The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

And after that I never saw her face again. In the next couple of years, I visited Sayyid’s home on a number of occasions, but Wahiba usually stayed out of sight. She would remain in the kitchen, behind a closed door, making tea or dinner, which would be served to me by Sayyid or one of the children. The few times that I caught a glimpse of Wahiba, she was wearing the niqab, and we never had another conversation. I realized that I had caught her unaware at our initial meeting, and it felt strange to remember that first and only glimpse. The more I got to know Sayyid, the less I felt I knew his wife, and the more mysterious she became.

  Not long after the sebou, tensions appeared in the marriage. Sayyid had always worked long hours in Zamalek, but now he seemed to delay going home, often returning as late as midnight. He complained that he was fighting with Wahiba, usually about money. Sometimes he mentioned the possibility of divorce, which has little stigma for male Muslims in Egypt. One of Sayyid’s older brothers had recently divorced for the second time and now was searching for a third wife. “You keep one for a while and then you change,” the brother had told me when we met at the sebou. “It’s like changing a tire on a car.”

  Sayyid and most of his siblings were born in Cairo, but like many residents of the capital they maintain strong links to their ancestral village, which is the source of most ideas about family. In Sayyid’s extended family, most women wear the niqab, but the reason seems to be more cultural than strictly religious. It’s a point of pride and possession for the men—Sayyid says that his wife wears it because she’s beautiful, and if she shows her face in the street she’ll be coveted by strangers and harassed. And other traditions serve to control women in more explicit ways. One evening Sayyid and I were watching my twin daughters play in the garden, and he asked casually if I planned to have them circumcised. I looked at the girls—they were all of three years old—and said no, this wasn’t something we intended to do. The majority of Egyptian women have undergone the surgery, which opponents describe as genital mutilation. Since 2008 it’s been illegal, but many people continue to have it performed on daughters, usually when they’re between the ages of nine and twelve. In Egypt, Islamists are the biggest supporters of the procedure, which, among other effects, makes intercourse less pleasurable for a woman. But in fact this tradition is not mentioned in the Koran, and Muslims in most parts of the world don’t practice it. Originally it was a tribal custom native to many parts of Africa.

  I asked Sayyid if he planned to have the surgery performed on his daughter, and he nodded. “Otherwise, women are crazy for dakar,” he said, using a word that means “male.” “They’ll be running around outside the house, chasing men.”

  For traditionally minded Egyptians, this is a common view: desire should be limited to males, who do what they can to heighten it. All those sex drugs in the garbage of Zamalek aren’t an anomaly—in Egypt, I’ve had a number of casual conversations in which the topic turns to sex, and a man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pill, to show that he’s prepared. Usually it’s some version of Viagra, but for Sayyid’s class the drug of choice is often tramadol, a prescription painkiller. Cheap versions are manufactured in China and India, and in 2012 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that there were 5 billion tramadol pills in Egypt, a staggering number in a country of 84 million.

  Many of the zabaleen I know use the stuff. The pills are available on the street for 30 or 40 cents, and they take the edge off the fatigue and pain of a hard day’s work. They are also addictive; in America, where the abuse of tramadol is growing, its status has recently been upgraded to that of a controlled substance. Last year, a zabal I know asked me for advice about how to quit. He looked awful: he was sweating heavily and his eyes were darting here and there. I knew that he was a devout Christian, so I did my best and came up with two recommendations: pray very hard, and drink a lot of caffeine. I suppose I wasn’t a total hypocrite—I do one of these things religiously—but I felt helpless. I was relieved when, a month later, the zabal told me he’d been able to kick the habit.

  In January, I accompanied Sayyid on a visit to his mother’s village, outside Beni Suef, in Upper Egypt, and he carefully prepared a foil pack of five tramadol pills as a gift for his uncle. He was a farmer who hadn’t yet tried the drug; Sayyid wanted to give him a taste of city life. But Sayyid has never seemed at risk of addiction, because he uses tramadol primarily for sex. In truth, the drug doesn’t function like Viagra, but many Egyptian men seem to believe that it does. And a number of users say that tramadol, which delays orgasm, also intensifies sensation. On Thursdays, Sayyid often grins and shows me his pills for the weekend. Even after he began fighting with his wife, he sometimes took a tramadol before returning home late on Thursday night, which didn’t seem like the best strategy for dealing with marital discord. And I found myself wondering about the social dynamics in some Egyptian homes—the combination of men who take sex drugs and women who are circumcised and housebound.

  After Sayyid and Wahiba started fighting, she secretly registered their apartment in her own name, at a government bureau. When Sayyid learned about this, their conflicts became angrier, and then one of his sisters, who also lives in Ard al-Liwa, got involved. At one point, Wahiba and some of her relatives confronted Sayyid’s sister in the street, and the fight turned physical; the sister’s eye was injured so badly that she needed surgery. Then Wahiba kicked Sayyid out of the apartment and changed the locks. For good measure, she filed three court cases against him, including one of nonsupport.

  She also sent a steady stream of text messages to Sayyid’s phone. At night, he slept on the floor of a garage on my street, where a doorman had allowed him to arrange a pallet. Whenever Sayyid received a text, he had to troop over to H Freedom, where he would stand mortified while the owner read these things aloud:

  Yesterday you didn’t fight for me. I’ll do it myself and you will regret what I’ll do.

  Oh, you want divorce? I’ll take all of my rights, you bitch, and all of the people will see you.

  It’s not your house, you thief, and you came back to me like a dog, as I wanted you to, and I will send you away as I wish.

  As the fight worsened, each relied on one key weapon. For Sayyid, it was money: he stopped giving cash to his wife, who was forced to ask relatives for help. For Wahiba, the weapon was words. She targeted her husband’s illiteracy, sending messages that she knew would become public and damage his reputation in Zamalek. And by filing repeated legal claims, she forced Sayyid into the hostile world of documents and government offices. One morning I went with him to the Real Estate Tax Authority, where he was trying to get the paperwork necessary to fight his wife’s claim on the apartment. For more than two hours, he went from floor to floor, office to office, encountering clerks who spoke in phrases that were code for Pay me a bribe. “I want to drink tea,” one clerk said, and Sayyid gave him £E20. “I have an itch,” the next one said, and Sayyid handed him £E5. “I need something to speed it up,” the third said, and Sayyid produced another bill.

  None of this seemed to surprise or even annoy Sayyid. But the notion of the government as provider of positive service was completely foreign to his experience: he hadn’t attended school as a child, he lived in an ashwa’iyat, and he had no health insurance or job security. His only significant contact with the state had been when he was drafted into the army, in the nineties. Like all uneducated draftees, he had served for three years instead of the one year that is required of educated males. But this extended service is effectively a punishment, not an opportunity to address Egypt’s epidemic of illiteracy. During Sayyid’s time as a soldier, the army didn’t provide a single class in basic reading. Instead, he spent three long years standing at a guard post in Port Said with a rifle in his arms.

  For the leaders of the revolution, who are mostly middle-and upper-class, the experience of a citizen like Sayyid is a perfect example of why radical change is necessary. But there’s a point at which somebody is so far removed from the
formal system that he has no interest in changing it. Sayyid never cared much about the protests in Tahrir Square, and, like most Egyptians, he tends to support whoever seems to be popular at any given moment. In 2012, he voted for Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate for president, and then, two years later, he voted for Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the general who had forcibly removed Morsi from office.

  With every change in leadership, there have been new promises to reform public services. After Morsi won, he made garbage reform a centerpiece of his “Hundred Days” program, but nothing happened. Since the coup, other proposed changes have failed to accomplish much. The government has been weak and incompetent for so long that people are accustomed to alternatives—the informal services don’t always function well, but they function well enough to keep things moving. And when the government does act, its weakness means that it often follows the lead of these informal institutions without adding much value. In the ashwa’iyat, officials typically arrive after locals have already tapped illegally into water, sewage, and electricity lines, and then the state installs meters and begins to charge for service.

  Waste collection follows a similar pattern. The main flaw with the informal service has always been that it’s erratic in poor areas, where zabaleen aren’t motivated to work, because tips are small and the garbage contains less material of value. In 2003, the Mubarak regime offered 15-year contracts to foreign waste-management companies, which supposedly would cover most neighborhoods, hiring the existing wahiya and zabaleen and paying them fair salaries. But the plan was underfunded, and the culture of the informal system was too complex and entrenched for foreign companies to navigate. The disastrous culling of the pigs and the instability of the post-revolution period have made things even worse. Hassan Abu Ahmed, a spokesman for the Cairo Cleaning and Beautification Authority, the government department in charge of waste management, told me that the foreign companies are covering only 50 or 60 percent of the services that were promised in the contracts. But he also said that the government owes the companies tens of millions of dollars, because the economy has collapsed in the wake of the revolution.

  My part of Cairo is ostensibly cleaned by an Italian-owned firm called AMA Arab Environment Company. At the beginning of the summer, when I met with Ahmed Hassan Ahmed, the project manager at AMA Arab, he seemed exhausted. He said that the government owed his firm almost $30 million, and he had just spent a week dealing with a strike by garbage collectors in northern Cairo. One of his employees had recently been stabbed in the lungs after infringing on a zabal’s turf. “If you go to a zabal’s neighborhood and ask him for his trash, he’s going to slap you in the face,” Ahmed told me. His company has instituted regular pickups by truck in some parts of Cairo, but in terms of actual door-to-door collection the main change has been the addition of a new layer of middlemen. On my street, the government subcontracts garbage collection to the Italian company, which in turn subcontracts to a wahi called Osama Apricot, who subcontracts to Aiman the Cat, who subcontracts to Sayyid. Bizarrely, payment moves in opposite directions along this chain: from the top, the government pays the Italians in cash, while from the bottom Sayyid pays Aiman the Cat in recyclables. It seems miraculous that so much trash is actually picked up, and that the people on the lowest level participate so energetically in this flawed system. But low expectations, like garbage, are a resource that Egypt has in great abundance. “The beauty is that trash doesn’t cost anything,” Sayyid once told me happily. “You just pick up the trash and you get paid for it!”

  Sayyid spent the winter sleeping on the floor of the garage. A couple of times he used my shower, and periodically a doorman let him warm up in a heated room, but most of the time he looked tired, dirty, and miserable. Finally a neighbor in Ard al-Liwa organized a traditional reconciliation session involving members of Sayyid’s and Wahiba’s families. At the session, the neighbor gave Sayyid a piece of advice. “If your wife asks for a penny,” he said, “give her two.”

  “Why should I give her two pennies?” Sayyid asked.

  “Because the man with three pennies is standing outside your house.”

  Afterward, Sayyid was optimistic. When I asked how his sister and Wahiba had gotten along at the meeting, Sayyid seemed surprised by the question. “They weren’t there,” he said. “Women aren’t allowed at a reconciliation.” He explained that it’s impossible to control them in such a situation. “They have long tongues, and they insult people,” he said. “There would be a fight.”

  Soon he was receiving more text messages—You’re going to divorce me with your legs crossed over your head—and it was clear that the all-male reconciliation had failed to appease this woman’s anger. On the last day of January, Sayyid went to see a lawyer he had retained in Ard al-Liwa, and I accompanied him, along with a translator.

  The lawyer’s office was in one of the dirtiest parts of Ard al-Liwa. As we picked our way through piles of rotting organic material, Sayyid explained that zabaleen had been dumping it here since the great pig massacre of ’09. But the office itself was neatly appointed. A row of hardbound legal books sat on a shelf behind the lawyer’s desk, and he had arranged religious signs throughout the place: PRAY TO THE PROPHET; THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD. The lawyer was a short, neckless man who leaned forward as he talked, shoulders level with his ears, as if prepared to ram his head into whatever stood in his way. His eyes widened when Sayyid showed him a text on his phone.

  “She’s calling you a bitch!” the lawyer said. “If she were my wife, I swear to God I would have shot her. Boom, I swear!” He shook his head and pointed to some court documents that Wahiba had filed. “The law has no heart,” he said. “It has a brain—and the brain is papers. And this paper says that she can’t live with you, she can’t stand you.”

  Sayyid said, “Up until now, I still don’t want to humiliate her.”

  “Sayyid, this is love!” The lawyer told him sternly that he was being softhearted, and he held up one of the papers. “Look at this!”

  “I can’t read,” Sayyid said.

  “She insults you with nasty words! She writes these things—look at it!”

  “I can’t read,” Sayyid said.

  “She insults you!” the lawyer said. “She’s filed three cases. Each one is a speed bump. Her goal is to make it so that either you don’t go or, if you go, you can’t work.”

  He said that if Sayyid failed to fight the case his wife would get everything. Sayyid appeared overwhelmed—there were bags under his eyes, and he had come straight from work, in his filthy zabal clothes. But the lawyer was skillful; he calmly asked questions, drawing details out of his client. Periodically he flourished a document and pushed it in front of Sayyid, who would say the same thing: I can’t read. I can’t read. After a while, Sayyid mentioned that his wife had recently taken a job at a weaving factory. The lawyer’s face lit up.

  “What’s the factory address?” he said. “Tell me and I can have her arrested!” He waved one of the papers: “It says here that she’s not working. You see, the law is beautiful!” He continued, “We can send a message to the factory manager: either he can fire her or he can give us proof that she’s working.”

  “She was always asking me to work,” Sayyid said. “I told her that when I die she can work.”

  “So she was asking you to work?”

  “Yes, but what am I, a child?” Sayyid said. “I can work. My wife doesn’t need to work.”

  “You won’t believe the cases I see,” the lawyer said, and he described a client whose mother had been flirting with her own son-in-law. “They get these ideas from watching television,” he said. “Your wife, she’s from Upper Egypt, and she’s used to being behind a cow.” He continued, “She came to Cairo, she got a television, she saw dancing—she wants all of this.”

  “I have two televisions,” Sayyid said proudly.

  “It’s our duty to teach her,” the lawyer said. “When we have a cow that’s aggressive, what do we do? We put a
ring through her nose.” He noted that Wahiba had hired a female lawyer, which he believed was a shrewd strategy for intimidating the judge, who he expected to be a graduate of Al Azhar University, the most prestigious Islamic institution in the Arab world.

  “When this female lawyer talks to the Azhar judge, he’ll stare at the ground,” the lawyer said. “He’ll be shy; he won’t know what to do. Your wife will say, ‘He abused me sexually, he did this, he did that!’ And the judge will say, ‘Enough, enough!’ Because he’s so shy. But if I go I’ll straighten it out.”

  He explained that by law Wahiba needed her husband’s permission to work, because the papers described her as a housewife. “In Islamic sharia, the woman is like an egg,” he said. “Let’s say you have ten eggs. Where would you put them? Would you just leave them lying around? No, you’d put them in the proper place, in the refrigerator. Women belong at home. They can go out of the house with their husband’s permission, but that’s it.”

  When Sayyid first entered the office, he seemed near tears. But the lawyer’s confidence was contagious, and by the end of the meeting Sayyid was smiling. The lawyer told him it was important not to request the divorce—if Wahiba was forced to initiate it, then her share of their assets would be much less. He warned Sayyid not to tell anybody about their strategy. “Keep the secret between your teeth,” he said. “That’s why God made your mouth like this!”

  Throughout the conflict, I saw Wahiba only once. I went with Sayyid to Family Court, where both parties made statements to an official. Sayyid wore particularly filthy clothes, because the lawyer had told him that appearing poor would improve his odds by exactly 15 percent. Wahiba arrived with her lawyer, her mother, her sister-in-law, and her three small children in tow; she wore a black niqab and her hands were gloved. Sayyid and I were asked to go into the next room while she made her statement. The night before, she had sent a text: I’m going to go under oath and destroy you.