City of the Sun by Juliana Maio Page A

shelters.
    “Monsieur?” the waiter interrupted them.
    “A beer please,” Mickey ordered. He turned to Dorothy, checking her drink. “You’re good?”
    “For now.” She put a refusing hand on top of her glass. “Go on.”
    “It ain’t pretty, I have to tell you,” Mickey continued. He shook his head as he thought about schools that had been converted into dormitories that reeked of urine. “But they have roofs over their heads and food for their bellies.”
    She downed the rest of her drink. “What are you going to do now?”
    “I’ll continue with the list, assuming Blumenthal is here in Cairo.” He closed his eyes for an instant, feeling the fatigue of the day wash over him. His mood shifted.
    “What’s wrong?” Dorothy asked.
    “I saw something upsetting today,” he reflected. “I visited another side of the Jewish community—the old Jewish quarter, the Hara , as they call it. It’s a far cry from the opera house. Abysmally poor and dirty, just as bad as the Arab neighborhoods ofShubra or Bulaq. There was this kid in the street with hundreds of flies eating at the pus coming out of his eyes. He must have been blind. The mother did nothing to chase them away. Sometimes you wonder—”
    “Your beer, sir,” the waiter interrupted. “A fresh one for madame?”
    “Why not?” Dorothy passed him her empty glass.
    Mickey resumed. “I had an interesting conversation with the rabbi of the Ashkenazi synagogue over there. He said there is an international organization against anti-Semitism, known as LICA, which had once set up a branch to resettle refugees from Germany here in Cairo. It turns out that this branch in Cairo was very short-lived.”
    “How come?” Dorothy asked.
    “The rabbi wouldn’t say. But I find it strange that they shut themselves down at the height of the Jewish exodus in ’38. LICA has a branch in New York. Maybe you can find out why the Cairo branch closed, and who its members were,” he said, picking out the few remaining pistachios.
    “Sure thing,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “Now let me update you on the immigration policies you asked about.” She blew a thin stream of smoke over her shoulder. “It’s very simple. Nobody wants the Jewish refugees.” She looked at her notes. “Listen to this. Australia’s prime minister says, and I quote: ‘We don’t have a Jew problem and we do not want one.’ The US State Department has come up with all kinds of obstacles to prevent their admittance, saying they’re communist agitators, they’ll be a burden on the state, and so on. Britain claims to have no room for large-scale immigration, but that country’s hardly a safe haven anyway with all the bombs falling. As for the rest of the Americas—Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Mexico—they won’t take any Jews at all. It’s pretty much the same in Brazil and Argentina, where boats carrying hundreds of Jewish passengers were prohibited from landingand quarantined as if they carried the plague. They were sent back to Germany, where God knows what happened to them. We did the same thing, you know. You remember the SS St. Louis a few years ago when the US denied landing to a ship full of European Jews, causing a furor among American Jewish groups?”
    Mickey nodded yes.
    “In fact, China, is the only country with a real open-door policy for Jews,” she resumed.
    “What about Palestine?” Mickey asked. “Is there any way to get around the immigration restrictions in the White Papers?”
    “It’s tight as a drum,” she said, taking a sip of her fresh drink. “To appease the Arabs, the English are enforcing the restrictions with an iron fist. They’re afraid of riots like they had in ’36. Just last week a ship with fifty Jewish French passengers left Istanbul for Palestine. Supposedly they all carried visas, but when they arrived they were interned by the British.” She gave him a tight smile. “Apparently a group of militant Arabs promised to