Oblivion here is not a bad thing

I’m supposedly already an old hand around Cairo yet I still get lost and can’t understand or be understood, but oblivion in this city is not such a bad thing…Bring dresses below the knee, Egyptian men appreciate more what they cannot see…Look for the one wearing diapers at the airport when you land.

-Letter Home, July 18, 1978

I wasn’t wearing diapers at the airport that day but I was just as easy to spot in the crowd. I’d left the hospital one day before and must have looked like a ghost, gaunt and drawn. What have they done to you? I was asked. Nothing. This is how oblivion looks in Cairo.

I can say Shish kebab

The city still amazes, frightens, and makes me lose my way, but I’m getting better at asking directions and people say I speak excellent Arabic when I do, which of course is a lie, but I can get around in general and in restaurants I’m served the food and drink that I’ve asked for.

-Letter Home, June 28, 1978

I remember going out to lunch on the hottest day that summer with classmates at a kebab and kofta restaurant in Bab al-Louk and asking for a pitcher of water- I had to ask someone how to say the word for Pitcher- which I drank straight down with the waiter standing right there when a sudden bloom of perspiration poured out of every pore in my body and my fine cotton shirt became sopping wet and he said, Allah huwa Akbar.

Like a pyramid pulled along by a thread

A sign in Arabic and English in the SwissAir office- All proper millionaires sometimes live in a chalet in the Swiss Alps…For as low as £42 per day, Why not you?- But I won’t go anywhere until I learn some everyday vocabulary. I can read the headlines but don’t even know the words for knife, spoon, and fork.

-Letter Home, June 28, 1978

On my first day in Cairo I left my suitcase in the AUC student hostel lobby and it was gone when I went to look for it. We had made a pledge to speak only Arabic if possible so I couldn’t explain to the deskman what I was missing- for two years I’d only learned Classical words like Carpet, Palace, and Lamp. I had to ask a classmate who’d already studied Egyptian Colloquial how to say Suitcase, Shanta, which that summer also turned out to be our Sri Lankan drinking buddy’s name. Later in Sudan I learned the hard way that Wehr was wrong, that the word ‘Afsh does not mean both Luggage and Garbage.

Take the breeze and lose yourself

Tonight to walk and take the breeze and lose myself I went to the medieval commercial district Khan al-Khalili, burlap sacks spilling raw safron and incense sellers burning mounds of the stuff, old alleyways not built for modern traffic, two large trucks came face to face in a lane not wide enough for a cart. I stood to one side to watch pedestrians, bicycles, donkeys and autos back up, then someone yelled at me! for being in the way, the foreigner a convenient target but the real culprit is progress.

-Letter Home, June 28, 1978

I was very green in Cairo that June, the month I’d arrived, much greener than I’d be the following June. The Klax- klaxon, the Zahma- crowd, the Dowsha- noise, the Sudā’- headache…bothered me later, when in the streets being called Khawaja, in a whisper behind my back or a shout to my face, made me angry, not like that first June, when if I heard that word- really an epithet for Alien- addressed to me, I felt they thought I belonged in those streets just like them.

$50 was a lot in Bahariyya too

The Exhibit You’ve Been Waiting For Since 1325 BC. Metropolitan Museum, Treasures of Tutankhamun, December 15, 1978 - April 15, 1979

-Newspaper Ad, New York Times

What do you know about Tut fever? I saw the December 17 New York Times Christmas shopping page, Sphinxes wearing neckties, Nefertiti on wig stands, Ramsees in evening wear. Egyptians think it is crazy that tickets are being scalped for $50, and Tut was such a trivial king, $50 is a generous monthly wage…I didn’t know and was shocked to learn the Mena House has a topless cabaret. Now I understand what the man in Bahariyya Oasis meant when he asked me if I ever went out to Pyramids Road and saw “women”. $50 is a lot there too.

-Letter Home, December 31, 1978

They say this was the first blockbuster art exhibition ever, all due to hyped-up marketing and advertising and Thomas Hoving’s P.T. Barnum-style hucksterism. You can bet the Mena House didn’t need to advertise its floor show like that, if word-of-mouth alone could get the news out to illiterate peasants in Bahariyya.

Blood in cairo's bathtubs

Yesterday was Feast of the Sacrifice, Ibrahim and Ismail, not Isaac [Ishāq in Arabic], the last day of the Hajj, every family slaughters a sheep and eats silly for four days, Cairo’s ovine population booms and busts overnight, no more Baas and Bleats, in the morning the poor go door to door begging for fleeces and intestines, I saw a few with entrails and skins draped on their shoulders like mink stoles and wooly capes.

-Letter Home, November 11, 1978

I remember going upstairs to talk to our neighbor just before Eid al-Adha and I found his apartment in a state of chaos and a sheep standing in the bathtub waiting for the sacrificial knife. Usually it was the toilets that were overloaded. Once a year it was the tub drains.

Bumming along the nile

I’m feeling fine, tomorrow will be at the Camel Market and next day by dark in the Oasis, have been bumming along the Nile, in the baths, mosques, pyramids, blind alleys, you know all these places…there is so much in the streets I’ll never see if I stay at home with my dictionary.

-Letter Home, April 12, 1979

In lieu of bumming along the Nile, I find that reading the 19th Century Lexicon of the Arabic Language by Edward Lane is far more evocative of Cairene baths than the 1914 edition of Karl Baedeker’s Egypt: Handbook for Travellers, which describes “the pleasanter operation of shampooing, performed by the Abu Kees, who is requested to do his duty with the word Keiyisni, Rub Me, who then rubs the bather with the Kees”, which Lane defines as “A Purse of Sewn Together Rags for Money and for Pearls and Sapphires, and The Membrane that Holds the Child in the Womb, and hence also, The Scrotum”.

Huwa, huwa...he, he

Yesterday the streets were full again to celebrate Sadat…in front of the Arab League Building after he passed, a crowd gathered at its gates and shook their fists and threw trash. Tempers run high when inter-Arab tensions mount [the peace treaty with Israel was signed March 26]. Cairo is so lit up, fireworks at night, explosions of gaiety and smiles…But very weird at the Moulid last night, a man was eating the glass chimney of a kerosene lamp, blood pouring from his mouth, and grinning.

-Letter Home, April 1, 1979

I was lucky to live in Cairo then, the year of Camp David, the peace treaty, the Iranian Revolution, and the war between North and South Yemen which broke out when each one assassinated the other’s leader two days apart, learning new military and diplomatic vocabulary words, and having impromptu conversations about it all in the coffee houses…but then realizing that many Cairenes were Sufis who would rather eat glass and hyperventilate to the all-night dancing and chanting of the words Huwa, Huwa, He, He, meaning God [and so close to Hawā’, meaning Air], than talk politics with me.

Abu sha'ara, mahmud zaki, and me

The other night we ate kebab in a famous Cairo restaurant Abu Sha’ara, neat interior, decorated with banners embroidered with verses from the Quran. The conservative owner closes during Ramadan to redecorate each year with new religious motifs.

-Letter Home, June 1978

I asked the owner who made the appliquéd calligraphic banners and he told me Mahmud Zaki & Sons in the Street of the Tentmakers just outside Bab Zuweila, so I went and commissioned a 2m x 1.5m Sura al-Fatiha, with orange (bortuqali) letters on a dark blue (kohli) field. It took weeks for one of the sons to make it so I’d go by the shop to check on his progress from time to time and we’d sit on his low work bench and smoke hash together which he said made him stitch faster. I hung that banner in New York for years until not long ago I took it to Khartoum to give to Sayyid abu Jaib for his new house. And to think it all started in a kebab joint on Qasr al-’Aini Street in June 1978.

'Ayyiz meen?

It is late, Cairo (I) am tired, I’ve walked across town tonight to eat huge Red Sea shrimp, am content with a bellyfull, tired of crowds and dust. The entire downtown is in an uproar, when is it not? Streets and sidewalks torn up to lay new telephone lines, one half of Cairo not connected to its other. The needs of this country are Jet Age, the tools it uses are Stone Age.

-Letter Home, Summer, 1978

My apartment telephone number was 30365, I do not know why I gave it to family back home because it was only connected to a small part of Cairo and it was a building party line so I could practice my oral comprehension by picking up the handset and listening in to any random conversation. Sometimes it rang and I didn’t understand the caller so I’d say, Nimra Ghalat, Wrong Number, or ‘Ayyiz Meen?, Who Do You Want?, or ‘Ayyiz Ey?, What Do You Want? (I always thought this last way to answer the phone was rude, but this being Egypt, Who Knows?, Meen Yi’raf?) which I’d learned from reading practice dialogues in my First Year Egyptian textbook.

A cairo racket

It looks like a full day of classes 9-2 Mon-Thurs and Sat, Colloquial, Grammar and Composition, Reading, and Aural Comprehension. A conspiracy is brewing among the Non-Achiever types to do as little work as possible. I don’t know where I stand on that…later in a crowded coffee house, drinking tea and ignoring the racket of dominoes and backgammon pieces being slapped against marble table tops, I forgot what I am doing here.

-Letter Home, September 29, 1978

Maybe in September I didn’t know whether I stood with or against the Non-Achiever types in my Arabic class, but by Halloween I certainly did. On any given night you could find me not with Hans Wehr open on a quiet desk but with a glass of tea on a coffee house marble table, enjoying the racket in fact. Dowsha, they call it, which Wehr defines as Din, Noise, Clamor, Uproar, Hubbub, and Hullabaloo.

Big news in cairo

Big news in Cairo, the Grateful Dead are playing three concerts at the pyramids with a Sudanese oud master. I’m going Thursday and if it’s good I’ll go again. It should be a strange night.

-Letter Home, September, 1978

I remember that night at the pyramids, there was VIP seating for Egyptian bigwigs and their wives in evening gowns, the kind who come for Aida and Sound & Light, the kind of show I’m sure they were expecting. None of them got all the tie-dyed dancing hippie chicks who’d flown in. Twelve years later I interviewed oud player Hamza el Din for an article about his life and forgot to ask him about that night. But I did tell him that we’d used a bit of his music in Voice of the Whip, paired with the scene of KhairAllah riding his camel through the grassland early in the Darb.

After the collapse, back to the streets

I saw Dr. Abu Sinna today, he checked me by thumping my chest and stethoscope-listened to my complaint and said it was a “good sign”, that my lung was adhering to the chest wall. He said it was a normal feeling and should go away shortly. In the waiting room I met a young guy with the same problem, his collapsed after a motorcycle fall. I was lucky to have mine happen in bed by the look of the stitches all over his face. Otherwise I’ve taken to the streets again…

-Letter Home, September 11, 1978

I learned many specialized medical vocabulary words that week. Istirwāh ‘Afwi, Spontaneous Pneumothorax. Anbūba al-Ri’a, Trachea or Chest Tube. ‘Amal ‘Amaliyya, Perform an Operation. That last one came in handy on the Darb when we cauterized the camels’ sore ankles with a red hot branding iron.

Gobs of students

My elective will be Contemporary Social and Political Writings in Egypt. It may make up for my lack of contact with Egyptian intellectuals and serious students my age. AUC has been taken over by gobs of rich Egyptian fashion plates full of giggles.

-Letter Home, September 1978

That semester I learned more from Ahmad the Bawāb [Doorkeeper] and Abdu the Makwagi [Ironing Man], one who spoke through toothless gums and the other who spat water onto wrinkled clothes straight out his mouth, than I did from reading the travelogue of America written by Ihsan Abdul Quddous, which I recall was full of bigoted and simplistic observations made about my country by a hack writer and Sadat stooge but reflected worse on his own. And from those fashion plates I learned about Francophile code switching, the meaning of Merci Awi [Beaucoup] and Chic ‘ala Tūl [To the Max].

Pussy cats on fire

Classes have me down, my new game is bluffing teachers into thinking that I’ve done my homework, but I haven’t even started, instead I’ve finished Les Femmes du Caire, but really didn’t like it, because of what wasn’t written about that first night with the slave girl…then I walked down 26th of July Street looking for the sleazy nightclubs I’d heard about- found the Pussy Cat but didn’t go in.

-Letter Home, November 3, 1978

I wish for homework we’d been assigned to discuss Qutta ‘Alaa Naar, Cat On Fire, an Egyptian remake of Elizabeth Taylor’s and Paul Newman’s tour de force. I remember sitting through to the end and only then realizing it had something to do with Tennessee Williams. I wonder what more would have dawned on me when the lights came up after the last show at the Pussy Cat. Something to do with Nerval?

Matinees at the Embassy

I saw Les Biches last night at the French Center, the second movie I’ve seen in Cairo about lesbians, the first was Egyptian, they must be obsessed in this country. The audience, all young men, acted like children seeing Playboy Magazine for the first time. But a decent movie by Cairo standards.

-Letter Home, November 22, 1978

The French and Italian Cultural Centers had weekly film screenings for movies that would never get past the Egyptian censors for commercial release. They entered the country in diplomatic pouches, the way Western embassies get good liquor into Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, booze was legal and there were plenty of bordellos if you knew where to look, but no naked European women in clean sheets.