Out ran the best girlfriend I made in New York City when she recognized my panting, American, “salaam ‘aleykum!” Clad in what seemed like yards more fabric than I had seen her wear since winter, she galloped over for one of the more reassuring hugs of our immediate recollection. After my driver helped me drag my baggage upstairs and I enjoyed a brief slump we set off in search of an ATM, a task which quickly revealed a few lessons-for-life-in-Egypt. First. Most ATMs seem, and are, sketchy. Second, when one asks an Egyptian for directions, he (no shes loitering about) will point purposefully off into the distance; and while his finger may well indicate the eventual direction we should take, it does nothing to explicate the twisting, traffic-filled roads lying between us and the goal. Third, crossing said streets requires a heady mixture of courage and recklessness: traffic lights are rare, and although interspersed with traffic controllers who show great enthusiasm for blowing their whistles, the noise merely serves to add to the general melee of honking, squealing wheels and hoots directed at the foreign girls. (“Welcome.” “Hayloo.” “Where you from?” “Wass yor name?”) Well, shit, guys, how much more modest could we possibly look? Thing is, a lot: by pinning on the old hijab. Because let me tell you, the hijabi beauties we saw mincing along, receiving the undivided attention of some male companion, are hot stuff. Since the veil fills the quota for modesty, from the neck on down they can sport the fashions and bare the curves that Sarah and I carefully – and dowdily, we realized – avoided. The Musriyyat brandish their sexiness without showing skin however; nary a shoulder nor a collarbone did we see, although one girl’s flesh-colored turtleneck did give us pause. “She did that on purpose,” I grumbled to Sarah as we stumped by in our shapeless shirts and skirts. Anyway, upon our return with Egyptian pounds kathira, we engaged in an argument with the full staff of the hotel (including the manager, with whom I was put on the phone for the final phase) over whether we should have to pay for a double room for the few hours of sleep Sarah had squeezed in before I arrived. In the end we finagled a 20-pound discount. Khalass.
Under the rather foolhardy impression that my battered bones would support me for an improvisational walking tour of the city, we sandled up again and set out. Before long a western-style cafe sucked us in, where Sarah re-coffeed and I slurped down a delicious glass of fresh mango juice. “You know the juice is fresh when you can chew it,” ruminated Sarah as she did so to her test gulp. It then dawned on me that despite my warnings to myself and others about not eating the fresh fruits and vegetables, I had managed to choose a prime example as my first nourishment in Egypt. I voiced this realization and Sarah and I laughed with irony and some hysteria. The remaining mango juice stared up from the glass with demure opacity; I shrugged and sucked down the rest. Sarah assured me that the now-turned-threatening juice would be no match for the industrial strength diarrhea medicine she had brought. In sha’ allah.
Re-energized, we mounted the Nile River overpass. “Dude,” remarked Sarah with no small feeling, “that’s the Nile. That’s the fucking Nile.” We stopped a few steps up, overcome with the task of contemplating this assertion. After letting a sufficient moment of reverence pass, I remarked that it was not quite like I expected. “Which is understandable,” I excused the mighty river, “but I guess I imagined it without the Welch’s can.” We watched the can’s progress through the murky water in silence, then giggled and turned our gaze to the more majestic skyline. Ahhh. Al-Qahira. “Isis, Isis, Ra Ra Ra!” I concluded and we continued our progress. We then undertook a half-hour’s hot walk through raucous concrete expressways in search of a certain “al-Tahrir Square.” Although signs urged us on in this direction and that, it had failed to appear and there seemed to be a silent agreement between us that asking someone to direct us to such a well-known landmark exceeded our quotas for necessary embarrassment. So on we loped until at last a subway map revealed the extent of our folly and thereby inspired us to dabble in the Cairo underground. As we aired ourselves out in the clean, cavernous and cool platform area, Sarah observed, “Here’s one thing they do better in Cairo than in New York.” This discovery cheered us nouveaux-New Yorkers up and we boarded the train all incredulous admiration. The windows were open on the train and no old person was allowed to stand. We got out one stop later (yep, we were that tired), following signs to American University in Cairo. By this point it is occurring to me that I may be bugging Sarah by insisting that she scour all signs we pass for words that she recognizes, then make her piece together ones she doesn’t. I bury this anxiety in my faith that Sarah is a fellow linguist and linguophile. Besides, she is a great sport and remembers words right away.
While our Arabic may well be advancing in great leaps, our sense of direction seems to recede with exposure to the Cairo heat and dust. We hefted ourselves over the last stair back into the open and shuffled this way and that in search of the announced university for a full five minutes before a garrulous gentleman offered us his services. Having spent the afternoon perfecting our studious avoidance of eye contact, I’m not sure how this guy got through, but it’s a good thing he did. “Amaah-ree-cahn univer-seetee? Walk one meenoot behind you!” We turned to find a rather massive university compound in rather less than one minute’s walking distance. Gee, thanks. “Awwal yom,” I excuse us to the man; I figure if he isn’t trying to sell us something, we may as well be honest about our plight and spare ourselves some humiliation. However, the man (Mohammad) did not appear to be in danger of finding us ridiculous so much as adorable. He praised my Arabic and shook our hands with serious admiration for our embarking on the study of such a difficult language. Indeed, using fusshah (modern standard Arabic) in the streets provides a good deal of entertainment for our interlocutors. Certain words send them into waves of giggles. In particular, “illeti,” a formal connector particle that I strove so hard to perfect, strikes many as a regular hoot. Alternating between being a hoot oneself and getting hooted at may well comprise my early weeks here.
As it turned out, there would be no entering the AUC grounds without an AUC I.D. so we wandered past into downtown Cairo. My head began to reel as hunger and exhaustion fought it out on my body for the top urgency slot. Sarah, much better rested, did not appear to harbor a similar inner struggle, and trotted on merrily with a buoyant “Yeah, I guess I could eat sometime. I should eat, huh?” I, who have dragged so many an unwilling walker in my wake, plodded after her and concentrated on not collapsing. My contributions to the conversation thus began to suffer, and it occurred to me that I had not managed to complete a sentence in perhaps four hours. Still, we managed to cross back over the Nile, after a few more reckless sprints through traffic. I am starting to realize that the running probably makes us stand out. The old Musriyyat just amble across and cars screech to a halt for them. Of course, they may not stop for two American girls, even dowdy ones, and those old ladies may have some kind of witchy protection spell, or at least Allah on their side. Sarah concluded by Day 2 that perhaps she should take to wearing a large gold cross; besides looking “ghetto fabulous,” she reasoned, at least you would appear religious and thus more respectable, even unveiled. Those veils were starting to look pretty cute to us, although our attempts once back in the hotel room to don them fell short of our hopes. By the way, “back in the hotel room” was a state of being won by another half hour’s walk once across the Nile, a grudging realization that we had better get a cab, forking over more than twice as much as we owed since that wily cabbie told his American charges to “pay what they thought was right,” and a hopeless failure of communication with street vendors in order to obtain two sandwiches and two sodas (sound simple? Just try talking to these guys.). Back in the room, we tried to drink a relaxing gin and tonic on our balcony, but our bodies rejected it; blah, enough, their peevish complaint. “Allaaaaaaaaaahu akbar, alaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Hu ak-bar,” the reminder of holier things echoing from the surrounding mosques. I felt utterly spent and over-whelmed by every aspect of both my new and old lives, from how we were to go about getting a phone to whether or not my little sister was safe in her new apartment back in St. Cloud. In short, my brain caved in on itself and began gnashing its teeth over the parts whose urgency left them intact. As is often the case, those parts are usually those containing one’s most acute worries, which suddenly appear beyond resolution.* So we went to sleep, while Sarah, still on a different energy schedule than I, stayed up to write. As I am now staying up to write. I imagine we’ll even out soon enough.
June 3rd
I woke up at 5:30 feeling every bit as anxious but with healed feet, which counted for a lot. I breathed deeply under a shower rendered luxurious by its timing in spite of its aesthetic reality (curtainless white platform on which I killed an Egyptian bug before starting). Of course, by this time Sarah had at last managed to descend into a profound sleep, but grumbled from the depths that she could get up. Discovery: Sarah is a rapid mobilizer. We dropped off our key with the concierge (who seemed a bit less charmed by us after the haggling incident) and tried to adduce where breakfast was to be had. In my dreams before waking, the breakfast had consisted in a sumptuous buffet of sweetbreads, jams, and beverages; in reality, we each received a small tray laden with stale, phallic breadsticks, packets of butter and jam, a hard boiled egg, and a glass of Lipton tea. Well, OK. At least the breakfast area was beautiful: a long veranda overlooking a tree-lined street. The morning breeze brushed over our memories of the previous afternoon’s heat and we both made proclamations about how we could totally get along here, in Egypt.
Afterwards we made the trek back to Cilantro (the Western cafe of the day before) to nurse our internet addictions and drink more of that mango juice, which appeared to agree with our systems. Here ends the air-conditioned, relaxing part of our day. After a few minutes’ concentrated study of a map of Cairo we found online, we decided to walk down to the neighborhoods of Mohandessin and Zamalek, where we hoped to live. I tried calling some of the numbers CASA had given me from the hotel, to no avail. Chilling memories of my hapless apartment search in Marseille a year and a half before overtook me (imagine in halting foreign language): “Ummm . . . I’m looking for a place to rent . . . but you can’t call me back because I have no phone . . . so I guess I’ll call back . . . ?” We decided to chance it anyway. Equipped with a list of apartments on streets of undisclosed location we headed southwest through the rising heat. A stop at the cell phone shop added a working communication piece to the mix, a development at which filled me with an inordinate amount of pleasure. The conundrum “howonearthwillIgetacellphone?” had kept me awake for a good hour that morning. However, within another twenty minutes our need for a map eclipsed this success. A man in the first travel store we stopped in told us to go to al-Tahrir Square. Yeah, right. We meandered on, as our sense of north south and forward disintegrated and our sweat began to pour. The lo and behold, the second travel agency we came upon did not contain the same species of “help” as the first; a smiling man dug through his entire wealth of papers in order to unearth a map, which he gave to us. It becomes clearer with each exchange of goods that prices depend entirely on one’s mood. We thanked the man with rather rapid profuseness and put our best foot forward.
By the time we finally reached the area my body began suggesting that we sit in the shade and enjoy a nice lunch. Easier desired than accomplished, it turned out, as the multitude of small street cafes so clear in my imagination failed to materialize. The neighborhood was beautiful – tropical trees, flowerbeds, and gorgeous buildings. However, most of the streets on my apartment list had not made it onto the map (or an map, as our later research revealed). I announced that progress would be impossible if we did not first get lunch, and hoped that a viable option would appear before I reverted from intense to weepy hunger. A certain City Talk Cafe (“Seetee Tok”) ended up fitting the bill; although we recognized that we would spend much more money (though we didn’t know yet how much more) if we kept frequenting these Western-style places, the air-conditioning enveloped us and squelched protest. Despite the modest, overpriced fare and insufferable music (god-awful R&B), we could not be but relieved just to be sitting down somewhere cool. A group of teenage boys playing cards at the table next to us interspersed English phrases into their game, each to the great entertainment of the others. Sarah and I both managed to provide a good laugh for our serving staff: Sarah by exchanging a “H” for a “h” and asking where they kept their pigeon rather than where the bathroom was; me by brandishing a 50 piaster note to pay our 40 pound bill. This being the second time I had unwittingly attempted to rip off my Egyptian brothers with this measly bill (I swear it looks like the 50 pound note), we had a good laugh too. I rounded out our sitting break with another call to the CASA cultural advisor, whom, I discovered, seemed to have been instructed to speak to me only in Arabic. Whew! The rigor I always wanted, right? I answered the best I could, and we agreed to meet the next day. Until then, Sarah and I were on our own. Noses buried in map and apartment list, we began our search for the few locatable streets.
This neighborhood, by our pretentious estimation, was “very Egyptian.” Mothers, small children, adolescents, all had their place amidst the dust, carts and garbage. We couldn’t seem to find a natural rhythm or path through it that did not involve flinging ourselves out of the way of honking cars or in climbing over steaming hot ones (in what Sarah aptly assessed as “parked traffic”). The few stretches that tempted us to use them as sidewalks inevitably gave way to more piles of dust and garbage, or immobile groups of smoking men or squatting children. Fortunately, we were loving it. At some point in the afternoon it occurred to me that speaking French in the streets may earn us a shade more impunity, and we were right. Or at least, we felt less obnoxious. I had forgotten how it feels to experience oneself first and foremost as UglyAmerican. Like, this body=uglypasteywhitey, this voice=uglystridentimpudent. The first apartment we managed to visit had already been taken by another pair of New Yorkers. Blast. Ever get the feeling that one’s niche has already been filled? We reeled back through the sun south toward Dokki, where we had another address. This walk ended up (we later discovered by mistake) through a lively street market. The English signs we had grown used to seeing alongside the Arabic ones had disappeared, as had any trace of a Western-style anything. Carts, bicycles, vendors, dust and fruit whirled around us, although the presence of the market did nothing to slow the constant trickle of cars through the middle of it. Honk honk. We tried not to upset anyone’s stand.
The “bawwab,” or doorman, at the second place we found told us we could visit an apartment if we came back in an hour. Even though we had just concluded in our exhaustion to go straight home to air-conditioning and get more mango juice, we agreed. He told us that the price for a 2-bedroom would be 3000 pounds, which struck us as ghaalii gidan and I said so. Our welcome packets had warned that they would always ask for more and encouraged us to haggle. As we dragged around the neighborhood looking for cold drink and shade, I began constructing my approaches to this task. A nice old man sold us a huge water and a mango juice for only five pounds, further underlining the fact that prices are contingent upon the seller’s mood. We must have looked pretty parched, and after all, he must be somebody’s father. We parked it on a wall in the shade and reasoned through a haggling plan. In the end, we only got them to give in 100 pounds, but when we saw the place we realized that it was in fact more of a 3-bedroom, which made the price more reasonable. To our New York sensibilities, the place seemed palatial, and we began imagining our new lives as we gazed over its balconies. The bawwab, named Nabil, put us on the phone with one Dr. Sharif, apparently the man calling the shots at 40 Mesaha Street. He spoke more fusshah and some English, and his warm voice made the price sound righter. Hm. We agreed to come back and meet him, unsure of how the place compared to others, etc. At that point we nixed the possibility of continuing our search that afternoon, however; we cabbed home (paying closer to the right price this time) and rejuvenated with cold showers and horizontal quality time. Did I say “utterly spent” about yesterday? I spoke to soon. I was UTTERLY SPENT. My every limb throbbed and resisted the stiffening yoga stretches I tried to offer them in apology. I seemed to have passed off my energy and hunger patterns of the day before to my companion, for now Sarah professed her pressing need to eat within the next forty-five seconds. She looked a bit frantic surveying my distance from readiness (in my underwear doing a shoulderstand) and I scrambled to my feet lest she venture a bite.
We dressed for the evening (clean dowdiness) and turned onto 26 July Street. We veered into the first eatery we saw and set about decoding the menu, all in Arabic. (Sarah: “Sha. war. ma. Shwarma! Kuf. ta, Kufta!” Me: “Fooool. Ful! Baaa. baaa. gaa. noooosh. Babaganoush!”) After a few more minutes of these antics, the fellows behind the counter invited us to the upstairs dining room. “They’re probably afraid that we’ll hurt their business,” Sarah remarked as they spirited us into a romantic dark corner next to an open window. Ahhhhh. The smiling waiter set about making us comfortable with alacrity, placing our laptops (I know, I know) on a third chair. He delighted in talking us through the menu in much the same fashion as we had done downstairs: “Ta’miyya: falafel! MessaHaa: aubergine!” We ordered what ended up being about one of everything, and they did not skimp on our servings in the kitchen (“probably ‘cause we’re whiteys” in Sarah’s opinion). I assured the waiter that everything was “lathith jidan,” and chirped a dutiful “bismillah” before attacking the spread: a plate of kefta sausages on a bed of spinach, topped with oily roasted red peppers; a plate of ta’amiyya, which we discovered was fava-bean falafel, fried with nutmeg (sound weird? It’s DELICIOUS.); a plate of marinated eggplant stewed with tomatoes and french fries (who said that Egyptians can’t cook?); baba ganoush; and two plates of fresh salad, which we ate in spite of it’s likelihood of sending us to the toilets. We devoured with pleasure, trying to remember whether it was rude or polite in Egyptian culture to eat everything. In the end, our stomachs’ limitations made the call for us, and we had to stop a few kefta short. The waiter was of course much to taken with us to notice, and hovered about chatting with us. His name was Matti. Every time Sarah says her name (“Sah-rrraah”) she meets with an approving, “Ah! This is Egyptian name!” I told him I would be studying for the year. “After that you will speak better Arabic than me!” he promised. “I’ll come back then and we’ll see,” I promised. “Ba’da sana? La, ashufkum kul yom!” he protested. I said we would be back tomorrow. I hope I was right. The price was definitely right: all that cost us 21, 50 pounds. Al-humdu lillah. Matti bowed to us with much ado each time we passed the restaurant after that (which ended up being three, since after returning from internet we realized we needed to buy a new telephone charger). Indeed, Cairo comes alive at night, which is understandable considering that this is the only time when the heat is bearable. Children hopped along after parents, teenagers lounged in front of juice shops, men sat in rows pulling moodily on their shisha pipes. At last we flopped down on our beds. And I discovered that contrary to all reason I had tons of energy. So this time I typed on into the night as Sarah tossed about in deep but restless sleep.
June 7th
Okay, so time slid by. As days of apartment searching dragged these old bones through dusty, sweltering streets full of bawwabs muttering “mafeesh, kuli shay sukun” my morale dropped to dangerous lows. And of course, since just about everything that means anything was left up in the air at the end of such days, my brain refused to let my body rest. Now that at last a few things appear to be in order, I may be able to find the space in that brain to convert all of this stimulus into stories.
The upstairs dining room of the Zamalek Cafe (where we are by now regular customers) affords us a perfect view of the street below, 26th of July Street (sittat ‘ashreen yulio), the thoroughfare heading through Zamalek from the bridge to Downtown Cairo. Our eyes glaze over and our thoughts wander as we watch the endless procession of Cairiyyin streaming by. The elevated position has the effect of foreshortening their already short bodies, increasing the sense we have of watching them in a fishbowl. We watch for particularly pretty hijab/tunic combinations, we chuckle at small children dragged behind curmudgeonly mothers and potbellied fathers. We marvel at old women balancing their day’s groceries in baskets on their heads, and follow the slow progress of old men being helped out of taxis by throngs of available handimen. But most of all we watch our little fellow, the nameless breadseller. He is exquisite. His black hair is closely shaved, his limbs spindly but his movements decisive. He wears the same red jersey every day. Sarah and I watch him sell pita breads off a square cart by the side of the road just in front of the Zamalek Cafe. Sometimes an older family member (I’m assuming) comes by to check on him or to bring more bread, but usually he is alone. Envoys from the various restaurants, bodegas, and homes up and down the street provide him with steady business, purchasing quantities ranging from bagfuls to handfuls. During his free moments, the boy makes himself busy rearranging the sheet of plastic that he attempts to keep secured over the stacks of bread, or by leaning against a large tree by his cart to count and recount the money. He is engaged in this activity when Sarah and I first notice him from our perch. His brow furrowed, his tiny shoulders hunched in toward his small fortune, he thumbs through the bills again and again. His lips move and his head nods slightly with each count. I am overcome with the futile desire that my brothers see this little businessman. Self-possessed and serious, focused on his task although no doubt the wad of pounds in his clutch will no doubt pass on to his parents by the end of the day. Never once do we see him leave his post to buy something to eat or drink. Besides the brief conversations with his customers, although I suppose he knows most of them personally, he is quite alone. Sarah and I rhapsodize about this little boy’s lot in life, converting him into an abstract representative of a phenomenon we have imagined into existence. Then I look back and he is looking straight at me. He does not smile, nor blink, nor flinch in the least, his dark eyes wide and upturned. I can’t tear myself away. Our eyes were locked and I had no idea what we were seeing. It scared me for reasons I still can’t grasp. The closest I can come to describing it is that I sensed a complete lack of connection. It was like staring into the eyes of a dead person, or being stared at while dead. One of us must be seeing something other than what is actually there.
“Sarah, he’s looking at me.”
Sarah looked too and the gaze was broken. Now he stared up at both of us, and we stared back, but the seriousness dissipated. One of us ventured a wave and he looked down, embarrassed. So we started grinning and he grinned and contained his grin and looked back up and we waved and he waved back, quickly and down at his waist. We were friends.
Sarah and I now take every opportunity to shower him with attention from our vantage point at the Zamalek Cafe. He eats it up. His smiles and waves grow bolder by the day, and he beams with pride when we greet him down in the street (especially if any of his friends are around). We joke that we now rely on interaction with little kids to satisfy our customary impulses of friendliness; in five years, that boy will be off limits. Despite this rather depressing eventuality, we have come to enjoy our exchanges with the small fry. As we walked with Nabil, the bawwab in our new apartment, to our landlady’s home in Agouza, we traversed many such groups of enthusiastic greeters. “Haylo!” “What, is, your, NAME?” they called to us as we passed. Nabil, far from reprimanding them, could not even suppress a smile. I took the opportunity to strike up a conversation, since he seemed to be feeling jovial (if at our expense). He divulged that he is forty years old and has four children (a son and three daughters), ranging in age from ten to two (this is the kind of information that my current vocabulary permits me to access). I wondered if his son wandered the streets saying “Halyo” to foreign women, but I figured that I would be unable to infuse the question with a suitable amount of good humor to keep from sounding shrill. So I told him Mabruk and Ma sha’ allah and that I too came from a big family. Having thus warmed up to each other a bit (our former conversations had all revolved around how much we should have to pay for the apartment in question) he decided to dole out a compliment: that I looked kind of Egyptian. Ma sha’ allah.
I suppose Nabil will now become a major fixture in our lives. Already I feel a kind of relief of familiarity in his presence, despite the severe limitations my shortcoming in ‘aamiyya places on our communication. Like most Egyptians, he is only slightly taller than we, especially with his slouching posture, dark skinned and haired and a salt-and-pepper mous-tache curtains his worn-down, yellowed teeth. Sarah says she heard somewhere that all Egyptians have short teeth from grinding them down on their sandy food for generations. Since a few days’ eating in Egypt has indeed yielded a healthy share of sand and rock (although we did concede that the rock in Sarah’s quiche did resemble mushrooms), I am starting to think she may be right.
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