We went to the same schools in Egypt and were the best of friends. I came to Canada and we corresponded. I told him how good life was in this country but he never wished to pursue the discussion any further. Not once did he ask me to elaborate on my description of life in my adopted country until one day I received a fairly long letter from him in which he asked a number of questions about Canada. I was convinced he finally decided to come and live here.
Eventually he did come to Canada but without his parents. He explained that his father had business to clear up in Egypt and that he will be coming with the rest of the family when this was taken care of. I knew his father's business well because he was the man who bought the content of our estate when we left the country. The father dealt with new and used furniture and just about everything that is bought and sold.
New in Canada and without a car, my friend spent most of his free time with me. One Christmas Eve in the late Nineteen Sixties when motorists were not afraid to pick up hitchhikers, I was flagged by three youngsters who looked cold standing by the highway. I was running around the city delivering presents to family and friends and had my friend with me in the car. After a quick consultation with him I stopped the car to pick up the hitchhikers but, being hundreds of feet ahead of them, I decided to back up.
As I was doing that, I encountered a patch of slippery ice upon which one rear wheel skidded and went down a ditch running alongside the highway. I tried with my friend to push the car out but could not. A little help from the hitchhikers would have done it but instead of helping, the three flagged another car and went away in a hurry.
My friend commented that I never told him about the attitude of the people like we just saw. I said they are not all like that. And sure enough, a car came along and stopped in front of us. A priest came out of the car and after a short greeting, pulled a chain from his trunk, tied it to my car and pulled it out of the ditch. He got into his car without saying another word and drove away. It all happened so fast, I did not have the time to thank him.
Like me, my friend was stunned and he asked if that was the attire of a priest. I said he looked like a catholic priest even though he was wearing pants. In Egypt, my friend and I first went to a school run by catholic brothers and then one run by priests. Those people always wore a robe and never a pair of pants. Also, my friend who is Jewish was renting a basement apartment in the Jewish district of Toronto and there too, he noticed a difference between the way that Jewish clerics dressed in Canada and the way they dressed in Egypt.
Once out of the ditch, we got back into the car and I drove out of the highway at the first exit. I opted to drive the rest of the way through the city where the traffic was light given that it was Christmas Eve. After a long silence my friend asked a question that baffled me for a moment. Knowing that I am catholic he asked what it was like to make a confession. For a moment I thought he wanted to convert but was not sure about that confession thing, a ritual that intrigues non-catholics. As I groped for a nice way to explain the thing, he told me what he was after.
He wanted to confess to me something that has been weighing on his conscience for some time. I swallowed hard and told him to go ahead. He said he used me once to do something I may not have approved of without telling me ahead of time and this was beginning to bother him. To understand what he did, I must explain something first.
Jews have a worldwide network to help each other move money around. My friend's father had money in Egypt where there was currency restriction at the time. Also, the man owed taxes for which he would be audited going back a number of years before the authorities would allow him to leave the country. I knew such thing was happening to everyone because it happened to my father who was Christian as we were getting ready to emigrate.
But contrary to the current lies by Jewish organizations to the effect that Jews were pushed out of the Arab countries, the rant at the time went like this: "Let my people go," precisely because the authorities were taking time to audit the people who wanted to leave the country and were catching those who cheated on their taxes. What tipped the authorities was that a few who were cleared by the tax man rushed to the bank and tried to exchange money by the millions when they were declaring minimal income and were paying little or no taxes year after year.
Learning from those lessons, my friend had to find someone in Canada who normally sends money to Egypt, perhaps to his family or associates. Instead of doing that, my friend would offer that his own father in Egypt give money to the family in there and that he collect an equivalent amount from the would-be sender here. This will have the effect of getting money out of the country and thus beat the currency restriction. If my friend could not find someone here who was sending money there, the Jewish organizations would find one for him.
In this way, having no money or little of it to convert and take out of the country, the father will have an easy time convincing the tax collector he was not earning much. With a scheme like this, Jews were able to kill two birds with one stone; they avoided paying taxes and got the money out of the country.
But I was not sending money to Egypt and I failed to understand how my friend could have used me to implement such a scheme. He said his scheme was more elaborate than that and then reminded me of the note he asked me to write in Arabic a while ago. This happened when he handed me a sheet of paper with markings on it that clearly showed it was of Egyptian origin. The sheet was otherwise blank and was sent here for the purpose I was unwittingly recruited.
My friend had asked me to write a letter that should speed up the process of his parents obtaining an exit visa in Egypt. I was happy to do that but was taken aback when he told me what he wanted me to say in the letter until he assured me there was nothing to it. He wanted a letter informing his father that so and so had died leaving no money to pay the debt he owes him. I did not know who the dead man was and I did not know the person whose name I was to sign. My friend said both were fictitious characters but the letter will explain to the tax collector why his father cannot pay more taxes. Trusting my friend, I naively accepted the explanation.
Well, as my friend confessed to me in the car, the dead man was real but he did not owe money to his father. As to the letter I wrote, it was not meant to be seen by the tax collector in Egypt but was presented to the dead man's son here in Canada who ran a business importing goods from Egypt. I was assured that no money was asked of the businessman; only a favor in lieu of the debt. The man was asked to let my friend's father pay the suppliers in Egypt next time he imported goods from there upon which he would pay an equivalent amount to my friend here.
But why would a businessman take the chance of doing something illegal and run the risk of getting into trouble with the Egyptian authorities? To understand the reason why the man accepted to go along with the scheme, my friend told me something I did not know about Islam which he, as a Jew, knew more about than I, the Christian. After all, my friend was born in Egypt and lived there until he came here whereas I lived in Egypt less than two years as an infant and then seven years as a teenager and a young adult. On the other hand, I learned to read and write Arabic in that short period of time and he only spoke it.
My friend explained to me that if a Muslim dies owing money and his son is in a position to pay the debt, the son has the obligation to pay up or the soul of the father will not rest. A scheme to beat the currency restriction was offered to the son in lieu of paying his father's debt and the businessman took the deal because the amount involved would have nearly bankrupted him.
With a scheme like this, everyone got something except that I was duped by my "best" friend. Also the country of his birth and mine was cheated out of tax money and had its laws violated at a time when rants were chanted throughout the Western World to the effect that the Jews only wanted to see their "people" let go out of the Arab countries.
Still, I considered it a miracle that a confession was made on Christmas Eve as a result of a priest appearing out of nowhere and pulling my car out of the ditch.
Merry Christmas everyone. See you in the new year.