What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten

15. City of the Dead

15 City of the Dead Cairo: April 2011 Her crimped fingers uncoil one by one against the gnarled restraints of her arthritis. With what little flexibility remains in the nearly petrified muscles, the fingers crab walk across the rumpled sheets of her bed; they probe forward, as would a spider on ruined legs, toward a brown bottle of medicine she takes for ailments whose names she has long since forgotten. As I look at her claw the bottle to her chest, I can hardly believe that Thoray Hamdan is just sixty years old. Her eyes are cloudy from cataracts ; her polio-afflicted legs, thin as loose ribbon, lie folded beneath her wasted body. Face jowly, voice thick and rough. She turns in my direction, eyes unseeing. I tell her I will leave her some money before I go. Thoray mutters a verse from the Koran that bestows blessings I don’t understand. She reminds me of my mother. At ninety-four and bound by arthritis herself, and blind in her left eye, my mother sits marooned in one spot on the living room sofa during the day and reads the newspaper, a slew of prescribed medications for her heart, blood pressure, and stomach in a frayed plastic shopping bag by her side. A glass of water stands on a coaster on the end table near her cane. Sometimes my mother looks up from the newspaper and asks, “What is green energy?” “What is Google?” “What is an iPhone?” Outside Thoray’s door chickens strut around the tomb of Basha Mohammad Retab, a towering stone castle-shaped edifice in the middle 247 248 home bound of a sooty walled-in courtyard. Thoray has lived beside the tomb for thirty years but has no idea how old it is. Two hundred ten years, maybe 150 years. She cannot say. Thoray grew up in Cairo but never married. She had lived with her brother downtown when she was younger. When he died, another brother told her about this place, City of the Dead, at the edge of downtown . He worked here cleaning graves, including the Retab tomb. No squatters at the time had claimed the burial site, he told Thoray. “Come and live here for a while,” he said. “Please, make it your home. It will cost you nothing.” Thoray’s brother convinced her, and along with a widowed sister and a niece she moved into the Retab mausoleum. In those days, she recalls, there was a garden in the courtyard. Back then the descendants of the Retab family owned one hundred acres of farmland outside Cairo. They sold crops and used some of the money to maintain the tomb. Then, in the 1950s, President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized private property, and the Retab family lost most of their property and could no longer afford to care for the tomb. They removed a glass chandelier that had hung above it and donated it to a mosque, leaving a hole in the ceiling now filled by bats. As far as Thoray knows, the Retab family has not been back since. Their distant relative lies in his grave, forgotten. The four-mile-long City of the Dead stands below the Mokattam Hills in southeastern Cairo in an area known as al-Arafa. The earliest graves date to 642 B.C. The thick network of bald domes of many of the mausoleums slopes above the four walls enclosing the cemetery and gives the impression of a small neighborhood, which indeed it has become. Here poor families unable to afford Cairo’s high rents have turned house-like tombs into homes. The narrow alleys twisting through the cemetery have no names other than those of the people who live on them. “I will meet you in the place where the Shafi family lives,” someone might say. “No, let us meet in the place of the Pasha family.” Thoray lives on the street of the Gabaly family in a room that would have belonged to one of the servants responsible for the upkeep of the Retab tomb. A short narrow hall wrapped in dampness and shadow leads into the crumbling room where she sits on her bed. Off to one side, a space in the wall provides enough room for a bucket beneath the City of the Dead 249 wood frame of a chair: her toilet. One of her nieces carries her to the chair when the need arises. Thoray would much rather have someone lift her out...