The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

So he kept his thoughts to himself, repeating again and again the words of the Prophet Muhammad, who had said so wisely, He who is in love and hides it and remains chaste is a martyr.

“Why do the Jews put their papers in the attic?”

There was the injunction against throwing away documents that contain the name of God, he explained, which was based on the belief that such papers hold something of God’s majesty.

It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.

You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.

It’s imperfect and incomplete. But what novel isn’t? Language is a gesture—a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself—and eventually, all stories must come to an end.

Like my father and his father before him, I am but a watcher, a guardian, protecting the geniza documents, and content to persist in their mystery.