Cairo, January 1999
created January 1999
Text of this page ("Cairo, January 1999") copyright © 1999–2005 by Eric Bourland. All rights reserved. The content of this page is a public resource and may be distributed freely if unchanged and credited to the author. Thanks.
The steps lead down to a wooden jetty, where I crouch and dip my hand up to my wrist. Two boats move on the water, one with a sail, one with a motor. Someone aboard one of the boats calls out in Arabic, whether to me or to the other boat I cannot tell, and the boats pass very close to one another. I do not understand Arabic. The city's lights reflect on the river's surface, and smog hides the stars. The person calls out again — maybe "Watch where you're going, you idiot" (to the other boat), maybe "Hey, don't fall in! Are you drunk?" (to me). I realize the sailboat's sail is slack and that it too is driven by a motor. I withdraw my hand from the Nile and go back up the stairs to the street.
Cars stream by, crowding together, constantly honking. In Cairo the drivers accelerate madly into any opening they find. They brake suddenly, inches apart. The roads are potted, and the dotted traffic lines are faded and ignored. Pedestrians take their chances. The city's few traffic lights are indistinguishable dots on the edges of a sea of fuming, blaring vehicles. A quarter of the volume of traffic is composed of taxis — decrepit Fiats or Peugeots or Datsuns mounted with luggage racks and driven by lunatics, plunging like meteors through the smoke of Cairo.
Many Cairenes live by selling services to tourists, and focus on anyone who looks like a tourist. Taxi drivers, bellboys, guides, or ad hoc customs attendants are constantly at your elbow, grabbing up your bags and hauling them away, then turning to you to collect baksheesh, or a tip. Street peddlers and bazaar proprietors lunge at you if you show the slightest interest in their wares. A peddler near the Egyptian Museum follows me for a block, imploring me in broken English to buy a sheath of painted papyrus sheets. "Mistah, I want to tell you something, these are good quality," he says. "Look here. Five of these for just ten pounds, then I go home, I'm done for the day." He clutches my sleeve, shoves papyri under my nose, and watches me fervidly. A girl, age seven or eight, follows me along an underpass with traffic barreling on either side of us, reaching up for a tendril of my hair to test in her hand and tugging at my pocket, saying "Baksheesh? Baksheesh mistah?" She breaks away from me as I cross the street, then rejoins me half a block later. I turn out my pocket to show I have no money. She examines my passport, looks at me doubtfully, then moves away on the bustling evening sidewalk. She looks back once and says "Bye mistah."
Soldiers are stationed outside embassies, hotels, museums, and business offices, to deter terrorists. They have posts throughout the city, equipped with phonebooth-sized shacks where they can take shelter if the weather turns bad. They will not let you take pictures of them. One evening, walking along a dark street, I pass suddenly through a cloud of cigarette smoke, and notice a figure moving immediately on my right. I start to the left, then realize the figure is a soldier loafing in the shadows outside his shack. He lowers his cigarette and grins. At first I see only his flashing teeth, his beret, and the barrel of his rifle slung over his shoulder. Then I see the ember of his cigarette and the outline of his hand lifted in a wave.
The men of Cairo smoke as if smoking were a profession. Whenever a break in the action occurs, the men light up. I see no women smoking, except for a particular young woman who sits alone and chainsmoking in the booth behind me in the Aubergine cafe. The men like to gather in open-air coffeehouses along the streets to smoke shisha pipes and play backgammon. The shisha pipe pours out a pleasant charcoal smoke that nuzzles the back of your throat. Its watertank bubbles at your feet as you suck the smoke through its hose and nozzle.
A cat washes itself on the sidewalk and scampers away at my approach. Hundreds of thousands of cats live in Cairo, scrawny animals with flat faces and tilted eyes, skulking under cars, begging on the patio at the Marriott. They raise their litters in alleys or abandoned buildings or any private place they can find.
In Omar's Cafe the waiter comes up, fidgets around, and pours my coffee. He glances at me and seems nervous. Then he actually leaves the coffee carafe on my table, a tribute I have never received from any waiter. In a while he goes over to the digital order processing station across the room and turns to peer at me, and I realize he is looking at my hair. A few minutes later he comes over to my table, puts down my check, pauses shyly, then says in English, "Your hair is very long!" I smile and nod. "It's very long," he repeats, grinning and genuinely amazed. "How old are you? Twenty?"
In the streets of Cairo so many people turn to stare at me that I begin to wear my hair in a ponytail, and to wish I had a hat. In a return visit to Omar's I get the same waiter, who greets me very cheerfully, his face lighting up. Grinning he brings over the coffee carafe. "I leave this here for you, OK?"
My balcony on the Marriott's nineteenth floor faces due south, and I can look down the length of Zamalik Island and see Cairo Tower sprouting up. Looking east I see the Nile. In the morning much of the city is hidden in fog. By afternoon the fog burns off and then in the west I can see one of the Giza pyramids rising spectrally behind the skyline. Several times every day the call to prayer sounds from the minarets of mosques across the city, sometimes to wake me in my room.
The horse knows that I am riding on horseback for the first time in my life, but fortunately for me his temperament is forgiving. He lets me flounder in the English saddle and tangle the reins in his mane, and continues his steady walk. My colleague David and I ride our horses among the sandy hills surrounding the three pyramids at Giza, accompanied by our guide, a proprietor of one of the many stables established in Giza. The day is clear and we can see Cairo to the east and the distant Saqqara pyramids to the south. Behind the Saqqara pyramids and out of view lie the ruins of Memphis. At the foot of the Giza pyramids there is great hole in the ground from which were chiseled the blocks, each knee high to waist high and the length of a shipping trunk, that constitute the pyramids.
On the day that I leave Cairo, the Aid el-Fitr begins, the three day feast that marks the end of the fasting period of Ramadan. Cairo turns festive and businesses close. I will catch the one a.m. TWA flight to JFK. That evening my colleague Bruce and I go to the Aubergine for dinner. The upstairs is crowded, smoky, and noisy, so we choose to dine in the downstairs area. Two waiters are lounging at the cash register, and the only other customer there is a woman dining by herself in the corner booth. Bruce and I sit in another booth. We order our meals, discuss the work we have completed during the past two weeks, and drink Stella beer. Bruce quietly mentions the woman sitting in the corner booth. He is facing her, and my back is toward her. "She's been smoking cigarettes one after another," Bruce says, concerned. After our meal I walk to the cash register to pay our bill, passing the woman in the corner booth. She has pushed away her plate and sits smoking, and the ashtray filled with stubbed out cigarettes is placed directly in front of her. As if she has made a meal of cigarettes. She is staring across the table, and a ribbon of smoke drifts away from her lip.
— EB
January 24, 1999