Baghdad Without a Map

by Tony Horwitz

  There was one quick call from Jack after that, warning me that the Gulf conflict “has kind of disappeared from the news over here,” then nothing for several weeks. I didn't need a coroner to tell me the story was dead; or, as they say in the trade, “spiked” (though computers have eliminated the need for editors to impale reporters' copy on desktop lances). Then one day there was a message from Jack, asking me to call again. Of course! They've changed their minds!

  They had. But it wasn't the story they'd reconsidered. “Remember I promised you a thou for a kill fee?” Jack said. He paused. “Well, it seems I overstepped my authority. . .”

  I settled for five hundred, which about covered my overrun on expenses. Hanging up the phone, having just renegotiated my first kill fee, I wondered how much lower my free-lance career could sink.

  5—CAIRO DAYS—Ozymanbias slept Here

  Why try to call up the traditions of vanished Egyptian grandeur? Why try to think at all? The thing was impossible. One must bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward.

  —MARK TWAIN, The Innocents Abroad

  Oayed took the corner recklessly, scattering chickens and swerving to avoid a water buffalo blocking the road. Traffic was bumper to bumper, the buffalo backed up behind a donkey cart whose rear wheel was stuck in the mud. The donkey brayed, the buffalo bellowed, the chickens cackled madly. We'd escaped the snarled streets of downtown Cairo for a gridlocked barnyard instead.

  Sayed glanced over his shoulder and flashed me a loopy grin. “Home, sweet home,” he said. His goggles were spattered with mud. He kick-started the motorbike and roared off through the animal jam, and into the tangled back alleys of Shubra.

  I had met Sayed a few months before, in Australia, where he'd tutored me in Arabic. Our lessons foundered on the gagging “ah” sound that has no equivalent in English—or in any other language. “You sound as if you're choking on spaghetti,” Sayed would say, correcting me. “Just choke. Forget the spaghetti.” He usually gave up after fifteen minutes and tutored me in the wiles of Cairo instead.

  “Carry heaps of one-pound notes, because no one will ever give you change in Egypt, even if they've got pocketfuls of it.”

  Or: “Always walk close to the curb, well away from the buildings. Otherwise you may find water or something worse raining down on your head.”

  The chubby, impish Egyptian promised to continue my education during a visit to his family in Cairo later that year. And so I found myself on the back of a motorcycle, clutching Sayed's waist as he bent the bike around the corners of the neighborhood he'd fled eight years before.

  Shubra was once a rural quarter at Cairo's edge, a tree-shaded suburb where the nineteenth-century ruler Mohammed Ali built his summer palace. It was now one of Egypt's densest slums, with three million people poured into“ a space smaller than Central Park. The buildings clung so close to each other and to the narrow streets that they seemed to touch at the tops, like overarching boughs, crowding out the thin winter sun.

  Still, like so much of Cairo, Shubra retained a village air. It wasn't just the donkeys and buffalo. It was also that someone at every corner recognized Sayed as he tore past on his motorbike, dodging potholes and pedestrians.

  “Ya Sayed!” a woman cried from four floors up. She was hanging veils and the long Egyptian robes called galabiyas to dry in a narrow patch of morning sun. Sayed sputtered to a halt and blew her a kiss. “One of my cousins,” he said.

  At the next corner, a man beckoned from a sidewalk café. He sipped thick Turkish coffee and took languorous puffs from a water pipe as tall as himself. “Another cousin,” Sayed said, pulling over for his fifth free coffee of the day.

  The men kissed each other on both cheeks in the affectionate manner that is obligatory between Arab males, and forbidden in public between men and women. Then they sat holding hands and blowing smoke rings, chatting about family, about work, and about the women walking past to the market. When a buxom teenager sashayed by, Sayed's cousin let loose a low whistle and said something in Arabic that I recognized from my trips to buy food.

  “She's got onions?” I ventured.

  Sayed frowned. “Third lesson, you've forgotten.” The word was garlic. “She's got garlic. Meaning she's hot. Spicy.”

  Two men, one tall, one very short, rode up on bicycles and cadged cups of coffee from the café's owner. “In honor of Sayed's visit!” the short one cried in a strange, high-pitched giggle. Sayed leaned over and whispered, “Hashish speaking. When he's not so high, he uses the bike to snatch purses.”

  “Another cousin?”

  Sayed smiled. “I have lots of cousins. Last time I tried to remember them all I lost count at three hundred.”

  The tall man had milky eyes and a sly, gap-toothed grin. Sayed introduced him as Port Said, a nickname that referred to his skill at smuggling goods past customs officials at the Mediterranean port. Port Said stood up and proudly pantomimed his technique. Several jackets, worn over ten or so shirts—each pocket crammed with calculators and camera gear—and a bowlegged walk that concealed the small television set wedged between his robe-covered legs. He had a female accomplice who was always nine months pregnant with electronics strapped to her belly.

  “Do you need anything?” Port Said asked.

  “Yes, desperately,” Sayed said, “Someplace to pee.”

  The men laughed and we climbed back onto the motorbike. Sayed kicked the accelerator and enveloped us in dust and fumes. We made it as far as the next corner before the owner of a produce stand rushed into the street, kissing Sayed and stuffing his pockets with bananas and cucumbers. “You see why Egyptians are so fat,” Sayed said, thumping his ample belly, “and why Egyptian storekeepers are so poor.” At the next corner, a one-legged woman approached, holding a crude wooden crutch with one hand and using the other to balance a basket on her head. A duck poked its bill above the rim and squawked. Sayed slowed down, slam-dunked the bananas into the basket and sped around the corner, into the street where he'd been raised.

  “Nothing's changed,” he sighed, parking beside his family's motorcycle shop. Chains, carburetors and dented cans of diesel lay strewn across the unpaved road. Men with grease on their faces came out to greet us, offering the backs of their hands to avoid blackening our palms. “Runs like a dream,” Sayed lied, wheeling the bike inside. The garage was cluttered with motorcycle designs I'd never seen, except in old movies. Clunky machines with huge hooded fenders. Blunt-nosed sidecars. Wheels big enough to fit on snow-plows.

  “I bet some of this is leftover junk from El Alamein,” Sayed said, referring to the World War II battle site near Alexandria.

  At the back of the shop, a man clutched a dented spray can and frantically spattered a new white car with blue paint.

  “That car's got garlic,” Sayed said slowly, in Arabic, so I'd catch the joke. Then in English: “It's so hot the cops will probably be here by lunchtime.”

  It was the Cairo I'd glimpsed from taxi windows and during walks through the city, but failed to penetrate for lack of a guide. Perched in my twentieth-floor apartment on an island in the Nile, I'd read Naguib Mahfouz novels about Cairo slums crowded with opium addicts and con men like “Zaita the cripple-maker,” who rearranges the limbs of aspiring beggars—and takes a cut of every cent they earn. I'd taken Mahfouz's city for a Cairo that had long vanished, or perhaps had never existed. But here it was, hot and dusty and close, and here they all were: the car thief, the smuggler, the hash head.

  There was honest labor as well, though it wasn't hard to see why so many hustled instead. A pile of logs sprawled at the end of Sayed's street, beside a weed-covered rail line. Brawny men hewed furniture and split firewood with rusty axes as women stooped before each workshop, collecting sawdust in baskets. Sayed said the sawdust was used to soak up the dirt on the floors of their homes—jerry-built sheds of scrap timber, chinked with mud. Children gathered out back, competing with goats to salvage whatever they could from a mountain of smolder
ing rubbish. They worked intently, pausing only to fling orange peels and rotten tomatoes as the occasional locomotive chugged past.

  I had seen the same industry applied to garbage all across Cairo. Each dawn, Coptic Christians in donkey carts wound down from the desert hills to gather the city's rubbish, carrying it back to pick through and recycle. What they couldn't use, they fed to their pigs. The donkeys knew the way so well that they hoofed through the dark without harnesses while their drivers, often children of six or seven, slept in the cart's front seat.

  Whatever the Copts didn't take, the doormen in our lobby did. To dispose of anything, we simply set it on the stairwell or fire escape; within minutes it was gone. In the street sometimes, as I walked sipping a Pepsi, children trailed after me to see if I'd discard the bottle. In Cairo, littering was a philanthropic act.

  Sayed strolled over to greet one of the women—another cousin, apparently—and children swarmed around him, thrusting their palms into his face. Sayed handed out twenty-five-piaster notes, one at a time, feigning shock at their begging. “They think because I was on top of things here that I must be big in Australia,” he said. “They'd do better learning a few tricks from Port Said.”

  I had visited Sayed at his home in Sydney, a bare semidetached house with the bathroom out back. He worked at a government welfare office, earning just enough to support his Australian wife and two kids. Even so, by Shubra standards he'd “made it,” which is to say he'd made it out of Egypt, an unlikely feat for any but the best-connected Cairenes.

  Sayed's mother came to Cairo from a small Nile village and married his father at the age of eleven. She bore her first child at twelve, and twenty-five years later she went into the bathroom and gave birth to number seventeen—Sayed. “She was taking a shower when she felt labor pains,” Sayed said. “I popped out on the bathroom floor. After sixteen kids, she didn't think anything of it.”

  Sayed's father was a journeyman: sometime mechanic, sometime truckdriver, and sometime ill-tempered brawler who landed several times in jail. Sayed wasn't interested in fixing motorbikes—or in snatching purses—though his first job wasn't much better. A hustler in the bazaar taught him to buy polished bluestones for a few piasters, then to resell them for ten times that much as “golden scarabs.” Scarabs—dung beetles—were a symbol of resurrection in pharaonic times, and stone scarabs are talismans in modern Egypt.

  “We had a complicated price structure, depending on the customer,” Sayed said, chuckling at the memory. The highest rate was tamen saye, or “tourist price,” an unabashed rip-off. Somewhat less was tamen babibi, or “friend's price.” Cheapest of all was tamen yabood, or “Jew's price.” Egyptians hated Israelis but held to the stereotype that Jews were clever bargainers, able to buy things for less.

  Sayed memorized the scam in French, German and-English, to capture the tourist trade, and discovered he had a talent for languages. He secured a student's visa to France, and it was there, while picking grapes to earn some cash, that he met an Australian woman named Jo. Two years later, he migrated with her to Sydney.

  “I love Shubra,” he said, as we sipped another cup of coffee at the motorcycle shop. “But there was nothing for me here, except family.”

  Sayed's parents had since died, but one of his sisters still lived in the family's apartment above the motorcycle shop. There was no elevator and no bulb to light our way up the five flights of stairs. The dark steps smelled of urine. Sayed shoved open a door, and we entered a cramped chamber that appeared to double as a living and dining room, with a sofa made up for sleeping as well. There was a picture of Mecca on one wall and a Bruce Lee poster across from it, alongside a photograph of a smiling teenager with a lustrous mane of black hair.

  A stout woman in a housedress appeared in the doorway with a baby on each arm. Her hair was covered by a scarf, and the dark circles under her eyes had been hastily daubed with makeup. As she walked across to embrace Sayed, she barely lifted her slippered feet from the floor.

  “My sister,” Sayed said, lining her up beside the picture on the wall. “Still the most beautiful woman in Shubra.” At twenty-nine, she already had eleven children.

  She smiled shyly and disappeared into the kitchen, returning a moment later with steaming plates of rice and a basket filled with the puffed pita-like loaves that Egyptians eat by the dozen. It wasn't yet noon, a good two hours before the usual Egyptian lunch break, but she'd kept something cooking, just in case. Sayed tried to beg off eating, insisting that he'd had a big breakfast just a few hours before. His sister answered by bringing out a plate of roasted pigeons, garnered from a birdhouse she kept atop the building. In Arab homes, as in Jewish ones, overeating is an obligatory expression of love.

  The rice was covered with a gooey green stew made from a vegetable that tasted like spinach but had the consistency of okra. “It's name is molokiya” Sayed said, letting some ooze off a serving spoon. “But we like to call it phara-onic slime.” Molokiya was such an addiction in Egypt that one cruel and insane ruler named Al-Hakim had prohibited its consumption. The ban, and the mad caliph who imposed it, didn't last very long.

  As soon as we finished, men and boys began drifting in from school, from work, or from the tea houses where I'd seen them loafing. Each time a male arrived, Sayed's sister appeared with another plate, another mound of rice and molokiya. Daughters were ushered into the kitchen to help with the food and to have a nibble themselves, apart from the men. There must have been a dozen shifts at the table before the afternoon was over.

  The men ate quietly, keeping a lazy eye on the television, which broadcast the most popular show in Egypt: a Friday prayer session, led by a man named Sheik Sharawi. Pounding on his Koran, the sheik expounded on the evils of dancing, a hot issue in fundamentalist Egypt.

  Sayed slumped on the couch. “Give me a break, sheik,” he said, turning down the volume. When visiting Egypt, Sayed let his beard grow, along with his mustache and frizzy black hair. Scruff was a sign of piety among Muslims—and a convenient cover for lapsed souls like Sayed. “If I've got a beard, I don't get lectured about how I should spend more time in the mosque,” he said.

  Sayed glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock, the siesta hour. “Time to go for dinner at my other sister's,” he said. “You're expected.”

  I looked at him incredulously. The pharaonic slime had formed a dense green sludge somewhere in my upper intestine. I'd been eyeing the couch before Sayed beat me to it.

  “What's wrong with you, man?” he said, smiling broadly. “This is just a warm-up. I haven't even started in on my cousins.”

  Sayed hadn't lied when he tallied his relations; his extended family was a cast of thousands. In the poor confines of Shubra, fathers and brothers provided whatever work could be scavenged, mothers and sisters promised food and shelter when none else could be found. But the obligation cut both ways. For someone who aspired to more, there was the expectation that if you succeeded, you would carry half of Shubra with you.

  Each time Sayed visited from Australia, he packed several trunks of clothes, small appliances, and even food for his relatives. And in Cairo he stayed up late each night filling out immigration forms for brothers and cousins who wanted to follow him out of Egypt. “Most of them will never make it,” Sayed confided. “But they keep filling out the forms and saving. It gives them something to hope for.”

  Between translating forms and slurping plates of molokiya, Sayed offered to show me the sights of Cairo. I had spent most of my time in Egypt under self-imposed house arrest, plotting stories that would get me out of the bewildering city. Playing tourist for a few days was just what I needed to cure my Cairophobia.

  “We'll do it properly,” he promised, “not the way its done in guidebooks.” For Sayed, raised on the Arab socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, this meant accompanying each sight with footnotes on the greed and cruelty of Egypt's rulers, from the “self-indulgent pharaohs” to the “decadent Turks” to the “parasitic classes” who prospered un
der Anwar Sadat.

  “Most of this is imperial rubbish,” he said, racing through the Egyptian Museum. We hurried past the rooms of exhumed mummies, the exquisite sarcophagi, the dimly lit chambers bursting with friezes and obelisks. Sayed broke his stride only once to inspect the miniature tombs encasing King Tut's mummified viscera. “Lungs, liver, stomach, yuk,” Sayed recited, reading the labels beneath the tiny gold-plated coffins, each one containing a different organ. Behind us, a French tour guide explained that the only item not embalmed was Tut's food supply for eternity: forty jars of wine, a hundred baskets of fruit, bread, and roasted duck. “A whole village could have lived for a year on what that fat pharaoh took with him,” Sayed said, still staring at the pickled innards.

  From there we caught a taxi to the Pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Cheops lies just seven miles as the dust flies from downtown Cairo. On a clear day you can see the Pyramids from the tops of city buildings. Postcards artfully obscure this proximity to Cairo, showing the monuments against a backdrop of boundless desert. And it is true that the arid expanse just west of the Pyramids stretches with little interruption to distant Libya. But point the camera the other way and the Pyramids are framed against a sprawling, smog-shrouded megalopolis of fifteen million. The city now reaches all the way from the Giza Plateau, on which the Pyramids stand, to the Moqattam Hills twelve miles away, where the giant building blocks were hewn and then floated across the flooded Nile.

  When Gustave Flaubert visited Egypt in 1849, the trip from Cairo to Giza was still an all-day affair, beginning on donkey-back, continuing across the Nile on a small boat (“A corpse in its coffin is borne past us,” he wrote) and ending with an afternoon's ride across the floodplain. Finally, he wrote, the Sphinx “grew larger and larger, and rose out of the ground like a dog lifting itself up.”

  Modern times have compressed the journey, and increased its peril. Egyptians undergo an odd personality change behind the wheel of a car. In every other setting, aggression and impatience are frowned upon. The unofficial Egyptian anthem “Bokra, Insba'allah, Malesb” (Tomorrow, God Willing, Never Mind) isn't just an excuse for laziness. In a society requiring millennial patience, it is also a social code dictating that no one make too much of a fuss about things.. But put an Egyptian in the driver's seat and he shows all the calm and consideration of a hooded swordsman delivering Islamic justice.