The Cairo Codex Read Online Free
Author: Linda Lambert
was returning to Egypt, free to discover it with her own eyes.
The plane passed over sparkling beaches; the new Alexandria Library rested near the shore like a giant disc, a spaceship with hundreds of Oriental eyes. Continuing its descent, the Lufthansa 747 aimed south across the verdant Nile crescent, emerging atop a landscape of tawny desert stretching as far as Justine’s eye could see. The sight ahead was nearly indecipherable: a tan, leathery blanket covering the city of nearly eighteen million, a few skyscrapers protruding above its smothering shield. She smiled as she recalled a comparable sight: two deep ochre towers extending above a white fluffy mantle of fog—the Golden Gate Bridge.
As they made their approach into Cairo International Airport, the runway met the plane with jolting intimacy. Reaching for her briefcase and purse, Justine stood up precariously and wormed her way back into a lightweight blue suit jacket. She was both exhilarated and apprehensive about what lay ahead. The Community Schools for Girls project would give her insight into today’s Egyptian girls, as well as help her to understand her own confusing roots.
How am I to understand myself as a modern Egyptian woman? Am I an heir of Isis or of today’s Islamic women cloaked in hijabs?
These were the questions on her mind.
She stared out the windows as she waited to exit with the other passengers crowding into the aisles. No longer the glorious view of Alexandria and the delta—leathery brown smog blocked her vision now. Heat rushed in from the open doors and the familiar chime signaled that everyone was free to go. Free to go. What an unfamiliar, though exhilarating, notion.
She had never really felt “free to go.” Raised by an Egyptian mother and a Berkeley professor father, she was often caught in the cultural crosscurrents of two stalwart individuals, both with immutable ideas about how to raise their headstrong daughter.
Justine’s Egyptian mother, Lucrezia, deliberately sought to marry an American, assuming she’d enjoy a more emancipated marriage than she could have had with one of her own countrymen. She was wrong. Morgan Jenner, with his roots in the American Midwest, was more than moderately protective of his exotic wife and young daughter. Each having disappointed the other, her parents divorced shortly after Justine moved to Chicago for graduate school.
Chicago had not been the liberating solution she had hoped. The endless demands of graduate work felt like a form of voluntary servitude. But here she was, for the first time, free of her father’s control . . . free of school . . . doctorate in hand . . . assuming her first professional position . . . free to go.
It seemed like a lifetime since she’d last walked through these corridors. When she was fourteen, her father, a renowned archeologist, had accepted a two-year assignment on a dig near the Serapeum at Saqqara, and her mother had come planning to take classes at the Cairo Modern Art Museum. Lucrezia, speaking rapid Arabic, had insisted on a customs line that didn’t exist, since the Egyptian custom was to cluster and push until you reached the desired window. Morgan had tensed against the press of bodies and held tightly to both his wife and daughter, juggling his briefcase and computer over his broad shoulders.
Justine remembered her mother reprimanding him sharply, “This is my home, Morgan. I can take care of myself.” Without answering, he had loosened his grip on her, but not his daughter.
No, not his daughter
. She’d been the last among her friends to date, and even then he’d insisted that a parent or another couple accompany her.
The Cairo airport was not what Justine remembered. The walkways were still a drab off-white, made even duller by dim fluorescent lighting. But there were quasi-lines this time, and an almost orderly check of passports and visas. On the periphery, young men in unfashionable suits and worn briefcases jockeyed for a place
The plane passed over sparkling beaches; the new Alexandria Library rested near the shore like a giant disc, a spaceship with hundreds of Oriental eyes. Continuing its descent, the Lufthansa 747 aimed south across the verdant Nile crescent, emerging atop a landscape of tawny desert stretching as far as Justine’s eye could see. The sight ahead was nearly indecipherable: a tan, leathery blanket covering the city of nearly eighteen million, a few skyscrapers protruding above its smothering shield. She smiled as she recalled a comparable sight: two deep ochre towers extending above a white fluffy mantle of fog—the Golden Gate Bridge.
As they made their approach into Cairo International Airport, the runway met the plane with jolting intimacy. Reaching for her briefcase and purse, Justine stood up precariously and wormed her way back into a lightweight blue suit jacket. She was both exhilarated and apprehensive about what lay ahead. The Community Schools for Girls project would give her insight into today’s Egyptian girls, as well as help her to understand her own confusing roots.
How am I to understand myself as a modern Egyptian woman? Am I an heir of Isis or of today’s Islamic women cloaked in hijabs?
These were the questions on her mind.
She stared out the windows as she waited to exit with the other passengers crowding into the aisles. No longer the glorious view of Alexandria and the delta—leathery brown smog blocked her vision now. Heat rushed in from the open doors and the familiar chime signaled that everyone was free to go. Free to go. What an unfamiliar, though exhilarating, notion.
She had never really felt “free to go.” Raised by an Egyptian mother and a Berkeley professor father, she was often caught in the cultural crosscurrents of two stalwart individuals, both with immutable ideas about how to raise their headstrong daughter.
Justine’s Egyptian mother, Lucrezia, deliberately sought to marry an American, assuming she’d enjoy a more emancipated marriage than she could have had with one of her own countrymen. She was wrong. Morgan Jenner, with his roots in the American Midwest, was more than moderately protective of his exotic wife and young daughter. Each having disappointed the other, her parents divorced shortly after Justine moved to Chicago for graduate school.
Chicago had not been the liberating solution she had hoped. The endless demands of graduate work felt like a form of voluntary servitude. But here she was, for the first time, free of her father’s control . . . free of school . . . doctorate in hand . . . assuming her first professional position . . . free to go.
It seemed like a lifetime since she’d last walked through these corridors. When she was fourteen, her father, a renowned archeologist, had accepted a two-year assignment on a dig near the Serapeum at Saqqara, and her mother had come planning to take classes at the Cairo Modern Art Museum. Lucrezia, speaking rapid Arabic, had insisted on a customs line that didn’t exist, since the Egyptian custom was to cluster and push until you reached the desired window. Morgan had tensed against the press of bodies and held tightly to both his wife and daughter, juggling his briefcase and computer over his broad shoulders.
Justine remembered her mother reprimanding him sharply, “This is my home, Morgan. I can take care of myself.” Without answering, he had loosened his grip on her, but not his daughter.
No, not his daughter
. She’d been the last among her friends to date, and even then he’d insisted that a parent or another couple accompany her.
The Cairo airport was not what Justine remembered. The walkways were still a drab off-white, made even duller by dim fluorescent lighting. But there were quasi-lines this time, and an almost orderly check of passports and visas. On the periphery, young men in unfashionable suits and worn briefcases jockeyed for a place
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