A nightclub on the Nile. Eight dour musicians sit on wooden chairs behind the emcee, a voluble man with bad skin and a commanding presence. Though the room is small, he carries a microphone, trailing the cord behind him. It doesn’t quite go with his robe and turban. The Egyptian Bill Murray. He patters gutturally with the audience and then, without warning, breaks into song-a searing, hypnotic, strangely soothing wail of Arabic.
I am sitting at a table directly in front of the stage with my two new friends, Gamal and Sherif. A plate of fruit decorates the center-bunches of grapes and neatly sliced bananas and oranges. Giant brown bottles of Stella beer stand in front of us like inactive smokestacks.
It is exactly where I want to be. After a somewhat frustrating week wandering alone around Cairo, I have, at last, broken through the wall that separates-everywhere, but especially perhaps in the Arab world-the tourist from the native. Looking around, I see that I am the only non-Egyptian or Arab in the place. The closest thing to fellow tourists are the loud Kuwaitis at a neighboring table. I grab a grape. I swig a Stella. I ask Gamal what the emcee is saying.
“He’s saying he wants to dance with you.”
True, he’s walking straight toward me. Despite my protests, he pulls me up on stage. He continues to hold my hand. The band starts playing. Not a performer at heart, I debate which will be the less humiliating: standing motionless and playing the spoilsport or coaxing my body into sensuous Levantine writhings. Either way, it seems to me, I lose. I sense the audience’s impatience, yet all I can think of is: This is exactly where I don’t want to be.
I arrived in Cairo a week earlier on a bus from Jerusalem. I was a bit apprehensive: This was before the bombs destroyed the tour buses parked on Tahrir Square but after the attacks on tourists in the south. At a party the night before my departure, a young, plump Palestinian woman said passionately: “I love Egypt! I love its noise! I love its dirt! I love its nice people! I love its nasty people!” With a population of 12 million, Cairo is the largest city in Africa.
My hotel was in Dokki, a relatively prosperous neighborhood far from everything. Each morning I stepped out of the lobby, steeling myself for the requisite haggle with the taxi drivers. Buses were out of the question, though I decided one morning to take one. Later I met foreigners who had lived in Cairo for months and never had boarded a bus. Even if they spoke Arabic, which I didn’t, and knew where it was going, there was the problem of getting off-fighting through the crush and then jumping, usually while the bus was still moving.
One morning, in rush-hour traffic on the El Gala bridge, I saw a cluster of young men hanging out of the unclosed door of a bus and using their hands to fend off the side of an encroaching truck.
My bus started out comfortably but became crowded quickly. One of them, a serious young man, motioned sternly to me to stand back from the young woman in front. He insisted on a space of about a foot on a bus that was short of empty inches. When my stop came up, I jumped with the happy release of the seasoned parachutist.
Taxi drivers were no less instructive. They drove their battered little black-and-white cabs down streets without lanes, through intersections without lights, around circles without signs. Because of the small engines and the constant traffic, no one ever achieved great speeds, so the feeling for the foreign passenger was less of fear than of constant suspense-like a game of bumper cars played by adults.
The excitement increased at night, when cabbies refused to use their lights except for an approach, flicking them on and quickly off the way we do high beams.
This reluctance with illumination was compensated for by an almost devout belief in the horn. All drivers, at all hours, honked their horns; it is the sound that Cairenes go to sleep with and the one they wake up to. Sitting in the back seat, I started to judge the distance of taxi rides not by miles, or, God forbid, fares, but by the number of beeps the driver made with his horn. From my hotel to the Cairo Tower, for instance, was about a 46-beep ride. To the Egyptian Antiquities Museum, a 35-beep one.
An American student I met expressed his belief that there is a directional message in the beeps-a secret language, like that of dolphins, that outsiders never can hope to decipher. But to me the honking sounded more like a desperate plea for recognition in a thunderously crowded metropolis, each pert, individual beep rising above the dust and clatter and chaos and crying: “Look, it’s me! I’m here! I’m alive!”
Downtown, walking the tourist routes along the Nile River or around the museums, I would attract shoeshine boys, taxi drivers (“A tour of Giza, sir? Sakkara?”) and papyrus vendors (“Is very old, very ancient, very worth much money. But for you, my friend . . .”). People came across as gentle and quick to smile and in some cases genuinely if ungrammatically friendly. “Welcome from Egypt!” After the first two days, I forgot about terrorists and wandered lost and at ease through endless alleyways.
But there was, underlining every interaction, every seemingly guileless overture, the insurmountable discrepancy between the wealth of the West and the poverty of Egypt. So that everything, sooner or later (and sooner rather than later), came around to money, or baksheesh. It was understandable-with debilitating unemployment and pitiful salaries-and unavoidable. I grew so weary of this fact of life that when people asked where I was from, I sometimes said, “Poland.” It did not deter them.
One evening I stopped a taxi for a ride back to my hotel. The driver was a reasonable-looking young man. “Dokki,” I said. “How much?”
“You tell me,” he said.
“Four pounds.”
“Five,” he said. I got in, agreeing to this fare equal to about $1.80. He started driving. “What your nationality?” I told the truth.
“Ten pounds,” he said.
“Oh, no!”
“Why not? You rich. Me poor.America is rich country. My brother is doctor in Chicago. I know.”
“Doctors are rich. But I’m not a doctor. I’m a journalist.”
“A what?”
“A journalist. I write.”
“You write?” he asked with sudden interest. “I draw.” I smiled. We had cut through the stultifying mercantilism and arrived at something more essential, more true. We were no longer buyer and seller, tourist and native, rich man and poor man, and instead were two fellow human beings united by similar pursuits.
“I draw your portrait,” he said. “How much you pay?”
I did the usual things: I visited the Egyptian Antiquities Museum and was charmed by the treasures from Tutankhamun’s tomb, especially the elaborate carvings in alabaster of water hearses and top-hatted ibexes.
I walked around the campus of Al Azhar University, founded more than 1,000 years ago and still attracting students from around the Muslim world, preserving Cairo’s position as its intellectual and cultural center. I toured the Mohammed Ali Mosque, with its clock, a gift from King Louis Philippe of France that never has worked. (The French, in exchange, got the obelisk that now stands in Paris’ Place de la Concorde.) Heading back downtown on foot, I passed a girl of 14 or 15 sitting on the dusty curb in a soiled robe and feeding a baby from a small, dark breast as perfectly rounded as the domes of the mosque.
I ate fool-a fava bean dish that is to Egypt what pasta is to Italy-and drank mint tea in the ancient darkness of Fishawi’s Cafe under creaking fans and dusty chandeliers. My tea arrived on a copper tray accompanied by a silver bowl of sugar. Waiters passed frequently, delivering water pipes to finely robed regulars.
Nearby, deeper inside the Khan el Khalili bazaar, I found the Naguib Mahfouz Cafe and Restaurant, an antiseptic-looking place named after the Nobel Prize-winning author. (He does, according to the maitre d’, stop in from time to time, though Fishawi’s looked more his kind of place.)
At the Pyramids, I had the distinction of being the only tourist on the tour bus. My guide, a young Copt, gave a perfunctory performance, as if the rare one-to-one ratio, rather than personalizing the routine, simply reinforced its tedium. She stayed on the bus while I crawled down a chute into the depths of the Second Pyramid to find an empty room and “G. Belzoni, 2 mar. 1818” inscribed on the wall.
The Sphinx impressed, even with half a face, as did the wall reliefs at Sakkara-still-vivid comics-like strips recording in painstaking detail the everyday life of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2345-2181 B.C.). I especially liked the zigzag pattern of water flowing from a jug, and the scribe wearing a pencil behind his ear.
But as usual, I was more interested in the human beside me than the history around me, in excavating whatever treasures and tidbits I could of the present. We made an obligatory stop at the King Ramses Carpet School, where barefoot children sat in rows weaving with small and flittering fingers. One, a grimy flirt, showed me how to do it and then, with an innocent smile, put out her hand and said, “Baksheesh.”
We ate a solitary lunch at a roadside restaurant set for a busload. My guide was visibly distressed by the drop in tourism. Islamic extremists had begun by attacking her people-the Copts-and now they were threatening her livelihood. (She was convinced they were being sent in by Iran.) Her dream, she said, was to see Jerusalem, but it would not look good if her husband, an ophthalmologist in the army, visited Israel.
She herself was a pediatrician but had given up medicine to have children. “Husband, home and family,” she said. “Work comes after all of that.”
And she was not an Arab. “Egyptians are not Arabs, you know. We had a civilization long before the Arabs. People think we’re Arabs, but we’re not.”
It is my next-to-last night in Cairo, and I ask the hotel receptionist to recommend a nightclub that’s not for tourists. Gamal is a somber young man with a hooked nose and hooded eyes. “My friend and I are going to one at 11,” he says softly. “You can come with us.”
We drive in Gamal’s car, a sputtering Fiat, across the 6 October Bridge, then north along the Nile, away from the luxury hotels. We park in front of a low building set along the banks. Gamal insists on paying at the door, saying they’ll charge more if they know I’m American.
A waiter comes and takes our order. The emcee asks where people are from. The Kuwaitis make themselves known. There are a couple of Jordanians. Gamal introduces me, loudly, as from America. I hope there are no Islamic extremists slumming tonight.
I do my dance. I return to my seat. I think if you do have to make a fool of yourself, it’s best that it’s done thousands of miles from home. A young woman-the only one in the audience-follows me on stage. She takes off her scarf and ties it around her ample hips, the better to accentuate her practiced movements. Her husband smiles approvingly from their table. A Kuwaiti, even more appreciative, climbs on stage and, out of a thick wad, flicks dozens of pound notes that fall, like dead leaves, over her slithering form. (I think: He didn’t do that for me. Just as well.)
Finally, the belly dancer appears. She is not obese, and in fact has rather slender arms, which makes me wonder about the authenticity of the place. But Sherif, using universal male sign language-first both hands, slightly curved and with fingers widespread, held out at an exaggerated distance from the chest, followed by a simple thumbs up-demonstrates his approval.
Gamal and I talk politics. “The Egyptians like the Palestinians,” he says.
“They don’t particularly like you,” I say.
“Egypt is the mother of all Arabs,” he explains. “That’s why many Arabs don’t like us. You know, when a child does something wrong, the mother slaps it. That’s what Egypt does, and that makes them unhappy.”
On the way home, after another round of Stellas, I offer to reimburse Gamal for the evening. It has been a pleasant night out, refreshingly free of monetary haggling. I feel honored to have been the recipient of legendary Arab hospitality.
“Whatever you want to give,” Gamal says humbly.
I hand him 200 pounds (about $72).
“Tom,” he says sadly, “those were very expensive beers. Very expensive.”
GETTING THERE, STAYING THERE
There are no non-stop flights from the United States to Cairo. Flights from Chicago require a change of planes in Europe. Contact a travel agent.
More on travel to Cairo:
Safety: Islamic extremists have not given up their goal of undermining the Egyptian government by disrupting the tourist industry, but the government-understanding how important that industry is to the economy-is on an all-out campaign to capture the perpetrators. What is so disturbing is that before the recent attacks on tourists, Cairo was one of the world’s safest cities. Indeed, it still is. Despite its poverty, it has no tradition of mugging or street crime. And there is a very visible police presence. The best advice to tourists is: Don’t bring undue attention to yourself through clothes (avoid shorts and sneakers) or behavior.
Lodging: I stayed at a three-star hotel that was adequate for my purposes, but I wouldn’t wish it on my dear readers. Cairo is one of those cities in which it’s best to stay in the larger, more expensive, more touristy hotels, of which there are many.
Eating: Similarly, most tourists eat in hotel restaurants, which specialize in continental cuisine. If they do venture out, it’s often to Felfela’s, 15 Talat Harb St. (near Tahrir Square), which has been written up in Gourmet magazine. The specialty is fool, a fava bean dish served with warm mounds of delicious pita.
Tours: Offices everywhere offer all kinds of packages, from an afternoon trip to Giza to a Nile cruise. Most hotels also organize tours.
More information: The Egyptian Tourist Authority, Suite 1706, 630 5th Ave., New York, N.Y. 10111; 212-332-2570.
