The Wet and the Dry

by Lawrence Osborne

  Sébastien walked over and sat at the neighboring table. “You look pale. Are you all right?”

  “I just got a little light-headed. It happens.”

  “It’s a strange experience, I know. The first time especially.”

  I feel drunk, I thought, as drunk as they are.

  The dance went on, and it occurred to us that after two hours, it might be opportune to make a quiet exit.

  But before we could agree, the ceremony itself began to wind down, and the men who had crammed the shrine room began to pour back out into the salon. As they did so, they parted to create a narrow passage, and it was clear that down this gap the leader would walk, destined to park himself in a red velvet armchair that was hastily being prepared for him next to the sofa where they were seated. It happened in the blink of an eye. The leader, mopping his brow, came down toward them, surrounded by awestruck followers.

  He seated himself with a sigh in the armchair, and two helpers came behind him. They pulled open his shirt and placed inside it a length of padding to shield his skin from the sweat-soaked fabric. His white cap was also replaced. He was about sixty, with cunning eyes and a short gray beard, cropped iron hair. He said, “Cigari,” and a man lunged forward immediately with a Camel Wide. Another sprang forward to provide the lighter flame. As the acolytes swarmed around their leader, we were trapped. We got up to leave at once. The leader blew out a lazy plume of smoke, cast an eye upon us, and said in Turkish, “You don’t have to leave.” We had no choice but to sit down again and endure the entire audience. The leader was going to take questions from his disciples about life, death, and all things in between. In doing this, he would go through about eight cigarettes.

  As he began answering the questions of his disciples—they sighed together and placed their hands on their hearts every time he said something profound—a Pakistani journalist appeared at his side with a Turkish interpreter, one of the disciples. The man had a formidable gray beard and grinned at everything the leader said, though it was obvious he spoke not a word of Turkish. He asked some simple-minded questions in English, and the leader replied with a verse in Koranic Arabic.

  “Understand?” he asked the Pakistani in English.

  No, the man did not get the Arabic.

  “The leader says that by dancing this way, we pass over into the other world. We shed our ego in this life.”

  “Yes, shed the ego,” the Pakistani repeated.

  “We shed our normal consciousness.”

  “Ah yes.” The Pakistani suddenly looked tense and a little at sea. “You mean we pass into a different state of mind?”

  “It’s as Rumi says. We drink the wine of love.”

  “Ah yes, love.”

  “Love is what we are striving for. It is all about love. And no one can make love grow by itself. It cannot be forced. It must come of its own accord.”

  There was a slight tension now. It was the idea of wine, even metaphorical wine. One can see why fundamentalists have always hated Sufism. For not only did Sufis use wine as a metaphor of intoxicating love, they also advocated love of Christians and Jews.

  The advantage of the Pakistani’s presence was that now I could understand some of the exchanges better. The leader chatted and cajoled, chain-smoking furiously, cracking little jokes and demanding some chocolate biscuits and tea that boys were carrying around the room on precariously balanced trays. It lasted an hour. Eventually, the leader tired of it and called an end to the questions. All rose. There was an orderly and polite scramble for the doors. We put on our shoes outside, under dripping icicles, and came back into the street, mobbed by the burly beggars in black.

  On the far side of Fevzi Paşa, the streets slope downward through ancient neighborhoods now rebuilt as cement tenements, their surfaces barnacled with satellite dishes. The lamps strung high up between them rock back and forth in the winds, making the alleys flash in and out of darkness. I went down alone, having said my fond goodnights to Monsieur de Courtois, and the mood of Sufi intoxication persisted until I came to the oval plaza of dark orange buildings where a forbidding Roman column stands, the Column of Marcian.

  In the middle of the neighborhood whose tradesmen like to dervish, this gray granite column stands marooned supporting a Corinthian capital and a square block of eroded marble. It was erected by the praetor of the emperor Marcian in A.D. 455. The pedestal has four sides bearing a sculpture of a winged Nike, a cryptogram of Christ, and a symbolic fish. The slots of the Latin letters, which were once filled with bronze, are empty but they can be read: “Look upon this statue and column erected for the Emperor Marcian by his praetor Tatianus.” The Turks call this column the Kiz Taşi, the “column of the girls,” because of the delicate carved Nike with her flowing robes and her outlines of long disappeared wings. I thought in that moment of the carved relief of the bacchic dancing girl I had seen at the Temple of Dionysus in Baalbek. It was the same motion, a girl moving forward as if dancing: a reminder that in that world it was also the girls who danced drunk and who were immortalized accordingly, whose volatile and ecstatic forms were celebrated as if they would last forever.

  Twilight at the Windsor Hotel

  At 6:10 sharp I come down from my decrepit room at the Windsor Hotel in Cairo, down the freezing stairs wound around an elevator shaft of such perilous ancientness that the heart does a little two-step at the thought of actually getting into the elevator itself. Nevertheless Mustafa is there waiting with the filthy iron doors held open for me, a ghost in a dark blue uniform that has probably been worn by generations of elevator boys since the days when the Windsor was the British Officers’ Mess in Cairo. His yellow eyes light up expecting a tip. “Sir?” he cries, raising a hand to invite me into his little carpeted cage. It is his duty, after all, to carry drunkards up and down from their tawdry rooms to the famous bar on the second floor, and no matter if they are afraid for their lives; he must carry them.

  He does this by means of a manual brass switch. “How punctual you are, habibi,” his eyes say as I walk past him refusing. (The hand-operated car is surely a death trap, though I will likely need it later.) I come down to the bar, and as usual in these days of trouble and strife in Egypt, it is empty. The never-extinguished TV, however, continues to bravely relay a stream of belly-dance shows to synthesizer music. The barrel chairs look sinisterly inviting. But one cannot forget that Tahrir Square is only a short walk away. The streets are filled with a strange, seething anxiety and self-hatred. This winter the tourists have stayed home or ventured to the Seychelles instead.

  An ancient and venerable bar must have a barman exuding those same qualities. The Windsor has Marco. Marco is about five foot four but musters the firmest and most intimate of male handshakes. You immediately wonder whether it might be possible that a very young Marco once pulled pints for Lawrence Durrell back in the day. Cairo is a city where nothing, but nothing, is forgotten. The walls of the stairwell, for example, are darkly rich with travel posters—hand-painted, one would say—issued from the offices of Swissair in the 1920s. The scenes are of cobbled squares in Germany long obliterated by the Royal Air Force. Of Saint Moritz filled with Weimar-era millionaires. The hotel was originally built as a bathhouse for the royal family around 1900. It then became an annex of the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, which was burned down by a mob during the Revolution of 1952.

  The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officers’ mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like the bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.

  It was here that Lawrence of Arabia stormed into the bar after
taking Aqaba and returning in triumph to Cairo, a scene famously re-created by David Lean in a grander setting probably inspired by Shepheard’s, which lay two blocks away at the edge of the Ezbekia park and which has now been replaced by a miserable gas station.

  Lawrence at the Windsor bar in 1917, scandalously dressed as a Bedu and demanding a drink: what other bar would you want to drink at?

  The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.

  I order a gin and tonic, but alas there is no tonic. There is no explanation for this dire lacuna. Instead there is soda, so I can have a whisky soda and a plate of slippery yellow thermos beans. I notice then, as I sit there with three or four Egyptian gentlemen of the elderly and bohemian variety (the two things now being virtually synonymous), that Egyptian cell phones sometimes erupt with a tune I know well but that takes some time to pin down—it is, quite unbelievably, Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending.” How has this fragment of English classical music found its way into the repertory of the contemporary Egyptian cell phone? There is no one to ask, since no one knows what it is.

  Looking over now, I see that these gentlemen are of the vaguely literary kind. Suave Egyptian men now in their seventies who wear those enormous sunglasses that are perfectly oval, with pale safari suits and pocket squares. The noses blunt and squat, the skin heavily scarred and blotched, the manners exquisite. Men of another era, the era of Sadat, I suppose, and by legacy of the golden 1960s, when this part of Cairo was a paradise of conversation and erotic dalliance. One of them comes over to the bar on unsteady legs to order another shot of Biulli’s Egyptian whisky. It’s a pretty raw drink, but what is familiar soothes.

  “British?” he says, shaking my hand for some reason. The eyes are quite beautifully mad behind the tinted ovals of glass, and he leans toward me as Egyptian men sometimes do, suddenly a little too intimate but nevertheless unconcerned by one’s stiff-necked reactions. He whispers heavily in my ear: “Tallyho!”

  The British left their mark on this city, on this faded and rotting downtown. They left their bars, for one thing. They left a memory that has taken decades to fade out, of a hard-drinking military elite that mostly despised the place to which it had been posted. But then they were the last wave of the Europeans who washed over Egypt beginning with Napoléon’s invasion of 1798. That so-called Army of Scholars, among other things, ushered in a revival of Egyptian liquor. But it eventually led to the aforementioned boulevards and to the incredible buildings of downtown Cairo and Alexandria. It led to the creation of a unique city now famous, if it is famous at all, through the works (if we exempt the incomparable Naguib Mahfouz) of the novelist Alaa Al Aswany. And in particular The Yacoubian Building.

  In his foreword to the English version of that book, Aswany—who was originally a dentist—describes going with a real estate agent around downtown looking for a place to house a new dental clinic. To him, a middle-class Egyptian, this decaying core of the city was unknown, a revelation:

  This experience did, however, bring me an important thought: what was the secret of the significance of Downtown? Why wasn’t Downtown just like the other districts of Cairo? In fact, Downtown is not just a residential or commercial center; it is a lot more than that. It represents a whole epoch, an epoch during which Egypt was characterized by tolerance and an amazing capacity to absorb people of different nationalities, cultures, and religions. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and Italians—all of them lived in Egypt for long centuries and considered it their true home. Downtown was tantamount to an embodiment of Egypt’s great capacity to absorb different cultures and melt them in a single human crucible. Downtown was also, in my opinion, an example of Egypt’s project of modernization, which extended from the Muhammad Ali years up to the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. It was inevitable that Downtown should wither away thereafter, its importance declining with the ending of the qualities that it represented. The culture of co-existence came to an end and, beginning with the eighties, Egypt fell into the grip of Wahhabite-Salafite thinking, in the face of which Egypt’s open, moderate reading of Islam retreated.

  I go out into the streets that form a warren between Al-Alfi Bey and 26th July, streets of somnolent trees that look like fossils of ancient forests, of the cafés that are spread out under white strip lights with rows of shish pipes and their baskets of coals smoking in the cold. Al-Alfi leads toward the Midan Orabi, an open space around which the shish cafés are scattered in carless alleys that also sustain a few last baladi or local bars. The gaudiest is Scheherazade, which lies at the top of a flight of ominous steps whose walls are covered with the peeling pictures of belly dancers of yore.

  The club is a single room with a stage at the far end and a decor of yearning Arabian nightmares. I sometimes come here and drink my Stellas and watch the tubby girls having their bras filled with pound notes—paltry sums compared to what you would see in a belly dancer’s bra in Beirut or Dubai. There is now a slightly harassed, furtive atmosphere in these sorts of places, as if the slutty girls hired by management to induce heavy consumption in their guests can never quite forget that out in the streets all the girls are now in headscarves. Their uncovered, inviting hair is now more than ever an anomaly. A sign that inside the Scheherazade they are fair game.

  Nearby, on the far side of 26th July—and even off the high-wattage sidewalks of Talaat Harb, where thousands of mannequins stand in windows displaying modest fashions for newly modest women—there are other, even more discreet baladi and belly-dance joints that have now withdrawn their more obvious signs and that exist inside a consensual secrecy.

  On 26th July, among the clothes stores, there is a tiny alley named after the Scarabee Hotel, which stands at its entrance. The Scarabee Alley leads past yet more fashion stores, past the down-at-heel lobby of the hotel, past cafés built into walls where the backgammon games are always at fever pitch.

  I come here when I want a shish in the courtyard cafés that lie at the end of the alley, in spaces that are squeezed between the vertical grandeur of old apartment blocks. The Scarabee Alley is a secret place that has not yet been gutted and sanitized, but its days are surely numbered.

  Even deeper into its bowels there lies a cluster of girlie bars: to the left, the LaVie Hotel and a club at ground level, and to the right the Meame and the Miscellany, which advertise themselves on a horizontal sign above the passageway that leads to them: Casino and Theater Miscellany. At dusk, as the small mosques all around—and a dozen televisions and radios—break into the muezzin’s song, the lights are switched on by the café owners, and the passageway leading to the clubs comes alive with groomed hustlers and tall, swaying girls in lace-up heeled leather boots.

  I have often seen the scarfed matrons puffing at their pipes in the courtyard café watch these creatures arrive with expressions of wide-eyed horror, which at the same time accommodates a sly curiosity. The club girls are aware that they are no longer protected by invisible hands. The tide is turning against them, and all they have to rely on is the sad immortality of male desire. It might save them.

  I sit here not just to escape Cairo but to escape Istanbul as well. Unlike Aksaray, this tiny enclave of bedlam is filled with Egyptian anarchy and humor. The Scarabee Alley is amateurish. On top of strange poles hang stuffed tiger toys, their tails and paws dropping earthward.

  The café’s plasma screens show American wrestling shows, keenly enjoyed as far as I can see by the same scarfed matrons whose disapproval does not extend to large men in bikini bottoms. I can drink Lipton with sugar and smoke for hours,
and Stella is served without much discretion. When I ask about this, a neighbor tells me that Egyptians do not really regard beer as sinful alcohol. “After all,” he says, “we invented it. We cannot ban what we invented.”

  It is probably true. Go to the Egyptian Museum, and in the room devoted to the funerary models rescued from the tomb of Meket-Re, a high official of the Middle Kingdom at Thebes, you see miniature reproductions of various workshops. Among them is a brewery, with seven little men thrusting their hands into beer fermentation jars. These perfectly preserved models of ships, workshops, and villa gardens filled with exquisitely painted fig trees are thought to embody things that the dead man valued in life and that he wanted to take with him into the afterlife. Four thousand years ago Meket-Re wanted his beer in the afterlife. In one model ship he is shown reclining in the shade of a bull hide smelling a lotus flower and listening to a minstrel.

  When darkness comes, I will go to the Meame and sit at a table in a dark corner and watch a girl dance on the stage, then wander down to the tables with an insolence that is not quite lechery. The men delirious but seated, the girls there not to provide sex but to induce drinking.

  Alternatively, there is a short walk to the Amira on Talaat Harb, a drinking club consisting of four rooms each with live music. It is much the same atmosphere. The music is deafening; the men occasionally dance with the girls. The darkness almost total, and the withdrawal from the new puritanism of the country almost complete. How much one goes to bars just to escape what others laboriously refer to as real life. But what if that life is neither especially real nor even especially congenial? What if the society begins to close down, to narrow?