Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  Whatever the Copts didn’t take, the doormen in our lobby did. To dispose of anything, we simply set it on the stairwell or fire escape; within minutes it was gone. In the street sometimes, as I walked sipping a Pepsi, children trailed after me to see if I’d discard the bottle. In Cairo, littering was a philanthropic act.

  Sayed strolled over to greet one of the women—another cousin, apparently—and children swarmed around him, thrusting their palms into his face. Sayed handed out twenty-five-piaster notes, one at a time, feigning shock at their begging. “They think because I was on top of things here that I must be big in Australia,” he said. “They’d do better learning a few tricks from Port Said.”

  * * *

  I had visited Sayed at his home in Sydney, a bare semidetached house with the bathroom out back. He worked at a government welfare office, earning just enough to support his Australian wife and two kids. Even so, by Shubra standards he’d “made it,” which is to say he’d made it out of Egypt, an unlikely feat for any but the best-connected Cairenes.

  Sayed’s mother came to Cairo from a small Nile village and married his father at the age of eleven. She bore her first child at twelve, and twenty-five years later she went into the bathroom and gave birth to number seventeen—Sayed. “She was taking a shower when she felt labor pains,” Sayed said. “I popped out on the bathroom floor. After sixteen kids, she didn’t think anything of it.”

  Sayed’s father was a journeyman: sometime mechanic, sometime truckdriver, and sometime ill-tempered brawler who landed several times in jail. Sayed wasn’t interested in fixing motorbikes—or in snatching purses—though his first job wasn’t much better. A hustler in the bazaar taught him to buy polished bluestones for a few piasters, then to resell them for ten times that much as “golden scarabs.” Scarabs—dung beetles—were a symbol of resurrection in pharaonic times, and stone scarabs are talismans in modern Egypt.

  “We had a complicated price structure, depending on the customer,” Sayed said, chuckling at the memory. The highest rate was tamen saye, or “tourist price,” an unabashed rip-off. Somewhat less was tamen habibi, or “friend’s price.” Cheapest of all was tamen yahood, or “Jew’s price.” Egyptians hated Israelis but held to the stereotype that Jews were clever bargainers, able to buy things for less.

  Sayed memorized the scam in French, German and English, to capture the tourist trade, and discovered he had a talent for languages. He secured a student’s visa to France, and it was there, while picking grapes to earn some cash, that he met an Australian woman named Jo. Two years later, he migrated with her to Sydney.

  “I love Shubra,” he said, as we sipped another cup of coffee at the motorcycle shop. “But there was nothing for me here, except family.”

  Sayed’s parents had since died, but one of his sisters still lived in the family’s apartment above the motorcycle shop. There was no elevator and no bulb to light our way up the five flights of stairs. The dark steps smelled of urine. Sayed shoved open a door, and we entered a cramped chamber that appeared to double as a living and dining room, with a sofa made up for sleeping as well. There was a picture of Mecca on one wall and a Bruce Lee poster across from it, alongside a photograph of a smiling teenager with a lustrous mane of black hair.

  A stout woman in a housedress appeared in the doorway with a baby on each arm. Her hair was covered by a scarf, and the dark circles under her eyes had been hastily daubed with makeup. As she walked across to embrace Sayed, she barely lifted her slippered feet from the floor.

  “My sister,” Sayed said, lining her up beside the picture on the wall. “Still the most beautiful woman in Shubra.” At twenty-nine, she already had eleven children.

  She smiled shyly and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a moment later with steaming plates of rice and a basket filled with the puffed pita-like loaves that Egyptians eat by the dozen. It wasn’t yet noon, a good two hours before the usual Egyptian lunch break, but she’d kept something cooking, just in case. Sayed tried to beg off eating, insisting that he’d had a big breakfast just a few hours before. His sister answered by bringing out a plate of roasted pigeons, garnered from a birdhouse she kept atop the building. In Arab homes, as in Jewish ones, overeating is an obligatory expression of love.

  The rice was covered with a gooey green stew made from a vegetable that tasted like spinach but had the consistency of okra. “It’s name is molokiya,” Sayed said, letting some ooze off a serving spoon. “But we like to call it pharaonic slime.” Molokiya was such an addiction in Egypt that one cruel and insane ruler named Al-Hakim had prohibited its consumption. The ban, and the mad caliph who imposed it, didn’t last very long.

  As soon as we finished, men and boys began drifting in from school, from work, or from the tea houses where I’d seen them loafing. Each time a male arrived, Sayed’s sister appeared with another plate, another mound of rice and molokiya. Daughters were ushered into the kitchen to help with the food and to have a nibble themselves, apart from the men. There must have been a dozen shifts at the table before the afternoon was over.

  The men ate quietly, keeping a lazy eye on the television, which broadcast the most popular show in Egypt: a Friday prayer session, led by a man named Sheik Sharawi. Pounding on his Koran, the sheik expounded on the evils of dancing, a hot issue in fundamentalist Egypt.

  Sayed slumped on the couch. “Give me a break, sheik,” he said, turning down the volume. When visiting Egypt, Sayed let his beard grow, along with his mustache and frizzy black hair. Scruff was a sign of piety among Muslims—and a convenient cover for lapsed souls like Sayed. “If I’ve got a beard, I don’t get lectured about how I should spend more time in the mosque,” he said.

  Sayed glanced at his watch. It was four o’clock, the siesta hour. “Time to go for dinner at my other sister’s,” he said. “You’re expected.”

  I looked at him incredulously. The pharaonic slime had formed a dense green sludge somewhere in my upper intestine. I’d been eyeing the couch before Sayed beat me to it.

  “What’s wrong with you, man?” he said, smiling broadly. “This is just a warm-up. I haven’t even started in on my cousins.”

  * * *

  Sayed hadn’t lied when he tallied his relations; his extended family was a cast of thousands. In the poor confines of Shubra, fathers and brothers provided whatever work could be scavenged, mothers and sisters promised food and shelter when none else could be found. But the obligation cut both ways. For someone who aspired to more, there was the expectation that if you succeeded, you would carry half of Shubra with you.

  Each time Sayed visited from Australia, he packed several trunks of clothes, small appliances, and even food for his relatives. And in Cairo he stayed up late each night filling out immigration forms for brothers and cousins who wanted to follow him out of Egypt. “Most of them will never make it,” Sayed confided. “But they keep filling out the forms and saving. It gives them something to hope for.”

  Between translating forms and slurping plates of molokiya, Sayed offered to show me the sights of Cairo. I had spent most of my time in Egypt under self-imposed house arrest, plotting stories that would get me out of the bewildering city. Playing tourist for a few days was just what I needed to cure my Cairophobia.

  “We’ll do it properly,” he promised, “not the way its done in guidebooks.” For Sayed, raised on the Arab socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, this meant accompanying each sight with footnotes on the greed and cruelty of Egypt’s rulers, from the “self-indulgent pharaohs” to the “decadent Turks” to the “parasitic classes” who prospered under Anwar Sadat.

  “Most of this is imperial rubbish,” he said, racing through the Egyptian Museum. We hurried past the rooms of exhumed mummies, the exquisite sarcophagi, the dimly lit chambers bursting with friezes and obelisks. Sayed broke his stride only once to inspect the miniature tombs encasing King Tut’s mummified viscera. “Lungs, liver, stomach, yuk,” Sayed recited, reading the lab
els beneath the tiny gold-plated coffins, each one containing a different organ. Behind us, a French tour guide explained that the only item not embalmed was Tut’s food supply for eternity: forty jars of wine, a hundred baskets of fruit, bread, and roasted duck. “A whole village could have lived for a year on what that fat pharaoh took with him,” Sayed said, still staring at the pickled innards.

  From there we caught a taxi to the Pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Cheops lies just seven miles as the dust flies from downtown Cairo. On a clear day you can see the Pyramids from the tops of city buildings. Postcards artfully obscure this proximity to Cairo, showing the monuments against a backdrop of boundless desert. And it is true that the arid expanse just west of the Pyramids stretches with little interruption to distant Libya. But point the camera the other way and the Pyramids are framed against a sprawling, smog-shrouded megalopolis of fifteen million. The city now reaches all the way from the Giza Plateau, on which the Pyramids stand, to the Moqattam Hills twelve miles away, where the giant building blocks were hewn and then floated across the flooded Nile.

  When Gustave Flaubert visited Egypt in 1849, the trip from Cairo to Giza was still an all-day affair, beginning on donkey-back, continuing across the Nile on a small boat (“A corpse in its coffin is borne past us,” he wrote) and ending with an afternoon’s ride across the floodplain. Finally, he wrote, the Sphinx “grew larger and larger, and rose out of the ground like a dog lifting itself up.”

  Modern times have compressed the journey, and increased its peril. Egyptians undergo an odd personality change behind the wheel of a car. In every other setting, aggression and impatience are frowned upon. The unofficial Egyptian anthem “Bokra, Insha’allah, Malesh” (Tomorrow, God Willing, Never Mind) isn’t just an excuse for laziness. In a society requiring millennial patience, it is also a social code dictating that no one make too much of a fuss about things. But put an Egyptian in the driver’s seat and he shows all the calm and consideration of a hooded swordsman delivering Islamic justice.

  As soon as our taxi sprang clear of the clotted city center, the driver began ducking and weaving through the traffic, looking for daylight. He swerved from right lane to left lane and back to right, then, spotting a space the width of a bicycle between the two lanes, he bulled his way forward and created a third. Clear once again, he resumed his sickening weave from right to left to right. I felt as if I were traveling inside a wandering eye.

  Whatever lane lines once existed had been rubbed out by dust, rubber and hooves. Cairo was also the first city I’d seen where policemen stood at intersections simply to enforce the traffic lights. Unfortunately, there weren’t any police on the Pyramids Road. Our driver raced through one red light and then another, honking to warn cars on the cross street against plummeting into the intersection just because their light was green. At green lights he honked again, to ward off anyone running the red. He even honked at a streetcar motoring slowly across his path.

  But then, Cairo drivers honk even when the road is empty. “It makes the car go faster,” Sayed explained. The horn is the one piece of Egyptian taxis that always works, long after the doors have rusted, the window levers have snapped off, and the meter has been hit with a hammer, or fed wooden slugs. Egyptians also are fond of driving at night without headlights, keeping them in reserve to use as a spare horn when a simple honk won’t do. Honk-honk-flash-flash, honk-flash-flash-flash; they burrow like moles through the night.

  Not surprisingly, Egyptian drivers are the most homicidal in the world, killing themselves and others at a rate twenty-five times that of drivers in America (and without the aid of alcohol). Motorists in other Arab countries are almost as driving-impaired. The only insight I ever gained into this suicidal abandon came from a speeding Kurdish driver, after he’d recklessly run over a bird.

  “Allah wanted it dead,” he said. The same fatalism applies to passengers.

  * * *

  We reached the Giza Plateau in the time it took a team of Egyptian slaves to haul one block of limestone across ten feet of desert sand. “The Pyramids,” Sayed sighed, sucking in the desert air. “One of the seven wonders of Egyptian greed.” Hustlers enveloped us the moment we climbed from the taxi, offering rides on mounts so decrepit that they could have been dragooned from the Egyptian Museum. There were mules, ponies, buggies, and camels of every size and shape. “One hump! Two hump! No hump!” cried one young boy. There were “guides,” “not guides” (who offered to fend off the former) and “watchmen” (who promised to beat back both).

  It is difficult to gaze in awe at the wonders of ancient Egypt with modern Egypt tugging so insistently at your sleeve.

  “Habibi, my friend,” asked one camel driver, following my gaze up Cheops’ pyramid. “You looking for me?”

  “Actually, no. I’m looking at Cheops.” I buried my head in a guidebook: 455 feet tall, for 4,500 years the tallest edifice in the world.

  “Habibi, my friend,” the voice nagged again. “You get much better look from my camel.”

  “Thank you, no. I’d rather look for free.” Over two million stone blocks in Cheops’ pyramid, its base covering eleven acres.

  “Habibi, my friend.” The driver dropped his jaw in a convincing facsimile of shock. “Who said anything about money?”

  The Pyramids hustle is horizontally integrated. It begins with the cabbie, who happens to know the cheapest camel driver in all of Egypt, who happens to take tourists on a long detour to visit a boy on a burro selling Pepsis and papyrus, who happens to know a man with a Polaroid, who also happens to be an expert guide, offering, for an undisclosed sum, to reveal deep funeral chambers adorned with pharaonic graffiti. This last service was tempting. Ramses Loves Nefertari? Ozymandias Slept Here?

  “Whatever it says, you can be sure he put it there himself, probably this morning,” Sayed said, shooing the man away. Scaling a few steps of the pyramid, Sayed delivered his own expert lecture instead; on the geometry of Old Kingdom architecture (“all lines, no curves, because Egypt is so flat”), on the significance of death in ancient Egypt (“people didn’t live long in those days, so death was a very big deal”) and on the decadence of the pharaohs (“they slept with animals, which is why we have the Sphinx”). With that, he skipped back down to the ground and held out his hand, declaring, “Who said anything about money?”

  Con artistry at the Pyramids represents the most dynamic sector of the Egyptian economy and certainly one of the oldest. When the Greek historian Herodotus stopped off to see Cheops’ pyramid in 450 B.C., he asked the meaning of certain inscriptions and was duly informed that they recorded “the quantity of radishes, onions and garlic consumed by the laborers who constructed it.” Herodotus didn’t say how much he paid for this dubious intelligence.

  By 1849, when Flaubert arrived, hieroglyphics had lost much of their mystery. “One is irritated by the number of imbeciles’ names written everywhere,” he complained after finding, at the very top of Cheops’ pyramid, the signature of a fellow Parisian, “a certain Buffard, 79 Rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters.”

  But it was left to the acid wit of Mark Twain, seventeen years later, to describe the true curse of the pharaohs. “We suffered torture no pen can describe from the hungry appeals for bucksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes,” he wrote. “We were besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyptians and Arabs who wanted the contract of dragging us to the top . . . . Of course they contracted that the varlets who dragged us up should not mention bucksheesh once. For such is the usual routine. Of course we contracted with them, paid them, were delivered into the hands of the draggers, dragged up the Pyramids, and harried and bedeviled for bucksheesh from the foundation clear to the summit.”

  Islam attaches no shame to begging and much virtue to charity; to Egyptians in particular, baksheesh is a birthright and a blessing. In eighteenth-century Cairo there was even a beggars’ guild, so wealthy that it presented the city’s governor with a mount and s
addle.

  But at Cheops’ pyramid the pleas for money know no bounds. Exploring the frontiers of Egyptian greed, Twain offered one of his tormentors a hundred dollars “to jump off this pyramid head first.

  “He pondered a moment, and would have done it, I think, but his mother arrived, then, and interfered. Her tears moved me—I never can look upon the tears of a woman with indifference—and I said I would give her a hundred dollars to jump off, too.”

  Western avarice has left its mark on ancient monuments as well. Every European visitor to Egypt, from Napoleon onward, made sure to return home with his very own obelisk or mummy. One nineteenth-century vandal even wrote in his journal that he found the huge sculpted head of Ramses II “near the remains of its body and chair, with its face upwards, and apparently smiling on me at the thought of being taken to England.” It was considered good fun in Victorian days to unravel mummies at fairgrounds, and the powder of mummied flesh was a staple of London druggists.

  Now the Egyptians have full custody of their monuments—and full freedom to destroy them. A slum sprawls less than a hundred yards from the Sphinx, almost lapping at the man-lion’s paws. Raw sewage and fetid canals seep beneath the Giza Plateau, unsettling the ancient monuments. A few months after my visit with Sayed, a six-hundred-pound piece of the Sphinx’s shoulder separated and tumbled to the sand, its most serious injury since Ottoman musketeers used the Sphinx’s nose for target practice (or so the legend goes). There were also dire predictions that the Sphinx and the Pyramids—even the vast Temple of Luxor—might soon succumb to smog, sewage and rising ground water, eroding to dust in the space of fifty years.

  Modern Egyptians inherited many things from the pharaohs—regal good looks, papyrus, bureaucracy—but a talent for building isn’t among them. Egyptians have the opposite of a Midas touch; everything they set their hands on turns to dust. Even spanking-new skyscrapers seem, after a year or two, fragile and filthy lean-tos. It isn’t just a question of money or expertise; fatigue and fatalism have so corroded the culture that Egyptians have simply stopped caring. Buildings collapse for lack of basic maintenance. Sewer lines explode, flooding whole neighborhoods. Dead horses lie rotting on the beach at Alexandria. And Egyptians muddle on, as they have for millennia, muttering malesh—never mind—and gazing toward Mecca in prayer.