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8. LETTER FROM CAIRO (August 2005)
So I'm out in the desert, maybe five or six miles east of the Nile in a car,
returning to Cairo in March of 2005. As with every large Third World city the
air here is usually hazy and filthy. Very sharp in the throat, foetid and even
deadly, as the leaders and people attempt to copy the only modern model they
think really works-- America's car-based, car-obsessed, carbon burning model,
assuming the future will always be on our side, no matter how we conduct
ourselves, but in Egypt with even less regulation and environmental sense than
in America. However, I'm lucking out today, in fact on the entire trip. The
air's fine. Someone tells me this may be Cairo's best air in the last five
years. And you can see clear and far.
A few nights even dip down into the 30's Fahrenheit, and a few days don't
even rise above the 50's-- who expected any of this?
Just before my arrival it rained, in fact. When I get up to Alexandria I'll be
told it actually snowed there recently-- just a pinch, as the guide
touches her thumb and index finger together, but enough to excite her, for she'd
never seen snow before.
And so in the great distance, many miles on the other side of the Nile, between
the silhouettes of Cairo's highrises, sit two incredible shapes-- they must be
just staggering in size to loom this large this far away.
Pure and archaic, stark and ancient, yes there are the Pyramids.
Somehow, staring into the distance at them through the windshield, old as I know
they are, they seem to be fitting very well with the present: clean and
unornamented, a few swift lines upward, and big big BIG-- that's sort of the
essence of our modernity too, isn't it? So these bulks meld oddly well with the
high-thrusting modern Cairo between me and them.
As my imagination runs on they could also serve as object-lessons from some
super-civilization that dropped them into our midst, just to overawe us. I see
the leader of that civilization's newest expedition, returning to us after
millennia, slowly emerge from his spaceship, then tilting his huge humanoid head
downward toward the gaping yokels below, and though their eyes plead with him
for reassurance, his message is the realistic one: "See us, puny mortals,
and tremble!"
Thus spake Khafre and Khufu and Menkaure.
On another day, I am in the Egyptian Museum. A sort of musty old place, even it
it is one of the supreme treasurechests of the human race. Finally, in one
darkened room, I don't have to work my imagination to imagine the Pharaohs.
There they are, with some of their queens, eleven in all, lying in glass cases
below me, resting fitfully while lines of tourists slowly move forever past
them. These are not the Pharaohs who built the Pyramids. They are ones who came
later, and built their own different kinds of great tombs, still trying to awe
humanity and cheat death. They include Seti I, Tuthmosis II and Tuthmosis IV,
and above all Ramses II, possibly the Pharaoh of the Exodus, who reigned for 67
years. If you think human vanity, an obsession with looking good whatever
your age, began with plastic surgery-crazed Americans in the late 20th
Century, please note that this elderly Pharaoh--- Ramses II died at around 90--
has gone to eternity with his hair dyed the original red.
I pass the cases, circle back to some, bending over for several closer looks. As
I stare some stare back; their artificial eyes are stunningly, sickeningly
life-like. Never take children to this room, unless you are prepared to comfort
them for months afterward as their little selves come screaming out of
nightmares. All of these bodies partake somewhat of skeletons, in their
sunken-cheeked gauntness, in the way their bones visibly push up under the dark
shiny skin-- but they seem near life too, on their backs staring up, still with
skin, with teeth in their mouths, lips around the teeth, hair on their heads.
Seqenenre II's arms and hands reach upward as if trying to push the glass
cover off and rise. His hands twist, in agony it seems, still trying to push
away an assassin's weapon or uselessly fend off battle blows. It is an
astonishing sight, as if this Pharaoh wasn't so much mummified as
flash-frozen. Their bodies don't seem completely dead but dead in a way we
all-- hoping-- have at one time or another dreamt death might be: oblivion or
nothingness that goes on and on but then's somehow interrupted-- maybe just for
a second every thousand years-- but that's enough, a spark of awareness, wait,
wait, I am dead, but WAIT IF I AM AWARE THAT I AM DEAD!!!...
As I said, never take a child to this room.
If these monarchs thought that through mummification they could cheat death,
convince men death is just one more opponent human ingenuity can conquer, they
have failed miserably. They have so successfully preserved their shells that we
weep at the meaninglessness of those shells. Amongst the bodies here death seems
to reign with greater power, for even these human gods are trapped.
Perhaps this is why I am not that impressed when finally I stand at the base of
one of those monoliths I'd seen from a distance. A relative e-mailed me shortly
before I left for Egypt and wrote: "I envy you. My one travel desire has
been to go to Egypt and stand at the base of the great pyramid-- it would
probably give me more understanding of the religious mind than all the words I
have read." My guide-- hired beforehand, not one of the onsite
hustlers--marvelous with her historical knowledge and enthusiasm, reader of
hieroglyphics and speaker of Ancient Egyptian-- tells me how she's conducted New
Agers to this place, New Agers so excited they actually worship the ancient
Egyptian gods (to the amusement of present-day Egyptians). But I feel no awe and
no stir of religiosity. The Pyramids are so obviously the work of men, men with
muscles, muscles bursting as they heave the stone up, sweating in the sunlight.
While the key extra meaning is added by their little genius monkey death-scared
eternity-worshipping heads.
In no way are these particularly beautiful objects seen up close. First of all,
when you stand at the base of a Pyramid you can only see that one side, so the
effect is of staring up at a wall, a not terribly interesting or beautiful wall,
though its sheer size-- almost 50 stories in the case of Khufu's Pyramid-- does have impact. The Pyramids,
in fact, put me in mind of the World Trade Center towers, blocky and
undistinguished in design, but impressive just through sheer brutal
enormousness.
You can't climb all the way up the Pyramids anymore, but can go up a few blocks,
move across and then come down again. I pass. If you go inside there's nothing
to see-- blank corridors ending in blank chambers. And someone my height-- 6-2--
would have to stoop all the way, probably ruining my back in the process. (Ramses
II and Seqenenre II are both about 5-6, 5-7, and aristocracies are always taller
than their subjects.)
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy to see the Pyramids. It's an experience. Sitting
across the street in the Pizza Hut with my guide, the great death-defying
constructions plus their ever-intriguing Sphinx framed in the window-- she tells
me some tourists like to take shots of the edifices with the window's words
"Pizza Hut" included-- I accept that I am wiser in a simple but big
way: mind and senses slapped out of the present, the over-rated ever-present
present, and opening to the (actually surprising) reality of the past. Suddenly,
instead of running a race in isolation I see the baton in my hand. What it all
means is probably nothing, but it's bigger, and I like the feel of it. At least
it will make me a better writer, blessed with more visceral understanding. I
wonder if those tourists across the street, in dungarees and baseball caps, with
digital cameras, marching into the Sahara to touch the monoliths, have the same
mild revelation. I'm almost embarrassed to spend so much time and these many
words adding up one and one as two, but it's a surprisingly hard addition for
most people to make, in their gut.
Perhaps it's this hunger on my part not for meta-meaning but a simple
sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with my forebears that makes me appreciate
the many tombs I'm now taken down into. These small tombs that lie around the
Pyramids, which many people ignore, have far more humanity and interest than the
great constructions themselves. In their hieroglyphic stories and relief
carvings of the everyday life that the dead so deeply wished to experience
forever-- I think all of us, in some part of ourselves, understand that the
truest heaven is being alive-- in some spots the carvings still washed with a
very fresh-looking paint-- the stern stone faces break into heart-warming
smiles, and better than awe we're moved to ache familiarly with love, or
friendship, or the pleasures of work and play.
Here the Egyptians whirl or shimmy in dance, there they play tug-of-war, they
pluck their instruments, hold up a fish, push a small papyrus boat through the
reeds with a long pole, bake bread, sip a drink, sit with their family. The
Egyptian Museum is filled with such objects of everyday life-- I'm amazed at how
much has survived through the millennia-- bolts of cloth, chairs and beds, bowls
of grain and fruit, musical instruments, little childrens' toys that will pop
into motion if you pull the string. You can hear the long-dead squealing. These
things are displayed in the same place as the great monuments that mean to awe--
the super-gigantic statuary, or Tutankamun's solid gold face mask, totally
lifelike and totally godlike at the same time, a work of absolute perfection
that humbles and delights me the same way the "Mona Lisa" did in the
Louvre, a few years ago.
If this is what these people were capable of thousands of years ago then what
miracles of progress await me when I step outside the Museum, my day's viewing
there ended?
Here is Cairo, the modern heir of a great past. The Egyptian Museum is down the
block from Midan Tahrir, something of the Times Square of Cairo. The crowds
leaving the Museum merge with the greater crowds of the 16-million-strong
metropolis, many of these Cairenes taking no more note of the huge museum to
their right than New Yorkers do of the Empire State Building to their
right as they walk east on 34th Street, and the buses packed with tourists merge
into the larger ocean of traffic speeding away. I would like now to cross the
avenue and walk south, but there are no stoplights and there is no sidewalk to
walk on. Hello! Cairo! 21st Century! You forgot something! As I stare at lane
after lane of traffic racing down Shari Ramses I am struck with the realization
that this traffic is never going to stop, even if I stand here all day. I think
to go back to the Museum-- but what's the use of that? I know they say move in
with a group of locals and go when they go, but I don't see any group. Every now
and then a single Cairene darts into the traffic, and I expect, suddenly, a whomp,
and gush of blood, but somehow they skitter across, like roaches avoiding your
swatting broom. I start to follow, to go-- but the next car's 10 feet, 5 feet,
3-- I jump back! YOU IDIOTS! YOU BUILT THE PYRAMIDS BUT YOU FORGOT TO PUT IN
TRAFFIC LIGHTS AND SIDEWALKS! AND YOU'RE KILLING PEOPLE! Meanwhile, an elderly,
bearded man in a long robe has moved beside me, offering some drawings in
"ancient style" on "papyrus" (actually, banana leaves).
"My daughter made." As I wave him away, concentrating on the traffic,
as I move away from him, he follows, lowering his price every few seconds. Soon
"20 dollars" is down to 2, 1..."I'm trying to cross!" I yell
at him, and finally give up, I actually cannot cross this avenue, and start
walking away from the Museum along the thin curb, or on the grass, with the
traffic, constantly looking back to make sure I'm not suddenly sideswapped, as
some of the cars come so close to doing.
Modern Cairo. I know I didn't get the full Cairo experience, thanks to the
freakishly cool and clear weather. I really needed to come back in a few months,
when the sun is madly hot and my clothes turn liquid-- the largely un-airconditioned
Museum must be a hellish experience in summer, how can anyone visit it?-- and
the air is filled with dust and filth, and I stand frozen on a streetcorner,
squirting sweat and squinting with craziness.
But this is bad enough.
The crowds are like human rivers. Even New York City, the epitome of urbanism in
America, will actually seem quiet and half-empty by comparison when I return to
it. Imagine a city where a huge proportion of the blocks are as packed as Canal
Street on a Saturday afternoon, or West 34th Street at Christmastime, or
Chinatown at its densest or the Wall Street area at rush hour-- but here beards
and robes and headscarves whirl around you, almost everyone is swarthy, and
they're chattering in some crazy language you understand is Arabic even if
months of study enable you to catch no more than one word in fifty. When
occasionally someone stops to talk to you, with their little bit of English,
you're startled yet grateful, even if they want to sell you something. (But
others are just being friendly.)
I've been to enough rapidly-developing (and rapidly decomposing) Third World
cities by now-- Bombay, Istanbul, Ankara, Bangkok, Alexandria, Cairo-- to know
the type. It's a city too big for itself, grown up before its infrastructure is
ready for it, and still growing bigger. The air is foul, the streets, many
narrow, can't remotely contain all the cars, mostly small or medium-sized, with
a Westerner's or rich native's SUV or Mercedes occasionally thrown in, the buses
are dirty and streaked and belching dark diesel smoke while inside men and women
grope for space and move their heads left and right for air, or maybe they're
one of the passengers hanging half-outside the open doors. (Scores, hundreds? of
different bus routes in Cairo and I never see a single sign indicating a bus
stop or a specific route. The stupidity of it, the contempt of the leaders, not
just Egypt's, most leaders in the world, for pedestrians or public transport
users-- as if we all ride limousines like them.) You mustn't drink the water, or
brush your teeth with it. Even be careful in the shower. Keep your mouth shut,
don't swallow anything. Everyone accepts this, as miserable normal. Parks, so
desperately needed, are completely inadequate. None of these cities has a
Central Park. It's like living with a single lung. There are, in certain parts
of these cities, the sort of tall, blank, glossy office towers and modern hotels
and apartment buildings that make the natives proud, especially the lead ones,
and make them feel they've caught up. Some of the buildings have a few
kitchy-koo "Eastern" touches added, but we're not fooled. These
buildings are One World elite architecture, and it's as if every such building
in the world has been designed by a single cloned architect who was trained in
Los Angeles or Hong Kong.
As for Cairo's older pre-60's architecture, the Colonial legacy, it's aging
poorly. I find these older buildings fascinating, and try to understand why they
give me the feeling I'm in a city of ruins, even though they're packed with
humanity. I think it's because even while they continue standing they don't get
the kind of maintenance Western buildings do. Often there are streaks down their
sides-- sometimes dark, other times like giant pigeon poop streaks-- never
cleaned off. Sometimes some of the walls' plaster has fallen off, revealing the
cheap brick underneath. Shutters hang sideways half off their hinges. Air vents
and air-conditioners are decades-dark with dirt. Metal slats are bent. Wash
hangs from many balconies, some of which look like they're ready to fall. Crude
huge plaster patches splotch some walls. Peeling paint hangs off, even in
sheets. Old, broken window frames that would have been replaced decades ago in
the West continue to serve. The buildings are cracked, pocked, rusting, spotted,
smudged like old pots, sagging, discolored, some have holes in them, some have
fallen bricks at their base, some do sag, some visibly lean a little bit left or
right. Wires hang down the sides like weird vines. The fences around buildings
lean too. Some of these are darker at the top as if there was a fire. Amazingly,
even some modern buildings are beginning to partake of this decrepit air. What
an even greater mess this city is going to be in 50 years, when its population
has soared with additional millions.
New apartment buildings, many in huge developments, sometimes for the masses,
with fewer and better for the wealthy, march all the way out into the desert.
Unlike American cities, which slowly peter out into richer and richer suburbs,
Cairo ends with a Bang! as if sliced off with a cleaver. The newest apartment
buildings sit at the edge of the desert and, if you walk out your door to the
west and step off the sidewalk, you are immediately in the Sahara Desert, and
all that's between you and the Atlantic Ocean 2,500 miles away is sand. Almost
all these apartment buildings look alike, cookie-cutter piles of brown brick
four or five stories high, with open stairwells in their sides. The workmanship
looks shoddy, the materials cheap. I couldn't believe how the bricks, not as
evenly placed as ours, seemed to be piled on top of each other without mortar!
Wasn't there an earthquake in Cairo in 1992 that sent just such buildings
tumbling down? Yes, with some 450 deaths. How corrupt is this place, how lax the
regulation? I examine one such building, still in construction, up close. I see
how only one-third or so of the brick is dabbed with mortar, enough to hold the
brick that will be put atop it, at least for a time, but not enough to cost the
building owner more than he wants to spend. A really huge earthquake will
absolutely devastate Cairo. A lot of these buildings won't last five seconds.
Yet what I have described doesn't represent the real poverty I see. Many of the
poorest Cairenes and Egyptians-- I traveled elsewhere in north Egypt too-- would
dearly love to move into one of Cairo's faded old apartment buildings, or into
one of the new, however shoddily constructed, apartment buildings at the edge of
the city. I'm not saying what I saw equals Bombay, a hell on its own level (and
a prosperous place too, if you've got the money), where some people don't even
have shelter but sleep and eat in the streets, "go" wherever, and
shower by maybe dumping some small cans of filthy water on their heads.
Nonetheless, I see some absolutely terrible poverty in Cairo, primarily in the
outer precincts, where you begin to see donkeys and horses replacing cars
(though you see some donkeys and horses in the center of the city too), and in
the Cities of the Dead (people living in cemeteries) and in areas alongside the
tracks going up to Alexandria, and elsewhere. It is deeply hurtful to see the
way some of these people are living, in low mudbrick houses, with roofs that at
their worst seem to consist of nothing more than a sporadic framework topped by
thatch. But even worse than the houses are the huge garbage lots in which
they're placed, the dirty pools of water around which or in which chickens and
ducks move, the obviously polluted streams and canals in which the women do
their wash, and people go to the bathroom in and-- good lord!-- do they also
draw their cooking and drinking water from this slime? And the incredible
brownness and dustiness everywhere, the absence of greenery and shade. Yet
little children play here, happy young selves, at least for a time, and adults
walk purposefully through the dirty lots to work, and here a woman vigorously
sweeps the dirt out of her sparsely furnished, poor house (where I was able
to look into the poorer houses and apartments I saw very little furniture) into
her bare backyard, trying, trying. Inside Cairo I see a different kind of
terrible housing, wretched little shacks built right on the roofs of the cheap
apartment buildings. But I also see, wherever I go, the beautiful rocket spires
of minarets, sometimes the small spine of a modest neighborhood mosque, other
times soaring towers of faith, and every now and then hear the muezzin's wailing
calls at the faithful to pray. Take away Islam, with its power and hope, and
insistence on social cohesion even in the worst of circumstances, and this city
is Lagos or Nairobi. But there has to be anger and frustration building here
too, and perhaps in a few years the child I now see playing amidst the garbage
will have drawn certain bitter conclusions about things, and moved up to Al-Qaeda.
It is extraordinarily hard for most Westerners to see Islam as it sees itself.
To Westerners, Islam is an unnecessary addendum to the great truths of Judaism
and Christianity, and, really, how they wish it didn't exist. To the Muslim,
Islam is a final testament, cleansing the errors of two flawed earlier drafts,
and bestowing on mankind the purest and sanest of monotheisms. I, a Jewish
atheist, must admit I have, for whatever reason, always been drawn to Islam,
perhaps for the clean lines of the faith, and if I believed there was an Allah I
would convert. I've been to Turkey twice, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and now
Egypt, and I feel the religion in the air in these places in a way I don't feel
Christianity or Judaism in the air in the West, and I'm impressed.
It reflects in the good public decorum of the people, even the young. In the way
their lives are obviously being guided by a code, not just a momentary
consciousness. What a pleasure to walk a city and see no giggly, sluttily-dressed
girls (though plenty of giggling girls), no barbaric boys with low-riding pants
and dead eyes shouting "Mother-fucker!" at each other to feel proud
and big, to never hear the huge pounding filth of rap, and to search in the
obscurest corner of a bookstore and still never find pornography. Americans,
other Westerners, of course, in return, will pity Egyptians for their lack of
sexual joy, and suppression of women's spirits. This even overflows into
contempt at times, I think. How else to explain the miniskirts of (a very few)
girl tourists as anything but an in-your-face gesture of contempt toward the
Islamic society they're visiting? (These girls know what the guidebooks say.) Or
the predilection of a very few tourist couples to neck and kiss in the great
mosques, as I saw in one? (In the same month I visited Egypt a Hungarian couple
was stabbed and slightly wounded by an Egyptian after he saw them smooching it
up in a mosque.) (And regarding miniskirts, I have never seen one on a Middle
Eastern girl. The shortest skirt I can remember was knee-length, worn by a coed
at the University of Istanbul. In Cairo, I saw two girls with mid-calf skirts,
and that was bold.)
Here, on the overall subject of human erotics in the Middle East, I can only
offer my gut feeling based on no authority or source, just based on what I
sensed walking or riding around the city day after day, observing, watching,
trying to feel it from the outside. The city has its own erotic heat, believe it
or not, the same erotic heartbeat you feel just below the surface of so much
"well-behaved" 19th Century literature. My gut tells me the Islamic
world has accepted some of the West's lessons of sexual liberation but channeled
it into private behavior solely, and of course within the confines of marriage
(apart from the few inevitable exceptions when hunger or love overrides
everything and risks everything). So give me some examples, you say. Okay. My
last day in Cairo I visited the Al-Khalili market, your classic Middle Eastern
souk with narrow winding streets and alleyways, noisy, jostling, scary, filled
with the rude spirit of all-out human commerce. (A few weeks after I visited, a
suicide bomber killed three and wounded eighteen there. One was an American
tourist; that could have been me-- but then, all of life is just a crapshoot.
Other close calls: In April a suicide bomber near the Egyptian Museum, and two
women, his sister and fiancee, on the same day, shooting up a tourist bus near
the Citadel of Saladin, where
I also visited. The three attackers wounded nine. It didn't surprise me that
they were from just north of Cairo, a poor area.) The market features
everything from the same plastic junk you find in the 99-cent stores in the
States to authentic Egyptian goods like costumes and tents. Many of the Egyptian
women moving through the souk are covered from head to toe, just the face,
sometimes only just the eyes, visible. What are they looking for? Well, amidst
the shops and booths, here and there, are sellers of lingerie, not many, but
some. Without stopping, I slowed a little as I passed their displays, to check
on the heart's desire of Egyptian females. Far from plain or drab, the panties
and bras were rich and vivid, lots of lace and bold colors, even to bright
scarlet, and really oodled up with lace. This is not a place where the most
modern Egyptian women shop-- they have their own stores. Some fundamentalistic
girls are obviously getting very racy under their long and conservative robes,
and some of their quiet bearded husbands (though they would never talk about it
in public) are no doubt delighted. But then, anyone who knows anything about
Orthodox Jewish women in New York knows they are among the biggest fans of sexy
lingerie in the city. Islam, like Judaism, does not, like Christianity, try to
fight off our sexuality. It accepts it and embraces it as a gift from God, to be
treasured, but only within marriage. Hadith, Islam's second sacred
source, sayings and actions of Mohammed, says: "In the sexual act of each
of you there is a form of charity." Or, as a little booklet I picked up in
the United Arab Emirates, Shari'ah: The Way Of Justice, puts it: "To
seek sex outside the limits set by God is a sin, to seek it within these limits
is therefore an act of worship." Again, so much of Westerners' sense of
superiority to Muslims comes from their sense of themselves as sexual pioneers
and visionaries, so different from those stick-in-the mud "towelheads"
and burka victims, but the truth of demographics tells us otherwise, that it is
Islamic people who are the reproductively vital ones and to whom the future
belongs, not we Westerners and Americans with our hookups and flings and
"meaningful relationships" and flop marriages that leave you alone and
childless in a room at 50 with your cats or internet porn.
This is interesting stuff, the reader says, not like the usual political
commentary. "Give me another example!"
Okay.
Take the bridges, and the walkways along the Nile. (Which, by the way, is a
rather slowly flowing and unimpressive river, nothing like New York's Hudson, the
flow having been made sluggish by the Aswan Dam, and of course it's poisonous
water-- all the guidebooks warn you to not so much as dip a finger into it.)
It's hard to get on and off Cairo's cross-Nile bridges. There are sidewalks when
you're up on the bridges, but no sidewalks at their ends-- you have to actually
walk into the avenues-- it's insane. Nonetheless, all up and down these bridges,
spacing themselves modestly apart from the other couples, men and women, usually
young ones, stand close, perhaps staring out at the water, perhaps staring
meaningfully into each others' eyes, but not touching or only lightly touching--
you never see any young couples actually "making out" in Cairo--
creating soft little cocoons of privacy for themselves in a city where privacy
is harder to come by than in the West. He's in whatever-- slacks, shirt, jacket,
she's in some form of Islamic dress, which can mean anything from sneakers,
jeans, a blouse and a scarf, to a full-length dress and head-covering. Their
looks, the way they stare into each others' eyes or look away, the willing
closeness of their bodies, the deliberate tilt of their heads, the way they
smile at each other, or frown if things aren't going well-- and the words--
spoken rapidly, softly or insistently, angrily or soothingly or flirtatiously--
tell you these are couples on dates, or in something deeper, or maybe married
couples who've come here to talk things out or just relax with each other. On
walkways along the Nile, couples stroll-- yes, sometimes hand in hand-- or sit
on benches and talk, or talk it out. At night, in the thickly crowded streets,
you see young couples on obvious dates. Here and there, but not often, a boy
even dares to put his arm around the girl's waist. What I'm saying is: men and
women after each other here, like everywhere. I recall one beautiful girl
walking with a guy. She wore a dark floor-length skirt and a scarf on her head--
but her t-shirt-like top was thin enough to display the definite outline of her
bra. She knew what she was showing. And she wasn't the only dark-eyed,
lush-lipped beauty I noticed on these streets. Middle-aged and older Egyptian
women are often heavyset, but the young ones are usually svelte, and move with
far more feminine grace than many of their cheeseburger-swilling, jeans-busting
American sisters. The androgyny of American women (see my Short Essay,
"America's Female Butch Heteros") is missing among Egyptian females.
When you see an Egyptian woman walking in the street she is a distinctly
different creature from a man, and that alone is exciting, regardless that her
cleavage or belly button or thighs aren't on display.
But while these teenagers may be on a date, she's going home to her parents
after, not to his bedroom. My guide for the Pyramids-- and for some other sites
in Cairo-- but I did a lot of exploring on my own too-- though chicly dressed,
in Western style, and made up, and wearing sunglasses-- was insistent-- this
came up in a general conversation we had about Islam and men and women-- that
premarital sex is absolutely forbidden to women. (She herself is married, with
several children.) Again, a Westerner might look on the Egyptian girl as a
prisoner of repression, and that's part of it, surely. But isn't it also
liberating for a girl to be able to go on a date without feeling any pressure to
have to go to bed with some pimply sixteen-year-old boy surfing on his hormones,
his hands hungrily thrashing all over her body, some boy who's realistically
years or decades from being able able to marry her and have a family with her,
assuming he even has such interests (increasingly, year by year, Westerners do
not), who realistically will not be part of her life beyond this night or
the next few weeks or months? Liberating, partly because of the way society
makes you dress, but also partly because of the way it controls men and demands
respect for women from them, to be able to walk the streets without being hassled
just for being female? "Hey, come on over and say hello!" "Yo,
Moma, you lookin' fiine!" "Mm-yeah!" (These rules apply to
Egyptian men and their own women. The same Egyptian men will feel free to hassle
Western women, whose reputation is very low.)
Yes, these are good things. But I wouldn't be honest if I denied that this vast,
messy city has the capacity to absolutely enrage you. The whole country
does.
I'd leave in the morning from my base on the island of Zamalek, an upscale place
plunked in the middle of the Nile. Zamalek is about 2 miles long and 2/5 mile
wide. It's an island favored by Westerners, especially diplomats, and a couple
of dozen embassies are there. So you would expect it to be a place that would
make an American feel comfortable. But even here you can't escape how
problematical Cairo is.
Seeing the Cairenes trying to walk up to the El Zamalek Kubri Bridge even though
the sidewalk simply disappears always made me uncomfortable. Even scared to
watch. Throughout Cairo I would see girls and women holding hands or linking
arms to give each other support and courage as they plunged into the deadly
traffic. All that's needed to avoid this mess is to build sidewalks up to
bridges or consistently along streets and install traffic lights, perhaps using
just a pittance of those endless billions the U.S. has poured into this corrupt
land. Or the way perfectly fine sidewalks suddenly turn narrow or turn into
rubble or sand or even totally disappear, in the most unlikely places. It's one
of the many ways the city's reality struck me as somehow "off", for
all its seeming modernity. Here in the West we have certain expectations for
everyday physical reality, such as consistency and logic in the infrastructure,
and good maintenance of it, and these expectations are continually frustrated in
Cairo, and you're thrown off balance by it, and in the end enraged, and you feel
contempt too, though to actually live your whole life in Cairo I think must lead
more to a kind of nervous exhaustion and deep resignation. Walking south on
Zamalek across the street from the river-- it's often not possible to walk right
along the river-- some blocks seem initially fine, the buildings certainly solid
and modern-- but somehow things are always turning wrong. I'm not talking about
native costumes and the Arabic chatter around you-- that's delightful. I mean
the incompetence and lack of caring in the way the city has physically been made
up, and in people's behavior as a result. I mentioned how you can be walking on
a good sidewalk and have it suddenly turn to rubble or sand. Another example is
the ridiculous height of the sidewalks, how you step way down off the
curb, cross, and then have to step way up to get back on the sidewalk.
Not always, but often. It was okay for me, but unnecessarily hard on the old or
weak or for children. Hasn't anyone in Egypt studied how high sidewalks are in
the West? How high sidewalks should be? It seems like a small thing, but it's an
accumulation of small things done well that make a city work.
As I traveled about I would occasionally take out an index card and jot some notes
on it, though it was something I was warned against doing in such a militarized
city, with police and soldiers with rifles and submachineguns sometimes present
even on quiet residential side streets. Here-- join my mind as it floats through
the city of Cairo, or to its north:
"This is a city like Bangkok or Ankara, growing too fast, hungry for
Western Miracle Wealth, newly rich, not planning well, seeking a bright new
fantasy of living....Movie billboards- Men: goofish, or impossibly good looking,
or older men. The Women: Dark, full-fleshed beauties like Bollywood or Latin
TV....Scarf - a soft helmet of virtue....And increasingly in the West it is only
Islamic men who get to know the joy of lasting marriage (& early marriage),
a wife who doesn't cheat drink smoke do drugs dress like a slut or alternatively
an obese heterosexual butch and the joys of raising a large family &
maintaining control of the children....Into an antique shop-- people sitting
around, chatting no hard sell....If only the countries were democracies. And if
only the great crisis (see two essays back) wasn't coming which will undo so
much of the Islamic world's material progress, & drive them who knows how
crazy...Traffic police seeming to do nothing, rarely stop traffic....Cars
parking on sidewalks, in street....few public phones few garbage cans....Shops
more like very large booths and they're open to the street. No doors or
windows....Entrances to older apartment buildings, especially small ones: dark,
narrow, not one electric bulb Like entering a medieval....donkey carts &
horse carts appear. Flocks of sheep...Narrow streets and
alleyways...Dusty...Polluted ditches....People - friendly, dignified, bordering
obsequiousness. Helpful....I didn't see a single rail car that looked like it
had been washed in decades. The inside was very clean....Fancy co-op/condo along
shore drive-- @ $160,000 Great teeming city. Great poverty viewed along the way.
Worse than anything in Thailand or Turkey. Old, pitiful apartment
buildings....Also, donkeys cost about 700 Pounds ($108), camels about 3,000
Pounds ($480)....Half of the War on Terror is about what will be the role of
women in the coming days, especially how much of their virulent, potentially
anarchic powers of sexuality & emotion should be released into the
world....many of the windows without glass, shutters only....what appeared to be
mud huts topped by thatch. I hope what I was seeing were structures meant for
animals, not humans....vast fields of garbage and shiny filth-- cans? glass?--
gleaming in the bright sunshine...I assume the ducks and geese "do their
business" in the pools, & I hope the people didn't use the pool's water
for any purpose....The Nile itself...seems to barely move....I saw no swimmers,
& little boat traffic of any kind. On the outskirts of Cairo & further
north factories pour their filth into the water....Yet the neighborhoods have
their mosques, the minarets soaring over the slum buildings & glittery
garbage fields, like fierce, pure, transcendent rocket ships of faith, their
launch to journeys not ours....The German woman backing back & holding her
camera away from the donkey driver ('Egyptian taxi'): 'Nein, nein'....Poor
signs, no signs....A group of male runners in track suits actually running
against the traffic down the middle of a highway....Scarfs-- but one scarf said
'Louis Vuitton, Paris'....Perfect example-- the bathroom in the Cairo Tower, a
major tourist spot-- no toilet paper & no towels....A museum w/no
b-r!....Museums that close between 1 & 5, or close for the day at
2....Smokers....The greatest insult I can give the Cairenes is this: Traveling
your city I understand why every army you & every other Arab country ever
threw at the Israelis was immediately annihilated. You have most of the outer
appurtenance of modernity & think you've completed the process but missing
is the inner mental efficiency. In a sense, in peacetime, you kind of fake it,
but war is the ultimate test of all, and an outer skim of modernity isn't
enough. The West triumphed over the world through an inner mind honed to
ruthless, fat-free efficiency....Cairo...works the way your PC works:...the
product of an amazing technology, it is incompetently designed, without human
comfort in mind...as if actually designed to fail at some point and crash, or
succumb to some virus its nature creates, or to be bored through by some worm
that exists only because it exists....I realize how ordered NYC is, & that
it has standards....missing...labels on museum exhibits....The elevator operator
in the elevator going up to the top of the Cairo Tower giving me some bullshit:
pandering, obsequious, meaningless 'America? America number one!', & then
pumping my hand up and down, with a big, hungry smile, & when I don't pay
him for this nonsense, ostentatiously pulling out & playing with a fold of
bills. So I gave him an Egyptian pound. 'Thank you for your story', I
said....After a week or so you begin to accept everything around you as normal,
so whether it's no sidewalks in Cairo or no toilets in Thailand or people
cooking on the street in Bombay while a bull passes behind them and a bearded
man in a loincloth passes in front of them-- that's just how it is...And to
change it-- is ridiculous. And of course impossible...A sense of pity, &
love, for human beings, who are trying so hard, yet are so misguided....Each old
Museum has relatively large #'s of guards, attendants, observers, doorkeepers,
ticket seller, ticket taker, 2 others to shmooze with the ticket taker....Abdeen
Palace. I was the only one there, on a Tuesday afternoon. Yet a ticket seller--
never saw a computer with any ticket seller-- 4 guards outside, about as many
inside, 2 women seated and chatting at the entrance to 1 exhibit, 4 or 5 male
attendants or guards. Book: Closes at 3. They: 2:45. At: 2:25, they start trying
to shoo me out....The automobile is like a computer virus. It infects the
software called the human mind & tks control of it....battered cars and
cabs, doors don't fully close, full of dents and batterings, fenders
falling....Roofs formed of flat pieces of wood (or just cardboard) laid on a
sparse row of crossbeams. Then garbage piled on top (not by the inhabitant, we
assume)....Guy sitting next to girl on bench: His arm hovers toward her back
then suddenly stops, hovers an instant & pulls back....Vegetarianism. I ask
for macaroni, potatoes & carrots-- get separate spaghetti, separate french
fries, & a single quarter-sized carrot slice. The Egyptian at the next
table, who'd heard me trying to get across a vegetarian meal [in Arabic],
laughed good-naturedly at the result. I held up the little carrot piece. 'Kwayyis,'
I said. 'Everything's fine.'....horse w/tremendous load trying to navigate the
Suq....Noticed lipstick on conservatively dressed women...."
At night I sit and read another tourist guide (Insight Guide to Egypt) to
see if it can give me some deeper understanding of what I'm experiencing, but
actually it confirms my own impressions:
"Egyptians are tactful and diplomatic, sometimes even to the point of
obsequiousness."
"On Cairo's streets the contrast between the elegance of imported luxury
and the rolling slum of a packed bus or the pathetic heap of a trash-collector's
donkey cart is particularly shocking....Trash collectors, known as zabbalin
or 'garbage people', live in conditions of appalling squalor...."
"Products of a school system that stifles curiosity and promotes learning
by rote, more and more young Egyptians feel a sense of frustration regarding the
future."
"Increasingly one finds university graduates working as taxi-drivers,
plumbers, mechanics and the like." (My only real conversation with a taxi
driver-- they generally have little or no English-- is with a high school
teacher who has an engineering degree, but has to moonlight to make ends meet,
and seems to be expressing that nervous exhaustion [vigorously smoking as we
talk] and resignation I mentioned.)
"The typical lifespan is not long-- perhaps 55 years-- and many Egyptians
appear to die of worry or grief...While families and neighbourhoods provide a
degree of support unimaginable in the West, they also eliminate
privacy...."
"...there are some districts of Cairo where the average density is three to
a room."
"...the Egyptian bureaucracy and public-sector industry, which together
employ half of the non-agricultural workforce, is catastrophically overstaffed.
Studies have shown that an average government employee actually works for
between six and 30 minutes a day."
"An atmosphere of melancholy pervades life but, strangely enough, the
salient characteristic of the Egyptians is their cheerfulness."
_______________________________________________________________
As I traveled about this huge and mediocre city I realized that there wasn't one
20th Century thing in it that would have brought me to it, and like every other
tourist who comes here I came for the past. But the present is overwhelming and
smothers you. This doesn't speak well for the Egyptians of today, but, really,
the same could pretty much be said of two of the most gloried European cities
I've visited-- London and Paris, the capitals of two once great empires and now
utterly played-out nations. There isn't one artwork or piece of architecture in
the last half-century to draw you to either place, or really to New York City
either. Indeed, staring down the Thames at the blocky and undistinguished office
towers that increasingly line it-- I could just as easily have been looking at
office buildings in Atlanta or Houston. A paradox, how this enormously wealthy
modern world of ours is creatively parched, and may not even want to live.
Is Egypt exhausted too, or is there some present-day source of energy to all
this that is unavailable to the West?
Again. And ending. With the subject of Islam.
On my last full day in Cairo my guide took me to a number of its greatest
mosques, including one she says is so great it's called "the Fourth
Pyramid". Looking back now, they sort of run together in my mind,
especially since I had so little time left on the trip. To get you their exact
names I guess I could go back to my guidebook, but that's not important. I
remember one after another, all with soaring interiors and great windows of
colored glass and massive columns and immense and beautiful carpeting (except
for one with such a beautiful tiled floor no carpet was thought necessary), and
light that had a quality of its own, a kind of brightness of the outdoors
beautifully touched and cooled by the indoors as it floated down. In some of the
mosques there were many worshippers, in others almost no one. In one of these
latter my guide, who obviously knew him, prevailed on the Imam, a youngish man
with a short dark beard, in a robe of course, to sing/chant in Arabic, his face
then tilted up to play his voice against the great interior, utilizing all the
echo effects. Voice was strong, just a tad over-dramatic I thought (playing to
his small Western audience?), but standing in that vast chamber near him as he
wailed his faith to the sky, I had my thoughts-- perhaps few of any originality.
Islam is impressive. The building I stood in was a work of genius. His faith was
strong. The question I can't answer, since those are days we all have to live
through, is how much of this power is going to determine history, and how much
is like the Louvre or Westminster Abbey, tokens of power past. Standing in the
great mosques in my socks, uneasy at the sight of bearded robed men around me,
though my guide assured me "Everything's okay" and that we were
welcome, I rather thought I was being serenaded to a considerable extent by the
human future.
Yet outside, the same messy megalopolis buzzed and swirled and both succeeded
and failed in meeting human need. I was about to return to a city which is
itself both a glory and a mess, in a country that is the same, so any certainty,
and any feeling of superiority, was put aside.
The plane I returned west on, cramped into coach as always, is a miracle of
human ingenuity, as are our great faiths, and our basic collective attempt as a
species to be the everything that is everywhere. But though I saw many vivid and
wonderful sights, and tapped into the reality of ages past, present and to come,
I'm afraid my final conclusion cannot satisfy everyone. It is a sour and in the
end unimpressed one, where not tragic, of activity that is half madness, though
the world doesn't know, the work of an ape that is as much to be pitied for the
results of its sudden, inexplicable power as it is to be admired or, really, as
it would prefer, in its endless self-satisfaction at how it lives and what it's
done, worshipped. Like, once, those poor and prostrate, dried-out Pharaohs.
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