by Tony Horwitz
As soon as our taxi sprang clear of the clotted city center, the driver began ducking and weaving through the traffic, looking for daylight. He swerved from right lane to left lane and back to right, then, spotting a space the width of a bicycle between the two lanes, he bulled his way forward and created a third. Clear once again, he resumed his sickening weave from right to left to right. I felt as if I were traveling inside a wandering eye.
Whatever lane lines once existed had been rubbed out by dust, rubber and hooves. Cairo was also the first city I'd seen where policemen stood at intersections simply to enforce the traffic lights. Unfortunately, there weren't any police on the Pyramids Road. Our driver raced through one red light and then another, honking to warn cars on the cross street against plummeting into the intersection just because their light was green. At green lights he honked again, to ward off anyone running the red. He even honked at a streetcar motoring slowly across his path.
But then, Cairo drivers honk even when the road is empty. “It makes the car go faster,” Sayed explained. The horn is the one piece of Egyptian taxis that always works, long after the doors have rusted, the window levers have snapped off, and the meter has been hit with a hammer, or fed wooden slugs. Egyptians also are fond of driving at night without headlights, keeping them in reserve to use as a spare horn when a simple honk won't do. Honk-honk-flash-flash, honk-flash-flash-flash; they burrow like moles through the night.
Not surprisingly, Egyptian drivers are the most homicidal in the world, killing themselves and others at a rate twenty-five times that of drivers in America (and without the aid of alcohol). Motorists in other Arab countries are almost as driving-impaired. The only insight I ever gained into this suicidal abandon came from a speeding Kurdish driver, after he'd recklessly run over a bird.
“Allah wanted it dead,” he said. The same fatalism applies to passengers.
We reached the Giza Plateau in the time it took a team of Egyptian slaves to haul one block of limestone across ten feet of desert sand. “The Pyramids,” Sayed sighed, sucking in the desert air. “One of the seven wonders of Egyptian greed.” Hustlers enveloped us the moment we climbed from the taxi, offering rides on mounts so decrepit that they could have been dragooned from the Egyptian Museum. There were mules, ponies, buggies, and camels of every size and shape. “One hump! Two hump! No hump!” cried one young boy. There were “guides,” “not guides” (who offered to fend off the former) and “watchmen” (who promised to beat back both).
It is difficult to gaze in awe at the wonders of ancient Egypt with modern Egypt tugging so insistently at your sleeve.
“Habibi, ray friend,” asked one camel driver, following my gaze up Cheops' pyramid. “You looking for me?”
“Actually, no. I'm looking at Cheops.” I buried my head in a guidebook: 455 feet tall, for 4,500 years the tallest edifice in the world.
“Habibi, my friend,” the voice nagged again. “You get much better look from my camel.”
“Thank you, no. I'd rather look for free.” Over two million stone blocks in Cheops' pyramid, its base covering eleven acres.
“Habibi, my friend.” The driver dropped his jaw in a convincing facsimile of shock. “Who said anything about money?”
The Pyramids hustle is horizontally integrated. It begins with the cabbie, who happens to know the cheapest camel driver in all of Egypt, who happens to take tourists on a long detour to visit a boy on a burro selling Pepsis and papyrus, who happens to know a man with a Polaroid, who also happens to be an expert guide, offering, for an undisclosed sum, to reveal deep funeral chambers adorned with pharaonic graffiti. This last service was tempting. Ramses Loves Nefertari? Ozymandias Slept Here?
“Whatever it says, you can be sure he put it there himself, probably this morning,” Sayed said, shooing the man away. Scaling a few steps of the pyramid, Sayed delivered his own expert lecture instead; on the geometry of Old Kingdom architecture (“all lines, no curves, because Egypt is so flat”), on the significance of death in ancient Egypt (“people didn't live long in those days, so death was a very big deal”) and on the decadence of the pharaohs (“they slept with animals, which is why we have the Sphinx”). With that, he skipped back down to the ground and held out his hand, declaring, “Who said anything about money?”
Con artistry at the Pyramids represents the most dynamic sector of the Egyptian economy and certainly one of the oldest. When the Greek historian Herodotus stopped off to see Cheops' pyramid in 450 B.C., he asked the meaning of certain inscriptions and was duly informed that they recorded “the quantity of radishes, onions and garlic consumed by the laborers who constructed it.” Herodotus didn't say how much he paid for this dubious intelligence.
By 1849, when Flaubert arrived, hieroglyphics had lost much of their mystery. “One is irritated by the number of imbeciles' names written everywhere,” he complained after finding, at the very top of Cheops' pyramid, the signature of a fellow Parisian, “a certain Buffard, 79 Rue Saint-Martin, wallpaper manufacturer, in black letters.”
But it was left to the acid wit of Mark Twain, seventeen years later, to describe the true curse of the pharaohs. “We suffered torture no pen can describe from the hungry appeals for bucksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes,” he wrote. “We were besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyptians and Arabs who wanted the contract of dragging us to the top. . . Of course they contracted that the varlets who dragged us up should not mention bucksheesh once. For such is the usual routine. Of course we contracted with them, paid them, were delivered into the hands of the drag-gers, dragged up the Pyramids, and harried and bedeviled for bucksheesh from the foundation clear to the summit.”
Islam attaches no shame to begging and much virtue to charity; to Egyptians in particular, baksheesh is a birthright and a blessing. In eighteenth-century Cairo there was even a beggars' guild, so wealthy that it presented the city's governor with a mount and saddle.
But at Cheops' pyramid the pleas for money know no bounds. Exploring the frontiers of Egyptian greed, Twain offered one of his tormentors a hundred dollars “to jump off this pyramid head first.
“He pondered a moment, and would have done it, I think, but his mother arrived, then, and interfered. Her tears moved me—I never can look upon the tears of a woman with indifference—and I said I would give her a hundred dollars to jump off, too.”
Western avarice has left its mark on ancient monuments as well. Every European visitor to Egypt, from Napoleon onward, made sure to return home with his very own obelisk or mummy. One nineteenth-century vandal even wrote in his journal that he found the huge sculpted head of Ramses II “near the remains of its body and chair, with its face upwards, and apparently smiling on me at the thought of being taken to England.” It was considered good fun in Victorian days to unravel mummies at fairgrounds, and the powder of mummied flesh was a staple of London druggists.
Now the Egyptians have full custody of their monuments—and full freedom to destroy them. A slum sprawls less than a hundred yards from the Sphinx, almost lapping at the man-lion's paws. Raw sewage and fetid canals seep beneath the Giza Plateau, unsettling the ancient monuments. A few months after my visit with Sayed, a six-hundred-pound piece of the Sphinx's shoulder separated and tumbled to the sand, its most serious injury since Ottoman musketeers used the Sphinx's nose for target practice (or so the legend goes). There were also dire predictions that the Sphinx and the Pyramids—even the vast Temple of Luxor—might soon succumb to smog, sewage and rising ground water, eroding to dust in the space of fifty years.
Modern Egyptians inherited many things from the phar-aohs—regal good looks, papyrus, bureaucracy—but a talent for building isn't among them. Egyptians have the opposite of a Midas touch; everything they set their hands on turns to dust. Even spanking-new skyscrapers seem, after a year or two, fragile and filthy lean-tos. It isn't just a question of money or expertise; fatigue and fatalism have so corroded the culture that Egyptians have simply stopped caring. Buildings collapse for lack of bas
ic maintenance. Sewer lines explode, flooding whole neighborhoods. Dead horses lie rotting on the beach at Alexandria. And Egyptians muddle on, as they have for millennia, muttering malesb—never mind—and gazing toward Mecca in prayer.
Soon after my visit to the Pyramids, the supervisor of the building Geraldine and I occupied wrote a brief summary of the structure's condition. The building, one of the newest and reputedly one of the nicest apartment houses on the Nile island of Gezira, was described as follows:
1. The marble is falling off from pillars inside and outside the building.
2. The main stairs are collapsing.
3. The walls and ceilings are in poor condition, filled with dust and spiders.
4. There are constant breakdowns of the electricity, the lighting in the apartments, and the elevators.
5. The three water pumps do not work because maintenance was stopped a year ago. The room which contains the three pumps has no floor tiles and has become a lake full of water.
None of this was news to us, except the fact that the building had a supervisor at all. Still, that someone had bothered to catalogue the building's woes was in itself remarkable. The response was not. Nothing happened. What was worse, I found myself not caring. The water main burst? Malesb, I'll shower with bottled water. There are eleven tenants trapped in the elevator again? Malesb, I'll walk the twenty floors. The mail's being tossed in a forgotten storeroom filled with dust and spiders? Malesb, I doubt there was anything important. And I'd been in Cairo only a few months. In another year, I feared, Egyptian inertia would so overwhelm me that I'd be clambering over mummified residents as I scrambled through the unlit stairwell.
It doesn't take long in Cairo to realize that the only way to survive is by commandeering fixers who can cut corners (read “bribe”) and keep things ticking feebly along. And it wasn't long before I met the ablest fixer of them all, Hassan Risk, a sweaty man with a carefully clipped mustache.
Hassan held a salaried job for which he no doubt earned the same hundred pounds a month—about fifty dollars—as every other Egyptian employee. But he also appeared on the payroll of every journalist in town, earning a hundred pounds a month from each of them as well. His only apparent function was delivering the monthly phone bill.
This in itself was not unusual. Hand-delivering bills is yet another scheme for creating employment in a country with an exploding birthrate and a collapsing economy (Egypt must feed 55 million people from an arable area the size of Holland's). It is also a way to make sure the bill doesn't end up in a pile of dust and spiders, with the rest of the mail. On some days, the lobby of our building was crowded with able-bodied, well-educated men waving electricity bills, newspaper bills, delivery bills—often totaling no more than a few piasters, not counting baksheesh.
Hassan Risk's bill-delivery service came with a twist: you paid him an outrageous sum to deliver the bill so that you had him on call when you really needed him. Cairenes could wait months, even years, to have a phone installed and to have it repaired when a breakdown occurred. A computer installation could take forever. Hassan could make it happen overnight—for a price.
“Mr. Tony,” he would patiently explain, holding a frayed computer line in his palm, “I must have five hundred bounds for the Telecommunications Ministry.” He would assume a serious expression and pantomime a man dealing cards around a table. It wasn't hard to imagine a dusty office in one of the Kafkaesque government blocks downtown, filled with supernumeraries slumped on desks strewn with papers and empty cups of tea, suddenly stirring awake as Hassan arrived with the cash. It was, of course, understood that Hassan would be dealt in as well.
It was also understood that if you didn't deal Hassan in each month, choosing to pick up your phone bill instead, things might happen. Phone calls fading out in midsentence. Service mysteriously cut. No one available to fix the phone for weeks or months. Journalists often bitched about Hassan Risk and his monthly handout—subject to self-declared raises—and insisted they could do without him. In two years' time I never met anyone who did.
And so at the end of each month, I waited for the call that always came.
“Mr. Tony? This is Hassan Risk. I have here your May bill for thirty-six hundred bounds. Also, there is my salary for this month. May I come? Insba'allab, I be there in fifteen minutes.”
Insha'allah is the phrase ending all statements about the future in Egypt. It means “if God wills it.” Hassan Risk was the only Egyptian I knew who put insha'allah in front of future plans instead of after, as though God's will were secondary to his own. Watching from the balcony as he double-parked his fancy Mercedes in front of our building and opened a trunk packed with cables and videos and telephone bills, I often wondered if Hassan Risk was the richest man in Cairo.
6—CAIRO NIGHTS Dancing—All Mohammedans love a spectacle.
The New Arizona nightclub announced itself with a broken window and a sign that read: “europins and jabanese welcome.”
“Don't worry,” Sayed said. “No self-respecting tourist would be caught dead here.” That was why he had chosen the club, to show me “real Cairo culture.” We had done the Egyptian Museum, the Pyramids, the Khan-el-Khalili bazaar. Belly dancing was the last of Sayed's “must sees,” and no venue but the New Arizona would do.
There was a picture gallery just inside the door, hinting at the enticing dancers awaiting us upstairs. The snapshots were arranged according to size, as in an elementary-school portrait. Towering above the others was a whale who went by the name of Ashgan. “My favorite,” Sayed chuckled, grandly offering to pay the cover charge. On a Thursday night, the start of the Arab weekend, admission at the New Arizona was eighty cents.
Upstairs, in the dimly lit club, moldering wallpaper peeled from the bar and week-old balloons drooped from pillars surrounding the stage. Though the club was empty, it was impossible to find a table with an unobstructed view. “More poles than in Warsaw,” grumbled Terry, an Australian friend of Sayed's who had arrived in Cairo that day. As we waited for our beers, a small man in a turban crept out from behind a pillar, slipped a plate of nuts onto our table and vanished. I idly nibbled at a peanut. The man in the turban darted out from behind his pillar again. “Two bounds,” he said.
I looked at him blankly and said, “Just add it to the bill.”
The man shook his head. “I not work for New Arizona.” He was a free-lancer, like me, hustling peanuts under cover of the club. There was also a free-lance flower seller, a cigarette peddler, and a photographer who snapped our table and returned with a picture so spotted that we appeared to be sitting in a sandstorm. He pointed at a ceiling fan circulating dust and lukewarm air, and shrugged apologetically. The club was a miniature bazaar and we its only patrons, bleeding piasters.
“Don't let them help you out of your chair,” Sayed warned. “They'll make you pay for that, too.”
At eleven P.M. the bar began to fill, mostly with visitors from other parts of the Arab world. After several months in the Middle East I had made a hobby of identifying nationality by the cut of a man's robe, the shape of his headdress, the way he said certain words. The two slim men in blue jeans and black-checked scarves were obviously Palestinian. The small, dusky man with a furrowed brow arid a cheap jacket was Yemeni; his jambiya, apparently, had been left at the hotel. Even darker—African-black—were the Sudanese, with their enormous, sloppy turbans. But I wasn't sure about two white-robed men in red-checked head scarves, who took a table at the front. Even in winter, in cosmopolitan Cairo, they carried a whiff of the desert with them. One man kicked off his sandals and sat cross-legged in his chair, as if on the floor of a goat-hair tent. The other had a dark, handsome face, seared by wind and sand. “Kuwaitis?” I ventured. “Saudis,” Sayed said. “How can you tell?”
“The scarves.” Saudis switched from white to, red in winter, while most other “Gulfies” didn't. “And the way they're being treated.”
Sure enough, their beer arrived in a bucket of ice. The waiter
even shooed the nut-seller back behind his pillar and told the photographer to piss off. It was the New Arizona equivalent of red-carpet treatment, the same slavish devotion that the debt-ridden Egyptian government showed Saudi officials visiting town.
Once the newcomers had settled in, a jovial brown-skinned man appeared on the stage, waving a microphone. His threadbare suit matched his skin, giving him the look of a well-worn teddy bear.
“Ablan wa'salan,” he said. Welcome, most welcome. Then, spotting us, he added in English: “Good night to you. What country?”
Terry immediately yelled “Australia!” and the m.c. broke into song, offering “special greetings” to the land Down Under. Between verses, he looked suggestively in our direction. He repeated the lyrics five or six times before Sayed finally elbowed Terry. “You're supposed to tip him, mate.”
Terry dug in his pocket and produced a five-pound note. “Anything to stop him singing,” he grumbled. The m.c. pocketed the bill and moved across the stage, offering “special greetings” to the “land of Mecca.” The barefoot Saudi quickly coughed up a ten-pound note. Then the m.c. began singing “black is sweet as sugar” to the Sudanese and “Egypt loves Iraq” to a visitor from Baghdad. Each matched the Saudi contribution.
As the m.c. milked the crowd, band members crept onto the stage and tuned their instruments. It was a weird ensemble. One man banged listlessly at a tambourine, pausing every few minutes to pop what looked like an antacid pill into his mouth. Beside him sat a cross-eyed accordion player. There was also an electric guitarist in shaded glasses, a man with one cymbal, and a piano player missing three fingers on his right hand.
