Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  There were also pedestrians, erupting out of the earth and swarming into the traffic from a newly built subway. Men in white robes and sandals, black Sudanese in foot-high turbans, men in frayed business suits, women in full-face veils, women in what looked like bathrobes, Africans with rings through their noses and tribal markings burned on their cheeks. And at the eye of the maelstrom, an old man selling melon seeds and stalks of sugar cane spread on a scrap of cardboard that served as his open-air shop.

  A crowd clustered beside me, wading a few feet into the street and shrieking toward the traffic. “Shubra!” “Giza!” “Abdin!” From my guidebook I recognized the words as Cairo neighborhoods, but it took me a moment to realize that the crowd was hailing taxis. If a cabbie heard the name of a place to which he was already headed—over the honking and the atonal Arab music blaring on his radio—he paused just long enough for the lucky person to pile on top of his other passengers, then drove off, leaving the rest to continue their pleading chorus: “Dokki!” “Attaba!” “Bulaq!”

  This was Cairo’s hub, Medan Tahrir—Arabic for Liberation Square. Standing at its center, I gazed down broad boulevards laid out by Napoleon: dimly lit arteries pumping more cars and bodies into the clotted square. In Cairo, all roads lead to Tahrir.

  I retreated back inside to collect Geraldine, and we headed out the hotel’s other flank toward the Nile-side corniche and the wide, slow river winding behind it. As we picked our way through the closely packed cars, stepping onto bumpers, six men on the far shore began waving sheets of brittle paper. They were hawking papyrus. Or rather, “babyrus.” The Arabic alphabet doesn’t include a p sound and the letter almost always comes out as b.

  “Blease, misyer,” the first man said, merging “mister” and “monsieur” into one all-purpose address. “Babyrus for bretty madam.”

  “Just to look, not to buy.”

  “Very cheap, very real.”

  The papyrus was decorated with images of ancient Egypt: long-bearded pharaohs, smiling sphinxes, Cleopatra-like princesses with snakes entwined about their heads. A certificate accompanied each sheet, assuring the buyer that the cheap banana leaf was actually genuine Egyptian papyrus, freshly plucked from the banks of the Nile.

  “Is like Moses from bulrushes!” cried one exuberant salesman, holding his banana leaf as delicately as Torah scrolls. “Is holy! Is ancient!”

  The corniche looked considerably more timeworn, as though it had been excavated for a sewer line some years ago and then abandoned. Refuse gathered in the furrows, as did mangy cats. In one pothole, a boy had ignited the trash and was using it to barbecue ears of corn, fanning the flames with discarded papyrus. Parked or abandoned cars, it was hard to tell which, crowded onto the pavement, nudging pedestrians into the street. Only the young couples, discreetly holding hands on a low wall beside the promenade, seemed oblivious to the bleating of car horns and commerce.

  As we shoved our way past the papyrus men, eyes trained to the ground, I felt something strange clinging to my throat and nostrils. It was the exotic air of the East, a greasy and malodorous broth of dust, dirt, donkey dung and carbon monoxide. The air was so dense that it brushed against my face, whole particles collecting in the creases of my skin and on the lenses of my glasses. “Cairo,” a long-suffering correspondent once declared, “is the biggest upturned ashtray in the world.”

  We scrambled onto the riverbank and into the arms of men offering rides on wooden boats lining the water’s edge.

  “Habibi, my friend,” a teenager said. We seemed suddenly to have many habibi, many friends. “I give you finest trip on the river.”

  The Nile was black and silent, and a few stars poked bravely through the smog. A trip on the river seemed a romantic way to celebrate our arrival in Cairo—and to escape the wretched corniche.

  Geraldine asked our new friend how much his finest ride would cost.

  “Ten bounds,” he said, spreading both hands just to make sure we understood. He was missing two fingers.

  “Okay, eight,” I said, offering the equivalent of four dollars.

  “Okay!” he cried. And then the news tamenya guinea—eight pounds—resounded along the Nile. Boatmen raced toward us from all directions, swallowing the eight-fingered teenager. It seemed two pounds would have been an appropriate counterbid.

  “Misyer, madam, this way,” said the pilot with the strongest stiff-arm, who announced himself as “Ahmed of Aswan.” He helped us down a creaking gangplank and onto an even creakier boat. Then he shoved off from shore with a huge wooden oar. It wasn’t until we’d glided thirty yards out that I realized our boat had no sail.

  “Malesh,” Ahmed said, producing a second oar. Malesh is an Egyptian phrase of surrender, meaning “never mind” or “doesn’t matter.” It is the most commonly used word in Cairo, usually when something matters very much but isn’t going to happen.

  Ahmed splashed one oar in the water, and then the other, turning us in wild wet circles. Peals of laughter drifted out from the boatmen on shore. It seemed that Ahmed of Aswan had never worked oars before. In his frenzy to win our business, he had commandeered the first boat at hand, not bothering to check its rig.

  After flailing for a few minutes, he let go of the paddles and sighed. “Malesh,” he said again. Meaning, I guess, that the current would carry us to shore before we reached Alexandria.

  I offered to do the rowing, and Ahmed took my seat in the back of the boat, beside Geraldine. The oars were thick and clumsy, and the oarlocks quickly buckled. Water seeped through the boat’s cracked floor, soaking my sneakers and making me uneasy. The Nile is rife with a microscopic parasite called bilharzia, which burrows through the foot and lodges in the liver, lungs, eyeballs.

  Ahmed’s anxiety centered on something else. “I do not want to take a bath,” he said, glancing overboard as a motorboat roared past, tumbling us in its wake.

  “Malesh,” Geraldine said. Ahmed laughed and complimented her Arabic. Then he let go of the side just long enough to grab her thigh. She edged away, causing the boat to list still more.

  I stopped rowing. We were in the middle of the river now, far from the noise and congestion. The water lapped gently against the oars, and the Muslim call to prayer wafted out across the river. It was the calm, contemplative moment I’d hoped for on shore—except that the boat was sinking, and the captain was groping my wife.

  We reached the island of Gezira, midway across the Nile, and decided to abandon ship and return on foot, on one of the river bridges. As we struggled up the bank, clutching tall reeds, Ahmed shamelessly demanded, “Eight bounds.” I rifled through my pockets. A ten-pound note was all I had. Ahmed kissed the bill and put it in his pocket, mumbling in Arabic that Allah would bless me for my charity.

  We found a bench and gazed out at the skyline we’d be living with for the next few years. Just to the south rose a tall statue of a fat man in a fez, gazing determinedly into the smog. Behind him soared the Cairo Tower, a modern building of such ugliness that my guidebook described it as “an immensely elongated waste-paper basket.” Farther back, somewhere in Gezira’s thicket of tall, tattered apartment blocks, was the building we’d be moving into the following day.

  The view across the river was equally grim. Crumbling concrete buildings lined the opposite shore, topped with squiggles of neon Arabic that advertised Fiat, Sanyo, Seven-Up. I couldn’t see the traffic in Medan Tahrir, but I could hear it. The dun-colored city seemed to stretch forever.

  Months later I returned to Tahrir to interview the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, upon his award of the Nobel Prize. Each dawn, Mahfouz hiked from his apartment on the river’s west bank across a Nile bridge and through Tahrir to a coffeehouse named the Ali Baba. The café was drab and dusty, opening right onto the swirling traffic. The fumes of stalled cars mingled with the reek of Indian tobacco from the tall water pipe that Egyptians call a sheesha or “hubble bubble.”

  Mahfouz
sat at a second-floor table, stirring the silt of his Turkish coffee. Rather deaf, he leaned close to hear my questions over the roar of the morning rush hour. Why, I asked him, did he come for inspiration each day to the least pleasant spot in Cairo, perhaps in the entire world?

  He smiled and cocked his head at the stalled tide of bodies, hooves, cars. “It is true Tahrir is not a pretty sight,” he said. “But I am a novelist, not a painter. You can see the whole world from right here.”

  I understood then what it was to love Cairo. To revel in the grit, the noise, the press of flesh and pavement. To snort and gulp the bracingly foul air. And I understood then that Cairo was a city I could never come to love.

  2

  YEMEN

  Confessions of a Qat-Eater

  A habit peculiar to the Yemenis is the chewing of a mildly narcotic leaf called qat, mainly throughout the afternoon. Parties are held at which much business may be settled, and a foreigner honoured with an invitation should accept . . . . Addiction to the taste need not be feared.

  —The British Bank of the Middle East, Business Profile Series

  We had stripped and chewed an entire shrub before the qat took hold. From my bed of pillows, the hose of the water pipe looked roughly the length of the Amazon, only longer. It started in a cloud of tobacco smoke at the far end of the room, snaked through a jungle of qat leaves and Pepsi bottles and ended in the pile of cushions beside me. Somewhere in there was Mansour. He’d shrunk out of sight in the course of the afternoon.

  “Qat kwayes,” he said. Qat is good. A dragon’s puff of smoke rose from the pillows and a hand reached out for another glossy sprig.

  Across the room, Mansour’s uncle kept pointing at his head and flashing me a green-toothed grin. Like most Yemenis, he was small, dark and wiry, with a pinched face and furrowed brow. He looked like an old squirrel. I pointed at my head and returned his smile, unsure what the gesture signified. Then the qat shuddered through me again: whistling up my spine, ruffling the hair on the back of my neck and whooshing out both ears. Odd snatches of poetry wafted through my brain and I recited them aloud.

  “The fog crept in on little qat feet . . . .

  “In the room the women come and go, chewing Michelangelo . . . .”

  Qat juice dribbled down my chin. Mansour giggled. I giggled. The old man grinned and pointed at his turban again. This time I understood. “Qat very good for the head,” I said, breaking a fresh branch and offering him a leaf.

  * * *

  Qat explained a lot about Yemen. The tourist literature did not.

  “He who blows into fire makes either flames or is covered by ash,” read the proverb on page one of my Traveller’s Guide to Yemen. I was thirty thousand feet over the Red Sea, en route to the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. I studied the proverb for a moment, then moved to another. “A lasting little is better than an ending lot.”

  It was either the worst tour book ever written or the worst translation. After a cursory swing through Yemeni history, the publication wandered into lists of “Under Construction Roads” and “Non-Religious Holidays”—Mother’s Day, Revolution Anniversary and Corrective Movement Day—before drifting to a photographic spread called “Views from Yemen.” Judging from the fuzzy box-camera snapshots, no tourist had viewed Yemen since 1937. And the proverbs became more obscure with each chapter.

  “You may stretch your feet only to the length of your mattress,” began a chapter titled “General Description of Yemen.” The guide ended with this bewildering message: “Don’t teach the bear how to throw stones.”

  Nothing about the place made sense. Geraldine, as a staff correspondent, had an invitation to visit Yemen for the opening of the country’s first oil pipeline. I didn’t. But since Yemen rarely admits journalists, I decided to sneak in under the hem of her dress-for-success suit. Arabs often seemed baffled by our odd Western relationship, but they always understood a husband’s desire to keep a close eye on a traveling wife. While officials squired her from palace to palace, I’d melt into the souk and find something else to write about. Or so I imagined.

  When I went to collect my visa in Cairo, an official at the Yemeni embassy said, very casually, “You did not answer the religion question.” This was true. North Yemen, like most Arab countries, wasn’t enthusiastic about Jewish visitors. Rather than lie on my visa application I had simply left the religion question blank. Now, assuming my visa had been approved, I saw no harm in telling the truth.

  “I’m Jewish,” I said.

  “Your passport,” the man said. “It needs another stamp. Come back later.”

  Later, say, after I’d converted. “No Jews allowed in Yemen,” he said curtly on my return. I called the Yemeni embassy in Washington to complain and was told that visas were left to the discretion of the local ambassador. Unfortunately, the Cairo envoy hadn’t been seen for days. “Come back later,” my embassy friend said again, twelve hours preflight.

  I phoned the ambassador’s residence and reached a man who spoke not a word of English. I had been speaking halting Arabic for all of three weeks. The conversation that followed strained my vocabulary to its meager limits.

  ME: I journalist. I Jew. Go Yemen. No visa. Passport me embassy of you.

  YEMENI: Never mind. Come to my office at eleven tomorrow.

  ME: No good. Plane go Yemen seven morning.

  YEMENI: Okay, come to the embassy tonight.

  ME: Time what?

  YEMENI: One o’clock.

  ME: One o’clock?

  YEMENI: Okay, two. As you wish.

  I hung up the phone convinced that neither of us had understood a word the other had said.

  Heading out on foot in the middle of the night, I tiptoed over my neighbors, sleeping beneath a bridge across the Nile, and into the diplomatic quarter. Soldiers slumped against submachine guns in guard boxes before each embassy. Then, around a corner, I encountered an elfish man in an overcoat and pajamas.

  “Embassy Yemen?” I asked.

  “Yes, good morning.” He smiled and handed me my passport and visa. “Have a nice trip.” Then he vanished into the night. It seemed we had followed normal procedures for the issuing of visas to Yemen.

  * * *

  Later that day, stepping outside the airport in Sanaa, I was greeted by ten men in colorful turbans and knee-length skirts. A gaudy curved scabbard stretched from the belly button to the middle thigh of each man, with a dagger handle poking out the top. How picturesque, I thought. The Yemeni National Guard.

  Actually, I was at the taxi stand. These men were cabbies, clad in the Yemeni national dress. In the rest of the Arabian peninsula, conformity is the keynote: white robes, white headdresses, sandals, sand. The whole Persian Gulf can seem a monochromatic shimmer, camouflaged by sameness. Here, nothing matched. From the waist down, the men looked like fierce, dagger-toting tribesmen. From the waist up, they resembled Bowery bums, clad in cast-off shirts and cheap Western-style sports jackets. Nor did any man look quite like his neighbor. Each had his scabbard angled just so, his turban a tight-wound rosebud or a full-blown cauliflower, his qat bulging in right cheek instead of left.

  “How much to the city?” I asked the lead driver, assuming that taxi rides here, as in Cairo, were subject to lengthy negotiation.

  The man named a price roughly equal to the per capita income I’d seen listed in the tourist literature. I laughed and offered one tenth as much. He rested his hand on the hilt of his dagger and gazed off at the mountains. I went to the next cabbie and had no better luck. Each man looked different, but the price of service was the same, set by tribal cartel. I finally paid the asking price.

  The cabbie drove to what he said was the center of Sanaa. It didn’t look like any downtown I’d ever seen. Mud towers teetered all around, reaching eight and nine stories into the air. Each earthen skyscraper was crowned like iced cake with whitewashed extrusions; stars, zigzags, triangles, snatches of
Arabic script praising Allah; whorls, swirls, waves and squiggles. Stained-glass windows swathed the upper floors in ribbons of red and blue. Lurching into the sky at odd angles, without a single plumb line, the whole city seemed tipsy.

  “Mister, what you want?” a voice called from the dark.

  “Is you English man?” called another.

  “Mister, come smell beautiful essence!”

  The peddlers stood just inside the city’s thick mud walls, luring me toward a tangle of cobbled alleys. Each lane was devoted to tinkerers in trades long lost or forgotten in the West. Blacksmiths heated ore in hellish furnaces, then beat the metal on broad black anvils, their sledgehammers spraying sparks through the night. There were milliners, bookbinders, brass-beaters, veil-makers, Koran-sellers and spice merchants whose high baskets of cinnamon and nutmeg crowded beneath my eyes and nose. In one narrow lane, men sat crosslegged, sharpening the curved blades, called jambiyas, which I’d seen at the airport. Nearby, carpenters crafted small wooden daggers—training jambiyas—for boys too young to carry real ones. I peered into a dark stall and saw a camel harnessed to a giant pestle, walking in a tight circle around a huge vat of seeds, crushing them into oil. The animal had a rag tied around its eyes. Without the blindfold, the camel’s keeper said, whirling his eyes in pantomime, the camel would become dizzy from walking around and around. I felt like asking him to fit me with a blindfold as well.

  “Mister, this way!”

  “Habibi, my friend! I sell you fine silver!”

  “Mister, what your name?”

  I turned a corner and wandered into what seemed a Halloween party. Strange specters in head-to-toe sheets scurried between the stalls. When the veiled women stood still, the direction of their toes was the only way to tell back from front.