long way in fueling his enthusiasm. Aaron and I had whiled away the afternoon with Hany not two weeks before, on a mission to purchase a wedding present for Aaron’s friends. We had learned of Hany’s expertise through Aaron’s roommate Matt, who swore up and down that he was the the best quiltmaker in Cairo. Operating under the principle, “illi ta‘arifu ahsan min illi mata‘arifush” (“the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t”), we bored through the veritable swarm of entreating quiltmakers looking for “Hany.” Easier said than done. At last Aaron resorted to asking someone. Immediately the final scene of Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian” began playing in my mind, the part where the Roman guards ask the prisoners bound for crucifixion which one is “Brian” so they can release him. Obviously, man, woman and child claim to be Brian, and the cheekiest imposter (Eric Idle, of course) is freed, while the real Brian is left to hang. But before I could open my mouth to relay the potential relevance of this scenario to Aaron, a fellow had spirited us into a stall and sent a boy to fetch Hany. When the sought-after seamster appeared, there could be no mistake that the messenger had led us to the right hole. With mention of Matt, Hany’s moustached smile nearly split his face and his fervor burbled over us: “Mat-sew! Of course! My dear, dear friend! How I miss him, how is he, is he still in Egypt? He is? God be praised, I MUST see him, and who are you? Matt’s friend, of course! How wonderful, you must be wonderful as Mat-sew is and this is your wife? God be praised!” We filled in responses with rising animation, influenced by his ebullience. I had worn a scarf over my hair that day which, coupled with posing as Aaron’s wife, made me feel downright respectable for the first time since arriving in Cairo. I reckoned that Hany was the first Egyptian with whom I could build a relationship within an acceptable, if fabricated, social framework.
Our friendship with Hany flourished indeed. The pre-purchase conversation betrayed no decrease in effusion from Hany, and earned us much praise for our Arabic. Never had we felt so encouraged and appreciated. Every response and observation, glubbed or no, met with his heartfelt agreement and even awe. “Exactly, Ustaza Anna! How true! Such a clever wife you have, Ustaz Haroun! Ustaz Haroun, you are a fine thinker! Beautiful ideas, these ideas of yours, and so true! However do you do it! Ahhh, Ustaza Anna wants to tell us something. What have you thought of, Ustaza Anna?” We glowed and glubbed along to our hearts’ content, then Aaron bought one of Hany’s finest quilts and fell in love with another that he ended up coming back for later.
I should emphasize here that Hany does truly astounding work. Throughout our chat I kept gazing around the little room in wonder. Quilted designs and scenes covered every inch of wallspace in his windowless nook, and scores more lay stacked and folded in the loft above. Hany’s designs ranged from Quranic script to flowers and birds to geometric patterns to scenes from local fairy tales. He had recently won a contest to create quilted illustrations for a collection of Goha stories (desert fables), which he displayed to us with pride. When it at last came time to talk of quilts, he and his servant boy vanished up into the loft and reappeared with an astonishing assortment of colors and patterns, each (literally) more beautiful than the next. He chatted along about which colors people of different nationalities tended to prefer: Americans – red, white and blue; Italians – assorted, muted fall colors; Germans – sharply contrasting colors, etc. I concluded that I must be Italian. Hany concurred and marvelled at my cleverness and taste. Aaron picked an American one for his American friends. Hany clapped his hands with uncontainable glee. We floated out of Hany’s workshop giddy and delighted to have spent money on his wares. Man, is he good. He probably could have sold me my own headscarf at that point, so taken in was I. As we ventured back through the gauntlet of quiltmaker stands we tried to convince one another that we had clearly selected the winner of the bunch, although from out there they all looked pretty identical.
On the visit in question, Aaron and I returned accompanied by Matt and another friend from school, Justin, both of whom are also Jewish. Hany could not have expressed greater joy at our interrupting his lunch to engage him in conversation for the remainder of the afternoon. As usual, he ushered us into the back offices of his workshop, swept a circle of decrepit chairs around a folding table and sent his servant boy to fetch us sodas. On our previous meeting, we had devoted the inevitable sixty to seventy percent of our discussion to politics, but had managed not to touch the topic of Israel. We were in deep this time though, as discussing politics increasingly means discussing Lebanon, which means denouncing the great Jewish/Israeli/American Satan, killer of babies, destroyer of homes, devourer of land, crusher of hopes.
“Innocent children are dying, a war is beginning without reason, and why? Because Israel wants to control the Middle East! And why do they succeed? Because America helps them! And why does America help them? Because the Jews control America!” Hany announced to his three-fourths-Jewish company. “They control Bush, they control the government . . . and they won’t give up until they take everything!”
Justin balked and leaned forward. “I have a question for you, sir,” he interjected, holding a rather impressive pokerface although I could see his hands trembling where they gripped the edge of his chair. “What percentage of America is Jewish, in your opinion?”
Hany stirred more sugar into his tea and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, calculating: “at least thirty,” his wager.
“Wrong!” exclaimed Justin with triumph. “One percent! A very small minority!”
Hany was unconvinced. “But they are the most powerful minority,” he insisted. “American interests are Israeli interests. America never criticizes Israel.” His voice rose to a feverish pitch. “How do we know it wasn’t the Jews that blew up the World Trade Center? Why did no one notice when Ariel Sharon came on TV to make a statement about the attacks only minutes after it happened? This is no coincidence! It was the Jews!”
He had gone too far. I felt a bit frantic that Hany might notice the smoke coming out of the attacked Jews’ ears as they prepared to defend themselves. Aaron began his marcato rebuttal.
“There is no evidence for any Jewish involvement in the September eleventh attacks,” he opened his commentary, although he did not go into the detailed evidence we have incriminating an Egyptian Muslim. “America’s interests are aligned with Israeli interests because of its strategic interests in the region. The Bush administration does not care about the Jews . . .” and so on. As my three Jewish companions furrowed dark brows over prominent noses in search of ways to set Hany straight without blowing their cover, I wondered how anyone who had ever seen a Jew could fail to identify them. It seems that at least the younger generation of Egyptians (Hany can’t have been more than four or five years older than us) actually have never seen a Jew, or at least not one that admitted it. Another Jewish friend had told me the story of revealing his religious identity to a curious questioner on a bus. The snooper had allegedly recoiled and croaked, “A Jew! An actual Jew! But . . . you don’t have horns, you’re . . . Allah. A JEW. Can I . . . touch you?” Mayhem ensued as the other passengers learned of the religious diversity of their vehicle, and the poor exposed Jew began to wonder if he had made a serious blunder. Then the original questioner’s voice whispered in his ear: “Can I tell you something? I . . . I love the Jewish people. I love Israel. I want to go so badly, but my people would disown me . . . Can I give you my email, brother, so we can meet one day in Israel?” Baffled, my friend accepted the email and vacated the bus in a hurry. “I never wanted to see that guy again,” he confessed. “It was just too weird, it totally freaked me out. I mean, could he have been serious?”
So what would Hany do if while in mid-tirade, tea and pointer finger held aloft, one of his doted-upon charges piped up, “But Hany, hadritak, I am Jewish . . .” No one seemed to want to find out. We steered the conversation back toward Egyptian identity, a topic all Egyptians seem to find irresistible. These discussions also usually give Aaron an opportunity to exhibit his superior knowledge of Egyptian history, the relaying of which he seems to see as a kind of responsibility in the face of such an approximative and often downright false national memory. Insofar as we have heard it discussed and seen it exhibited, Egyptian history can be narrowed down to the Pharaonic times (which encompass, depending on the version, the invention of paper, writing, and humankind), the 1919 Revolution, the 1948 War in Palestine, the 1952 Revolution, the 1967 War, and the 1973 War, all providing timeless examples of Egypt’s heroism, and, most recently, Israel’s demonism. I’m afraid Aaron’s expansions and refutations of these themes have not brought about any epiphanies yet. While Hany claimed that Egyptians “love history” he did not show much interest in registering Aaron’s deliberated addenda to the storyline he cherished. I tried to derail what was quickly becoming the Orientalist paradigm of our nightmares (in which we, the educated whities, catch ourselves explaining to the Mohammadans just how they fit into the big picture that we have constructed). “But in America it’s the same,” I reminded them. “In a public school in the Midwest, you get a very limited, heroic version of American history and rarely does anyone but historians look any deeper.”
“You can’t expect everyone in a society to read,” Matt cautioned. “Throughout history this has never been the case. To run a country, you need most people working out in the fields, worrying about crops and livelihood. History is only really important to the educated minority.”
Hany cheered this point with vim. “Exactly! The most important thing for humans is to stay busy and to spend time with their loved ones. That is the stuff of life, isn’t it? Conversations and jokes and tea . . .”
Little did he know that he shared that pleasure currently with three members of the people that troubled him so. May as well let him enjoy it.