Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Page 11

  It was the Egyptian way of dealing with sensitive issues. Desperate to cut the national budget, the government wanted to raise the price of bread, but feared this would spark riots. So it had solved the problem by coarsening the state-subsidized loaves—with sand, it was said—so that Egyptians had to buy a more expensive grade. Officially, Egyptians could still get loaves for five piasters, just as belly dancers could still get licenses. In practice, neither was a realistic possibility.

  “Someday all these dancers will be old and fat and then I will have no more club,” Samy said. “There is a limit to what customers, even my customers, will pay for.”

  Looking around at the tumultuous crowd cheering Ashgan on, I wasn’t so sure he was right.

  * * *

  Sayed left for Australia a few days later, but not before buying a dozen drums to sell back in Sydney. He gave us one, coaching me to bang out the monotonous boom-tac-tac to encourage Geraldine’s nascent career as a belly dancer. He thought she had potential. “Eat plenty of basbousa,” he advised her, recommending a favorite Egyptian dessert, a cholesterol nightmare of nuts, oil and fried dough. “In a few months, a year maybe, you could have a very nice figure for belly dancing.”

  Before going, Sayed also introduced me to another Egyptian who would become a close friend: a slim, dark Nubian named Yousri. The romance of Yousri’s origins intrigued me. Shortly before coming to Cairo, I had visited the British Museum and stared at a frieze pilfered from a pharaoh’s tomb called “Scenes of the Conquest of Nubia.” It showed African-looking men swathed in leopard skins, fleeing before the chariots of Ramses II. They became, I imagined, the first of the Nubian slaves. Until I met Yousri, I hadn’t realized that a people called Nubians still existed.

  Nubia is an Egyptian province near Sudan, in Upper Egypt, so called because it lies upstream on the north-flowing Nile. Several millennia after Ramses swept south with his chariots, the conquest of Nubia was completed, first by crop failure and then, irrevocably, by the flooding of farms by the Aswan High Dam. The temples of Abu Simbel were moved to higher ground, and thousands of Nubian peasants swarmed north to the slums of Cairo.

  As rural folk, accustomed to tight-knit village life, Nubians brought with them a reputation for trustworthiness, and they quickly took up residence as boobs, the ubiquitous Cairo doormen who live on the baksheesh they collect for opening elevators, hoisting bags and just generally keeping an eye on things. Perched before every building, sitting on bits of cardboard or on creaking wicker chairs, Nubian boabs in robes and turbans lend a leisurely, almost countrified air to the otherwise hectic metropolis.

  Yousri’s father graduated from boabdom to caretaker of a city mosque and sent his children to school so they could aim higher. Yousri’s mother, like Sayed’s, knew little beyond the complexities of raising seven children. “She couldn’t even read numbers,” Yousri told me. “We kids were her eyes and ears.”

  Yousri met Sayed at school, and together they studied languages, particularly Hebrew, which enabled them to spend their mandatory military service in a radio room, eavesdropping on the Israelis, instead of in a trench. By the time Yousri finished university, he spoke fluent English as well as a smattering of Turkish, Farsi and French. He had also picked up—through close study of movies, I suspected—a smooth, aristocratic bearing to complement his aquiline nose and skin that glowed like well-burnished copper. Yousri’s face wouldn’t have looked out of place on the lid of a pharaoh’s coffin.

  In America, a man with Yousri’s assets would have completed his father’s ascent up the social ladder, becoming, perhaps, a businessman or professional. In Egypt, he found himself at thirty still living in an apartment with his parents and working the graveyard shift at the reception desk of a hotel near the airport.

  “This is the most a man of my background can hope for,” he said, without melodrama, flicking ash from the Cleopatra cigarette he held daintily between long fingers.

  Like millions of other Egyptian men, Yousri had tried the alternative—lonely servitude in the hot, joyless cities of the Persian Gulf—and returned home after three years. “I do not like being a second-class citizen,” he said. Though a man could earn three times the Egyptian wage in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, the Gulfies were known for treating their imported labor with condescension.

  Yousri also couldn’t abide the drudgery of working for the Egyptian government, stamping papers in some outstation of the Cairo bureaucracy. The hotel paid no better than the state, but it offered Yousri the hope that someday, some way, he might do what Sayed had done and meet a woman with whom he could migrate to the West.

  “I’m choking here,” he told me one morning after a long night’s shift at the hotel. “Just work and sleep and more work. This is the life of a donkey, not a man.”

  The only escape I could offer was a sympathetic ear and the occasional decent meal. By Cairo standards, my modest free-lance income made me a pasha, and I enjoyed treating Yousri to dinner at a Western-style restaurant near my home. He always ate slowly and made sure to leave some steak on his plate, lest anyone think he was ravenous.

  But after three outings, Yousri turned down my invitations, saying he had to be at work early or that he wasn’t feeling well. The subtext wasn’t hard to ferret out. Yousri wanted to reciprocate, but taking me to a restaurant of similar standards would have cost him twenty dollars—half his monthly wage. Taking me to someplace less was, for Yousri, unthinkable. He was the proudest man I’d ever met.

  So we began meeting instead at the sprawling Khan-el-Khalili bazaar, where we could take turns picking up the tab for sipping tea and smoking water pipes—and rarely spend more than two dollars. Our favorite haunt became Fishawy’s, a back-alley teahouse that had been open twenty-four hours a day for two hundred years, without evidence of a single renovation. One-bladed fans clung precariously to the ceiling, looking as though they might descend at any moment to decapitate unwary patrons. Century-old dust coated the mirrors and the unflattering portraits of the cafe’s former owners: portly men in Ottoman fezzes, perched on tiny burros. Rickety chairs and tables spilled into the alley, already crowded with peddlers selling papyrus, Korans and hashish. It was there, stirring the coals atop three-foot-high hookahs, that we plotted and replotted Yousri’s flight from Egypt, and talked long into the night about women.

  “See that one there?” he said one evening, pointing into a crowd of women in modest Islamic dress, promenading through the medieval streets.

  “She’s religious,” I said. “Off-limits, right?”

  Yousri smiled. “Look again. See how tightly her dress clings? And the braid holding her veil? She does not dress this way for Allah.”

  Yousri wasn’t interested in devout women—or their counterfeit—and he didn’t go for makeup and Western coiffures, either. “These women are not real,” he complained. “If they wash their faces you do not recognize them.”

  Even the occasional woman who caught Yousri’s eye was quickly dismissed as beyond his reach, usually because they looked wealthier than he was, an imposing barrier in class-ridden Cairo. “No middle-class woman will marry the son of a Nubian boab,” he said. Women of similar rank posed a challenge as well. To propose marriage he would need an apartment, furniture, a dowry. His brothers had achieved this by returning to work in the Gulf, spending only one month each year with their families in Cairo.

  “I do not want to waste the best years of my life in the desert, just so I can marry a woman I will never see,” he said with characteristic dignity. The only other option was to take up residence in the City of the Dead, a Cairo necropolis whose above-ground tombs had become cheap housing for half a million people, many of them newlyweds.

  Yousri was, in a word, trapped; too poor to live as he wanted, too proud to live any other way. All the things I took for granted—a wife, my own place, work I enjoyed—were denied Yousri for no other reason than the lots we’d drawn at birth. I made it my mission t
o equalize the stakes.

  With Geraldine, I canvassed single women in America and Australia, thinking of any who might find Yousri a suitable mate, or who might consent to a marriage of convenience. When several of them visited Cairo, we invited Yousri over, on the off chance that some spark would strike. It never did. Each time, Yousri’s charm and manners deserted him. He’d either retire shyly or come on much too strong.

  “She likes me,” he giddily confided one night on the landing outside our apartment, waiting for the elevator that never came. “I can tell already.” But he was, unfortunately, wrong.

  One night, after a particularly awkward encounter, I attempted a bit of coaching. “Ask about her work. Talk about politics. Anything but her legs.”

  He nodded. “Maybe she does not like me because I am Nubian.”

  “Nonsense. It sounds exotic.”

  “Yes, but all anyone knows is that Nubians were slaves.”

  “Maybe she’s into bondage.”

  Yousri smiled, but I could tell he was angry. He was still angry when I met him a few nights later at Fishawy’s.

  “It is easy for you to get to know women,” he said finally, staring into his tea. “It is not so easy for me.”

  Or for any single man in Cairo. Few Egyptian families would consent to have their daughters go out alone with a man. Ushers patrolled movie theaters, shining flashlights in the face of any couple daring to hold hands. It was part of Yousri’s job at the hotel to make sure that Egyptian couples checking in for the night could give some proof of marriage. If they couldn’t, Yousri booked them into separate rooms and another worker made “virtue checks” through the night to confirm that they remained apart.

  The most an unmarried man could hope for was a furtive kiss and “brushing”—rubbing genitals with a woman while fully clothed. “Some girls expect a proposal of marriage, even for this,” Yousri said. Then he confessed what I’d already suspected; though handsome and well-spoken, Yousri remained, at thirty, a virgin.

  We gave up on matchmaking and tried to get Yousri a visa through other means. This proved equally fruitless. Every Western embassy in Cairo—as in other Third World capitals—was a thinly disguised fortress against visa-seekers. Even tourist visas were unobtainable; it was widely assumed, with good reason, that an Egyptian would overstay a tourist visa and remain illegally. Some Western embassies charged two hundred pounds—twice the average monthly wage in Egypt—just for the privilege of filling out an application. The risk wasn’t just monetary. A stamp in your passport saying that a visa had been denied all but destroyed your chances of successfully applying to that or any other Western embassy in the future.

  So Yousri tested the alternatives: bogus applications, and bribes. He tried claiming medical cause, saying he had a back problem that could only be treated abroad. When this failed, he turned, inevitably, to fixers: shady men who promised that a visa could be “arranged,” for a price. This was the Egyptian way, I knew, and I lent him the money to go ahead.

  Soon after, Yousri began calling me from work and whispering over the phone line, “The man says my visa to Australia is coming any day.” Three months later, the visa was still coming, any day.

  After a time I began resisting Yousri’s bleak vision of Egypt, both for his own sake and for mine. Unlike Sayed, whose cynicism was leavened by humor and by a genuine affection for Egypt, Yousri had an unremittingly grim outlook. I found it depressing to dwell on Cairo’s faults, and I found it even more depressing that Yousri, who would probably remain there forever, found so little to sustain him.

  “You need a new job,” I told him one night.

  “I need a new country,” he replied.

  “How about asking for a raise?”

  “I did. They said in another year I might get ten percent more.” That would bring his wage to sixty-six cents an hour, up from sixty.

  Events conspired to alienate Yousri still further. One day his father woke up feeling sick, went back to bed, and died. Soon after, his mother took ill and went to a hospital. She lasted two weeks. “The doctors told us her organs were enlarged,” Yousri said. “They said this was common for a woman in her fifties.” It was the sort of mysterious ailment that often carried away Egyptians, frequently before they reached middle age. One of Yousri’s sisters had died at twenty-four from what he called a “poisoned pregnancy.” Most of Egypt’s well-trained doctors had long ago fled to higher-paying jobs in the Gulf or the West, and hospitals in Cairo weren’t much more sanitary than the streets outside.

  I tried to cheer Yousri up with a trip to the Roy Rogers restaurant at the Marriott Hotel. But the sight of young Egyptians like himself, clad in kerchiefs and cowboy hats, serving up french fries, only made him more depressed. The restaurant’s manager had “Dr.” on the name tag pinned to his red-striped shirt. “You see,” Yousri said, “Egypt is full of people like me. Too much education and too little to do.”

  We toured the lobby until just before midnight, when Yousri had to go to work. Then, at the door, two security guards pounced on Yousri, grasping his elbows and bombarding him with questions. Who are you? Where is your identification? What are you doing here at midnight with a foreigner? I explained that Yousri was a friend and the interrogation finally ended, but only after a warning to Yousri that he never return there in my company.

  Egypt, though much freer than most Arab countries, keeps close watch on its citizens. Egyptians are barred from hotel casinos. Soldiers stand guard on the Nile bridges each night, stopping cars and quizzing drivers. And Yousri was suspected of unspecified offenses simply because he was Egyptian and I was not.

  “It is a way to remind us that we are not free,” he said, hurrying into the night, humiliated. I didn’t hear from him for weeks. Then the late-night phone calls resumed. “The man says my visa is coming,” he whispered over the hotel phone. “Any day.”

  7

  BAGHDAD

  In the Land Without Weather

  If man has not heeded my words which I have inscribed on my monument, may the Lord kindle disorder that cannot be put down and despair to be the ruin of him in his habitation, may he allot unto him as his destiny a reign of sighs, days of scarcity and years of famine, thick darkness and death in the twinkling of an eye.

  —The Code of Hammurabi, Article 250

  On a midsummer’s night in Baghdad, soon after an Iraqi triumph in its eight-year war with Iran, Mohammed Abid stood outside his restaurant by the Tigris River, poking a net at the last fish circling in a tiled tub of water.

  “Tonight Iraq celebrates victory and eats a very great deal,” he said. “But in the morning, maybe we find that peace is like this fish, a slippery thing that swims round and round and sneaks away.”

  Snaring the river fish, Mohammed flopped it onto the sidewalk to see if it was of suitable size for my dinner. Then he picked up a rusted monkey wrench.

  “We must never forget,” he said, raising the tool in the air, “that Iraq has enemies everywhere.”

  “Persians.” Thuuunk.

  “Syrians.” Thwaaap.

  “Zionists.” Thluuub.

  He gutted the bludgeoned fish with a few deft strokes and propped it over a wooden fire. “No one,” he said, wiping blood on his apron, “makes love to Iraq.”

  * * *

  No one loves to visit Iraq either—certainly not three times in one summer, as I did in 1988. Baghdad was for me the most depressing of Middle East cities, though it had once seemed the most romantic. The name conjured images of a fantasy Arabia, a land of harems and slave dens, of Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. It was the sort of place I imagined traveling to aboard a magic carpet.

  The actual journey resembled walking through the gate of a maximum-security prison. Iraq Air officials in Cairo told me to report four hours preflight for security, and I needed every minute. Guards frisked passengers from toe to turban while X-raying their bags to the point of radioactivity
. Then the soldiers lined us up on the burning tarmac to identify our luggage while they shook us down yet again before we boarded the aircraft.

  Every personal effect was regarded as a potential weapon. One passenger had a small bottle of cologne, and the guard uncorked the perfume and passed it beneath the man’s nose, presumably to see if it was chloroform or some other substance that could be used to disable the crew. The guard asked for my camera, aimed it at me and clicked, checking, I guess, for a gun inside the lens. Then he plucked the penny-sized battery from the camera’s light meter and pocketed it; the Duracell could somehow be used to detonate bombs.

  “You are lucky,” said the Egyptian in line behind me. “Last time I flew, you could not carry on anything, not a book, not a pen, not even a diaper for the baby. It was a very boring ride.”

  At the airport in Baghdad it was my typewriter that aroused suspicion. Iraq requires the licensing of typewriters so security forces can take an imprint of the keys to trace anti-government literature. Behind the customs desk rose a ziggurat of other forbidden imports: videotapes, audio cassettes, binoculars—any instrument for gathering or disseminating information. Even foreign blood evoked xenophobia. The first sign welcoming travelers at immigration stated that anyone who failed to report for an AIDS test would be imprisoned. There was a certain irony to the sign, as few Westerners visited the country. Iraq didn’t issue tourist visas. Never had.

  The second sign—and the third and the fourth and the fifth—showed the jowly, mustachioed face of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. Big Brother was watching from portraits on every wall surrounding the baggage claim. He was watching from a leviathan billboard outside the airport—Saddam International Airport. He was even watching from the dial of the wristwatch worn by an official sent to the airport, to watch me as well. “Saddam is like Superman,” the official said, showing how the watch hands ticked across the leader’s cheeks and brow.