The Water Table

The pump dies at first light, and the water starts coming up through the floor of the trench.

Ilias hears it from his cot in the container. The diesel pump has run all night on the lip of the shaft, thuk-thuk-thuk, with one hose down into the hole and the other over the hoarding into the gutter of Nabi Daniel Street, and it has stood over his sleep like a dog that knows its job. It coughs twice and stops. He is out the door with his laces trailing before the second cough has finished.

The rain started in the night. It comes in off the harbor at a slant, and the blue hoarding bangs on its posts, and down at the crossroads the lamps of Horreya Avenue still burn yellow in it. The lot is the hole where the Kyriazis building stood until the big storm two winters ago, when it folded down into its own cellars and the families ran out into the street in their nightclothes, and the stairs went down behind them. A developer wants a tower here. The law wants a hole first, and the ministry gave the hole to Ilias for one season, and the permit taped inside the container door says the season closes on the ninth of December.

He goes down the ladder with his head torch on and the rain going down his collar. The trench drops through Ottoman fill and Fatimid sherds and the cobbles of a Roman street, and at the bottom, seven meters down on his own staff, it reaches the pink plaster floor he cleared yesterday. The Ptolemies laid that floor against exactly this water. They made it of lime and crushed brick, and it has held for twenty-two centuries, and now the water is coming up through its cracks. It comes up grey and cold and smells of salt and drains. It covers the floor by the time his boots touch it. It finds the low corner and starts up the section toward his tags.

He stands in it to the shins and works the strainer off the intake hose. A plug of silt and plaster crumbs has choked it. He digs the plug out with his fingers and slaps it against the wall, and the water climbs his calves while he works. His fingertips are white and puckered. They have been white and puckered since October, and they will stay that way until he flies home, and when they were married Ourania used to hold his hand up to the kitchen light in Pangrati and call it the hand of a drowned man.

"Ilias."

Shahd stands at the top of the ladder in a yellow raincoat with two coffees from the kiosk on the corner, and the rain runs off her hood onto the lids.

"The pump," he says.

"I heard it from Horreya." She sets the cups on the plank by the shaft and comes down the ladder fast, and at the bottom she steps into the water to her shins and holds out her hand for the strainer. "Go up and pull."

"I can do it."

"If it floods, which one of us climbs out faster?"

He gives her the strainer and climbs. His knees take the rungs one at a time. At the top he stands in the rain with his hand on the starter cord and his coffee going cold on the plank, and below him the light of her phone moves around the bottom of the shaft. The water has reached the lowest tag. It is a white plastic tag with a context number on it in his own handwriting, and the number blurs as the water closes over it.

"Now," she says.

He pulls. The diesel catches and dies and catches again, and the hose kicks against the plank, and down in the shaft the water stops climbing and stands on the tags and then starts, slowly, to fall.

Sabry comes through the gate in the hoarding at eight with his umbrella and his folding chair. He is the ministry's inspector. The mission pays him, and he has watched foreign missions dig in this city since before Shahd was born. He opens his chair at the lip of the shaft and sits and lights a Matossian in the cup of his hand, and he tips his face up into the rain.

"Qasim," he says. "Five days. He always keeps his appointment."

Shahd comes up the ladder with silt to her knees. Sabry offers her a cigarette, and she takes it and lights it off his, and Ilias drinks his cold coffee and watches the water go down in the shaft.

"How deep today, Doctor?" Sabry says.

"The same as yesterday."

"Every day the same as yesterday." Sabry taps his ash into the rain. "The Poles dug at this crossroads in my father's time. Then the Greeks. A waiter from the Elite dug for thirty-five years on his tips."

"He had a permit."

"He found the sewers." Sabry smiles at his cigarette. "He thought they were the road to the king."

"Everybody finds the sewers," Shahd says. She has her laptop open under the flap of her raincoat. Her resistivity line has lain along the pavement outside the hoarding since before the rain. It is a row of steel stakes knocked into the cracks between the paving stones and joined by orange cable, and every night she carries the readings home to her mother's flat in Moharram Bey and runs them through her software until the colors come. "The sewers are on every map."

"Not on the waiter's maps," Sabry says.

Ilias finishes the coffee and puts the cup in his jacket pocket. His trowel rides in the back pocket of his trousers. It is a British pointing trowel from WHS, and he bought it in Thessaloniki the year he turned twenty, and forty years of floors and sections have worn its blade down to the shape of a laurel leaf. He takes it out and goes back down the ladder into the water.

The boy from the hire yard comes for his money at noon. He is perhaps nineteen, and he wears a green Ittihad rain jacket, and he holds out his card machine under the overhang of the container roof with the patience of a boy whose yard pays him whether the foreigners pay or not.

Ilias gives him the card. The machine thinks about it and prints a slip, and the boy tears it off and holds it out between two fingers. The slip says DECLINED.

"Again?" the boy says.

"Again."

Ilias goes into the container and takes the envelope out of the drawer under the plan table. The envelope came from the Athens branch of Piraeus Bank in September, and it was fat in September. He pays the boy eleven hundred pounds for the pump and the night, and the boy folds the notes into his jacket and goes out into the rain, and Ilias puts the envelope back in the drawer, and it lies flat now.

The producer writes from London at three. His name is at the top of the email, and under it is the name of the network, and under that, in a font the size of a headline, is the working title of the film, which has a colon in it and the word Final.

Ilias, we love the water. We love you in the water. But the network needs a reveal before the ninth, or there's no money for the edit, and without an edit I can't take next season to anybody. Is there anything at all we can shoot? Even a maybe. A maybe cuts beautifully.

Ilias reads the word reveal twice. Then he closes the laptop and puts his hand on the lid, and with the other hand he takes out his wallet and opens it on the table and runs his thumb along the sliver behind his old card from the university in Athens. It is a piece of grey-green glass no bigger than a fingernail paring. Its edge has taken the skin off the ball of his thumb before, and it opens the skin again in a thin bright line, and he closes the wallet and puts it away.

Ourania calls in the evening. The rain has thickened, and it drums on the roof of the container so loud that he has to put his finger in his other ear.

"Ilia. Did the papers come?"

"They came."

"The buyers want to be in by March. You sign at the consulate. You can walk there from that hole."

"I know where the consulate is."

"Then walk there." She is in the kitchen in Pangrati. He can hear the kettle and the bus going by on Imittou. She was always in the kitchen when she called, because the kitchen was where she sat to tell him things. "And your notebooks. The storeroom has to be empty for the buyers. I carried them all down there myself, Ilia, the year I left, every notebook from every season, and the rain got into the bottom ones."

"Keep them."

"I'm not keeping them."

"Then put them in the car."

"I sold the car." The kettle starts to boil and stops. "I kept them nine years. Where am I going to put them now? I have a husband who wants to use his own storeroom."

Over the cot, pinned to the wall of the container, is a postcard of a green stone box. Ourania bought it for him in the shop of the British Museum the year they married, as a joke. The box is the one from the courtyard of the Attarine Mosque. Napoleon wanted it for Paris, and the British took it from the French in 1801 and shipped it to London, and a Cambridge man called Clarke wrote a book proving it was the tomb of Alexander. It was cut for a pharaoh. In the photograph you can see the holes somebody drilled around its base to let the water out when the faithful used it for a bath.

"Myrto asks if you're coming for Christmas," Ourania says.

"The season closes on the ninth."

"That's before Christmas, Ilia."

He says nothing. The rain says it for him on the roof.

"I'll sign," he says.

"Good." She breathes out. "Sign it this week. And the notebooks go to the kiosk on Imittou that buys paper by the kilo. I'm telling you so you know."

She hangs up. His half of the flat in Pangrati is a season, pumps and inspector and all. He puts the phone face down on the papers, and he puts on his jacket, and he opens the container door. Across the street every book kiosk but one has its iron shutter down for the night, and over the last one a bulb hangs on a wire above the stacks while an old man in a cardigan ties up the day's unsold paperbacks with string.

"Strabo," Hafez says, before Ilias reaches the kiosk. He has the green book ready in his hand. "Volume eight. The one with Egypt in it. For you, four hundred."

"I have it."

"You have the English. This one has the Greek on the other page."

"The Greek says the same thing."

"In Greek," Hafez says. He offers it every winter, and every winter the price changes, and every winter it goes back on the stack. He has kept a kiosk on Nabi Daniel Street for forty years, and he sells law books and schoolbooks and Agatha Christie in Arabic and the French and Greek paperbacks that came out of the flats when the families who read them left the city. He takes the rent envelope from Ilias and puts it in his cardigan without opening it.

"The water is up in every cellar on the street," Hafez says. "Lift your boxes."

"I'll lift them."

Hafez hauls down the shutter, rrrrak, and locks it at the bottom, and goes off toward the crossroads under a black umbrella with his bundle of paperbacks under his arm.

The building behind the kiosks has an iron door of scrollwork and a hall that smells of cats and wet plaster. Ilias lets himself in with his own key. Under the stair a second door opens on three steps down, and at the bottom of the steps is the low vault where Hafez keeps the stock that will not fit in the kiosk. The bundles stand along the walls in towers tied with string. At the back, under a square of carpet and a sheet of plywood, is the mouth of the cistern.