MUAWIA, DR. ABU KABIR

(1930-1982)--Arab Hebraist, professor at Cairo University. His field was comparative study of Middle Eastern religions. He studied at the university in Jerusalem, did his doctorate in the United States on "Hebrew Thought in 11th-Centrury Spain and the Teachings of the Mutakallim". He was a handsome man, whose shoulders were so broad he could not make his elbows touch. He knew most of Judah Halevi's poems by heart and was sure that the Khazar Dictionary printed by Daubmannus in 1691 was still to be found on some old shelf. To give credence to this claim, he reconstructed its whereabouts in the 17th and later centuries, then drew up a concise list of all copies that had been destroyed and the few that had been released into circulation, only to conclude that there were at least two copies still in existence. But he never managed to trace them, even though he could swallow an egg by just looking at it. When, in a burst of creative energy, he was publishing his three-thousandth work, the Israli-Egyptian war broke out in 1967. He went to war as an officer of the Egyptian army, was wounded and was captured. His military papers attest to severe head and body wounds, one of which left him permanently impotent. When he returned home, his face was swathed in confused smiles, which he tried behind him like a scarf. He took off his uniform in a hotel and for the first time saw his scars in a copper mirror. They smelled of bird droppings. He realized he would never again be able to lie next to a woman. Dressing slowly he thought, "I was a cook for more than thirty years and bit by bit I prepared and put together this dish I have become: I was my own baker and dough and kneaded myself into the bread I wanted; now another cook has suddenly appeared with a knife and within a split second has whipped me up into an entirely different, unknown dish. Now I am the Lord’s sister--I don't exist!"

And he did not return to his family in Cairo or resume his job at the university. He moved into his father's empty house in Alexandria, where he lived in a hurry, and watched the white air bubbles under his nails escape into the world like those that come out of fish gills. He buried his hair, wore Bedouin sandals that left hoof-prints in their wake, and one night, when raindrops were as big as an ox eye, he dreamed his last dream and jotted it down.

That was Dr. Abu Kabir Muawia's dream. He dreamed it again the following night and, as after the first time, he could not remember the animal's name. Then he redreamed all of his dreams one by one, but in reverse order. First the one from the day before last, then the one before that, and before that, and son on down the line, quickly, until he had done with all his dreams of bygone years in only one night. After thirty-seven nights he had finished the job, because he had reached his earliest childhood dreams, the ones he could no longer remember when awake, and when he came to the conclusion that hi s servant, the mulatto Aslan, . . . resembled him now more than he resembled himself of thirty-seven years ago. And this brought him to his last dream. Time, in his nights, like Khazar time, flowed from the end to the beginning of life and then expired. After that, he never dreamed again. He was clean, and was ready for a new life. Than he began going every evening to the Bar by the Bitch.

They charged only for the chair at the Bar by the Bitch, for they served no drinks or food, and riffraff came here to drink and eat what they brought themselves or to sit down at a table and get some sleep. Sometimes the place was packed, but nobody uttered a word. The place had no bar, no kitchen, no hearth, and no waiters, only a man at the door who charged for the chairs. Muawia took a seat amid the other customers, lit his pipe, and engaged in an exercise: he did not let a single thought last longer than the smoke coming out of his pipe. He inhaled the stink and watched the people around him stuff their faces with moldy buns known as "ripped pants", or with pumpkin jam with grapes; he watched them pass each mouthful through a bitter look and wipe their teeth with a handkerchief; he saw how their shirts burst open when they turned in their sleep.

Watching them, he thought of how the material used for every second of his time and theirs was a tattered second from past centuries; the past was built into this present time, and the present was made up of the past, because that was the only material that there was. These countless seconds of the past, carried like stones into various structures over the centuries, were, if we cared to look closely, clearly recognizable in our present day hours, the way today we recognize and put on the market a gold coin from the times of Vespasian. . . .

Such thoughts did not serve to relieve any of his pains. Relief came from these people, who expected nothing more of the future than that it trick others as it had already tricked them. This rabble of worried masticators helped him find his way in his new life. It was soothing to know that very few of these people, who reeked from here to Asia Minor, could be unhappier than he was. The Bar by the Bitch was the right place for Muawia. With its sea-salt-polished tables and its fish-oil lamps, it looked at least seventy years older than it was, and it soothed Muawia to know this, because he could not stand anything to do with himself or his own time. And since his profession, which he loathed as much as his present, awaited him in his past, he slipped into a kind of semi-past, where opal and jade are still half-sisters, and where the cuckoo bird still counts the days man has left of live, where knives are still forged with both edges blunt. . . .

After dining on beef and goat ears, he would go to the long-unopened rooms of his father's house, where deep into the night he would leaf through English and French newspapers printed in Alexandria at the end of the 19th century. Crouching on his heels and feeling the nutritious darkness of the meat flow through him, he would read the papers with thirsty interest, because they could have nothing to do with him. The advertisements were ideal for this purpose.

Night after night he poured over advertisements put in the papers by people who had long since died; offers that were now meaningless glistened in a dust that was older than he. These yellowed pages advertised French brandy for gout, and water for the mouths of men and women; August Ziegler of Hungary announced that his specialized shop for hospitals, doctors, and midwives had cures for upset stomachs, stockings for varicose veins, and inflatable rubber souls. The descendant of a 16th-century caliph was selling the family's fifteen-hundred-room palace, situated on the most beautiful part of the Tunisian coast, in the sea, only twenty meters below the water's surface. It could be viewed daily in fair weather with a southern wind called the taram. An unnamed elderly lady was selling an alarm clock that woke you up with rose scent or cow dung; there was an advertisement for glass hair or armbands that swallowed your hand as soon as you put them on. The Christian Pharmacy by the Holy Trinity Church was advertising Dr. Leman's lotion for freckles, celandine, and lupus scabs, powder to give camels, horses, and sheep an appetite and prevent foal disease, mange, and cattle exhaustion due to guzzling water. Somebody who did not give his name was looking to by a Jewish soul on credit; he wanted one of the lowest order, called nephesh. A prominent architect offered to build, at very low cost, a luxurious custom-ordered summer home in heaven; the keys would be turned over to the owner in his lifetime, as soon as he had settled his accounts--no with the builder, but with the rabble of Cairo. A lotion was recommended to counteract going bald on a honeymoon; there was for sale a magic word that could be transformed into a lizard or a Chinese rose; there was a reasonable priced foot of land from which the rainbow could be seen at night every third jum'a in the month of Rabbi-ul-aker. Like getting rid of bugs, once she gets rid of her pimples, freckles, and beauty marks, every woman becomes more beautiful with the aid of Rony & Son English whitener. A porcelain set for green tea in the form of a Persian hen and chicks for sale, along with a wooden bowl under which the soul of the seventh iman had spent some time. . . .

Countless names and addresses of no-longer-existing companies, sellers and shops that had long since shut down, covered the yellowing newspaper pages, and Dr. Muawia plunged into that bygone world as into a new grace-saving generation that was uninserted in his troubles and woes. One evening in 1971, when each tooth in his mouth felt like a separate letter, Dr. Muawia sat down and answered an advertisement from 1896. He carefully wrote out the name and address--an Alexandrian street he was not sure still existed--and put his reply in the mail. From then on, every evening, he would answer another add from the end of the 19th century. Piles of letters were sent out into the unknown. The one morning the first reply arrived. The respondent wrote that, although she no longer sold the French Touroul patent for home economics, which Dr. Muawia had mentioned in his letter, she did have something else to offer. And the very next morning a girl and a parrot called on Muawia in connection with the advertisement; they sang a duet about wooden clogs. Then the parrot sang a solo piece in a language unknown to Muawia. When Muawia asked which of the two was for sale, the girl said he could chose. Dr. Muawia looked at the girl--she had pretty eyes and breasts like two sunny-side-up eggs. He rousted himself from his lethargy, instructed Aslan to clear out on of the large rooms in the attic, placed in it a glass hoop, and bought the parrot. Gradually, as replies to his letters began arriving from all sorts of heirs to the one-time advertisers, the room filled up. In it were now numerous oddly shaped, undefined pieces of furniture, a huge camel saddle, an iron cage in which to hang people from the ceiling , two mirrors, one of which was somewhat late in reflecting movements and the other cracked, an old manuscript of song written in some unknown language. The song was:

A year later the attic room was full, and Dr. Muawia was astonished when one morning he entered and realized that the objects were staring to make sense. Some of his acquisitions were obviously equipment for something that looked like a hospital. But an ancient, unusual hospital that did not use modern day methods. Muawia's sanatorium had seats with strange slits in them, benches with iron rings for people to tie themselves to when they sat down, wooden visors with slits for just the left eye or right, or for a third eye in the forehead. Muawia moved these objects to another room. He called in a colleague from the medical school and showed them to him. This was the first time since the 1967 war that he had seen one of his university friends.

The man stared at the objects and said, "One evening a dead man returned from the grave to dine with his family. He was just as stupid as when alive. Death had made him none the wiser. . . .This equipment is too antiquated for a dream clinic, for recovering the sight used in dreams. Because, according to some beliefs, we use a different eye in our sleep from the one we use when we are awake. . . ."

Dr. Muawia smiled at these words and focused his attention on the objects that had been left in the first large room with the parrot. But, as compared with the room that housed protective equipment against blindness in dreams, here it was harder to establish a connection between these articles. He spent a long time trying to find some common denominator for all the things, and eventually decided on a method he had used in his previous life as a scholar. He decided to use a computer. He telephoned one of his former associates in Cairo, an expert at calculating probability, and asked him to feed the computer with the names of all the objects he had listed in his letter. Three days later the computer produced its findings, and Dr. Muawia received the report from Cairo. With regard to the poem, the computer could only say that it had been written in a Slavic language on a sheet of paper from the year 1660 bearing the watermark of a lamb under a flag with a three-leaf clover.

The other objects, such as the parrot, the huge camel saddle, the dried fruit in the shape of a fishlike pine cone, the woman's dress with bells instead of buttons, the cage for people, and so on, had one common denominator. Based on the scanty information fed into the computer, mostly from Dr. Muawia's own study, it transpired that all these objects had been mentioned in the now-lost Khazar Dictionary.

And so Dr. Muawia was back where he had started from when he went to war. He went once more to the Bar by the Bitch, lit his pipe, looked around, put it out, and returned to his old job at the university in Cairo. Waiting for him on his desk was a pile of letters and invitations to various conferences. He chose one and started preparing a paper for a meeting due to be held in Istanbul in October 1982 on "The Cultures of the Black Sea Shores in the Middle Ages." He reread Judah Halevi on the Khazars, wrote his paper, and left for Istanbul , thinking that he might meet somebody there who knew a bit more about the Khazar story than he did.

The murderer of Dr. Muawia in Istanbul told him as he aimed his gun ,"Open your mouth so your teeth won't be ruined!"

Dr. Muawia opened his mouth and was shot dead.

The had taken such perfect aim that Dr. Muawia's teeth were left intact.